Gregor The Cripple

Of the few non-academic books that Mildred had bothered to read in her youth, all had agreed on one thing – that going out from the home on an adventure was a pleasant exercise which very certainly held some sort of non-specific sense of romanticism. In Mildred’s experience, that was bullshit. There was a lot more saddle-soreness and boredom than whatever somehow-pleasant nonsense it was that she was meant to be experiencing.

The scenery might be nice, she supposed, but when you have nothing to do but look at scenery, your appreciation becomes a fleeting thing.

With Gregor asleep, Mildred had nothing to do but look at trees and rocks, and the sky, and sometimes also birds… and think. She often did a lot of thinking after Gregor slumped into rest. Very little of it was pleasant.

Mildred couldn’t help but get to thinking, and she began to suspect that idle thoughts, such as one might have when bathing or cooking or riding a horse in silence for hours, were something like the unconscious mind’s natural defence against boredom, which was a kind of poison for thinking organs.

As she guided the party back downriver to the road, she thought mostly about bad things, like how she had killed a man yesterday, and how she might not have a home to return to, and that even if she did, everyone she’d ever known besides her father might be dead anyway. However, her thoughts were not exclusively bad and uncomfortable. She also managed to think a few benign things, like wondering if Gregor could fly.

It was a reasonable question to have, though she’d never heard of a wizard flying. She’d seen him do some pretty heavy telekinetic lifting, not least of which just now with the river, and he couldn’t possibly weigh prohibitively much. Mildred couldn’t think of practical reason for Gregor to be unable to lift himself, at least for a little while, and so she couldn’t help but wonder.

She also barely managed to squeeze out some good thoughts, like realising for not the first time how lucky she was to have a Gregor around. Not only did he want to help her, purity of motivations aside, he seemed to be a good enough wizard that he actually could help her, no matter her obstacles, or so he claimed.

Mildred didn’t have a full accounting of the situation – this ‘Norn’ character seemed half real and half madness on the part of the wizard – but she understood enough. Her enemy was some kind of overachieving necrophile (Gregor’s words), who was headhunting her for some unknown reason, and the wizard, having history with this particular necrophile, had been recruited to her defence by a third party. This third party, whom Gregor called the Norn, had either manipulated events outside of his knowledge such that he came to Mildred’s aid, or had recruited him within some part of his knowledge lost to madness.

The whole situation seemed quite unreal and was more than a little confusing, but she was very glad to have help.

However, the rare good thoughts were almost always supplanted quickly by something proportionally bad. For example, she realised subsequent to the previous thought that something of quite a scary scale was going on, and that she of little power was stuck right in the middle of it. These people meddled with undeath and divination in schemes that seemed to span most of a century, and were quite willing to pursue her, even though she had a dragon for a father.

In her experience, dadgons ward away ne'er-do-wells – and others, annoyingly – almost as if by magic. The Worldeater either didn’t care about her father, or wanted her for the purposes of threatening her father.

Either way, he was unafraid of the dadgon’s retribution, which spoke to his significant capacity to do terrible things. And if what Gregor had said was true, the enemy hadn’t yet bothered to send their best.

Everything was going to be fine though, because Gregor was taking her home, and her father would take care of everything after she returned. Perhaps they could even hire Gregor to go out and solve the problem. The wizard would be eager, she was sure.

Mildred thought her thoughts all the way down the river to the road, and then up the road to the shadowed foot of the Shard, whose grand mass entirely blocked the downing sun. This was called ‘early night’ by Shard locals, whom Mildred hoped to encounter during the course of the following day.

It was then that she woke Gregor, not only because she feared to be alone with her thoughts any longer, but also because he could see in the dark and she could not.

They set no fire that night, and Mildred lay struggling to sleep through the abuse of a busy brain, wrapped up snug in Gregor’s enchanted mantle. It was almost winter and they were high enough that seasons stopped being the difference between warm and cold, but she found with some surprise that she couldn’t complain about the temperature.

How terribly useful.

She’d need to ask her father for one of her own.

Initially, she lay against a tree opposite Gregor, but as she looked out into the quiet night around them, which at that moment seemed very noisy with rustling leaves and snapping twigs, an uneasiness grew within her. Phantoms of men in the night sprang up amongst her thoughts.

Would they come again?

Swallowing some mild embarrassment, she got up, still in the comfort of her wrappings, and waddled over to lie down beside Gregor. The wizard helpfully made no comment.

While Mildred struggled to breach the threshold of sleep, Gregor studied the Starbeast finger in the dark, hoping academically that one of their pursuers might appear and present themselves as volunteer for an experiment. They did not, of course. They couldn’t, what with them being so far away and all.

He hovered the thing a good few yards away from him, thinking.

It bent space around it to such an extreme degree that there would always exist a small infinity between it and alien matter, but magic could touch it and remain unwarped. He was magicking it at that very moment.

His wizard senses were tingling and he knew that this was something terribly profound, but couldn’t say why. Even intangible things are affected by the bending of space, and magic was at least partly tangible, being that thaumatons, which are very likely things that actually exist, can be observed to exert predictable and consistent influence over mundane matter.

Did that mean, then, that magic and spacetime somehow don’t interact, or perhaps that they can be kept from interacting? If that were the case, somebody surely would have noticed by now…

Hmm.

He decided that this was a subject worthy of his study, and he fruitlessly theorised the night away.

