Gregor The Cripple

Thunk.

Kaius’s neck sprouted a jar. His head bubbled inside as air escaped his various face-crevasses and the blue-black necromancy juice spilled from his veins to mingle with the preserving fluid. His jaw hung loose and his eyes were listless, neither making any effort to open nor close. No vital spark could be seen within.

He was decapitated, and the arcane insulation of the jar now stood between his soul and his brain. In effect, he was dead. But he was not free. The necromancer still had him, in the soul gem or elsewhere.

Somehow, Kaius’s hat had known to jump up and avoid being partially transposed into the jar. It fluttered down to find itself rather comfortably atop the flat bottom of the glass vessel. It had no eyes, but it seemed to leer at Gregor.

It was a hoary old thing, long-ago crafted by the grandmaster of the master of Kaius’s once-master. The longer a hat sits atop the head of a wizard, the more magic it soaks up, developing bits and pieces of a personality along the way.

This was a hat among hats, an item of power, and it had a pride that demanded satisfaction.

Making an approach, Gregor addressed it as he felt was proper. “Don’t worry. I’m rather anal about tradition myself. You’ll find a new place atop the head of my own apprentice, whenever I eventually have one.”

Gregor would not be the end of his magisterial lineage, and Kaius would not be this hat’s last wearer. That would mark the end of too many great things.

The hat seemed mollified – though Gregor could not say how or why – so he picked it up off the jar and vanished it into the folds of his robe. The jar he stashed in his own hat.

In haste, Gregor went to the corpse’s near-skeletal fingers, yanking an unadorned ring of silver from among many enchanted bands of value enough to buy countries.

“Your master told you to kill him.” Spoke softly Dieter, who was rather confused about the whole series of events. Weren’t these two in conflict? Wasn’t there great animosity between them? How had they been able to so amicably sit down and discuss a consensual death? It was surely a wizard thing, he assumed. His experience with wizards had so far proved that they were all strange in the head.

“He only asked because he didn’t think I could do it. I don’t doubt that he’d prepared his own solution – one more perfect than mine. He didn’t actually intend to die.” Gregor slipped the ring onto the second of his five surviving fingers, abject satisfaction of pride threatening to split his mask of stern intention. “I killed him because I wanted to.” He said, not speaking to anyone in particular. He would have done the same in absence of the lich or the bounty, and he would have been just as glad.

A dense association of spiderwork lines rose to visibility on the silver as it found a snug fit on Gregor’s finger, shining with bright intensity then fading to nothing. In an instant, information flooded his mind. He was the tower itself for a baffling few seconds, the very stones were his body and the crystal lattices in far-off chambers were his heart, then willpower reasserted the ego and he was flesh-and-blood Gregor once more.

The eyes of the structure were his to direct, should he know where to look, and all of the infinitely complex spellwork that maintained the place would abide by his instruction, should he know what instruction to give.

With this ring, Gregor had supplanted Kaius as the master of the tower.

Taking a moment to scout his new domain, he found that the general layout matched his memory, but with a significant discrepancy. The tower’s grand vaults, the main ritual chamber, and the various war arrays were all unavailable to him.

There was something alive in the spellwork of the tower. A patch of foreign magic had wormed its way into the mechanisms and taken root. Like a cancer, it had metastasised, and Gregor held no influence over it. He could neither command it not excise it. Despite his new dominion, here he was impotent.

Being snubbed like this dampened his mood and excited the arrogant part of his wizardbrain into anger.

He felt something peering out from the influence of the malignant intrusion, observing him as he observed it. It was no doubt the lich, who had surely noticed that her servant was deprived of his body.

The foreign intelligence felt fetid and oily against his mind, and her magic reeked of cloying decay. Gregor was incensed.

This disgusting thing had made its home in his tower and harmed it significantly with her corruption. Further, she had the audacity to make a servant of his master!

Gregor was in a mood. He adopted his most arrogant sneer and opened his mouth. “I hereby revoke your permission to exist.” He snarled, before standing from his seat, not really caring that the lich had no way to receive his proclamation.

Without a word of explanation or warning, he began stalking down the hallway, hunched and malevolent. The long walls of the corridor – now Gregor’s to malleate – each morphed to accommodate many, many doors, which he inspected at length in deliberation.

Seeming to make a choice, the wizard approached a great slab of polished granite which bore no handle and beckoned with a single ring-bearing finger to the others.

They had little time.

***

Gregor was swaying as he stalked forward, empty canteen in hand.

There was a parasite in his tower, and it begged to be removed, as was proper and as his pride demanded of him. Gregor began tightening and untightening his jaw, fascinated by the sensation.

“There was a king lich once.” He began unbidden. “Not a king of liches, but a lich who was a king. He was good, by all accounts. Not like this one.”

“What happened to him?”

“He left. It was boredom, I assume, or perhaps he just stopped caring about what happened to his kingdom. Ageless things are all like that. The endeavors and responsibilities of a mortal lifetime are nothing but a passing fascination to them – a transient phase. They’ve all been someone or something of significance at some point and thrown it away for disinterest.” He paused in thought.

Ahead of the group loomed the alien territory of the lich. The walls were neither stone nor wood, more closely resembling the glossy black carapace of a beetle. An eerie green luminescence clung to the dull, reflective surfaces and wisps of foul fog hung at the ground.

“I wonder who our lich once was? Which figures from history am I about to kill?” Gregor quite liked the prospect of ending someone important.

Not having the capacity for hesitation, he continued forward, untroubled by the strange architecture. The party at his heels possessed significant capacity and inclination toward hesitation, but with their wizard pressing ceaselessly forward, they followed nonetheless.

