Gregor The Cripple

The dipping sun seemed to stare at Gregor as it met the horizon, as if it knew. He felt as if it were looking at him one last time before they lost sight of each other, wondering if it would miss his next great failure while it was away, bringing day elsewhere.

Perhaps it would, he conceded.

“Away with you,” Gregor spat at the great blazing orb of fire, “I always liked your sister better anyway.” But then Gregor shook, what if the moon planned to spectate his failures too? What if they were both watching him in idle entertainment? Loathsome things.

The moon thus rose at his back to find him plodding along a wooded trail, sullen and listless.

He walked. The coarse path brutalised his feet, yet he kept walking. He’d been travelling for a week or thereabouts, horseless. They were tethered at the base of the tower, so he let them loose. Briar had probably followed them. Gregor didn’t know. He couldn’t remember.

Are horses slaves?, he had thought, the words of the lich fresh on his mind. Concluding that they were, he had gifted them freedom at significant cost to himself, which was good. He felt like paying some kind of price for the deaths of Greta and Dieter, whom he had unequivocally killed.

He walked because he wanted his legs to ache and his feet to bleed, for surely he’d soon fail again and lose his legs and feet, like his hand and eye, and like all those he’d killed who he he hadn’t wanted to kill. Then, the opportunity for self-flagellation would be gone.

From pine to field, he walked, and then from field to fen, and now the fen had gone woody. The ground was still soft, but littered with pebbles and shortish trees covered in moss. It was tough going, but he walked ever westward. Graciously, the sun had seen fit to guide him to a path through the wood.

Was opium the source of his failure? It played a part at Sine. Had it been the catalyst for disaster at the tower too?

Gregor shook his head, experiencing the newly familiar taste of self-loathing. It was bitter, and he hated it.

The opium did nothing on its own, he decided. It was a disadvantage because he allowed it to be. Or rather, it was a disadvantage that he had imposed upon himself. Gregor had acted, and he had suffered for his action.

I am slave to nothing, he thought, the detriments of opium are the detriments of myself. This was his plain truth. All of Gregor’s failures were his own, and nothing could mitigate that painful fact.

But, either way, it wouldn’t matter soon.

The opium had run out, and Gregor trembled at the thought of an unaddled mind. Not only would he be in pain, but the phantoms of the dead would speak. He couldn’t hear them, not yet, but he knew what they would say.

They would rightly curse him for the enormity of his failure, and point out, rightly, that all of his wizardly qualities were a facade – that he was a pretender to his ideals and that he wore the skin of a wizard as if it were an item of fashion.

They would tell him that he was a fake, a fraud, a phoney; a failure despite his earnest effort and yearning for legitimacy.

Wizards are expert practitioners of sorcery who ply their trade for the benefit of those without magical agency of their own. So then, what did his actions make of him? What good is a wizard who keeps killing his employers?

He burned Corle’s family to ash and transposed the young couple into a solid obelisk of stone. What benefit was he providing? What value did his services hold?

The tower would stand for aeons, an unchanging monument to his grand failure.

With Gregor’s unmatched education and unnatural talent, none of them should have suffered under his care, let alone died at his own hand. It shouldn’t be possible, but it happened. Since leaving the tutelage of Kaius, it seems that all of his endeavours had ended in crushing failure.

The magnitude of his shortcomings had pierced the bounds of reason and made the impossible come to pass. Oh, what a formidable agent of chaos he was!

Up and down he went, for this was a land of many hillocks. The path, being a game trail, wasn’t too troubled by being circuitous. It meandered and looped as opportunity provided.

Gregor, passenger of the path, was similarly unbothered – he had much to think about.

In this past week of mindless westward travel, the opium had kept him together. It made his mind too calm and dull for manic hallucination, but the withdrawal was soon upon him, and then he expected the dead to speak.

Already he was unravelling, and the opium had yet to fully leave him. Without it, Gregor expected himself to go quite mad, for he had found through experience that lucidity could only really be taken from the lucid.

Randolph had tried to intervene and curb his ruinous intake, but there is little that a rat can take from a mad magician.

It was dark, and sister moon was obscured by clouds overhead. Gregor was tired, but he didn’t dare sleep. He was afraid that he might wake as a madman, so he pushed on through the night.

***

Head pounding in the wake of some strange dream about bargains and fate, Gregor cracked his eye to find that the world had gone brown. The sky was covered in great mottled pits and sinewy ventricular lines stretched throughout the firmament, as if the world was stripped of flesh and the veins beneath were bare to see.

With a groan, Gregor reached up to pull the leaf from his face.

