Dance magic

e sulked about it for a while. He really wanted that baby. He wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t because it was cute or useful. He had plenty of toys. It was probably because he couldn’t have it. It was a game he’d lost and that was that.
​    He loved to play dirty but he couldn’t cheat. Those were the rules. He lost to a little girl, and being several thousand years old and the king of his own private world, he found the whole thing rather annoying.
    He could try and get another baby. Find some squealing thing without a precocious sister who could somehow blindly stumble her way to the center of a labyrinth that a host of Mensa members couldn’t crack. But what kind of magic spell could he use? Slime and snails or puppy dog tails? He tried those the last time.  He hadn’t waited thirty years just to do the same thing all over again.
    Besides, it’d probably be like the end of that movie, the one with Dustin Hoffman and that woman on the bus. He’d get the baby and then he wouldn’t want it anymore. He certainly had no interest in changing diapers. And it’s not like you could just drop a boulder on it when you got sick of the damn thing. 
    So he mostly just sat around with the goblin hordes and played with his magic balls. He really let the labyrinth go to shit. Sometimes he still made the goblins sing and dance. But their hearts just weren’t in it anymore and they were often off-key. And not the kind of off-key that’s amusing. It was enough to make him stop turning into an owl. Instead, he spent a lot of time alone, wandering around the Bog of Eternal Stench feeling sorry for himself.   
    The goblins started to grumble. Who died and made him king? Somebody obviously, but no one could remember who. He was about twice the size of the rest of them, and despite a pair of freaky eyebrows and a general atmosphere of androgyny, he looked suspiciously a lot like a regular human being. Shouldn’t a goblin king be more representative of his population? A few more warts and some more hair in unwanted places. Or less hair in wanted ones. And enough with this whole obsession with stealing babies thing. It was giving them all a bad rap. 
    He didn’t fill out those tights quite the way he used to. Everyone found his codpiece rather creepy.

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