The place was a labyrinthine confusion of space, like it had grown according to the positions of the chambers it wished to integrate. Gregor could imagine tendrils of carapace-mass reaching out through the void to claim the various rooms that the lich desired, leaving behind a disorganised mess of tunnels.

The maze might be impossible to navigate according to his knowledge of the tower, but Gregor had a clear destination.

He could feel a great pulsating mass of magic somewhere in the passages beyond, so that was where they headed.

Penetrating deep with the conviction of smug superiority and anger, Gregor led the party through the eerie warren. Deeper and deeper they went, and behind the dark elbow of every turn they heard a faint something which shook their nerves.

It was a scuttling, or a clattering. Something of that nature, but so slight that they had no idea if was actually real, or just a mental product of tension.

Greta, Dieter, and Briar, being mostly normal people uninitiated into any of this magic business, were aflame with uncertain expectation. They had no solid idea of what a lich was, and no real understanding of what necromancy entailed – beyond making dead things walk and generally being evil.

So, those sounds spurred their imaginations to create all manner of freakish things. If Gregor weren't at the head of the party, unaffected, they might have taken flight right back the way they came.

Unexpectedly, they encountered no opposition. There were no skeletons or zombies, no strange and murderous undead adversaries of any kind. The sounds precipitated no encounter.

Their way was unobstructed… and Gregor had no idea what that meant.

After the passage of uncertain minutes, they made their way to the grand ritual chamber with suspicious ease.

Gregor caught sight of the lich immediately. Loosely robed and facing away from them, she was standing in the centre of the chamber, arms raised in obeisance to a monstrous obelisk of that same beetle-black material. The grotesque thing bore the life-like impressions of a thousand screaming faces, all twisted in the myriad shapes of agony. A few seemed almost familiar.

Having himself been the creator of such expressions, Gregor could attest to the uncanny accuracy.

Despite its prominence in the room, the conspicuous pillar of pain was not the source of the magical presence that Gregor felt. Instead, it was a smooth sphere which held an obsidian shine, hovering at the peak of the obelisk.

The orb seemed to be the nucleus of the corruption, but the obelisk was entirely unknown and the relationship between the two wasn’t something that Gregor’s brief few seconds of inspection could discern.

The near-skeletal lich at the base of the structure was unresponsive to their presence, giving issue to raspy whispered mumblings and swaying slightly, as if in trance.

Gregor almost couldn’t believe his luck, half suspecting a trick.

Motioning for the others to maintain their silence, and for Greta to draw her revolver, he approached with all the stealth he could muster.

Cautious, he crept behind her slowly.

This would need to be quick – his advantage here would evaporate as soon as he made his move.

They were in her territory, the centre of her power. Gregor knew that she had defensive spellwork in place, because she had cannibalised it from the tower. It was his. Though this meant swift death in the case of their failure, it gave him confidence regardless.

The fangs of the tower had been taken from Kaius, confiscated by mother lich for fear of misbehaviour, meaning that he was a potential threat, so-armed.

If Kaius could manage to be a threat as a thrall, then Gregor saw no reason that he shouldn’t be able to manage the same as a free wizard with an inclination toward hostility.

It took very little time for his plan to knit itself together in his mind.

Despite what many may think, killing a lich is actually quite simple. The first step, as Kaius had taught, is to kill it like you would kill anything else. You damage the body rather extremely, with significant preference toward obliterating the brain. Only once it is deprived of a functioning vessel do you go searching for the phylactery.

Thus, the plan was rather simple.

A fireball, the natural preference of wizardkind, would be a poor choice, for they require time to prepare. During which the enemy would likely sense the magical activity behind her.

Something quick would be ideal, like the lightning which killed Kaius the first time. Lightning was unavailable here, so he opted to employ the mundane wands of modern convenience.

Motioning with his newly-ringed index finger and thumb, Gregor beckoned Greta to approach and mimed shooting the lich in the back of the head.

He found this method quite droll, but he was very good at killing things, and his well-practised intuition told him that this was the best way to proceed.

Strangely, Greta shook her hear in firm refusal of his expert direction. This earned her a raised brow and a moment of consideration, then a shrug.

It must be fear, Gregor assumed. She was a normal person, after all. It was reasonable for her to feel fear in moments like these – it was probably even a good thing.

Normal people are frail sheep who require the stewardship of law and must retain the services of wolves like him to keep themselves safe from wolves of a less cooperative nature, like the lich. Asking a sheep to deal with a wolf ran against the natural order of things – what was he thinking? Of course she was afraid.

If the girl wished to remain a normal person, as he knew that she did, then it was a good thing for her to maintain a healthy fear of wolves.

Only half correct about her motives, Gregor held his hand out in obvious request for the gun so that he might do it himself. Not once did he consider that the young lady might have moral qualms about shooting a defenceless enemy in the back of the head.

Whatever the case may have been, she reluctantly handed over the battered old revolver. It was her father’s gun, stolen from the little box beneath the floorboards on the night she ran away. Since that night, she’d never been without it. It was a thing of complicated significance.

Gregor knew none of this and saw her hesitation as yet more fear, which concerned him very little.

Gun in hand, he stalked forward with the characteristic boldness that firepower lends, idly noting that he should get a wand for himself, or perhaps a real staff. Previously, he had thought that weapons were unbecoming of wizards, but at that moment he understood. Weapons are hand-held power – fun made an object.

Once close enough that his shaking hand wouldn’t cause him to miss, he raised the gun, pulled back the hammer, took careful aim, and pulled the trigger. Smooth and quick.

It was with calm surprise that he felt a thick barrier hum to life around the lich in the instant he fired.