Trona
The goblins have all cleared out of Trona now.
As hatchlings they tiptoe along mountainous ledges and throw rocks and tame lizards and terrace steep bluffs to the most beautifully derelict backdrop on earth.
As full grown goblins they clean windows in Dubai, stock refrigerators in Malaysia, sell shirts in Thailand and weld steel under Qatar’s glaring sun.
The luckier ones are able to hatch out new lives with their families on flat ground in the nearby factory towns below. They are ancestrally bound to Trona, and visit some times, but quaint sentimentalities alone won’t lure them back for good. It’s a hard life up there in the high desert; a demanding, unremitting, and remote life full of labor and frost and hardship just to scrounge up enough meat scraps to live by. There are few amenities or modern perks and they are taunted by glimpses of the urban world beyond.
Life is far less taxing in the city. It is a narrative known the world over. Chasing promises of comfort and leisure and even excess, they do what the majority of our species has now done. They leave their barren deserts for the flashing lights of modernity.
Culture
Of the progenitor’s culture we know very little. Their cosmology is hardly revealed through the obfuscated objects they addressed to us. My credentials compel me to speculate and prescribe narrative to these inscrutable peoples, to elucidate their way of life so that we may confidently add yet another patch to the elaborate quilt of goblin history.
But I remain mystified; we have dug up the whole mountain, and they have left us nothing more.