Gregor The Cripple

The base of the tower bore a single imposing door.

“It can be thickened.”

The others raised their brows, not expecting Gregor to start a conversation at a time like this. They were all tense, anticipating an encounter with an unfriendly necromancer who probably wanted to eat their souls or something. It was quite odd to hear Gregor of all people strike up a casual conversation.

But then again, who else but Gregor could act so nonplussed in these circumstances? He was a shark in water, while the others felt like they could barely swim.

“What can?” Asked Briar, emulating the wizard’s nonchalance upon finding that he had none of his own.

“The door. For defensive reasons, the space inside can be unfolded and filled with several tons of steel. It will not open if we are not wanted and I will be forced to enter more creatively.”

With this, he moved to test the door. It swung open at the slightest push and he smile-sneered sinisterly. Either the fool inside hadn’t yet deciphered the core mechanisms of the tower’s spellwork, or he was stupid enough to think that allowing Gregor inside would be to Gregor’s detriment.

“We are not rejected. Come.” Gregor beckoned as he strode to enter the place that was once his home and his prison, where a mere six months prior he had killed his master and been forced out into the world as an independent wizard.

The opium was with him this morning. Just enough of it sludged around inside his brain to make him normal – enough to banish the infirmity of withdrawal and pain and allow him to perform as he should. Just enough. No more. He had learned the perils of excess.

Benefiting from the alchemical aid, his thoughts were flowing freely. He began to consider his flight. Might it have been a good thing? It was an uncomfortable, squirmy thought which bore confusingly comforting conclusions.

He had hated being here with Kaius, but he craved wizardliness. For the longest time, his only goal had been to become more of a wizard. As a child he had learned to speak like a wizard, think like a wizard, and act like a wizard. It was his ultimate aspiration.

Though he had unintentionally birthed it, Kaius had no regard for this aspiration whatsoever. The ancient man wanted only to produce the best apprentice possible, and his definition of possible was strange indeed. It was purely incidental that Kaius’s goal accommodated Gregor’s desires in a stifling, forceful way.

The boy bore with it and remained, stewing in his aimless and impotent hate, intending all the while to kill his master when he was capable enough. It would be the wizardly thing to do, after all.

Gregor’s exile from the tower had done terrible things to him in these mere six months of independence. He was now an opium-addicted cripple and a professional failure. But what of his wizardliness, his goal, how that that been impacted? Was he more wizardly for his suffering?

Yes, he decided. He certainly was.

He recalled the dichotomy of Kaius, suffer or stagnate, and marvelled once more at the truth of the words. Had he stayed in the stifling tower, or later, maintained his stable position in Sine, had he not suffered in those instances, he would have surely fallen into stagnation.

Loathsome as he was, Kaius played host to experience and wisdom that well-befitted his years.

They waltzed through the door into a too-large lobby which ballooned well beyond the apparent diameter of the tower. Gregor stood still, lone eye boring into a figure standing impassively in the recessed balcony in the wall before them.

Somehow, the perpetual stump-ache grew to pierce the veil of opium and his blood thundered in his ears. Shit.

After a moment, he addressed his Kaius, who looked down upon the group with indifferent eyes.

“It is very rude of you to still be alive.” Gregor said, voice calm although he was certainly not calm.

“Your blame is misplaced, for I had no choice in the matter. My hateful circumstances are a result of your actions, boy, though I do not wish to hold you to account.”

Ah. A realization rippled through Gregor’s mind and he felt truly stupid for the first time in memory. It was unfamiliar and unpleasant.

“You have been raised.” The living wizard stated.

He knew that the tower now housed a necromancer, and he knew that it also housed the corpse of an extraordinarily powerful wizard. The fact that he had never even considered the former might interact with the latter was nothing short of absurd incompetence. He should have expected this.

“Since I was the previous tower master, my m-” Upper lip drawn back into a snarl, Kaius fought visibly against the compulsion to call his new owner ‘my master’. “-The lich has assigned me the ignoble duty of watchman and caretaker, like a common servant.”

All were silent for a time, not that Gregor’s companions had any wish to speak in this situation. They were all quite out of their depth.

Gregor began considering his options. Kaius represented a near-insurmountable obstacle and whatever commands he may have been given by his lich were a deadly unknown.

Intuiting the direction of Gregor’s thoughts, Kaius spoke again. “I cannot directly or knowingly act against her wishes.” Behind these words was a silent implication – that unknowing or indirect disobedience was possible. This meant that his actions were bound by his own perceptions and not actively arbitrated by the will of the necromancer, or bound by some impartial ruleset.