It seemed that, in his delirium, he had left evergreen territory. Here, the trees were brown with the season.

He sat slouching on his bedroll, staring at the cracked char and ember of his dead fire in fugue.

He had been without opium for… an amount of time. It felt like weeks, but, being a veteran of battles against withdrawal, he judged it to be mere days. The nausea had barely started. Things were going to get much worse if he followed the path of his previous infirmity.

For now, he had only exhaustion and headaches to suffer in his half-lucid discontent, along with the chronic throb in his stump and the ice-cold ache from his slowly mending ribs. His crippled arm had been dislocated in the fight, but telekinesis had set it right and now it only hurt to a regular degree, not like everything else.

Stuffing his mouth with food of some sort, Gregor decided to spend his remaining sanity in productive thought.

According to his original intentions, he should have gone south from the tower, retracing his steps to take the Maultier down and out of the Horrel gulf, or found some other river that led to a seaport. A ship would take him to wherever he wanted to go far more expeditiously than his bleeding feet.

But, at the time, Gregor had felt that such wise action was beyond him, or perhaps below him, being as great a failure as he was, and as mad as he was soon to be.

Even in shame did his bizarre pride shine brilliant.

“…Perhaps,” he decided after brief consideration of the coals, and of the west-beckoning sun “it would be best if I weren’t alive.”

Strictly speaking, Gregor’s failure at the tower wasn’t a loss. He was still alive and the lich was obliterated, but he did not win, not in the duel with the lich, and certainly not when considering the totality of the engagement.

This undeniable fact spoke to his significant capacity for further catastrophic failure.

He was still alive, but for how long?

Barbara, Corle, Greta, and Dieter. All dead at his hand whilst under the shade of his supposed ‘protection’. Gregor was a failure, this was clear to him, but he had not lost.

Yet.

It was only a matter of time. A failure of his calibre would inevitably face crushing defeat, and this could not be permitted. Defeat was unacceptable.

Might it be better to quit the game on his own terms? He found himself wondering if self-annihilation would count as a loss. You weren’t falling to another; you weren’t being beaten.

Rather, at that moment, Gregor considered it closer to proactively avoiding defeat, which, while not winning, was the next best thing.

Thus, upon considering each premise of the situation, willing death emerged as his most practical option.

But… wait. Through the gloom of his disquietude and burgeoning insanity, Gregor felt something.

It was annoying, like an itch inside his brain, or like something was on the tip of his brain’s tongue, which confused and irritated him because brains don’t have tongues. Or did they? Did his mouth’s tongue count as his brain’s tongue?

Gregor considered this issue of tongues at length, trying to ignore the long-familiar throb in his stump and the new throb in his chest. Before he could reach a conclusion, he again suffered from the mystery feeling and correctly identified it as the sensation of remembering.

What had the lich said? Hmm… It was something about his death, and it carried the vague suggestion of importance. Gregor took a moment to think, wishing that the withdrawals hadn’t robbed him of his usual intellectual agility.

He distantly remembered something about being marked for subjugation, and that death was no escape from eternal slavery. Nonsense, certainly, but this line of thought reminded Gregor of something very important.

There were people he needed to kill.

He possessed an enemy to whom an agonising death was most certainly owed. Unfinished business, as they say.

Dying before his enemy would mark the final destruction of his once-grand pride, and that would be a true loss. He would become nothing, a wizard no longer, defeated in life and death.

This made Gregor angry.

The fact that matters concerning his life and death were being influenced by another was an offence of incalculable severity. Nobody had the right to force Gregor into either life or death, except for himself.

Nations might burn for less.

He rose unsteadily from his seated position, hunched and tense as malevolent power flowed through him, not quite under his control. The air tremored in the wake of his fury.

Right – he had an enemy, a purpose and goal beyond his whims. His own death would need to wait, and finding a healer for the pain in his stump might need to wait too, which wasn’t so bad. The prolonged suffering could be a boon. It would serve to ward away stagnation.

The wizard began shuffling west after his solar guide.

“Norn!” He shouted to nobody, sounding hoarse and more than slightly insane, “If you exist, I entreat you – count me as an ally and employ me in your conflict against the Worldeater! I can kill anything, I am quite confident in this. You need only offer his neck so that I might separate it from his head. That will be payment enough!”

If this architect of fate was more than mere imagination, she should hear him. And if she was truly in conflict with his enemy, Gregor could think of no reason that she should hesitate to engage his services.

Truthfully, the sane little voice in the back of his mind was of the opinion that such a being would be directly responsible for arranging the events that led to him hate the Worldeater, and thus the lich spoke of slavery to the Norn. But that was fine.

