Gregor The Cripple

Being up high doesn’t just make the things below appear tiny. It also gives the impression that the world itself is extremely large, which it is, though most people never really gain a conscious appreciation of that fact.

It is only when you can see further than ever before, and possibly further than you have even been, that you truly gain an appreciation for the scale of the world.

Neither Gregor nor Mildred were particularly struck by this revelation of enormity, as both been higher and travelled further than they could ever possibly see, but Gregor suspected that Randolph was different.

Mildred was too busy thinking bad thoughts to work her mind around the fact that Randolph wasn’t like other rats. It would require ignoring every single thing she thought she knew about rats, and that was altogether far too much work. She had better things to do.

Randolph perched proud over the brim of Gregor’s hat, casting his beady gaze down and around from his high mountain vantage.

Did he understand it? Did he know that the mat of green and brown down there was the ground? He had probably never seen a tree from above before, let alone whole tree colonies. It must be very bizarre.

Did he smell the familiar scent of the storm on the breeze and know it for what it meant, like Gregor did?

It was entirely possible, the wizard thought. After all, Randolph had been present for all but one of the storms, and he seemed to know things that Gregor didn’t.

Night came, and they camped uneasy in a happened-upon mountain fastness. It was no longer just Mildred who had become unsettled.

There weren’t any lights down in the dark, but apparently that was fine – they shouldn’t be seeing the village quite so soon. If it hasn’t grown larger, that is, considered Gregor silently. Evidently it hadn’t grown, and Gregor thought unbidden of slaughtered Schlechtegegend.

The storm was in the direction of the village, fast approaching, and the next day brought it closer.

Morning was a bright time when up so high, but from where they stood ready to proceed with the day’s trek, they could see clearly the darkness cast by the mountain. Blowing in from the direction shard’s shadow was a wind, half harsh mountain gale and half muggy storm breeze. It felt very familiar, and Gregor knew it instantly by its scent and the way it made his mind light up, as if a hand of pure adrenaline were caressing his grey matter. This storm was an omen, and its fell winds blew foul against his soul.

His exquisitely crafted body seemed to possess new instincts at that moment, and he became aware of the storm and its portents in a new way. He felt them as one feels the temperature.

“Gregor?”

He had been standing there in brooding silence, gaze lancing out at the patch of dark on the horizon. He squinted at the clouds, then sneered.

“Hardship will find us down there. When we meet the storm, be ready to shoot something, and always be ready to shoot me.”

***

With failure on the mind, Gregor followed Mildred down the mountain. Prior to this, they had been travelling generally up for days, but now their course trended decidedly downward.

The road of gravel and dirt had given way to thin rock-cut paths which allowed only single-file passage. These were not the main arteries of commute in the area, but rather mountain trails known by Mildred and chosen for expedience. There was a steep wall on one side, and a steep drop on the other. Not the precipitous kind of drop, wherefrom an unfortunate faller might fall for a while before going crunch-splat at the bottom, but rather the kind with a near-vertical slope strewn with jagged rocks, down which mountaineers often liked roll for some reason, flaying themselves apart long before reaching the ground.

Odd sorts, those mountaineers.

Navigating the thin path, ever mindful of his horse’s ability to trip, Gregor followed a listless and slouching Mildred. She kept looking over the edge, behind then, above them, searching constantly but half-heartedly for any indication that she and her wizard weren’t the only two souls in living memory to use the path. It was an act of the anxious, committed in token effort to maintain her hopes, which had been flagging. Even if someone had been here, she didn’t really expect to be able to tell, but she knew that a Mildred who really believed in her hopes would look, and so she looked.

Since they had set foot into the territory of the Shard, there had been no indication of local habitation, which was fine. It was a big place. But the roads were becoming suggestions of roads, lacking as they did the regular maintenance of hooves and wheels to keep the grasses and weeds from softening the soil with their roots, and what little signage here had once existed was all eaten by rot and weather.

Locals, if there were any, would keep signs in good order, for an unsigned village is a village seldom visited by wholesalers and merchants, which are a vital part of life for remote places.

Perhaps, though, a new road had been cut on the other side of the mountain, and that was the reason for the disuse. The capital was in that direction, after all.

Mildred’s hopes were sparse and weak, but she tended to them dutifully, and they in turn kept her going.

Gregor watched her from behind as they went along the precarious path, judging her expression as she cast her eyes to every little thing that might mean people. She went from trying to look neutral to being clearly anxious, to trying not to look anxious, to dour, and then to anxiously thoughtful. Overall, she looked fairly put out, like a wet cat.

Gregor, on the other hand, looked slightly mad.

Failure was at the front of his mind, as was Mildred, who would likely suffer the most from his failure. As they rode around the mountain and the storm grew to cover the horizon, Gregor knew that he was approaching an opportunity for failure.

He decided then that, if he was alive to see his failure manifest, he would die. He would have lost utterly, and living beyond that point would be contrary to his nature, and no longer would he have just cause to pursue his enmity with the Worldeater.

Gregor was a wizard, and wizards do not make a habit of surviving their overwhelming failures. They were professionals, and there is no point to a professional who cannot perform. So then, he must perform even at the cost of his life, because to fail would mean the destruction of both Gregor the Wizard as a concept, and of Gregor the Living Thing in practice.

Their downward trajectory became extreme and they encountered a very steep switchback, likely patronised more by goats than by people.

