The morning dawned damply, but it did dawn; the sun shining through the trees onto a half-drowned muddy road and swollen creek.
Harriet felt quite as though she'd been folded in half and then slept on a cushion propped against a board, which is exactly what had happened. Bleary-eyed and decidedly grouchy, she extricated herself from beneath a pile of smallish goblins and sleepy kittens, blinking slowly in the light from two high-set windows on either side of the fireplace, which had been un-shuttered to let in the sun. Guffin was already awake, or perhaps still awake; puttering around and shoving a final few items into a bag.
Harriet stared. The bag was something unholy unto itself.
It was easily half as large as Guffin, and might once have been the outside half of a goat. A goat that had been turned inside-out, laced into a shape resembling a seed packet, turned right-ways-out again, and tied in place with a complex harness of braided hemp ropes. And more insulting than that to the goat, she thought, it had been patched and modified into a rainbow horror, dangling tassels and straps, several bits of cast-iron cookware and the horns of what had perhaps been the same goat, a quilted roll of unimaginably clashing patchwork, dozens of smaller pouches, earthen bottles stoppered with cork and wax, strings of beads and clinking metal scraps, and a voluminous bright scarf tied at the topmost loop. And that was just the outside; never mind what horrors lay within.
"Surely you don't need all of that," Harriet sneered. "That thing weighs more than you do. You won't be able to ride or walk in a day or two."
Guffin gave her a judgmental eyebrow, which was impressive for a creature with no eyebrows.
"I do so need all of it," they drawled. "It's everything I own in the world, or at least what I won't mind being gone when I come back - those kids can pick a nest apart in hours. And it only weighs just as much as I do, and I can carry that much just fine. I carry me around every day."
There wasn't much she could say to that, besides to stalk back up the steep and narrow stairs into the store. The canvas bag still lay innocently against the pickle bucket, but the memory of it being heavy enough to knock her head over heels still burned.
Carefully weighing options, Harriet decided that perhaps her magic would be best spent in keeping the bag from becoming a world-eating center of mass. Gingerly, wrapping the weave in magic, she hefted it again, slipping the tote onto her shoulders, grateful that while it wasn't exactly "light," it was certainly no longer bone-crushingly heavy.
Guffin clattered out of the stairwell, somehow, despite being somewhat larger than the opening with that abomination of a backpack on.
"Anything else before we go?" they chirped cheerfully. "Well, besides the outhouse. Always gotta stop there on the way to adventures."
"Coffee?" Harriet asked hopefully.
"Oh," the goblin beamed. "Well, that's back downstairs. Unless you want to try camp coffee and see if it's worth bringing along?"
How many more things could they possibly fit on their persons? she wondered, but only said;
"Maybe camp coffee."
It was better than going back down the stairs, anyway.
Still obnoxiously chipper, Guffin grabbed an armful of clanking things from their bag, and a handful of rustle-y sorts of things from the shop shelves, and bustled onto the porch. The sun was gaining strength, and Harriet blinked miserably into the damp morning as the goblin all but ran circles around her, setting a kettle over a small firelight that seemed to come from nowhere at all, and grinding beans in a grey-granite mortar and pestle.
The horse was gone. In a way, it had never been there; only a magically-captured gust of wind and starlight, made to carry a rider at speed. A single rider, not a rider in tow of a goblin with an entire goblin nest strapped to their back. The energy would be better spent keeping the bags light and the road easy.
The outhouse door clanked... Guffin had wandered all the way in, and back out, as Harriet stared into the swirling mist.
"Your turn," they commented. "Coffee will be done in a few."
Groggily, she went.