Gregor didn’t feel that the Norn was using him as an implement yet. She might have orchestrated a reason to draw him into her conflict, but in that moment he was choosing to participate of his own murderous intention.

Therefore, choice now made, Gregor hoped to run into his enemies quite soon.

“You know, the reward in itself is a vital part of the process, the value thereof is immaterial.” He continued speaking, his mind stuck in the epistemological rut that it had dug.

“I am a wizard. I render services, and I ask for payment to give value to those services. To give without receiving would injure the economy of utility that lends wizards significance. In other words, it would destroy our way of life.”

Gregor seemed to have wandered so far away from his previous train of thought that it had left the station without him while he was lost in his enjoyment of the pleasant catharsis of speech.

“Many think we care for money. We do not. Money is a mere consequence of our true pursuit, and of our nature.”

He was broken from his pleasant exposition by the far-off rhythmic tonk-tonk of a drum and the clatter-tink of equipment and tackle, accompanied by the muted murmur of many men – tell-tale signs of a military organisation.

A minute more of travel revealed a large mounted convoy riding four-abreast down the road. The standard-bearer flew the emblem of the sun.

Each man bore a sabre at his hip and carried a long gun in his saddle sling. They were clad smartly in double-breasted coats underneath mostly anachronistic steel cuirasses, and had blunt-spiked helmets which few actually wore – most opting to have them hang upon the horn of their saddle for reasons of comfort.

In the instant that both parties became known to each other, forty men fixed their eyes upon one wizard and visibly tensed, sending silent glances toward the man at the head of their column.

The officer, who bore a blue plume upon his helmet as mark-of-rank, narrowed his eyes and grasped his reigns tightly. After a moment, he gave a clipped shout.

It was the kind of barely intelligible bark that characterised marching orders, and sounded something like ‘FOOO H’LT.’ The men, interpreting this esoteric instruction seemingly by intuition, came to a clattering stop, all eyes on Gregor.

Gregor kept walking, uncaring for the tension. Seeing that they weren’t occupying the entire breadth of the road, he judged this company of dragoons to be a collection of rather polite men.

The plumed fellow rode out alone.

Gregor looked up and around, spying the ever-watchful sun embedded in a clear blue sky, nothing in her midst. The wind was somewhat enthusiastic, but there was not one cloud to be seen.

Good. Gregor sighed softly, for no storm-omen had arisen.

The officer clip-clopped closer, his men watching.

Gregor halted, appraising the officer and, over his shoulder, the soldiers he apparently commanded.

His own appraisal ongoing, the well-moustached man announced that he was ‘Lieutenant Zimmer von Bandt’ in salutation.

“Gregor the Cripple.” The wizard responded brusquely, wondering if he came across as normal. He didn’t feel normal, not at the moment. Would they notice that he was mad? Would his madness precipitate conflict with the soldiers, even in absence of the storm?

Should he strike first, so as to avoid possible failure?

“Have you business nearby, wizard?” The soldier was tense, but not aggressive, and it didn’t seem like he actually expected Gregor to be a threat, but more that the spectre of some far-off possibility had made a home in his mind, and he couldn’t help but entertain it.

Gregor took this as a rather standard prelude to proposition. “I have neither business nearby, nor am I interested in having business nearby.” He stated this flatly, hoping to head off offers of employment.

“I see. We- Hmm.” Lieutenant Zimmer seemed to struggle with finding the right words. After all, it wouldn’t be good to share more than was necessary. “Do you know anything about the attack on Wurmburg? Perhaps you’ve heard rumours that would only travel between people of your… vocation.”

Wurmburg was an alchemist town, filled to the brim with experts of the craft. It was where continental alchemists congregated and plied their trade; the beating heart of the industry.

“Wurmburg?” Gregor’s brow crinkled. “Where am I?” It seemed that he had crossed a few borders in his wandering.

With slight mirth, the soldier tapped the emblem of the sun on the brow of his helmet.

“Yes, I noticed that. Not ‘Where am I in general?’, oaf. Which of the member-states of your confederacy have I reached?”

A lost wizard? What a rare thing. With greater mirth, the soldier once more tapped the sun.

“… I see.” Gregor took this to mean that he was in the head-state of the Solherz Empire, under whose banner the rest of the land marched. “Then-,” he paused, mentally charting his approximate position according to the positions of things known to him, “north would bring me to your City of the Sun?”

“It would. What of Wurmburg?”

“What? Oh. You said that Wurmburg was attacked?”

“Decimated. No survivors.” Zimmer paused, surprise striking him after a moment. “It was a rather significant event. You really didn’t know?”