Gregor The Cripple

With a sphincter-clenching whizzzz, the lead pellet ricocheted off the barrier to explore its newfound independence in the dark corners of the room.

“Gregor the Cripple,” a voice echoed from all around, “worthy soon-servant of the Master. Have you come to seek a place in our great work?” The corpse in front of him was not the speaker, but it turned, revealing its face of brittle brown decay.

It – or ‘she’ allegedly – was clad in jeweled gold-and-blue trappings, and a prominent ruby ankh was embedded bone-deep in her forehead. This seemed to be no mere lich, but a Corpselord from the necrophage cities of the southern sands – one of the true titans of the world. Gregor had woefully underestimated his quarry.

He felt the chill blade of death at his neck now, but did not lose confidence. An abominable contingency brewed inside his mind, a surefire way to end his enemy. He would not die here, but he stood to lose much.

His own wards at the ready, Gregor backpedaled unsteadily, whirling about in search of the voice but finding no second foe.

“I assume that I’ll be killing both.” He began with arrogant bravado, intending to evoke an informative response, “But for the sake of priority, which of you holds the soul of Kaius?”

A rumble of mirth preceded the simultaneous response from both corpse and voice. “Little wizard of tender years, both are I. We are me. The soul and body need not act in tandem when separate.”

Gregor etched this lesson into his heart, finding Kaius’s instruction insufficient for the very first time. Already, he was growing beyond the old man.

“Do you desire the freedom of your master? It can be done, for the price of service.” The dual voices intoned as one.

Gregor scoffed. “I returned to the tower because I wanted his head, and I came to excise you because the tower is now mine. Your presence here is not tolerated, corpse.”

“This place? Yours? The arrogance of youth stupefies. I hold power here, yearling. How could this place belong to you?” Now singular, her voice was like the tearing of paper.

“Furthermore,” Gregor continued in wilful disregard for the words of his adversary, “Before I decapitated him, Kaius informed me that you are an associate of Labourd, who I recently destroyed. This is reason enough to exterminate you.” The lich’s head jerked to the side, as if this were unexpected. “Did he come to find me knowing where I would be, or was it mere coincidence that I met him on his way to feed the Kopfbiest?”

“… Labourd told you of the Kopfbiest?”

Gregor’s smug arrogance rose to a peak. “He told me nothing. On the contrary, It was the beast who informed me of its association with Labourd, right before I killed it.”

“You lie!” She hissed, and the room cracked and creaked as it swayed under the influence of her anger.

He was to fight this thing, a monster of untold power and experience, a ruler of the desert.

“I lie frequently, but not about this.”

How would she measure against the Kopfbiest? Gregor had no idea. Even if she were more powerful, he should still have an easier time here, in theory.

The beast, though arcane in nature, fought with its abstruse physicality. Against such an attack, Gregor would only be able to defend by evasion. The lich, however, was a sorcerer, and Gregor had trained his whole life in the art of magical combat, his teacher counting among the most formidable duelists one could conceive. Gregor’s confidence was grounded.

But…

He thought of the others. If things progressed far enough that the contingency came into play, he’d be in no condition to teleport them all out.

Certainly, he could leave them to die, but their deaths would mark his failure as a wizard. It would be the same calibre of thing as dying himself – just as severe a loss. After his incompetence at Sine, such a thing was unconscionable.

He needed to send them away.

“Briar.” He spoke quietly, though the lich could probably still hear. “Do you remember the route we just took?”

The bandit raised his eyebrow, adjusting his appraisal of the situation according to Gregor’s stark manner. “…I do.” He nodded.

The wizard jerked his head toward the pair. “Take them and leave. You’ll find the tower’s exit nearby once you're out of the corruption.” After a pause. “Wait for me outside.”

“Is this winnable?”

“Yes. Leave.” Was the terse reply.

Briar understood this to mean ‘Not with you here’, and nodded once more. He agreed wholeheartedly that this was not a place he should be.

Without warning, Gregor teleported behind the body of the lich. Back to the agony monolith, two more shots barked from the revolver in his hand, striking hard against the still-present barrier. Looking past lich, he saw his three companions hurrying back whence they had come.

An unnecessary precaution, he told himself, because the contingency would not be needed.

“You shall serve the master in death!” The ancient thing rasped, turning to catch sight of a fireball gaining mass above Gregor’s stump. In response, she conjured a luminous green miasma which surged toward him, scarring the ground as it went.

