Gregor The Cripple

It was not a large horde, for its members were very small. Instead, they were a multitude, teeming and loud.

All around, beady-eyed rats and mice emerged from the periphery, scurrying close, but stopping often, and never coming too near. They'd approach, stand up on their little hind legs to squeak and sniff at the air, scuttle back as if in fear or shock, and then circle the camp to try once more.

To what end? Gregor had no idea. However, Randolph – probably an expert on the practices of rats – seemed unalarmed, and so he refrained from lighting the multitude on fire.

After a brief crescendo, the squeaking settled into a background drone, and a purpose-filled handful of rats scurried from the throng. They scampered close under the gaze of the comparatively giant pair, stopping a few feet away. In mirror of Randolph and the curious members of the multitude, they stood up on hind legs and began chittering.

Peculiarity, these rats were noticeably small, and when they stood like that, Gregor found that they looked remarkably similar to his little friend. It was odd, but not too odd. Most rats look generally similar, after all, but still…

From his high vantage, Randolph squoke down to the masses. The handful of chosen representatives squeaked back, and the bulk of the multitude grew quiet and still. Leaping suddenly, Randolph jumped over to cling with his little claws to the arm of Mildred. Descending, he scampered to her hand, which she took initiative to lower to the ground.

Once down, he deigned to leave the appendage of conveyance and strutted over to the littler rats; thus commenced the conclave.

The rats conversed. There was no room for doubt, they were speaking in squeaks and chitters. This wasn't mere animalistic behaviour – it wasn't a contest of posturing and presence, but an assembly of rodents in discussion about some unknown matter of presumable importance.

This boggled the mind of Mildred, but with Randolph as the nucleus, Gregor had no trouble accepting that some rats were apparently intelligent enough to speak to one another, even though it should be impossible, because, like most animals, rats had insignificant souls and unsophisticated brains, and possessed entirely nonmagical biology. It made no sense, but reality could not be denied. The rats were conversing.

After a few initial squeaks were exchanged, perhaps in introduction, one of the little representatives turned to the multitude, giving a loud cry. In response, the mass parted, and forward came a few large rodents dragging the much-bitten head of a monster, with bloody spinal column still attached.

The general form was similar to that of a rat, but all of the specifics were wrong. It was too grotesquely stretched and long and large, with blisters and pustules all over and a fang-filled mouth. Its fur was sparse and wiry, and its eyes were abyssal and black. It was a type of thing that Gregor had met before – dragged to the feet of Mildred in the empire and killed by Randolph, slayer of abominations. Back then, Gregor had assumed it to be the only of its kind, but that was clearly inaccurate.

Further squeaks were very quickly exchanged, and a verdict (assumably) was reached.

Randolph turned to Gregor, reared once more on his hind legs to squeak sonorously, then thumped down onto all four limbs to scamper away with his horde. At this, the wizard nodded. He understood.

There were monsters to slay.

"Gregor."

He glanced over to Mildred, finding that The Look had returned.

"Explain." She demanded. But before he could respond, she very quickly added in amendment, "-not in your usual way, but in a reasonable, understandable, non-cryptic manner. Please."

To his credit, Gregor spent a few extra seconds in contemplation before proceeding. "So far as I know," he answered, "rats are not magical, and I would know."

Mildred waited for him to continue, taking advantage of the moment to deploy one of her very best expressions of raised-brow incredulity, but no elaboration came. When further stern looks and even more dramatic eyebrow-positioning failed to elicit anything, Mildred slowly came to realise that Gregor couldn't explain it. He knew as little about Randolph as she did, but simply had a more laissez-faire attitude toward extraordinary abnormality.

Slowly, they both turned back to watch the multitude recede into the night.

***

Suddenly, Gregor came to awareness in a jungle.

All around, gnarled, sweaty trees stretched up into a distant darkness that might just as easily have been empty void as dense canopy.

Distant drums beat a heartbeat rhythm beneath the windblown thrashing of leaves and branches sent mad by a thick swampy wind, blowing wildly, warm and pungent with rotted blood and vegetable decay. It pulled at Gregor's robes and sent yet more leaves and branches clattering against one another. If there was sun above, it was blotted completely, and all available light came instead from the ghastly blue-burning eye-sockets of skulls that grew from the trees or were hung as crude ornaments from moisture-slick vines, swaying and clattering in the gale of the jungle storm.

