Gregor The Cripple

Information is perhaps the most dangerous thing in the world. To know something is to allow it to hurt you, not that unknown things can’t hurt a person, but injury of the mind is wholly a product of perception. Ignorance is safety in the case of painful knowledge.

Thus, one must choose to either suffer or stagnate, and decide which of these is more evil to inflict unconditionally upon the self.

Gregor and Mildred crested the ridge to behold the desolation of time with little suspense. There was no village. It had died to abandon and nature. Mildred wept silently.

Everything was not fine.

Without a word, Gregor piloted the horse along the top of the ridge. Ahead, the great cavernous maw of a distant cave loomed high, overlooking the valley.

What point is there, he wondered absently, in a dragon having a village?

The tower had Schlechtegegend. They were permitted to exist and were protected from tax and tithe to local sovereignty for hundreds of years. Not out of kindness, but for utility – the goal was to maintain a stock of viable servants and to make them dependant upon the wizards of the tower.

Dragons do not need servants. They do not need food, they do not care for fine wines or luxurious furnishings which servants might be sent to obtain. They have no use for human domestic talents, like cooking, cleaning, bookkeeping, or maintenance. They live in caves; a Schlechtegegend would be of no use to a dragon.

So then – why did Mildred’s father have a noisy, smelly village growing at his doorstep? It must have been unpleasant, for all ageless things dislike the hubbub of mortals.

However…

He might not need it, but his daughter certainly did. After all, a dragon is simply not equipped to handle a little girl. She would need clothes, and food, and a place to live that was a little nicer than a cave.

He’d need help, and practical necessities aside, a human child raised in the middle of nowhere by a dragon would not act very human at all, nor would they be likely to develop into a human of Mildred’s significant quality.

Children need to be stimulated intellectually by an active and interesting world, and, lest they end up like Gregor, they need to socialise. They need little friends and enemies who are not so different from themselves, with whom they can practice being social animals. They need to be surrounded by noise and life and safety, lest they become stunted or be eaten by the hungry world.

The village, Gregor supposed, was purely for the benefit of Mildred.

Thus, Mildred’s village really was Mildred’s village.

The sky shuddered and rain began to spit down in speckles, not enough to mask Mildred’s tears, though he could tell that it planned to grow heavier. Storms were ambitious like that.

As she shook lightly behind him, Gregor felt some vague sort of something in his chest. It was similar to pain in the way that smells are similar to tastes and came from that empty place between his lungs where blood apparently lived. He had no idea what it was.

This would not do. Gregor would not abide being made to feel things. He had to take action.

“Rejoice Mildred,” he said, and she very politely halted her silent grief at the odd words, not in some miraculously abrupt compliance with Gregor’s command, but in weird realisation that this was the first time he’d ever addressed her by name. He had used her name before, but never directly.

The wizard continued, “Your enemies yet exist to be made to suffer. They have forced you to be away from your home as it withered. Luckily, they were not wise enough to die during the interceding years and can still be harmed.”

He turned to eye her with his baleful eye, “As an expert, I suggest that you begin with spite. You should find out what they want and aim to ruin it. After that, killing them all would be ideal. Even the dead ones. My help will come cheap.”

Mildred didn’t speak for a while, but she cried a little less afterwards, and so Gregor judged that his prescription of revenge had served as a decent remedy.

Eventually, she croaked, “Not to the cave, not yet.” And then after a pause. “I want to go down.”

And so they went down to the village that wasn’t.

***

Detritus was the main remnant – scraps of wood lay in big piles that were once homes. Opportunistic grasses grew on these housebones, with roots winding through little termite-eaten holes, making cool, leaf-covered places where moisture and detritivores could dwell. Theses piles would soon become dirt.

Some already had, humps in the earth with little rust-colored patches being the only evidence of long-dead structures. The non-uniform states of decay suggested that the place had suffered a staggered depopulation; a hint toward the exact circumstances of the village’s abandonment, though Gregor had no idea what it meant.

Mildred wasn’t thinking about any of that.

They rode among these piles, going slowly from outskirts to innerskirts, meandering. Mildred stopped occasionally to look at a heap of once-building which she imagined she could identify, though it was vexing for her to realise that she was having some trouble.

The rain relented as they went in further, a brief respite before the deluge. The clouds rumbled with intent to drench as they hoarded mass for the next downpour.

Gregor couldn’t see much sense in being here. The village was gone, sure, but the dadgon might still be slumbering in his cave above, which, pointedly, Mildred did not look toward.

They were wandering the ruins in simple procrastination, and in the fear of uncomfortable knowledge.

Gregor felt the fireball an instant before it detonated.

Reacting by instinct, he summoned the same sphenoid ward that he had used to part the river. The fireball struck the peak of the wedge and the blast blew past them on either side, drawing a clean line of disturbance in the dirt.

Gregor’s single eye failed him, but his magical senses were razor-sharp. He felt the attacker thirty-or-so yards to his right, and so he retaliated by flinging a spray of still-wooden refuse and dirt in that general direction.

As the happenstance projectiles scattered, most fell to the ground, but some struck an invisible plane of force which protruded from behind a hump in the ground – the wards of an adversary in cover.

“Shoot.” He commanded to Mildred, pointing.

Gregor realised then that he had miscalculated.

The burning of the bridge had not been a way to force Mildred and himself into an ambush, but simply a means for the enemy to buy time. They mightn’t have known the exact path that he was going to take, but they certainly knew his destination. Why then would they ever set an uncertain ambush on the road?

Gregor’s phantom pursuers were ahead, not behind, and it was stupid of him to think otherwise. This misapprehension was dangerously close to being a failure. If he could be wrong about this, where else might he be incorrect?