Teleporing behind her once more, he released the fireball and shot again, wishing ruefully that he had made time to enchant Greta’s bullets.

The shot struck home and the fireball detonated with a roar an instant later. Her wards held firm.

Four of his six rounds had been spent to little effect. Gregor knew from experience that bullets were not easy things to catch. They were heavy. Against a mage or an average wizard, a normal person could almost hope to level the playing field with a steady aim and a handful of ammunition.

Gunfire was to be avoided, even for powerhouses like Kaius, but the lich did not seem to care.

Gregor teleported once more, this time to a random point on her right so as to be unpredictable. At the moment of his materialisation, a bright bolt of something impacted his wards. His mind blurred under the strain.

“Little wizard,” the lich creaked, “are you really so eager to follow your master in accepting the tyranny of fate?”

Was she mocking him for choosing to fight, knowing that he risked serving her in death if he failed? Did she really think that his failure was so certain as to call it fate?

“You overestimate yourself – Kaius was soon to escape and your death at my hand is imminent.”

The lich’s face grew into a desiccant mockery of glee in realisation. “He misunderstands!” She rasped. “The stakes are unknown to him!”

Gregor teleported again. Bang-bang-click went the gun, now depleted. He reached up to draw the poleaxe from his hat.

“I speak of a different slavery.” The lich continued behind her barrier, unbothered and churlish. “Kaius accepted the tyranny of fate and abided by the dictum of the Norn. You were his fate. He lived to create you and nothing more. That was his duty as a slave, and he accepted it because he was pathetic. He was a pawn, as are you.”

Gregor was unaware of this ‘Norn’, but he entirely doubted that Kaius would consent to her commands. Likely, this nonsense was concocted as a distraction. “The Norn is your enemy? Well, she can count herself lucky; her foes are soon to die.”

The miasma was spreading throughout the chamber with rapidity, encroaching upon Gregor’s pocket of habitable space.

The lich’s strategy was clear. While concentrating most of her magical expenditure into maintaining her formidable defences, she employed a low-effort, low-cost offence which gradually overwhelmed her opponent.

From his education, Gregor understood this to be a strategy common to ancient, cowardly things who were afraid of death. Quite boring, but effective.

Naturally, he had a counterplay.

“Kaius was a cog designed and created for the turning of another cog. The Norn has plans for you, Gregor, weak as she now is. Already, you act your part.”

The wizard swung his poleaxe telekinetically, summoning up a great gust of magically amplified wind to push back the corrupting miasma. In his hand, there was the glow of brewing spellwork. Tongues of almost-flame flickered eclectically between his fingers as they arced about a central nucleus.

If she was going to mount a low-intensity offensive, then Gregor could slow his pace and take all the time he needed to pierce her shell.

Intuiting the change to Gregor’s approach, the lich now teleported herself, appearing close behind the wizard and lunging for him with skeletal claws. She looked frail, but Gregor had no doubt that he’d be shredded to handsome ribbons if she made contact.

Backpedaling and multitasking in an absurd display of magical ability, Gregor continued gathering power in his hand while simultaneously casting a metalworking spell on the head of the poleaxe with his stump, superheating the dull iron in an instant.

He swung the viscous mass down hard upon the lich’s wards, where it splattered messily and stuck, the globules of gooey-hot metal hissing and spitting violently at the points of contact.

Finally, he saw lich’s defences degrade under the continuous assault of the heat. The barrier, previously invisible, began to shimmer and ripple in the vicinity of the metal – a clear sign of instability.

Despite this, the lich continued her spiel. “In life, you will be a slave to the fate the Norn weaves, and in death the master will claim you. He has placed his mark, and cannot be deterred.“

Gregor’s eye narrowed. The lich seemed to be describing an architect of fate. Could such a figure really exist? If so, it would make sense for the Norn to be the enemy of a Worldeater, who would conceivably make a mess of her work.

He set aside these thoughts for later as the lich’s wards continued to weaken and he saw his chance.

Teleporting again with intention to attack from the lich’s blind spot, Gregor was once more assaulted at the moment of materialisation.

A colossal wave of force struck him from his eyeless side, crumpling his defences and throwing him across the chamber. Upon rolling to a stop and recovering himself, a sharp pain below his heart told him that his ribs were certainly broken.

