The Goat at the End of the World

“Some things you lose to time, some to chance—and some to a goat named Vincent who’s clearly here to teach us humility.”

The midday sun bore down with unrelenting cruelty, turning the camp into a kiln. The air shimmered with heat, a wavering mirage that made even solid shapes blur at the edges. Every surface radiated warmth. My clothes clung uncomfortably to my skin, damp with sweat, and the simple act of breathing felt like inhaling through gauze baked in an oven.

I wiped the back of my arm across my brow, wincing as salt stung the corners of my eyes. My hands were gritty from restocking supplies—grains, dried legumes, the last few tins of tomatoes—each item hauled and counted with the dull focus of routine. The effort had left my limbs heavy, my throat parched, and I was already half-dreaming of a tepid drink when I heard the hurried slap of footsteps approaching. Fast. Urgent.

“Karen! Have you moved the coriander plants?”

Chris’s voice cracked through the thick air like a snapped branch. I turned, squinting into the light to find him hurrying toward me, face red, sweat glistening on his balding scalp. His breath came in short bursts, chest heaving beneath his sweat-stained shirt.

I frowned, the question catching me off-guard. “No, why would I have done that?”

The very notion felt absurd—moving the coriander? It had never even crossed my mind. That planter bed had been carefully chosen for the sliver of shade it received in the morning hours. Shifting it would serve no purpose.

Chris planted his hands on his hips, as if trying to anchor himself against some invisible tide of panic. “They’re gone. All of them. I went to check on them this morning and the entire planter bed is empty.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak.

Gone?

I stared at Chris, my mouth suddenly dry. Somewhere in the pit of my stomach, something began to harden.

“Let me see,” I said, barely above a whisper, as though raising my voice might cement the loss into something irreversible. A knot tightened in my chest with each step as I followed Chris. We rounded the edge of the tent where the planter had stood—a space that had once held so much promise.

And there it was.

A bare patch of soil, ragged and unsettled, the delicate green shoots reduced to memory. The earth looked trampled and careless, as if something had gorged without a trace of guilt. Not even a torn stalk remained—just churned dirt, scarred and silent. The small oasis we’d nurtured had been swallowed by the landscape, returned to its original desolation.

The sight made my heart twist. I crouched slowly, knees cracking as I knelt down, brushing aside a curl of dry soil with the tips of my fingers. I scanned the scene, trying to suppress the growing wave of emotion that threatened to crack through my concentration.

Then I saw them—pressed into the earth like faded hieroglyphs: the faint, broad outline of a snout and the cleft marks of hooves.

“They were eaten,” I murmured, the truth settling in my throat like grit. Cold and immediate. It wasn’t just a loss—it was a theft. A violation.

Chris let out a guttural groan, his frustration palpable. His fists clenched at his sides, knuckles whitening as if he might strike the very ground in retaliation. “Those damn chickens! I knew we shouldn’t have expected them to stay at the Drop Zone without an enclosure.”

His voice carried a raw edge, brittle with anger and something deeper—guilt, maybe.

But I was already shaking my head.

“No,” I said slowly, still crouched, tracing the impression in the dirt with one finger. “These markings are too large for the chickens.”

My mind spun backward, unspooling the memory like film—of hooves, a stubborn gait, and an infuriating goat, who had already made a habit of testing boundaries both physical and metaphorical.

And just like that, the seed of suspicion was planted.

Vincent.

That mischievous, four-legged menace. The thought of him—innocent eyes, twitching tail, and all—stirred something between exasperation and disbelief. Of course it would be him.

A low sigh escaped my lips as the pieces began to fall into place, each one clattering down with a dull finality.

I straightened up slowly, brushing the grit from my palms as my eyes swept across the camp.

"Where's Vincent?"

Chris followed my gaze, his expression tightening. He turned in a slow circle, scanning the camp as though Vincent might suddenly materialise from thin air. Then his eyes widened.

“You don't think…”

The rest didn’t need to be said. We locked eyes in a moment of grim understanding—the kind born not just of shared suspicion, but of a weary, mounting recognition that yes, of course it would be Vincent. Who else?

No further words passed between us. We moved in unison, shoulders squared, footsteps quickening. There was a kind of reluctant choreography in it now, the urgency of people who had been here before and knew what it meant when things went suspiciously quiet—or suspiciously loud.

Our camp wasn’t large, but Vincent had a talent for vanishing into improbably small spaces, his wiry frame and troublesome persistence giving him the stealth of a feline and the appetite of a plague.

“Vincent!” I bellowed, the force of his name cracking through the midday air. The sound rebounded off canvas and metal like a warning shot. “Vincent, you woolly menace, you better not have—”

I didn’t get to finish.

From the direction of the supply tent came a sudden burst of chaos—a crash, then shouting, metal clanging violently against metal. The still air shattered like a dropped pane of glass.

“What the...? No, no! Shoo! Get out of there!”

Nial’s voice, unmistakable and laced with panic, reached us in waves. It carried that strangled tone of someone already two steps past exasperation and hurtling toward surrender.