Worryingly, Kaius had to have delivered this implication knowingly, thus, he must not think that it would be of any real harm to the lich.

“But what of your own wishes? Where do you stand in this?”

“I lost to you, Gregor. I did not lose to her, and I certainly did not lose myself somewhere in the process. There is no force in any reality that could compel me to accept these slave-chains which chafe against my soul. At this moment you are no doubt planning my second murder. I would gladly welcome a fresh oblivion at your hands in exchange for freedom from this vile undeath.”

After a pause. “If you are ever offered a chance at lichdom, I suggest you decline violently with all of your being. This is an exceedingly unpleasant existence.”

“All of that goes without saying, which is why I was asking about something far more uncertain.”

“You assume that I must resent you for killing me.” The ancient man scoffed. “You should know that I am too rational for hatred. Gregor, the past is unchangeable and revenge will profit me nothing. Furthermore, as your master, my ultimate goal was your success. Events occurred in such a way that my death was necessary for your success, so I died. In this fashion, my death served my goal. I do not resent you for it.”

“If my success was your goal, why did you try to steal my soul and hijack my body?”

“I did not.”

“I’m fairly certain that you did.”

The elder wizard’s head snapped upwards and his eyes focused on some unknown point beyond the chamber they inhabited.

“She stirs. We must continue later.”

The walls around the group surged closer and a doorway sprouted from the solid marble face to their left.

“Enter immediately and be hidden from the eyes of the tower.”

It took Gregor only a moment to consider the situation. If Kaius wished for his demise, whether under the influence of the necromancer or by his own intentions, there would be no need for trickery. Thus, the passage should be a genuine refuge.

“Where does it lead?”

Kaius smirked the only smirk Gregor had ever seen him wear. “I am sending you to the space between the walls.”

***

They emerged into an ancient reliquary, unused for probable centuries. Above them loomed an impenetrable black void. Evidently, the ceiling of this room had been whisked away and re-purposed some point.

Arrayed around the group were display cases and shelves, with a few still housing whatever trinkets had been stored here and forgotten long ago.

“Get looting.” Suggested Gregor with a gesture. They had nothing better to do.

Briar happily set about pilfering and plundering, but the young couple weren’t quite so enthusiastic. It seemed that they had qualms about Gregor keeping certain aspects of the situation to himself.

Taking a comforting swig from his flask – one part laudanum to nine parts water – he decided to let them draw their own conclusions.

“Greg-” Barbra had called him Greg. He found it unpleasant. “I don’t quite understand everything, but it seems like your master treated you poorly.”

In Greta’s eyes, the wizard was a man burdened and suffering. He was unshaven, his single hand tremored occasionally and he didn’t seem to notice, he stood stooped, walked with an unsteady gait, and the skin around his wounded eye – which he refused to discuss – had turned from the purplish red of their first meeting to an ugly piss yellow.

He was such an infirm, feeble-looking thing, yet he made the tremendous effort to hurry here through the death forest while protecting and directing them, just to reclaim the corpse of his master who had apparently attempted to steal his body, but was now once again unpleasantly animate.

Neither she nor Dieter could possibly imagine the exact nature of his circumstances. He certainly wasn’t the type to share, but they were sure that his situation must be very tragic.

Perhaps it was, but Gregor didn’t think so.

He saw them looking at him with pity in their eyes, and was almost so surprised that he forgot to take offense.

Pity was a very unexpected reaction to his mild deceptions. Scorn would be understandable, but not pity.

They must have invented a misunderstanding, he thought, and decided to let them keep it, however injurious to his pride it might be.

“You two are over-thinking things.” Announced Briar, inspecting with glee a worthless piece of coloured glass, thing it to be a magical gem. “‘Far as I’m concerned, nothing changes. We walk in, we kill the necromancer, and we walk out with valuables.” The bastard turned to Gregor. “By the way,” He pointed up into the nothing “What the fuck is that?”

“That’s the infinity between the walls.” This simple answer earned him three uncomprehending stares. “The tower isn’t a building. It’s more like a shell for a network of independent spaces. The master of the tower is at liberty to arrange these parcels of reality however they wish.”

“…I see.” Replied the bardstard. He didn’t see, but Gregor had expected that.

It was then that Dieter spoke up, displaying a rare hint of insight. “Your master said that he can’t act against the interests of the lich, so how was he able to send us here?”

“To begin with, he isn’t trustworthy at all. We can’t even be certain that there’s a necromancer in the tower.” Gregor began shuffling toward the door that had brought them to the room. “My master liked living, so it’s entirely possible that he set up some kind necromantic contingency for his death. These things are common.”