Dismounting, they lead their horses by hand around the tight bends and the across the thin crumbly bits inbetween. This switchback was a passage down the ugly and uneven face of a cliff, and it didn’t seem to have been entirely cut from the stone, but rather, it seemed to have been opportunistically built between existing rocky outcrops which were sufficiently fortified.

As such, it was neither wide nor sturdy.

The left forehoof of Gregor’s horse landed upon an unfortunately mobile rock, which slid itself and the hoof over the edge. There was a great panicked neigh as the horse stumbled, scrabbling its hoof against the edge of the path, trying to find purchase. It found another rock just over the side, which also gave out shudderingly. Gregor watched as the animal toppled over.

It tumbled down the embankment of alluvium with a screaming sort of sound, eventually meeting a lower section of the switchback. It crunched there and the screaming warbled, then it kept tumbling limply down. The horse came to a silent rest at the dirt-and-gravel bottom of the shallow ravine that made the terminus of the switchback, which Gregor and Mildred had planned to follow further around the mountain.

Offering no comment besides a simple ‘watch out for that’ to Mildred, Gregor continued with nonchalance, occasionally kicking rocks to make sure they were sturdy. It would be a pain to lose both horses.

He knew that he was slightly mad, and that paranoia is a major component of madness, but his instant inclination was to suspect that this wasn’t some simple accident.

Shockingly, he was helpless to convince himself otherwise. Gregor was very clearly and cynically aware that reality is more often simple than complex, but his mind was irrationally closed to that fact. It was sobering to catch himself in the act of forming an insane thought, and if he were anyone else, Gregor suspected that he would be terrified by his inability to quash it.

Mad thoughts, he considered, need not necessarily be wrong, and nor does paranoia necessitate delusion.

As it was, he agreed with himself, and so he went on thinking that the death of the horse seemed portentous, thought it might just as well have been his mind expanding upon the theme of the dark omen in the sky (which itself might be a figment of mad imagining).

Perhaps the stumble of the horse was the Norn giving him a warning, for she would surely know that it would spur such thoughts, or perhaps his enemies had somehow afflicted him with ill fortune despite her influence over fate. They were at war with the Norn, they must have some way to avoid her machination, so it stood to reason that they might be able to affect the fates of others.

Come to think of it, Gregor looked to the sky, which was almost neatly half blue and half grey, Might then the storms also be signs from the Norn?

He realised quite belatedly that he had no idea at all what she could do, or what she had done.

Hmm.

As Gregor flirted with paranoia in a very wizardly way, Mildred peered down at the dead horse, finding herself not so disgusted as she might have thought.

Was it because she was a murderer?

She shrank at the notion of death and dead things becoming normal to her. The possibility struck her hard, leaving a horrible hollowness in its wake, which she imagined was the feeling of some important part of her soul being taken away.

It was very queer for Mildred to look at the broken crumple of the horse and feel no disgust. It was as if becoming a murderer had wiped clean all her previous feelings toward the dead. The horse corpse now was a completely new classification of thing which her unconscious mind had no idea how to parse, like a bird seeing creature from the depths of the sea, or a boy seeing a shirtless woman.

There was a sort of fascination with the alien nature of the thing, but Mildred didn’t like her capacity for such fascination.

She didn’t look at it again, not even when they reached the bottom and Gregor went over to recover what little equipment he had kept saddle-strapped.

A bizarre collection of these items went into either his hat or his unfathomable pockets, the rest, chosen according to some presumably incomprehensible criteria, were foisted onto Midlred’s horse. They rode off along the alluvium bed of the ravine, which was rather quite wide, more like a canyon in miniature.

Of course, there was only one horse, so to ride off suchwise the pair both needed to be on that same horse.

For practical reasons of height and comfort, Gregor sat at the front and Mildred at the back. They were both tall, but Mildred was very tall, and her specific aesthetically optimal distribution of muscle tissue offered her further vertical advantage when she was seated. That is to say, she sat tall taller by a good few inches – enough that the slightly floppy cone of Gregor’s hat wasn’t too difficult to see around.

As Mildred’s horse plodded along, no doubt wishing that it had enough of a mind to learn human speech and protest all the extra work it was being made to do, the walls of the ravine shrank away, and then they were on the very gently rising shoulder of a bulge on the side of the Shard, which, much like many of the mounds of rock in the vicinity, would itself be a rather significant mountain if it were somehow amputated.

Over this almost-mountain they went, tracing its forgiving terrain as far around the shard as it would take them, and then the gentleness of the shoulder turned severe, taking them zigzagging down its face to a dry, shallow gully. A great rocky ridgeline rose on the opposite side of this dip in the earth, and the sky above had lost all of its blue.

Thunder rumbled faint as they began their ascent up the ridge, which was made far easier by the fact that this place had a well-cut road. It was wide, and hewn from the rock into switchbacks which climbed the ridge in easygoing, slowly-graduating sweeps. Whatever dirt or gravel had once been the surface of the road was gone, whisked away by wind and rain, but this was clearly a well-trafficked area at some point.

Mildred took a deep breath.

“There’s a valley on the other side of this ridge.” Gregor felt her pressing into him as she spoke. She felt elastic. “-and inside that valley will be a village.” She was shaking, just a little. “If we follow the ridge toward the Shard, we’ll find a cave, and inside that cave will be a dragon, and then everything will be fine.”

Gregor looked to the storm above, silently disagreeing.