Gregor The Cripple

“He’s a dragon.”

“What?”

Mildred was looking at him, anxious, uneasy. She bit her lip.

“My father.”

Gregor looked her up and down. No scales, no wings, flesh, person-shaped. She didn’t look like a dragon.

“No he isn’t.”

“Well, he’s not my real dad, but he’s a dragon. A dadgon, you might say.”

That… wasn’t what Gregor had been expecting to hear. If nothing else, it explained Mildred’s insistence that he’d still be alive. Dragons lived for as long as they could maintain themselves. It was still absurd though, even for someone as strange as Gregor.

“…Are you sure that you weren’t just a pet? They’re known to keep pets.”

Occasionally, it was said, they trained little flesh people to assist in this maintenance, but they weren’t known to take daughters.

“We had a cat, but that was a gift from my aunt.”

“Is she a dragon too?”

“No, she’s a… person.”

Gregor raised his brow at this, but couldn’t muster the care to ask.

They had re-acquired his horse from its bolt and were making swift headway. Their destination, as revealed by Mildred in her conversation with the minotaur, was the Shard. A week more of travel, roads and enemies permitting.

“I haven’t heard of any dragon at the Shard.” He said, finding himself immediately regretting it.

If someone were to be aware of such a presence, it would be a wizard, and Gregor was a wizard among wizards.

Mildred licked her lips, which were noticeably dry. Her voice was quiet and she no longer sat so tall. “Well, he’s rather reclusive.”

“…How reclusive?” The terrible, horrible words fell from his traitorous mouth as if by instinct. He was a person who lived to hurt people, and it seemed that he could do nothing else. The question contained an unpleasant implication, and both were well aware of it.

“He just stays in his mountain – might sleep fifty years or more. He’ll be there, probably waiting for me to wake him up. Can we change the topic?” She had introduced the topic, and he had soured it.

She was hurting, it was plain to see. Was it his fault? Had he made that happen, or was it simply unavoidable?

He was to be Mildred’s ally. He wanted to be her ally – to help her and protect her, and for more reasons than just the denial of the Worldeater, yet he had hurt her.

Gregor, who had a recent history of hurting people he didn’t mean to, saw this as a looming portent of things to come.

Would he fail again? Was it safe for her to be around him? Probably not, he conceded, but it was too late to walk away now, for Mildred’s enemies had come to know that she was protected by Gregor the Cripple. Whoever they sent next would be of a calibre intended to deal with him, she would stand no chance.

If he left, her life was forfeit.

Quite unfairly, he had made her situation far more dangerous. A more rational man might have blamed the Norn, upon whom all of the blame in the world might conceivably be foisted, but Gregor was far too arrogant to consider himself under the absolute influence of another.

Feeling bad about the exchange, Gregor acquiesced. “Then,” he said, “let me tell you about some of the interesting things people have learned to do with petroleum.” Knowing her odd conversational predilections, he felt that this topic should provide a decent distraction from the Dreadful Thoughts he had inspired.

***

It was often said that technology was replacing magic, but that was a misconception.

Across the world, populations were growing. Magic, by its nature, was exclusive and rare, and could only ever ease the lives of the elite few.

In the past, a wealthy family might save for a few years to buy an enchanted ice box, which was larger on the inside than the outside and would keep food frozen in time. It would last for generations, and the family would often come to ruin and need to sell it (ancient food included) before needing to buy another.

Enchanted faucets were like this too, condensing clean water from the air or transporting it from some far-off curated reservoir and heating or chilling it as needed.

Old mansions were filled with family relics of magical convenience, affording the occupants material status and quality of life unobtainable by the common person, but artifice wasn’t mass-producible. There simply weren’t enough skilled enchanters in the world to populate factories or to supply storefronts, and even if there were, the process simply wouldn’t be economically viable.

The world was getting too large to rely on arcane contrivances, so mundane innovation had ballooned to fill the gap as a natural consequence.

So, rather than a replacement, technology was a supplement to the shortfalls of magic’s availability.

It was becoming quite uncommon for new money to commission artifice, because sorcerers were now so few as compared to the people who had the assets to engage them that one needed to already be someone or to know someone who was something to be able place an order. For most, it just wasn’t worth the trouble or the money.

Though, that wasn’t to say that work for sorcerers was drying up, rather, there just wasn’t enough of them to go around.

“So, surfaces can be cooled via evaporation, making it possible to build a closed-circuit ice machine? Really? Rather than make ice, you could use that to cool whole buildings.” Posited Mildred, a thoughtful finger on her chin.