Peeping through the door’s keyhole, Gregor found that it now led down some unknown corridor of stone. “But, if there exists a lich with potency enough to curse my former master with undeath and keep him as a slave, and if that lich is really here in the tower furthering an unknown goal, then there are two possible circumstances which would allow Kaius the Corpse to help us. The first: that he doesn’t believe he’s helping us at all. The second: that he doesn’t believe helping us is of any actual detriment to the lich.”

“He thinks we’re insignificant.”

“Correct, and that ancient asshole knows where we are, so it’s best to treat him like an obstacle rather than an ally.” Declared Gregor as he threw open the door. “We must flee like vermin into the derelict bulk of the tower.”

Randolph gave a hearty squeak of excitement, being the rat among rats that he was, the little rodent was very enamoured with prospect of scurrying about in abandoned infrastructure. There might be scraps! Rats love scraps.

Gregor was also quite keen on finding some useful scraps in the dumping ground of the tower, because he currently had no idea how he was going to pull this off.

Originally, Gregor had planned to swagger through the front door, meet the necromancer under whatever pretences were convenient, then detonate his head, or maybe boil and drown him in mercury, or inflict upon him some other entertaining death. Gregor had a growing list of things he wanted to try.

But the presence of both Kaius and the lich greatly complicated matters.

The lich was an unknown, but certainly formidable. Not just anyone could control a magical powerhouse like Kaius. And, whether under the influence of the lich or not, Kaius would be their opponent at some point. After all, Gregor wanted his head.

He was confident in his ability to kill anything – he was himself – but Kaius was far too formidable to take in a fair fight, and most sorcerers would consider an unfair fight similarly impossible. Kaius had the power invisibility, thus, he held an absolute advantage in every scenario.

Gregor was confident that, being himself, he could surmount this absolute advantage. The leverage that he needed could be found within the vaults of the tower, which held insane things capable of delivering absolute annihilation, greedily amassed over generations.

Of course, these things were unavailable to him now, and would remain unavailable for as long as Kaius was animate, being that the mechanisms of the tower still seemed to be slaved to his will.

Thus, Gregor must hope to find some useful scraps in the dumping ground of the tower.

***

A faint drip-drip-dripping echoed down the infinite corridor from an unknown source, the sound curiously warping as it passed through Strange space. Continuing their tramp towards this sound, which was in the only direction they could travel, the party noticed patches of wall and floor where the perfectly cut stone blocks seemed to take on an oblique appearance. Their edges were impossibly straight, but they did not look straight at all.

It was a fascinating phenomenon which Gregor had painfully little time to consider, for he needed to devote the bulk of his mental resources to the obstacles before him, but try as he might, the Kaius problem would not allow itself to be solved.

Upon the most cursory inspection, every prospective solution turned out to be the kind of bad idea that other bad ideas tell their children to avoid for fear of it being a poor influence. They were the kinds of theoretically possible things that even a sheltered, ivy-tower-dwelling, critically experience-deficient mage might consider to be impractical, and would suggest only with a decent amount of accompanying caution.

Fight Kaius? This should perhaps be the standard against which other bad ideas ought be judged.

Free Kaius from servitude and hope that the presence of a shared enemy inspires cooperation? Setting aside the fact that this would be impossible given Gregor’s meagre resources, Kaius is Kaius. Although he had hinted at his willingness to assist Gregor against the lich, a free Kaius would possess neither need nor inclination to cooperate.

Kill Kaius without fighting him? Though Gregor had actually done this before, he wasn’t optimistic about the chances of it happening again.

His only viable option was trickery. The old man was compelled to prevent harm to the lich’s intentions, which presumably included harm to himself, being that he was a powerful asset to the lich.

The only thing Gregor could leverage was Kaius’s seeming agency to allow things which were not directly harmful, or which he was convinced would not be harmful to the lich, like the hidden presence of Gregor’s party in the bowels of the tower.

Gregor would need to sneak some innocuous or supposedly ineffective act past his former master to gain the advantage he needed.

Obviously, this would be difficult. Aside from Kaius’s monstrous intellect and his abnormally long lifetime’s worth of experience, he had hinted at exactly this situation during their previous conversation, so he would be expecting it.

Ahead, the dripping continued its steady staccato attack against the stonework. The sound was distant and echoing, but identifiable, and they headed toward it for lack of anything else to do.

Suddenly, they hit a patch of Very Strange and went wonky. Gregor, who was in the lead, became long, and his single step stretched vanishingly ever onward. As he walked on, he appeared to the others as a bizarre elastic smudge extending and receding into the distance.

