Gregor The Cripple

Having made his intentions clear, Gregor did not wait for the other party to begin the fight.

One of the men to the rear held a smart-looking lever carbine, so Gregor teleported behind him and telekinetically appropriated it, ripping the thing from the man’s grasp whilst preparing a fireball in his hand.

Seeing that the butt was plated in brass and could serve as a decent bludgeon, he brought it up hard against the man’s chin and then into the side of his head, again and again and again. The sharp angles of the gun broke the skin, and the sturdy brass-clad wood cracked the bone.

Scrambling to action, the now-brutalised man’s partner lunged toward Gregor with a wickedly curved kukri, only to find the barrel of the carbine punching through his lips and shattering his teeth on its way down to his throat. It rested inside briefly before firing. The bullet clipped his spine and he crumpled.

Two down in an instant.

Gregor teleported back to a stunned Mildred, bringing both the knife and carbine with him. They each found their way to one of her hands.

“Shoot them.” He said as he stalked toward the remaining three, fireball still gaining size.

Terrified because he could now feel exactly how formidable Gregor was, the warlock unleashed his demon. It went off bounding toward the wizard, clawing and gnashing its teeth at the air in frenzy.

This creature was a minor demon from some lesser hell – an animal thing of only a few hundred years’ existence. It could not be compared to the tartarian fiend that had driven Gregor from his tower. As such, he dealt with it in passing.

A spike of ice condensed beside the tip of his hat, spinning itself together as if the moisture in the air were thread. Faster and larger it spun, until Gregor sent it rocketing toward the demon’s knee with a mental flick.

The joint and the ice shattered each other upon contact and the demon fell to the ground, screeching and howling as it began to crawl along its original trajectory.

Seeing this, the warlock started to panic, very quickly making the decision to run. Gregor should not have been able to do that while focusing on both the fireball and his wards. Multi-tasking of that sort was simply absurd; evidently this was a wizard to escape, not to hunt.

Gregor disappeared with the distinct crack of teleportation a moment after the demon fell, and an accompanying crack rang out close behind the trio. Turning, they managed to catch a glimpse of Gregor’s magnificent cloak falling to the ground.

With another crack, Gregor appeared in time to catch it. He watched with interest as two of his enemies began rushing toward him, only to be thrown off their feet and engulfed in a cloud of flame as his fireball descended from above to violently detonate between them.

This was diversionary teleportation – a clever tactic that Gregor had conceived whilst mulling over his fight with the lich. He had sent his cloak close to them, and himself far above in the same moment. They had been able to hear both himself and the cloak apparate, but the near drowned out the far, allowing him to attack from the far while they were focused on the near.

It would have been useless against the lich, of course, but he needed to be better, to improve. He would not squander himself in content confidence like a mere mage – he would not be stagnant.

The warlock was partially protected from the fireball by his feeble wards, but they collapsed before long, hammering his mind with backlash. And as he writhed around and ululated in burning agony, the many-voiced zombie silently collapsed in a manner that rather reminded Gregor of the first time he had killed Kaius, his dry flesh almost inviting the blaze. The third man seemed oddly unaffected by the flames.

He was short and bald and muscular, and very very angry.

Blood trickled from his ears and he was swaying about, off balance, but the little man quickly righted himself and began barreling toward Gregor, stumbling at first, but finding his pace after a few steps. The flames stuck to his clothes, eating them, but his flesh was unmarred and he didn’t seem to mind the heat. Lesser men might have found this display to be quite intimidating.

A shot rang out as Mildred placed a bullet in the small fellow’s back, and he went down against the dirt. Gregor hadn’t expected her to actually shoot. Most people wouldn’t. But, he considered, these were her enemies, and she certainly wasn’t most people. She was better than ordinary people, just like he was.

While she attempted to calm her horse – Gregor’s had already spooked – the wizard approached his prey, another spike of ice spooling together in the air beside his head.

Bloody spittle covered the little man’s chin and his jaw clenched tight, veins bulging – he was trying not to scream or cough. Mildred must’ve hit a lung. His ears were small and pointed, and his eyes were black-speckled amber.

“Fey?” Gregor observed with some surprise. “Tell me little sprite, is your King in cahoots with your master?”

“…I have no king.”

Glancing over to the badly burned warlock, Gregor gave issue to a particularly pretentious snort. “Hmpf. Two oathbreakers in company. How fitting.”

Thunk! The sprite’s neck became unwilling host to a large icicle. Gregor dispatched the nearly-dead warlock similarly. Looking around, Gregor found the many-voiced corpse to be a corpse in the proper sense, and neither of the other two drew breath. All were dead.

He should have left one for interrogation, but he was a wizard, and a mad wizard at that. As a matter of principle, he did what he wanted and expected the consequences flee his presence for their own good.

Foes of this kind were obviously below him. As such, he had no need to act prudent. Wise action at this juncture would injure his arrogance and blunt him, which would be a terrible thing because his arrogance was nearly all that kept him together, bloody and bruised though it was.

These were not the calibre of enemy he had been expecting to meet. Clearly, they had come only for Mildred without anticipating his presence.

Labourd had known where to find him, and these five had known where to find her, so they evidently had some kind of divination directing their movements. It was a rare art, though not so rare as healing, and not a simple thing to guard against.

Gregor knew of ways to hide himself, but he couldn’t be sure that they’d actually work, and hiding Mildred aswell was another matter entirely.

However, this was fine. It was only proper that his enemies should be difficult to handle.

