[i]Three Months Later...[/i]

Siwa gently rubbed her belly as she slowly made her way through the muddy streets. There was no doubt about it now, a litter was on the way. Some species considered this to be a very special thing, and perhaps it was in a way for goblins. While their species revered reproduction to the point of worship, individual pregnancies were so commonplace that they barely registered. Even so, this was Siwa's first, and this pregnancy would always be special to her. 

She had mated with several other males after seeing Koglan. She had been back to him a few more times in the last three months, and she was certain that she had at least one of his offspring in her womb at that very moment. The gobliness had continued her vocation as a dancer, but it was starting to get hard to keep it up. Soon, she'd be unable to do very much work at all until after giving birth. While the tribe still kept a granary for her to draw a bit of food from, it wouldn't be enough for herself and her children, once they were weaned, of course. 

Today, she found herself heading over to Koglan's forge once again. The rings he had given her had already been traded for some of those "coins" humans seemed to love so much. There was a fair pile of coins in Siwa's hut, in fact. None of them could be used to buy food in the goblin village, and going back to the human town to buy food was getting harder and harder as her pregnancy progressed. Worse, she believed she was going to give birth to a large litter; good for the tribe if most of the children survived, hard on the mother when it came to feeding all of them. The point was, she needed help.