Of course, to him, everything seemed normal. He proceeded forward at regular pace and his forward progress as compared to his stationary stone surroundings appeared utterly normal, being that they suffered from the exact same spatial distortion that he did.

Following into the Strange after him, the others discovered that the constant dripping sounded completely alien and was rapidly growing in volume. It would be unrecognizable if they weren’t already acquainted with it.

The wizard’s back appeared in the distance and drew closer and closer with what would otherwise be alarming rapidity. Evidently, he had exited the wonky and become strange to them by contrast.

“Whoa,” realized Briar upon stepping into Normal, “that’s why the hall was so long. It was stretched.”

“And we have stretched with it.” Confirmed Gregor.

They were at the end of the hallway now, having crossed the seemingly infinite distance from thence to there in a mere few steps. In reality, a few steps of distance was all that it was, but they couldn’t have known that by looking. They lacked the perspective.

Before them was a great doorless aperture from which wafted dank, humid air. Dead and dying trees could be seen within, set apart in orderly rows and each bearing a little plaque. Some were diminutive, being more shrub than tree, and others were giant knurled things, boxed in and trimmed according the the invisible bounds of their enclosures.

Here the dripping had grown to be a very slight cacophony. It was the sound of a self-perpetuating dampness, of water that evaporated, then travelled around to condense and evaporate once more, having not learned its lesson.

A warm, damp arboretum in the bowels of the tower? How unexpected.

They entered in mild awe and noticed that the manufactured sun still limped in a decaying orbit around the great dome of the room, flickering on occasion with a moonish glow. It reminded Randolph of cheese, and he wished to possess it, though he knew that he could not.

The space was so expansive that little wisps of proto-cloud could be seen hanging in the cavernous space above, tickling the tips of the tallest trees still standing.

Wandering further in, they came upon a small plot of identical trees bearing engorged blue ventricles, visible beneath ephemeral, paper-thin bark. The plaques here bore numbers rather than names, ascending from one to thirteen. Experimental specimens, no doubt.

They seem to have stumbled upon the grand arboretum of some hortimancer. If Kaius knew that the tower held such a chamber, it would currently be in use. If not for research, then for profit, for the life’s accumulations of a talented plant fancier would not be insignificant. In other words, their current location was unknown to the elder wizard.

“Um, Greg? There’s a wizard in this wall.”

He frowned at Greg, but made his weaving through the trees to find that there was indeed a wizard in the wall.

The wall in question was a tremendous rectangular pillar supported by many buttresses which rose up to meet the impossibly distant ceiling – one of many such pillars which provided integrity to the structure.

About ten feet above the group was a rather conspicuous hat. Pointy and brilliant blue, covered in glimmering star-shaped runes. It was attached to a head, protruding just far enough from the stone that the party could see its empty eye sockets yawning down at them.

“Ah,” muttered Gregor, “we have found a fool.”

On either side of the wizard’s head were his hands, sticking out from the wall and grasping at the stonework in long-frozen desperation.

“What happened to him?”

“He attempted to teleport, and wound up transposing himself into the pillar. Fools like him are scattered all throughout the tower.”

“Is teleportation that dangerous?”

“Teleporting in the tower is dangerous. Every point in space here correlates to two separate points – one in realspace and one in the tower’s hyperdimension. Teleporting in the tower is a bit like pointing at your destination with a long stick and using your visible surroundings as a fulcrum, except you can’t see the end of the sick, and the stick is warped like that hallway we just walked through, and it also likes to bend on occasion. The longer the sick, the greater the deviation between the bit you’re holding and the bit at the end, and you have no idea how long it is.” Gregor took a long drag from his ‘water’ flask.

What the fuck is a hyperdimension? Silently wondered everyone else.

“There is a portrait of this dead fellow in the incantation library.” Opium made Gregor talkative. He knew this, and saw the signs that he should probably curb his consumption before it took over.

“A self-portrait.” He continued. “His name was Xanadu.” That far-too-blue hat was quite identifiable compared to Gregor’s stern grey.

Telekinetically, he plucked the thing from its bony perch and the brim of his own hat wilted slightly in jealousy. One wizard and one hat was the proper order of things, so why would Gregor ever need to touch another?

He rubbed the side of its cone with his stump while he reached his surviving hand into the gaudy blue crime against hattery, seeking to pilfer Xanadu’s former possessions.