“How so?”

“If you put it on the roof, you could pipe cold air downwards and then cool the warm air that comes back up, and you could use the wind up there to spin a fan to push along the conditioned air.”

“What if there’s no wind?”

She shrugged, “Electricity, I suppose.”

Gregor considered himself a genius, so he rather appreciated intelligence in others. Mildred had certainly proven to have an appreciable mind.

“…Patents are quite robust these days.” He suggested lightly. Rather than smart – though she clearly was smart – it would perhaps be more fitting to say that she was clever, and a long-sufferer of that insidious condition known as ‘insight’ which occasionally brought the world to its knees.

“A patent? I’ll keep that in mind.”

Night was quick to come in the cooler months. The sun couldn’t have been happy about that, but she’d have her turn in the other half of the year.

At camp, Gregor didn’t read his grimoire.

Instead, he sat listless, looking into the dead eyes of a head in a jar, back-lit by the fire behind. Mildred had seen the creepy thing a few times and she gathered that it was the head of Gregor’s master, whom he had killed.

Why? Who knew. The wizard was alien to her – of ways and means that were opaque and incomprehensible. Even though she was odd enough to have a dragon for a father and a ‘person’ for an aunt, Gregor was still stranger by far. However, she was beginning to understand that she could rely upon him.

She hadn’t had cause to think about it before, but there was an appreciable difference between a deranged vagrant who you had no choice but to hope would be useful and who might suddenly jump your ladybits in the night, and a Wizard who had proven to be a principled and professionally proficient problem-solver.

Gregor was committed to being a wizard, and baffling circumstances had placed him as her wizard. So, though her guts now felt tight in near-perpetual anxiety about her return to the mountain, she expected to be able to relax a little in the quiet moments.

However, the things that crept in the dark had other ideas. Rude ideas. Like silently crawling close by the dozen. They weren’t even polite enough to go bump in the night.

Looking up, she found Gregor standing and facing the dark with a rat on his hat. The master-in-a-jar had vanished back to wherever he usually lived.

A familiar stench was on the wind, and the treeline around them had grown to possess the silhouettes of many grotesque heads and limbs. Squinting through her fire-blindness for a moment, Mildred found innumerable red-eyed things staring back at her, silent and motionless.

The deeptrolls had returned.

This time, Gregor decided on an explosive fireball rather than a bright one. The woods might burn, but woods were always burning somewhere. What did one more fire matter?

Against expectation, one of the throng came to meet him as he strode into the dark. It was big, and its eyes were covered with a dirty gauze to shield it from Gregor’s light.

Seeing a deeptroll clearly for the first time, Mildred was quite disturbed to find an oddly human nose at the end of its dog-like snout, and big, floppy-lobed humanish ears on the sides of its mottled moleflesh head.

The thing approached Gregor slowly and deliberately. “Spike-hat, peace.” It said, the words not quite sounding right from a muzzle so long and unaccustomed to speech, as if it were compressing growls and grunts into the shapes of syllables. “Deep-King sends us as message-taker. He wishes to peace-make and talk-a-lot.” It jerked its head this-way-and-that in an oddly avian manner as it spoke.

Gregor tilted his own head, for he had found a rare gap in his knowledge. “You are different from them.” He stated, gesturing with his stump to the silent multitude that surrounded him and Mildred. “Explain.”

“Them-all, cave-digger and meat-stock; think-little, breed-a-lot. Us, thinking-stock. Think-much, eat-a-lot, breed-little. Meat-stock too-few to make-a-lot the thinking-stock.”

“What about your king?”

“Deep-King is king-stock. Eat-most, think-most, breed-never; lead-a-lot.” It beckoned with a long finger that had disgustingly many joints. “Come. Peace-make and talk-a-lot with Deep-King.”

If Gregor was alone, he would not have hesitated to go with it. Many though they may be, walking into a deeptroll warren was far less dangerous than walking into a basilisk nest, and few had ever seen a Deep-King, let alone spoken with one. However…

He glanced back to Mildred.

Gregor had other priories.

“…Why?” He asked at length, nasal and arrogant.

The deeptroll paused, taking time to figure out which words went together to make the meanings it needed to make.

“Spike-hat is powerful. Magic-make. Deep-king gives-prize; riches, knowledge. He earth-sings and thinks-much, knows the you-enemy. World-eater. Peace-make and talk-a-lot.”

***

The hole was dank and foul, and here the deeptroll stench was fresh, mingling horribly with the odour of moist earth and peat. Lurking still deeper in the mélange was something that Mildred imagined to be the smell of death, though she was no expert. Gregor was an expert, and she assumed that it was fine because he made no fuss.