Threat gone, he began limping back to Mildred in a slouch, exhaustion and pain beating out adrenaline.

How long had it been since the disaster at the tower? Gregor didn’t know, but he knew that it wasn’t nearly long enough for his broken rib to have healed, and he felt it. Usually it was just a dull ache, but he must have upset it during the fight because now it felt like a star had begun to burn below his heart.

With ten feet between the pair, Mildred pointed her new gun towards Gregor. She was not happy.

“You aren’t a good person.”

In one moment, he was thoughtfully educating her about civil conveniences, and in the next he was executing the helpless. Gregor was erratic and clearly very dangerous, but that wasn’t the problem.

“I am aware.”

“You aren’t a good person, you’re really very scary, and they knew you.” She waited with her brow raised, clearly expecting an explanation.

Once again, Mildred was threatening Gregor, and once again he was unbothered. She wasn’t nervous about it this time, for the titan of a woman was angry. Towering tall in her saddle, straight-backed and forehead furrowed, the chords of muscle in her forearms were taut as she gripped the carbine. She was somehow both large and lithe – a svelte predator posed to strike. Gregor found it quite appealing.

“I should make you angry more often.”

“Gregor, stop being weird and explain why they knew you.”

And so he did. He told her of the beginnings of his enmity with the cult of the Worldeater – his encounter with Labourd and later the Kopfbiest, and then of his dialogue with the lich.

“So, these people go around recruiting by hook or by crook, and that’s why they were after me seventy years ago? I gotta say, it’s incredibly coincidental that you – an enemy of my enemies – happened to stumble upon me by chance in some random cave in the middle of nowhere.”

And why me? She wondered to herself.

It was understandable that they’d want Gregor the Scary Badass Wizard, but Mildred was just Mildred. She’d always assumed that she was being targeted as a hostage to get to her father, but it seemed that something more was going on.

“I suppose it could be called coincidence, or at least, it was as coincidental as anything else is to us, with our three-dimensional perspectives. Lady Luck builds her own deck in the casino of fate – the Worldeater’s enemies are more than just you and me.”

Gregor said nothing more, and Mildred thought him more mad than usual.

For him, this incident was confirmation that the Norn existed, and that she had manipulated events to place him at Mildred’s side. Why? Evidently it was important to the Norn that the Worldeater not obtain the girl. Beyond that, he couldn’t say, but his services had been engaged in the battle against his enemies and it satisfied him deeply. He was now party to a conflict between world-shaking forces. What more could a wizard want?

But how might she have done that? By what mechanism might an architect of fate carry out the orchestration of causality? These were secrets that could lay bare the base workings of reality, and Gregor regretted that his soul wasn’t nearly weighty enough to contain them, for he was a mere fleshly thing and not some astral thoughtform unfettered by biological limitation. His perspective simply wasn’t broad enough. For him, reality only consisted of the present. Past and future were really just labels that he assigned to hypothetical, non-tangible states of being – intellectual contrivances that kept man grounded. It would be different for the Norn.

Someday he would certainly have an astral presence and exist beyond himself, but these arcane mysteries would need to be left alone until then. He knew this, but that didn’t stop him from trying to wrap his big wizard brain around the problem.

As Gregor attempted to goad himself into existential crisis, Mildred was having some deep thoughts of her own.

Guilty thoughts, mostly.

She had withheld information about her father, about their destination, and about herself. Gregor hadn’t asked, but the information was incredibly relevant the job she had asked him to do. There was no way he wasn’t curious, and she should be eager to share, if only for the sake of ensuring his success.

Really, the main reason she hadn’t told him anything was out of fear that he might know things she wouldn’t like to learn. Was the village known to be abandoned, or her father known to be elsewhere? It was unrealistic to expect everything to be the same after seventy years, but what did she have other than her hopes? If Gregor knew some terrible truth about her home, she didn’t want to hear it. She’d rather live with her hopes than have definite answers to these questions.

But…

He had protected her. Gregor had proven himself a dependable ally committed to preserving her well-being. There was payment involved, as well as his grudge against her enemies, sure, but that didn’t diminish the fact that he protected her. For this, she felt that she had responded by treating him rather unfairly.

She had pointed a gun at him in angry threat, but that was all bluff and bluster. She knew deep down, where Mildred was honest with herself, that she was lucky Gregor hadn’t taken it seriously. He was powerful in a terrifying, hair-raising way. She understood, quite frankly, that he could do anything he wanted to her, but he hadn’t.

So far, he had done nothing unsavoury to her, and demanded neither answers nor assurance of payment.

Benevolence of that kind, however slight, meant quite a bit from someone so bad and spoke to the existence of some bizarre system of values – things he would and wouldn’t do. It meant that she could trust in him to stick to his odd principles and continue protecting her, at the very least, which was an unimaginable comfort for someone so lost as Mildred.

Gregor had even been honest about how horrible he generally is, and tried to warn her away from employing him. So, she didn’t think he had been keeping his secrets maliciously, and yet she was withholding information for her own selfish sake. She didn’t like it.

Mildred knew that one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but she was coming to learn that you shouldn’t judge a book by what’s inside the book either, for the true qualities of things were often impossible for external parties to accurately interpret – a problem of qualia, her father might say. Gregor was a bit like that.

He was a big bad wizard in every way, but he was tame and dependable when it came to Mildred. Professionalism, she supposed. It was a very curious feeling, coming to trust such an objectionable man.