Gregor The Cripple

The pair weren’t lost, the roads were just wrong. The gravelly, weed-eaten things seemed to have forgotten which way to run in the seventy years since Mildred’s ill-conceived exodus. Not her. She knew exactly where she was going.

The roads were just wrong.

Carried by wrong roads, the fate-arranged pair found themselves standing before an abandoned cabin in sparse woodland somewhere along the way to Mildred’s village. The four walls still stood and the roof was held aloft above them, mostly intact. Antique and rotted beyond repair, but good enough for a night.

Judging by the rusted-to-dust snares that hung by the door, it might have once been a trapper’s hut. Men of that profession like to roam between remote dwellings as the season demanded. Why else would someone come out here?

“I remember this place.” Said Mildred, dismounting. “Nobody was home, so I let myself in.” Perhaps the roads weren't so wrong.

Repeating the sins of the past, Mildred very roughly forced the door open. Its rusted hinges came apart with a light sound, like the dropping of a spoon, and she was left holding the worn slab aloft.

Gregor raised a brow. What a frightening woman.

Mildred leaned it against the interior wall, flustered. She had caught Gregor’s look. “It wasn’t that heavy.” she said, and her face flushed slightly at the vulgar display of physical power.

It probably was that heavy.

Continuing in, they found the place to possess a stone fireplace and little else, which was just fine – having a roof at night was already better than they had been expecting.

Mildred began ferrying in wood for the fire while Gregor set down to rest his weary self, back against the wall of the cabin with his bedroll as padding.

He was near the peak of his infirmity, and probably would have collapsed in exhaustion without the horses from Apfeloch. Abject torpidity had been his constant companion these past few days, as if no food could reach his stomach and his flesh had become lead.

The nausea was now transitory – it came and went as it pleased, morning or night.

All in all, the withdrawals this time around weren’t as bad, but they weren’t good either.

Retrospect told him that he was only suffering a slight relapse as compared to his original period of opium use. Perhaps that was why his condition was less extreme, or perhaps his body had just learned to better wean itself.

Mildred joined him after a moment, sitting with him at fireside as the sun set.

Munching idly on boar jerky, Gregor read his grimoire.

When he had first produced it, Mildred had remarked that it was 'the most magical looking thing I have ever seen.' Which made sense to Gregor, because it likely was the most magical thing she'd ever seen.

She sat leaning against the wall opposite him, pouring over a technical manual on locomotives, which only existed in her time as innovative contraptions employed in highly specialised contexts – mere exploratory prototypes.

She had commented idly that she’d seen one during an excursion to the Golden Empire with her Aunt. Again, Gregor was left wondering at the precise identity of her father. He wasn’t quite familiar with the local area, but could recall nobody so impressive being nearby. This led him to doubt that Mildred’s father was still alive, but he decided to see the job to the end regardless.

Even if the Norn wasn’t present as an incentive – and he half-suspected that she was just a figment of his madness anyway – Gregor was a wizard, and wizards ply their trade for the benefit of the needy. That was, in essence, the entirety of their lives’ pursuit. Payment was important, of course, but the deed itself was the goal.

Magic was to be practised, and where better to practice than where it would have most significance; in aid of those without magic of their own? That was the most impactful application of magical force, thus, it was the pleasure of wizards carry it out.

This wizarding philosophy which obsessed Gregor’s soul carried a tiny hint of noblesse oblige, that old hobby of the declined magical aristocracy, though not enough to inspire moralism. Rather, it was a transactional thing fueled by a desire to exercise power, fair as a point.

Therefore, he would see Mildred home, whether her father might be there to pay him or not. They could work something else out if need be.

He looked over to her, currently lost in the minutia of transforming pressure to power while mitigating the significant risk of explosion. Her ears wiggled slightly as she clenched her jaw for a moment. The muscles in her neck looked taut, but were probably very flexible.

Distracted from his own reading, he considered that she was truly a formidable woman.