“Look around. A place like this probably has a seed vault.” Gregor suggested, and the others understood his intentions. Most of the trees they’d seen were either some breed of freaky or some kind of magical, not they really knew the difference. The seeds had to be worth a decent amount.

As they dispersed, Gregor began taking inventory of Xanadu’s hat.

There were long-expired potions, scrolls containing trite theories, a few doodads and McGuffins, a bag of gold coins struck with the icon of Tumair, a smattering of enchanted jewellery ranging from worthless to useless, among which was an emerald pendant designed to interdict attacks upon the soul. While this might initially seem perfect for mending Kaius’s current condition, it was not.

Kaius was currently being controlled by a lich, newly in possession of the wonderfully high-quality soul gem that had catalyzed Gregor’s flight from the tower. It must be known that liches hold on to souls as a matter of practice. His soul will likely be kept in a slave-phylactery in the possession of the lich, so what good would wearable protection be?

Further rummaging revealed a pair of fireproof gloves, a sword, a knife, and odd collection of finger bones, and an ivory pipe still stuffed with a decent quantity of some unknown herb which Gregor was not keen to try.

Nothing of use.

***

Stone gave way to rotten wood and they had to take care not to step on weak planks, lest they plunge though into the ponderously gargantuan void beyond.

They had come across a labyrinth of disused halls, presumably abandoned in favour of long-lasting stone at some point in the history of the tower. The degradation became steadily worse as they picked their way along. Several times, they had been forced to jump across gaps where the planks had already failed.

Somebody had posed the question, ‘What would happen if I fell?’ and Gregor wasn’t quite sure. Death by starvation or thirst, probably. They’d just keep falling and falling, because there was nothing to slow them down, not even atmosphere.

Gregor tried very hard not to think about the fact that he was breathing without an atmosphere or the fact that this place shouldn’t have gravity yet it was possible to fall. He was afraid the tower might notice.

More than anything, magic is the practice of getting the world to conform to your perceptions, so noticing inconsistencies in reality is very dangerous when you inhabit a space with magically malleable laws.

Thankfully, the space within the tower seemed content to make little sense, and so they remained alive.

“Oh, a door.”

Happy for the distraction from his potentially disastrous thoughts, Gregor looked up to find Briar picking at the lock of a locked door with his lock pick. They had found several such doors, with some leading to nothing of use and some leading to nothing at all.

It scraped open after a moment of click-clack to reveal a room of glass jars filled with bits of dead things.

“Ew… Yuck.” Uttered Greta.

Gregor found it quite amusing that all the jars containing eyeballs were placed at head-height and facing toward the door. There were about a dozen of them, all stoically staring at their new visitors through the lens of preserving fluid. “It’s quite a nice collection.”

“This is not nice at all, Greg.”

“It’s freaky as hell.” Echoed Briar.

“Hell is much worse.” Seeing no need to elaborate, the wizard entered. Judging by the probable age of the room, most of the specimens would be long-spoilt and unusable for alchemy, but it was still worth taking a look.

Entering, he found that the shelves filled the room almost entirely, with a narrow path snaking between them. On all sides, organs and appendages from long-dead creatures greeted him.

There were the gonads of a heptalotl, the paw of a five-toed monkey, the intact seedpod of a frag falcon, and the wing of a buffalo. Most of the bits and bobs crowding the room were quite rare, and it seemed to Gregor more like a collection for the sake of collecting than a storehouse of ingredients for the practice of alchemy.

After walking his way though the maze of unimaginably disturbing shelves (in the eyes of the others) Gregor found himself before a large wooden table in the centre of the room. The dissection platform, he assumed. Around the edge of the table ran a thick metal rail, to which strips of ancient leather were still tied. An anchor for restraints? That was a little odd.

Though live dissections are often preferred for the sake of freshness, the subjects are typically kept unconscious, and thus do not require restraints. After all, it would be incredibly difficult to cleanly remove organs from something that is aware of its organs being removed.

It would be absurdly impractical, but the presence of restraints on the table indicated that the subjects of these dissections were not always unconscious. For torture? Perhaps. Or maybe some surgical experiment which required the subject to remain aware.

Whatever the case, it didn’t really matter.

There were several fat jars stacked down by the legs of the table, filled with formaldehyde and ready to receive whatever valuable viscera was intended for them. Curiously, the glass of these jars held an iridescent hue, and the sides and lids were inked with dimly shimmering runes.

A rare grin crept onto the face of Gregor as he hefted one of the jars. It was just big enough to accommodate a human head. He had found his solution in an innocuous place.

“Gregor, that’s like really creepy.”

“This jar is magically insulated. I am going to use it to re-kill Kaius.”