***

Mildred woke before the sun.

They had camped on a high ridge, affording them a vantage over local terrain, and so she took this opportunity to look out at the grey-blue world around her. It was a world that she knew. She’d seen this sight before.

To the far north-west, between the Shard and the next tallest peak, she saw faintly the woods where she had played as a child with the other village children. It would have been a lifetime ago for all of them, but it was a comparatively recent thing for her.

A few valleys over ran the river where she liked to swim, and beyond that was the little lake that it fed, and which she had always seen but never visited because it existed beyond the bounds of safety her father had set.

Peering at this familiar scenery, which was only now visible in the morning light-bleed, she felt curiously little.

The sight should have been painful, or nostalgic, or filled her with hope, or brought about a pang of anxiety, or anything at all really, but it did not.

Mildred figured that she should feel something different now that she was here, but her fears and worries remained static in intensity, and no others muscled into her brain to join them. What did that mean? She had no idea, which elicited a surprising kind of disappointment. She was disappointed in herself for not being as emotional as she thought she should, she supposed, which stung because it made her feel stupid. It was profoundly uncomfortable to be Mildred at that moment.

This view marked the final stretch of her decades-long trip. She wasn’t sure what else there was to feel, but it was a rather momentous thing. It shouldn’t be so empty of emotional significance. The sight should be… evocative, but it was not. She just felt bad.

***

The Shard was tall. It stood in rigid majesty above them at a staggering height of too-many-feet-to-count.

They were at the foot of the light side of the mountain, which acted like a giant gnomon for the surrounding landscape, casting a great shadow which scythed to-and-fro according to the hour of the day.

For Mildred and Gregor, there was a morning sun, but the world would still be dark for hours after sunrise for the village on the other side. The mountain was that big.

They began upward almost before the sun herself, and certainly before the moon had passed off to night other parts of the world. Gregor watched them as they watched him, quite discontent with the voyeurism. They were big, they had gravity. He couldn’t help but wonder if they knew the secrets of the finger.

These two titans of the sky wouldn’t be their only spectators. Whatever happened, the events atop this mountain were to going be significant. He felt this with surety. Wizards had a keen sense for the significant.

There would be eyes on him and Mildred, judging outcomes and planning future events – the Norn and the Worldeater, among probable others. He didn’t know why Mildred was so important, but she was very certainly an organ of a body at war. And no small war at that; Gluttony was fighting Fate and her allies for the chance to devour a billion souls.

There were bound to be spectators.

Up and up Mildred and Gregor went, riding at first a snakeish road through slanted trees which grew on dirt only held in place by the roots of other trees, which would eventuality die to themselves become dirt for other trees to hold. After the hill-woods came great rock slopes which rose up slowly at first, then steeply to become cliffs. Only hardy shrubs grew here. Anything bigger would need roots too substantial to creep into the cracks between rocks.

Here, the road switched from being dirt with a smattering of gravel, to gravel with a spattering of dirt.

“Can you fly?” Asked Mildred, idly.

“What?”

“I mean, is it possible?”

“Me? Fly?”

“Yes.”

Gregor snorted. “Wizards do not ‘fly’.”

“But can you?”

“That’s more of a witch thing. Broomsticks and such.”

“So it’s possible.”

“I am a wizard, not a witch.”

“I’ve seen you lift things heavier than yourself. I’m sure you could manage it.”

“Witches don’t lift themselves. They do it with a broom, and I don’t have a broom.”

“… So they do it with the broom, and not the magic on the broom, and if you had a broom you could do it?”

“Of course not.” Said Gregor, quite uncooperatively.

A very thin grin rose on his face as Mildred turned to fix him with a peeved moue. It was a slight thing, more a grin of the eyebrows than of the mouth, but it stood out like blood on linen. It was a very scary expression which conjured in the mind suggestions of violent intention, but all of Gregor’s expressions did that.

Much like blood on linen, that face could give nightmares to nurses, who were really rather sturdy people.

However, Mildred found herself to be decidedly unafraid.

Was this the effect of familiarity, of trust? She felt a little like a zookeeper who had grown close with a manticore. Close enough that she could rub it behind the ears without the slightest fear that it would tear her face off and rape her corpse to bits, which they were known to occasionally do.

Disturbing comparisons aside, she found herself wishing that Gregor had a few more things to grin about.

“Surely you could fly if you really wanted to.”

“It would be difficult and impractical. I’d teleport.”

“Flying sure seems more practical.”

Gregor shrugged. “With a broom, maybe, and some Tumairi sorcerers ride on rugs, I suppose. But that’s almost cheating. Flying with telekinesis is another thing entirely.”

“Perhaps you should invest in a rug so that you wouldn’t need to fly with telekinesis.”

“Absurd. I don’t need to fly at all.”

Up and up Mildred and Gregor continued, though not too far up.

They didn’t seek to ascend the mountain, but rather to reach the village on the other side in as direct a route as possible, which meant going up, but only a little.

Still, a little was a lot when talking about the Shard.

The moon went off to see other vistas, and then the sun made to follow her, passing overhead then dipping low.

Thankfully, by that time the pair had long left the territory of early night.

As they rounded the knees of the mountain, about midway between their camp and their destination, Gregor caught sight of something troubling in the distance.

There was a storm on the horizon, and it was rolling in to meet them.