The violent crack of teleportation sounded as a second assailant apperated beside them – a wizard. His robes billowed brilliant red and he wore a hat that was little more than a nightcap of velvet, very non-standard for a wizard. Gregor disapproved.

This new enemy lunged toward saddle-bound Mildred with an odd page in his hand, looking as if he planned to slap it on her leg. A spike of ice punctured two layers of the ward that surrounded him, and shattered against a third. He jerked at the mental impact, but continued his ruinous work unhindered.

Clearly, this enemy wizard had prepared for the risks inherent in being near someone as dangerous as Gregor. To Gregor’s quick judgement, this marked him as a professional, and he felt formidable too. Magic radiated from this fellow quite conspicuously, almost as if he wanted Gregor to feel it.

Was it perhaps to draw attention from the other, or to conceal the presence of a third? Whatever the case, it didn’t matter. There was no time to think.

As the red wizard’s hand came to almost touch Mildred's leg, a giant hammer slammed cleanly through all four layers of warding to meet his elbow, shattering it limp.

The wizard’s pride had blinded him. In his mind, Gregor the Cripple was his opponent. Mildred was just something to be collected, ancillary to the matter of the battle.

In this fashion, it is the common folly of the powerful to forget the fangs of the weak.

She swung again, but the red wizard managed to teleport through the pain before the hammer could crumple his ribs.

He reappeared on the other side of the horse, and again he thrust the page, though now with the other arm.

Mildred felt a hard pressure against her joints with mild panic. She recognised this as a telekinetic attempt to restrain her and, with some light strain, she swung the hammer again anyway.

Gregor then himself teleported, materialising behind their assailant.

The wizard’s mind blurred with an ache as Mildred broke his hold. Dumbly, he saw the hammer approaching and attempted to teleport, but Gregor made his move.

With his single furious eye scrunched in hate, Gregor had decided to introduce the finger that curdled flesh to the back of the red wizard’s head. Propelled like a spearhead by Gregor’s considerably stronger telekinesis, it lanced through the wards to make unobstructed contact with the man’s ugly hat, and he found definitively that ‘curdled’ was the wrong word to use.

There came a strange crunch-pop sort of sound as meaty cranial debris were flung in every direction, painting Gregor and spattering the side of the horse and Mildred’s left leg.

Then, something punched violently though Gregor’s wards, sending his own mind reeling. The world turned to shock for an instant, then reasserted itself. He dimly registered the echoing report of a rifle and the bizarre pain of a thousand freezing-hot nails being driven through his leg at once.

Wide-eyed now, he made a sharp inhale and vanished.

Mildred wheeled about wildly, somehow hefting the hammer with one hand and pointing Greta’s revolver with the other.

Holding her arm at full length, she traced the barrel of the gun over every little feature of suspicion, searching for someone to shoot.

The pregnant clouds rumbled and a distant tree began screaming horrible agony before bursting into flame.

She was huffing, blood thundered in her ears, and she knew then that she was going to shoot someone if she got the chance, not as a reflex, not like with the hunter, but with intention. In calm circumstances this desire for hurt would be a horrible and bizarre thing to feel, but these were not calm circumstances. She didn’t care, she just knew.

It was an insane feeling, being in a fight to the death. Mildred had none of the emotions of a social animal in that moment and she was the most aware of her surroundings that she had ever been. It was a feeling beyond just the adrenaline and the fear and panic and anger. It was something mind-opening that she knew Gregor must crave, and which she knew she’d never be able to describe to someone who hadn’t felt it themselves.

She wondered if her father would understand.

Another tele-crack announced Gregor’s return, just in time to block the blast of a second fireball, which was not easy. As the wave of heat blew past him, his teeth were clenched, his eye was pinned madly wide, and every muscle in his body was tense. Haggard nasal inhales rocked his shaking gaze up and down.

He had never been shot before. He didn’t like it.

Sensing the vague direction of the remaining enemy but seeing nothing, he sent another spray of soil and rock toward the presence. Perfectly silhouetted against this scatter of debris was the spherical outline of a ward with nobody within its bounds.

It seemed that the enemy was invisible.

Abruptly, the bubble of force disappeared. No snap of displacement sounded, so no teleportation – they’d dismissed their wards to hide.

“Shoot.” Gregor commanded once more, now in the stilted rasp of man with a bloody hole in his leg. He palmed the wound and it came up slick on both sides.

Mildred shot again and again and again, but no lucky spurt of blood blossomed in the air. She clicked dry and things went silent, save for the agitated huffing of the beast she rode and the wizard beside her.

Gregor stowed the starfinger to keep the enemy helpfully uncertain about it, and began building his own fireball – a big one.

Thus, they had a standoff. A strip of linen appeared in the air and wrapped itself tight around Gregor’s leg. He coughed, waiting for the bastard rain to fall and hoping that the enemy was either stupid or arrogant.

If they were smart or prudent, they’d run. The inevitable rain would reveal them and their invisibility would be better leveraged by retreating to the periphery and waiting for Gregor to eventually sleep, or by lurking to feed information to whatever reinforcements were probably coming along.

Several quiet seconds went by, and then fat dollops began pelting down as the sky rumbled and Mildred, high and vigilant in her saddle and with a general idea of where to look from Gregor, started cracking away with her carbine almost immediately.

Half-sighted as he was, Gregor failed to detect the fuzzy disturbance in the downpour, but the invisible sorcerer teleported away in panic when they heard the sphincter-tightening whizz of nearby bullets, and Gregor felt that. They were quite distant. Evidently, they had chosen to flee.

Gregor materialised right beside the enemy for an instant, then flashed back to Mildred, sans fireball.

The explosion was quite large and the foe had no wards. The pair watched him die in the distance.