All in all, it was an impressive atmosphere for a dream, and Gregor rather approved of the air of cultivated menace. However, it was not his dream, and nor was it really a dream at all. He was in an astral place of strange aspect, filled with a foul, foetid magic that felt slimy against his bare mind.

All around, Gregor was surrounded by lives. He could feel them. Each of the trees, the vines, all of the little plants and shrubs, the wind, all of it, all were made of the essence of people, stretched and squeezed like taffy and stitched together in a grand work of animantic grotesquerie. The fabric of the place was soul-stuff, grafted into the blank nothing of the astral planescape.

The purpose? Unknown. It was beyond Gregor's learning. For, though he was adept in most fields of magic, animancy was less an area of study, and more of an outré realm of possibility. The applications and the actual methods of the practice were exceedingly obscure. Generally, mortal things did not even dabble, being that a single lifetime was insufficient to gain the opportunity, and that Gregor's lifetime was hopefully much closer to the beginning than the end.

Being pulled into a dark jungle of mangled souls would terrify any mage, and arouse in any other sorcerer the most desire to be elsewhere, but not Gregor. Rather, he found it invigorating. It was the kind of thing he lived for. Surrounded by the evil and alien, and filled with the rich magic of the astral plane, Gregor the Cripple was in his element, with his basest desires for power and grand purpose satisfied and his deep belief in his own significance vindicated, because something like this could only happen to someone very special. At that moment, he felt very confident in his ability to murder whatever at all might need murdering.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

Thus, he sought no escape, and wished for no safety from the evil which must surely lurk amongst the trees, but rather, he stalked forward on two steady legs for the first time in a long time, intending to meet with whatever had so insultingly summoned him.

For he was unbound, subject to no geas or oath – summoned, but free to act however he pleased. This could only mean that his summoner felt him harmless. Rightfully, he planned to abuse this grave lack of respect. He was not prey, neither here nor anywhere else, and between them, the unknown other would certainly not be the threatening party.

Though, with all of the immortal soul-bending power of his summoner in mind, Gregor graciously conceded that they might at most manage be his equal, but that he was the danger, always.

As to the identity of this mysterious other, he held a singularly keen hope.

"Wizard…" The wind howled distantly.

Strutting forward with vigour, fearless and mean, Gregor was not ignored.

The wind ceased, the drumming halted, and utter silence descended upon the jungle as every skull on every tree shifted and swam across soul-bark to face him.

Gregor did not halt, and displayed no shock or nervous hesitation.

"You have my hard-won attention," he announced, as if he were a lord, and the ageless denizen of the place were a petitioner come to grovel for favour. It was suitable disrespect, he thought.

Uncountable deep, groaning whispers rose in harmony from everywhere, from all the skulls of the jungle, joining in collaboration to form stretched, cacophonous syllables, reminding Gregor of the kopfbiest he had battled all those months ago.

"Wizard," the tortured sound sang at length, "…do you not hate your slavery? …Or be you a fool? …Ignorant of stolen agency?"

"My slavery?" Gregor tried to affect an absent tone, taking care to seem like he was paying more notice to the rare magic around him than to the content of the abominable speech.

Here, the whispers rose and grew raspy with hate. "The Norn! Utmost avatar of tyranny and great slaver of the world! Dare you not rebel!? Is the gumption of wizards so feeble that the Norn has forged a dog of you so easily? Craven! Cowardly! Deficient of bravery! Content to be dominated!"

The excitement of wrath filled Gregor's veins and buoyed him, carving a brutal sneer below his mad eyes. He had hoped very dearly for this meeting.

"You are the enemy." He stated, lips drawn back in glee. It was not a question. Gregor's hopes had been confirmed. "The enemy, my enemy! Worldeater!"

The trees bent and creaked as the storm returned, and the far-off drums began to once more beat their heartbeat rhythm, now closer and feverish.

"I am the Chainbreaker! The Unsupplicant!" The skulls howled. "You are a dog-tool set against me – a slave as force for slavery. Your dying patron is the controller of lives. Causality but a broach upon her breast; the subjugator of wills, and you her subjugant, a beast in her thrall. Do you not writhe and rankle? The collar not chafe? The tyranny not burn? What wizard would be content with your lot? What man? What creature of thoughts and mind? Here, you are free, so speak, fool. Parley. Renounce your master. Deal with me for true freedom."

"…Free? Here? From fate?"