The miasma crept closer.

“No matter how you struggle, you will always serve the purposes of another, but my master extends his hand. He offers escape from slavery and revenge against the tyranny of fate.” The single voice of the lich had again become two.

Thankful for the numbness of opium, Gregor sprang to his feet and made a slapdash attempt to reassemble his shattered wards. Near-defenceless, he began teleporting madly at random, exhaustion mounting.

Somehow, she seemed to know where he would appear.

Another blast decimated his recovering wards, sending him tumbling across the ground. His vision dimmed for a moment and the pain in his chest became a horrible piercing thing. Blood began streaming blindingly down his face from some unknown injury. Upon trying to push himself up, he found his crippled right arm to be dislocated.

With a sudden crack of teleportation, the lich loomed over him. “You have been offered a bargain.” She intoned, “How do you respond? Will you die here a slave and become again a slave in death, or will you choose to serve and break free from the Norn? This is the bargain that I was given… I took it gladly.”

Gregor sent a fat wad of bloody spittle in her direction. “You and your necrophile master have made an enemy of ME. Nothing else could be so foolish. I choose my own option – I will kill you all. Your master cannot enslave me if he does not exist, as such, I announce his annihilation! Let this be his death knell!”

Gregor realised that he wouldn’t be winning this duel. How long had it been? He couldn't quite tell though the triplicate fog of adrenaline, pain, and opium. Long enough, surely. There was no choice but to employ the contingency.

“Don’t you dislike being arranged, Gregor? The Norn treats you as a piece on her grand board, as she does to all who possess power.”

Through the blood, he grinned hideously.

“I am a wizard. So long as I am compensated for my services, she can have me do whatever she likes. It is employment, not slavery.”

Assuming the Norn existed, which wasn’t impossible, she would know of this conversation. If she refused to pay, Gregor would simply need to go and collect his debt.

Clearing his mind as much as he was able, Gregor encouraged his exhausted magic reserves into action one last time.

Long-ago, he had formulated a theory about teleporting within the tower, but, decently wary of death as he was, it had remained untested.

The theory is as follows:

No matter where one is within the tower, the outside always occupies an absolute position, because, while there might be a potentially infinite distance to cover within the warped interior, movement between any two points within the tower can only ever correspond to a small change of position relative to realspace, and that distance will never exceed the dimensions of the physical building.

When teleporting within the tower, you simply need to act according to your position in realspace, rather than your position in towerspace.

Kaius can safely do this because he has an accurate understanding of how the various rooms within the tower correspond to points in realspace.

One would die a horrible death within the yawning void between the walls if they tried to teleport around the interior without this knowledge, but because the outside of the tower occupies a functionally absolute position in realspace relative to any point within the tower, it is quite easy to teleport from the inside to the outside. One simply needs to teleport twenty or so realspace feet in any direction.

Thus, Gregor had a theoretically viable escape vector, untested though it was.

Holding a very carefully chosen set of coordinates in his mind, Gregor reached out with his magic to interface with the foundational artifice of the tower.

Peering through stone and space, the ancient runes burned with power in his mind’s eye, wrought in complex lattices of tens of thousands of diamonds – the stones each themselves etched with complexity that defied comprehension.

He commanded this beautiful thing to kill itself, and it obeyed; a slave.

With a crack, he was in the sky. A second of free-fall found him bending branches and impacting the sloppy ground.

Moon-lit rain chased him through the new hole in the canopy. Wet, muddy, and in agony, Gregor the Cripple stood and gained his bearings.

Spying grey stone through the leaves, he hobbled a dozen feet over to the wall of the tower and placed his palm upon it.

Nothing. No response. He held still for a moment, mind blank. This was expected. It was what he wanted – it signaled his victory, but it shook him nonetheless.

Gregor had instructed the tower to halt spatial cavitation, which had caused the pocket dimension to collapse. All of the matter previously contained within the tower’s stretched space had been compressed and superimposed within the actual, normal space that the tower occupied.

It was now probably the densest thing in the world.

The lich was gone – dead in the minutest fraction of an instant, but so was Gregor’s tower. He had been forced to destroy his home and everything it contained. Many people would need to die for this. His enemies would bleed lakes.

Limping and faint, he dragged himself around the base of the new monolith, searching for the entrance.

He happened upon Briar pulling uselessly at the door. Alone.

The tower was dead, and much had been lost within.