However, as the pair stood taking in the foulness of the warren’s maw, something in the back of her mind lurched into thinking.

During their first encounter with the deeptrolls, Gregor had told them to go back to ‘feeding on kin-flesh’, and in this second encounter, the thinking-troll had referred to some of the others as ‘meat-stock’. This possible stench of death now bespoke terrible things, and she almost wished that the wizard’s violent madness had taken hold of him and inflicted itself upon the creatures.

Certainly, she did not wish to enter the hole.

She was going to enter the hole regardless, because apparently they needed to speak to the king, and kings do not leave their holes. Gregor could have gone in by himself, but that would leave her alone with them. Mildred would rather stay in the protective proximity of her wizard.

The thinking-troll beckoned at the entrance, eager to descend.

“We will have light.” Said Gregor in the manner of a declaration. These things would obviously not appreciate him bringing light into their home, but he would have light unconditionally.

After a moment of deliberation, it acquiesced with a shambolic half-bow and crept into the dank crevice, expecting them to follow, smoothly scuttling in a way that seemed wholly unfitting for something of such size.

Despite herself, Mildred hesitated. Before them was a hulking freak, and behind them was an eerily silent mob, staring at their light (and meat) from a distance. She wondered if the things could even think, or if they were just animal masses of muscle.

Gregor took off his hat so that it wouldn’t brush against the low ceiling of the rock-and-mud passage and began his plod with a little globe of magelight floating at his side.

Single-file they went, and Mildred made sure to keep close to Gregor. She had no choice but to follow him into the horrible dark, lest she be left alone. Being that she was quite tall and that the deeptrolls went about on all fours, the ceiling was uncomfortably low, and she was forced to hunch here and there in deference to the rough-hewn tunnel’s many imperfections, which often stuck down quite offensively.

There wasn’t much to see besides the mud and the back of Gregor's head, which was scruffy and unkempt. The hair was long in places and short in others, which she took to be a sign that he cut it himself without really paying too much attention to what he was doing. He was generally scruffy and unshaven, as if his pallor and disfigurement were so great that it didn’t really matter what the rest of him looked like.

It rather annoyed her.

Ahead, Gregor found himself growing more and more comfortable and confident. He was in his element here, in a strange place and surrounded by monstrosities, on his way to meet the abomination king. This was the kind of thing that wizards were born to do. The odder and more dangerous things became, the closer they were to his domain of mastery.

Deeper and deeper they went, and Mildred drew up quite close to him and his fire. In addition to the monsters that escorted them, Gregor understood that she was probably afraid of the dark that yawned before and behind, which is unwelcoming to creatures who live by light.

Gregor liked it, for it was similar to him – it was the promise of dreadful possibility. It was an unknown that held knowably ruinous portents. In this aspect, the deeptrolls were his kindred as well. Vile abominations, much like himself; abhorred because of their proven practices and unknown, half-assumed natures.

They were obligate cannibals, he knew it to be true, and he found himself wondering if it was really so bad.

Gregor had long held that good and bad were viewpoints informed by perceived benefit and injury to the interests of the self, and that this is the sliding standard from which people derive the arbitrary principles of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. If so, the deeptrolls’ kin-eating would be good to them, because it serves the interests of the collective which the ego treats as a proxy of its own worth; in other words, the greater good.

However, an outsider who bears the moral taint of civilisation would find the cannibalism distasteful and in ill-accord with their sensibilities. In the interest of satisfying their moral compass – which is an unctuous device informed entirely by culture and circumstance – they will form the opinion that the cannibalism of the deeptrolls is ‘bad’.

Put more crudely, they will call ‘bad’ the thing that they dislike for an arbitrary reason. Thus, the thing is both ‘good’ to one party and ‘bad’ to the other. Who is correct? Both are, because these labels only truly exist as reality in the minds that assign them, as such, only in the original context of that mind are they fact, or rather, their original contexts are a tacit precondition for their truth.

Wants and preferences inform the interests of the self, and the satisfaction of these interests is tangibly beneficial, so transcendental value undiminishable by objective quantification is assigned to this satisfaction.

Morality wasn’t any more complex than that, in Gregor’s opinion.

Feeling smug in his pseudo-philosophical superiority over the foolish many who had never actually thought about it, Gregor realised that he didn’t really know where he stood on the issue of deeptroll cannibalism.

After thinking hard for a good half-second, he decided that he didn’t care at all and that good and bad are silly things to worry about.