These words bespoke enormous things, for fate is not a force, nor is it physical, mystical, or even theoretically a thing unto itself. It is simply a label applied to the outcomes of causality. Which is to say, the phenomenon of things causing other things to happen – a necessary fact of any reality which contains any things at all. It is so base a trait of existence as to be inseparable from the nature of existence entirely.

The practical reality of being free from fate is to also be free from causality, which to Gregor was nonsensical, but which he recognised must be necessarily true for conflict against the Norn to be possible.

In other words, here, in this strange place, action did not always produce reaction. A thrown stone had no guarantee of going anywhere. Maybe. Or perhaps that wasn't it at all. Some other esoteric counter might be in play. Gregor couldn't be sure. With his fleshly brain and yet-young mortal perspective, all of this impossibly strange eldritch arcanism was beyond him.

"Pledge yourself!" The whispers screamed, the drums growing fast and frenzied.

The Worldeater had called Gregor slave to the Norn, perhaps in earnest, perhaps merely to sway him. It did not matter. He was unmoved. He judged himself free. Gregor was enemy to the Worldeater because the Worldeater had offended him enough to earn death, and he was helping Mildred because she had asked.

He knew that, likely, through whatever mechanism placed fate as the tool of the Norn, these circumstances were arranged by her, as well as the fact of his predisposition towards Mildred, and his capacity for such extreme offence, as too were probably all the circumstances formative to his personality, such that he had become himself and possessed every quality which made him beneficial to the Norn's aims. She had created the very incidents and inclinations that placed Gregor as her eager ally.

This was not hard to see as a kind of slavery. For, though he was a willing actor, the will was manufactured.

However, he was a perfect, ideal wizard, and this was a gainful exercise. Fate was his client, and fate was paying. If she paid, it would not be slavery, he would simply be acting in accordance with his whims.

It was not lost on Gregor that even his capacity for such a rationalisation had likely been intentional.

How far back might the laying of plans go? Was his father's father's father manipulated into producing a line of heirs that eventuated into himself. Kaius too, and Mildred? What of the innumerable others with whom he had interacted majorly? The potential scale of the work was dizzying, as were the consequences of the Norn's unlikely failure in her conflict against the Worldeater.

What could be more grand than a key role in such an insane design? Gregor craved it, intentionally.

And thus, all was well, so long as the Norn paid.

"Enemy of mine!" Gregor shouted, not calmly. "You are victim to grave misapprehensions. You have brought me your sanctuary in the false surety that I am harmless. You imagine that I can neither kill you nor cause to harm your haven and damn you to the Norn's notice. You are wrong!"

"You would fight and die a slave, never having tasted action under your own agency?"

With intentionally arrogant disregard for the Worldeater's words, Gregor continued unperturbed. "I can kill anything. This is a fact. It is a constant, base to the nature of me. It is more universal a truth than the causality you hide here to shirk. Enemy of mine, you have invited death to your home."

"Accept my mercy, find freedom under my banner!" The winds settled a little. "Or does greed snare you? Do you lust after flesh? Forgotten things? Ancient imaginings never written? Slave! These are parasite-wants! Chains to bind you to service!"

Contrary to Gregor's words of bravado, he held some reservations about battling the Worldeater here and now. He knew that he could kill anything, obviously, but being so out of his depth as he was, he also knew that he wasn't guaranteed to survive the act. Likely, he would die and kill in the same instant.

Death in itself wouldn't be too much of a problem, not for him, anyway – it certainly wouldn't count as a loss to perish in such a grand act of violence. But what of Mildred? If Gregor died to kill, what potential doom might befall her in his absence? The enemy would be dead, but would his forces desist? They likely would, though not immediately. A fired bullet doesn't simply drop from the air if you murder the man holding the gun.

But how to escape with his life? Gregor had an idea, and the whole situation very suspiciously reminded him about his escape from the tower, almost as if the one had been intended to serve as inspiration for the other.

In the astral realm – and in dreams, by extension – all things supposedly physical or concrete were actually mostly matters of opinion. Like discrete measures of distance, for instance.

In Gregor's previous dreams of special character, distances had been crossed by the simple employ of thoughts to the effect. Thus, the difficulty in teleporting impossible distances could be bypassed, he hoped, by simply intending to teleport to your destination, rather than concerning yourself with teleporting between there and wherever you happened to be. Regarding his exact destination, these previous dreams again came to mind.

Gregor thus had a choice; to kill and die, or to live and let live.