Gregor The Cripple

There were chambers under the earth. Great big ones filled with deeptrolls. They were the product of unknowable and absurd scales of natural creation, expanded by generations of obscene claws raking against the clay and stone.

Here the trolls cavorted in great orgiastic masses of flesh, breeding and eating and being eaten blindly in the dark – the very stuff of nightmares, all the more fearsome for being real and close.

Mildred caught this in glimpses as they moved downwards along some narrow thoroughfare-tunnel. The radiance of Gregor’s magelight cast shallow illumination into the openings of these passing chambers, sending the pale trolls within scuttling deeper and darker, away from the offensive brightness. She was glad that the caverns were so vast, despite what the vastness might suggest about their contents, because it meant that she wasn’t able to see much of what went on inside.

Though, she could definitely smell it, and her nose crinkled in abject revulsion.

The thinking-troll led them on a long, winding route down to the hall of the Deep King. No doubt trying to bring their harmful light to as few eyes as possible. The trek was somehow completely silent, save for the footfalls of the wizard and the girl.

Time unknowable passed as they tramped down through the stinking deep, and then the walls and ceiling of the passage fell away as the space around them became impossibly vast; they had entered a chasm which stretched up far beyond the reach of their feeble light.

Head-room now permitting, Gregor donned his hat.

Stepping forward into this space which ate both sound and light, the pair were ushered along its wall for a few dozen yards. Slowly revealed by their illuminating approach was a colossal figure; a corpulent, pale monstrosity surrounded by a cadre of thinking-stock. The Deep King, presumably.

It sat on a huge ziggurat-like dais caved from the floor of the chasm, regarding them both curiously from behind an eye-protecting veil. Seeing it, Mildred and Gregor both understood that it probably couldn’t leave. It was simply far too massive a grotesquerie to fit through the deeptroll passages. It was confined to the chasm.

This place was likely the only place it had known in a very long time. Which, Mildred considered, would be a very sad thing if the creature didn’t prove to be so unforgivably repulsive as they drew closer.

It was completely hairless and so pale that it almost seemed to glow in the dim light. Poking out from beneath the veil were the same almost-personish features as the thinking-troll, only incredibly large and distorted by the lipid accumulations of its many kin-meals.

There were bones everywhere around it. Some were still bloody and raw.

For Mildred, the bones were the worst part.

She nervously drew close to the wizard and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “Of all the things in the world that I could imagine wanting to eat me alive, that is probably the worst on the list.”

Her breath tickled.

“Do you want me to kill it?” Gregor whispered back.

He was dead serious, she could tell. He really would jump straight to the killing if she asked him to, which was a reassuring thought in a dangerous-feeling kind of way. It was a bit like holding a big sword – she now had the agency to protect herself, but was wary of her potential to misuse that agency.

It occurred then to Mildred that she was the boss in this relationship, at least technically, and that he would probably do most of the things she asked him to, provided they were things a wizard might generally do. How good of a person was she, really?

Could she be trusted to hold Gregor’s leash? She didn’t know.

“Uhh… No.” Mildred responded, actually half-considering it.

Morbid curiosity had her wondering what he might do, for surely if he started a fight here, he would eventually need to kill them all, and the disgusted part of her mind was busy offering up all kinds of justifications as to why it might not be such a bad thing. These creatures were repulsive and obviously not to be trusted, and so Mildred kept the Gregor Option in mind.

She was a little scared of herself at that moment.

They stopped a short distance away from the ugly king, and it leaned forward to inspect them, squinting through the gentle light despite the protection of the veil.

“I am King.” It began with a voice that was a voice, and not some animal attempt at vocalisation like that of the thinking-troll. “You are a powerful wizard?”

“I can kill anything.” Claimed Gregor as answer, and the Deep-King nodded, seeming to find no issue with the statement. “You know the Worldeater?"

“Wizard, the task comes before the reward.”

Gregor shrugged, “Then what would you have me do?”

“My trolls dig deep for meat-space. We grow always, and there is never enough room, so we dig where the rock is soft. We have dug to danger.“ Beside it, one of the thinking-trolls raised a truncated hand as example of this danger. The claw-fingers were all withered to stumps at two-thirds of their full length. “A vault from previous diggers was breached. The earth wails around it and death lives within. Remove the danger so that we may dig. For this, I will provide you with riches from above and knowledge from below.”

Gregor was impassive and expressionless as he pressed for clarity. “Knowledge of the Worldeater?” Knowing that the Norn’s hand was at his back, the coincidence of such information being available to him was not nearly so interesting as the fact that a deeptroll was delivering it.

