Gregor The Cripple

When Gregor woke, it was not slow. Dream-things swirled in his head, known, but half-remembered, and he rose at their urging, pushing himself up to sitting with the elbow of his crippled arm and sending his hand to wherever his cane might probably be, his head swivelling, eyes searching.

Caught in that peculiar state of just-woken discombobulation, Gregor had no idea what he was looking for, or why precisely he was looking, but there were words of warning in his head that wouldn't fade. Something about a 'coming escalation'. The dream was fog, but he remembered danger.

He found nothing immediately amiss. The camp was still the camp, unmolested. The moon was in the sky, and the fire crackled low. Mildred was there too, sitting cleverly so as to face away from the fire and not blind herself to the things that might creep in the dark, but could still read by as much of the fire's light as fell upon the pages of her book.

She held this book, but looked to him curiously.

"You didn't sleep for very long," she remarked.

Having found Mildred healthy, Gregor's roving gaze drifted away to interrogate the shadows of the trees and the distant shapes that made the horizon.

"It was long enough."

Turning fully to face him, she pursed her lips and donned one of those looks, which was notably not a variety of that look, but was similar, and was characterised by a knowing hint of slight frustration.

"It occurs to me," she began, "that your sleep is rather more important than mine," and paused, hoping to lend her statement more significance. "It's no trouble at all for me to keep watch a little longer, or much longer, or for me not to sleep at all, really. My fatigue has a much lower cost than yours."

"Neither of us will be getting much sleep tonight."

Sensing innuendo, Mildred's expressive brow gave an upward twitch, though Gregor continued in a different direction.

"We leave as soon as Randolph returns."

"…Why?"

"Wizard intuition," he explained, which actually explained nothing, but was suitable explanation nonetheless.

And so, Mildred lay down to sleep while Gregor kept two eyes on the night. He did nothing else, no reading, no spellcraft, no planning of improvements to his cane or to his eye, no study of the finger, and no contemplation on the new mysteries of rats. He simply sat, accosting the empty dark with his glare, holding it to account such that it didn't dare misbehave.

His mind was steeped in a murderous agitation that wouldn't allow anything else. It was extreme, not simply a mood, but a deeply dissatisfied disquiet, as if he had been aroused to violence but denied the release of fight.

Gregor really wanted to kill something. He thus waited by the fire for whatever might come, letting the chaotic amalgam of dream-memories slowly precipitate into clarity, and gradually, he remembered the foggy broad strokes, though it felt strangely as if he hadn't actually been there, and that none of it had happened to him, not really. It all felt impersonal and second-hand, like he was recalling facts of history.

And perhaps, Gregor considered, it wasn't actually him that he was remembering.

His soul had been there, certainly, but was his soul really 'him' in the truest sense? Without the time-carved groves of his brain, was he still the same person? It wasn't unthinkable for there to be a difference, and that this subtle difference could give rise to a sense of unfamiliarity toward the acts of the self.

Though, the disassociation might also be a downstream consequence of the fact that he had never actually formed real memories of the events in question, not in the conventional sense, anyway. They hadn't occurred in the presence of his brain, so his brain hadn't carved itself with their recollection. Rather, Gregor was absorbing them as he would any learned information, just as one might read and picture a scene from a book, then later remember it, though instead with the greater detail and nuance of lived experience.

Perhaps this feeling was simply the practical reality of remembering things that occurred outside the body.

At least, that was his best guess. To his knowledge, this was something that nobody had ever properly studied.

Gregor 'remembered' the meeting between himself and the Worldeater in that jungle safehold of souls, and thereafter the groundbreaking act of wizardry which had ferried him safely to the friendly fields of gold, ruining his opportunity to lose himself in grand violence with a premature evacuation.

His arrival had not been ignored, and a… something had found him to deliver a warning: Hostilities were now sure to escalate.

This matched his own keen understanding of conflict, and though he would have very much liked to meet this prospect with eager glee, he discovered that his concern for Mildred would not allow it.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

For whatever worth she held to the Worldeater, Mildred had not been an immediate priority at the start of her troubles. Back then, she was a (relatively) normal girl, alone against an unknown enemy who could exhaust her almost without trying, far from any safety or assistance. Little effort was thus committed to early attempts at her capture or elimination, whichever was actually planned.

Now, however, Mildred was Gregor-protected, fate-assisted, and not a week away from a port to sure safety, which wasn't to say that she would be absolutely safe in the Golden Empire, but that the difficulty of any act against her there would be tenfold, and carry the price of sure retaliation.

Thus, if ever there was a time for the enemy to exert themselves fully, it would be very soon.

Hours passed. Five, if the moon could be trusted, which it likely could, and then began a distant squeaking.