In matters of physicality, appearance, pedigree, and recently intelligence, she was exceptional – and more than is ordinary, much like himself. Gregor even half-expected that she was playing up her innocence to evoke sympathy and better retain his assistance.

He found it incredibly attractive. Quite to his surprise, Gregor found that he wanted to help her, and for disgustingly non-wizardly reasons.

He went back to his grimoire, seeking distraction in the arcane secrets of his dead master.

She glanced up at him for a moment, then went back to her own book and he became unavoidably aware of the silence.

It wasn’t a bad silence, per se, but silence between people was often far less pleasant than silence when alone. Not necessarily because one might desire conversation, but because silence in the company of another always meant something.

During such a silence one might find themselves asking any number of deep-meaning questions.

Why aren’t we speaking? Do we have so little in common that there is nothing to say, or are we simply uninterested in each other? Am I disliked by the other for some reason, or are they content with the silence? Is it appreciable or tense? Why might that be? Why do I care?

Always, silence between the acquainted held the spectre of social connotation.

This silence, he decided, was a comfortable one. Unbeknownst to him, she had similar thoughts.

There were questions that both would like to ask, but for now, silence was good.

***

In the night they came, long of body and red of eye. Though their silhouettes suggested bipedal habits, they crept up low to the ground with all four limbs. Silently they drew near, with hideously long hands placed deliberately and slowly, one after the other, moving toward the light of the fire with an unfaltering grace that clashed against their uncanny features.

Gregor felt them before Mildred saw them, for they had a presence.

He rose, and she glanced about in askance. Her gaze made its way to the window, finding a cadre of large reflective eyes lurking in the dark beyond.

Motioning for Mildred to stifle her alarm with a finger to his lips, the wizard rose to peer through out at the them, eye a-glimmer with darkvision. A peculiar stench blew toward the pair on the cold wind.

There were dozens of the pale things, with distended limbs and long, dog-with-an-underbite snouts, all covered in a sparse, wiry hair of near-pubic aspect.

“Deeptrolls.” Gregor identified, frowning. “Stay put.”

He dispelled his darkvision to conjure up a great ball of luminous white flame, swaggering out to meet the eerie throng like a police constable might swagger into a crowd of vagrants in need of encouragement to move along.

They scuttled back from his light in absolute silence, large crimson eyes never leaving his figure, not even to blink.

Wading out into the hostile dark with bold attitude, now-radiant Gregor traced a line in the dirt with his boot.

“No easy meat for you here. Get back to your holes to feed on kin-flesh, abominations.”

Slowly, silently, the uncanny crowd retreated into the dark.

Gregor did not sleep. He couldn’t, not with the predators about. They hadn’t left, not really. They remained, lurking beyond the periphery.

Occasionally, in intervals of hours, the malign things would approach again in silence. Gregor would flare his light each time, sending them back to their native darkness. They played this game until dawn, when they finally departed for good under the threat of sunshine.

Being subterranean, the Deeptrolls were nocturnal by necessity and reviled the sun. Thus, they were hated for both religious and practical reasons by the people of the empire. Gregor didn’t like them much either, though he cared less for the sun than the moon.

Mildred rose to find a groggy Gregor with his star-bound tome in hand, awake early despite his feebleness.

He had not discussed his intention to maintain a vigil through the night, but, given how intelligent she had proven to be, it wasn’t hard for her to figure what had happened.

“We could have taken shifts.”

“I had reading to do.”

“So did I.”

Day proper found Gregor’s horse tethered to Mildred’s, with her leading the way and him nodding off in the saddle.

The wizard was a strange one. Stranger than other wizards, she postulated, though she’d only met a few. He was currently sick and mad, by his own testimony. Sick with what, she didn’t quite know, but the madness seemed to almost suit him.

It was as if he appreciated having an excuse to act more him than would otherwise make sense.

All of his characteristic Gregorness, his arrogance, his eccentric bravado, his lack of social care; she suspected that none of it was a creation of the madness, and that none of it was significantly diminished by the madness, but rather increased in proportion to the degree of madness he perceived himself as suffering.