Then came the scrabbling of hooves on canvas. Frantic. Slippery. A discordant rhythm of clatter and buckling poles, as though the tent itself were engaged in a wrestling match with its intruder.

Chris and I broke into a jog, sending up faint puffs of ochre dust that clung to our trousers like pollen. The sun still blazed overhead, relentless and oppressive, but all I could focus on was the growing din ahead—a cacophony of curses, crashes, and chaos.

As we ducked into the supply tent, the scene that greeted us stopped us in our tracks.

There, in the heart of what was meant to be our most ordered and precious space, stood Nial in a posture of sheer disbelief, locked in a surreal standoff with a goat who clearly had no intention of surrender. Vincent—of course it was Vincent—had somehow wormed his way into the tent, and was now perched triumphantly atop a sunken mattress like some anarchic deity of disarray.

The supplies lay in ruin. Bags torn open, tins dented and leaking, a trail of cracker crumbs leading like breadcrumbs to the epicentre of the devastation. It looked less like a camp store and more like the aftermath of a minor natural disaster. The faint, acrid smell of something powdered hung in the air.

“You bloody beast!” Nial growled, his hands flapping uselessly at his sides as he half-lunged, half-retreated from the goat. His face had gone a deep shade of crimson, a mixture of heat, fury, and complete exasperation.

But Vincent remained unbothered. Reclining on the mattress as though it were his personal throne, he chewed lazily, his jaw moving with the steady rhythm of a creature who had long since relinquished any fear of consequence. He glanced in Nial’s direction with a bored flick of an ear, utterly unrepentant.

The sheer absurdity of it hit me like a slap, and despite myself, a laugh escaped—a sharp, involuntary snort that echoed far too loudly in the stuffy canvas enclosure.

“Having trouble, Nial?” I said, the words slipping out with a wry lift of my brow, my voice laced with teasing warmth. I knew it was unkind, but the picture of this man—normally so composed—utterly undone by a goat was just too much.

Nial spun toward me, eyes wide and frantic. He looked like a man who had stared too long into the abyss and found it staring back at him with hooves. “This... this animal broke in and has turned the supply tent upside down! I've tried every bloody thing to get him to leave, but he just digs in further.”

His rant escalated with a string of expletives that spiralled rapidly from irritation into outright poetry. I might’ve been impressed if the situation weren’t so dire.

Vincent, unmoved, resumed chewing with a slow blink. A king surveying the wreckage of his domain.

He chose that moment to issue a defiant bleat—a brassy, nasal bellow that ricocheted off the tent poles and rang out across the camp like a rallying cry. It was bold, indignant, and utterly unapologetic. The sound echoed like a battle horn, announcing his claim not just on the tent, but on the chaos itself.

I closed my eyes briefly and exhaled, a weary sigh escaping through clenched teeth. My irritation simmered just beneath the surface, a heat that rivalled the midday sun. But alongside it came something else—an odd, reluctant fondness. For all his disruptions, the old goat had spirit.

Still, enough was enough.

I stepped forward, my boots crunching over torn packaging and crushed tins, and levelled my gaze at him. Vincent blinked lazily, as though I were little more than a passing breeze.

“All right, you lawnmower, let's go. You've caused enough trouble for one day.”

My voice was flat, stripped of all patience. The kind of tone that dared defiance. Any ordinary animal would’ve bolted.

But Vincent was no ordinary animal.

Nial let out another strangled sound behind me—equal parts indignation and disbelief—but I ignored it. His face had taken on a blotchy hue now, somewhere between beetroot and plum, as though the stress might physically eject him from his own skin.

I reached out and clamped a firm grip on the loose scruff at Vincent’s neck, hauling his bulk off the mattress with a grunt. He twisted immediately, hooves scrabbling for purchase, bleating in high offence. His body wriggled like a sack full of snakes, legs kicking and head tossing, but I kept my grip steady, jaw clenched and shoulders set.

“I'll get this escaped convict secured back at the Drop Zone,” I said, breath already coming short as I adjusted my hold on his shifting weight. “You two see if you can't salvage what's left of the supplies.”

It was a long shot. Most of it looked like it had been trampled, eaten, or… inexplicably rearranged. But I needed them to try. Needed to believe something could be salvaged.

Dragging Vincent out of the tent felt like dragging a tree stump through sand—equal parts exhausting and absurd. He protested every few steps, planting his hooves and trying to twist free with the tenacity of something far younger than he had any right to be.

And yet, despite the sweat on my brow and the grit in my throat, I felt that strange flicker of affection growing again. He was a nuisance, yes. A walking embodiment of entropy. But he was also, somehow, a symbol—a creature that refused to bow, even in the face of a world as hostile as this.

As the tent receded behind me and the Drop Zone came into view once more, I adjusted my grip and pressed on, the sun at my back and a goat with the heart of a troublemaker in tow.

In Clivilius, perhaps that was the only kind of heart that would survive.