It was not the discordant squeaking of an approaching horde, not like before, rather, it was subdued somehow. Akin to the difference between a barfight and a boxing match – one being chaotic and animalistic, the other direct and intentional – almost civil, but not quite.

Nudging Mildred with the toe of his boot, Gregor summoned a little globe of magelight so that they might both better see whatever it was that Randolph had been doing.

He held assumptions, of course, but his dream had inspired a preference for surety.

Mildred, now possessing extraordinary experience in the art of resting as necessary and waking with a presumption of urgency, woke after having slept for an impressive four out of those five hours.

Her hair, by now grown much longer than she'd like it to be, sat ruffled and messy as she gathered herself, not quite knowing if there was an immediate need for her to be running and shooting. Seeing that there wasn't, and suffering the particular discomforts of interrupted sleep, she rose to stand in the cold night beside Gregor, scrunched-up and squinting bleakly at his light, swaddled in her tightly-pulled scarf and greatcoat.

Not long thereafter, three lengthy abominations were dragged into the camp tail-first through the dirt, leaking a dark, gooey ichor and very certainly dead. Atop the lead of these stood mighty Randolph, fur matted with the gore of his enemies and with half an ear missing, lost in glorious battle.

The monstrous rat beneath his feet still clutched a crude knife in its death-stiff claw, fashioned perhaps from an abused scrap of tin or some other such item of metal refuse – a weapon, wielded by a rat. It had thumbs, too.

Something very strange was afoot upon the continent.

Following behind were the squeaking multitude, obviously war-weary and fewer in number, but still many, and with various of the larger rats limping, or missing tails or ears. Evidently, Randolph had neither battled alone, nor commanded his horde from safety, rather, he had slain the creatures in the company of a cadre of his best and most capable comrades.

As before, the horde halted teemingly a distance from Gregor and Mildred.

Turning to face the furry mass, Randolph delivered several bold squeaks, waited a moment, then squeaked once more and hopped down from his corpse-perch to scurry over and climb up Gregor's leg. The rats didn't really respond, not like a human mob might, and in fact gave no indication at that they were anything other than regular animals, but dispersed at once to scamper off in all directions, leaving behind the corpses of their enemies.

It was almost as if, now that their common cause was accomplished, they'd been released from their duties and were free to return to regular rodent business.

Strange things indeed.

***

Luckily, the dream-warning hadn't heralded any immediate doom. Unluckily, this meant that the doom was still lurking in the fog of the near future, waiting to arise at the most suitably inconvenient moment.

Thus, the pair wasted no time and were on the road before the horizon held any hint at all of grey dawn, and then again off the road once there was enough light to navigate their horses around the lumps and bumps of the surrounding fallow fields and cow-populated pastures, grateful for the lack of snow. If any landowners had a problem with their imposition, none approached to complain, preferring to let the pointy-hatted trespasser pass in peace.

Eventually, the much-worked fields made an abrupt transition to untouched woodland. Seeing that the trees weren't very dense and that the land was generally still flat, Gregor and Mildred opted to maintain their heading without detour, and began winding their way through the gentle wood.

Some of the trees were naked with the season, but stretching overhead was a foliage of tall oaks and yews, with the occasional poplar springing up wherever the canopy was thin. It struck Gregor that this was exactly the kind of place where animals would like to live during the wintertime, with evergreen trees providing decent cover from wind and snow in certain places, but in others being thin enough that sunlight was still abundant.

In other words, it would be a good place to hunt, and there thus might be hidden snares strewn about, or men hiding in bushes with guns. Gregor hoped to meet the latter.

"…It can't be all the rats. That wouldn't make any sense. We'd know if it were all the rats. Randolph must be some special type of rat that can communicate intelligently with other special rats, and can also communicate with regular rats like regular rats communicate with other regular rats… Probably." Mildred was still working at the problem of impossible rodent intelligence.

"Likely," Gregor shrugged, keeping an eye on the nearby shrubs. The rat in question being asleep somewhere within the nebulous depths of his robe. "In any event, Randolph seems to be the rattest among them," he said, and Mildred could not fault the assertion.

"He did seem rather chiefly when he addressed his… 'people'..." She trailed off, her clever mind picking out a notable peculiarity from amidst all the background oddness. "You know Gregor, it's extraordinarily coincidental that two very strange new varieties of rat have appeared at the same time and seem to be in conflict with one another."

Hmm. Strange forces in conflict? An extraordinary coincidence? Gregor happened to know someone in the business of coincidences.

Along their way, the pair happened upon a man-made trail winding through the wood, and they followed it in the view that hunters and hunters' traps would likely be elsewhere. It took them diligently in a north-westish direction for a good few hours, before they very abruptly found themselves staring into the eyes of a tree.

Typically, trees do not possess eyes, so this seemed a little odd.