To her eyes he looked half dead and seemed to be getting worse as the days went by, yet he had opted unilaterally to bear the burden of watch-duty alone.

It was an unwise decision, and someone so allegedly competent should know that.

Was it a product of the madness, or was the madness a product of knowingly making unwise decisions?

It struck Mildred that she didn’t really know what madness was or what caused it. In Gregor, at least, it seemed to result in decisions free from the constraints of reasonableness. Did this mean that mad people were less affected by outside pressures to think or behave in certain ways, and thus more true to themselves?

If so, was madness really a bad thing, or is it people who are bad, and the madness just reveals it?

Was Gregor bad?

Mildred glanced back at him over her shoulder.

He was slumped forward in his saddle, mostly asleep. The reigns were twisted tightly around his non-crippled arm so that he wouldn’t fall. It took skill and a certain absurd level of exhaustion to sleep while riding, this she knew because she had tried and failed in the past. Gregor was not in good shape.

It was an odd thing to realise that this killer trusted her enough to lead their way and to wake him if something happened. He trusted her, yet she had told him so little.

Gregor must wonder about her father and his village, but he hadn’t asked. From the things he had said, she as pretty sure that he knew nothing. It would be reasonable to ask, and she assumed that he must want to, but he hadn’t. Was it because of the madness?

If so, and if madness was just the true self unburdened by the fetters of reasonable action, then Gregor’s true self must thus be content to wait for Mildred to explain on her own.

Was Gregor then good? Despite his insistence to the contrary, maybe he was, she decided. Just a little. At the very least, he wasn’t bad to her, though he might be very bad to other people.

Mildred felt guilty for it, but something about this notion was appealing in a dangerous way.

“Do you know what an egregore is?”

He was awake, barely. The tip of his hat flip-flopped with the movement of his horse.

“My master wrote about them extensively. That’s what I was reading last night. I won’t burden you with the uncomfortable specifics, but it spurred me to think. Which of my thoughts are my own? Which of them really have their origins within me? I contend that it is impossible to know, and that my own thoughts must be very few in proportion to those that come from without.”

“Gregor, you’re weird.”

“Near everything that I think was spawned elsewhere in another mind, or born from epistemological seeds planted by another mind, and which came to me, spreading almost by viral transmission through contact with the minds of others, as by their speech or by their writings or by direct or indirect knowledge of their actions.”

It didn’t seem like he was going to stop or accommodate conversation. Gregor was on an expository roll which Mildred was powerless to halt.

“These informational parasites, they come to me, they inhabit my mind. They fester, they breed, they mutate and exchange that of themselves which makes them unique so that new ideas can be born from the resulting amalgam.”

He seemed to be enjoying himself in the throes of this existential episode, and once again Mildred wondered at the nature or madness. Was it distortion, or was it truth?

“Are these new ideas mine for having spawned in my mind, or do they belong to their true originators, or to the nebulous mass of collective shared information which sowed their seeds?”

A normal person wouldn’t care about this. To them, it wouldn’t matter where their ideas came from or who originally spawned them. It was enough that the things they thought were true. That was extent of their considerations.

To Gregor, however, it mattered. He was a creature of pure ego, and this truly affected him.

“They will go out from me and infect the minds of others, so as to be further mutated and propagated. I am merely a temporary host. They will continue to mutate and breed, subsuming and parasitising all the other ideas they meet, and being subsumed and parasitised in turn.

“What is the end of this great evolution of information? How does the process terminate? Will all ideas eventually merge into a single homogeneous idea, or will there be myriad specialised ideas, with every possible unique arrangement of information having been coaxed into being and differentiated? Will the monad be formed through the self-culling of the zeitgeist?”

“Gregor,” began Mildred in her most calm, placating voice, “you’re more insane than usual at the moment.”

“I am.” He agreed readily.

“And no, Gregor, the monad will not formed through the self-culling of the zeitgeist, whatever that means, because people forget things.”

“Oh. I suppose so.” He conceded. In his fervour, he had forgotten about forgetting.

“I have a weird wizard. You’re weird, Gregor.”