“The earth sings of your enemy and his ambitions. I listen.”

Odd. He thought. A lie, perhaps.

Gregor looked to Mildred. “Well?” He asked, making it clear that this was her call. She was, after all, his employer in this matter. His own interests might be involved, but he wouldn’t pursue them at the expense of his obligation to her.

The trolls all then shifted their shielded eyes towards Mildred. “What kind of danger is it?" She asked, managing not to hesitate or quaver.

"An untouchable thing; it curdles flesh. Remove it so that we may dig."

Curdled flesh implied the existence of cheese flesh, and Mildred tried not to imagine what that might be. She looked to Gregor, and he just shrugged.

"We’ll do it.”

So then, they were led back up the winding corridor that had taken them down to the king’s chasm. A mere five minutes of travel found them at the entrance one of the meat-stock chambers they had passed on the way down. However, they found that this particular meathall held no meat. No writhing flesh ecosystem brooded within.

As they entered the great expanse, the pair found nothing at all. The place was truly massive, though not quite as large as the Deep-King’s chasm. They had many of these chambers, yet they still needed more? The probable deeptroll population were sickening to consider.

Daring to go no further, the guide’s gauze-covered eyes tracked the pair and their terrible light as they continued on into the dark.

Once they were some distance away from it, Mildred leaned over to Gregor. “Could you really fight your way out of here?” She asked. The wizard might be insane, but he probably wouldn’t offer to start a fight that he couldn’t win.

Gregor had to think for a moment, calculating, strategising. “I could. It would be very exhausting.” He eventually decided. “The whole warren is a network of choke-points. I would plug our rear with corpses from our front. A simple approach.”

Mildred shuddered. In hindsight, she shouldn’t have asked. Silence would probably be best for a little while.

***

The vault, whatever it actually was, presented itself quite obviously. The breach that connected it to the incomplete meat-chamber was a stark break in the otherwise uniform coloration of the cavern, being of a much darker stone which bore little flecks of shimmering crystal, like stars tiny in the black ocean of night.

These ‘previous diggers’ and their vault didn’t resemble anything known to Gregor, but the world was old and more things had existed than could ever be known, so it didn’t bother him too much.

Approaching the breach with caution, he sent the bobbing magelight in ahead of himself and found that he was staring into a smooth-cut passageway from the elbow of a sharp corner, such that two paths extended diagonally into the ponderous dark away from the trolls’ point of entry.

Inspecting the paths with great scrutiny, Gregor found neither anything of note, nor anything that could point him in the direction of whatever great danger lurked within. Seeing that there was nothing obviously special about either direction, he chose to go with his left because it was the side that still had an eye.

Before he could set off, however, Randolph the Rat awoke in the wizard’s sleeve with a jolt, and he squeaked and scampered up the arm of the robe to sit on Gregor’s shoulder. Randolph squeaked again and pointed with his tiny little claw-hand to the passage on the right, his meaning quite clear.

“You want me to head right?” Randolph squeaked a third time. “Well, why not?” Gregor shrugged, starting down the rat-chosen path.

Incredulous, Mildred stood still for a moment before striding quickly to catch up, not quite sure what had just happened.

“Is that a magical rat?” She asked.

“No, that would be ridiculous. Rats aren’t magical.”

Gregor was a little insane, she knew this, and thus often regarded his claims with levity, but she had just seen a rat give directions toward something that it could not have possibly known to exist. Mildred felt that this was rather abnormal.

“Gregor.” She began with a placating tone that one might use when speaking to a particularly particular problem child. “Regular rats don’t just do that.”

“Randolph isn’t regular. He’s my rat, so it is only natural for him to be better than other rats.”

“…Right.” She sighed. “Okay, sure.” Perhaps the madness was contagious and Mildred had also become its victim.

With the matter of importance settled to satisfaction, they set off in earnest down the passage. Gregor’s light reflected brilliantly off the sparkling walls, which, he remarked idly, would probably look like a nightmare to the deeptrolls.

Along the way to meet whatever horrible danger lurked within the vault, they found a strange mural covering one side of the steeply curving passage. Though, rather than a mural, it looked more like a constellation painted in the stars of the night sky. Somehow, it was drawn using the little crystal flecks in the stone. They had been gathered and arranged into a depiction of many little men of odd proportions making war with a group of dragons. The men were tall and willowy, with everything about their bodies looking a bit too long.

There were mountains and trees too, which shattered in the wake of the dragons and warped and bent in the presence of the men.

“A scene from the history of these ‘previous diggers’.” Mildred supposed, running her hand along the wall. “I wonder how they made it.”

“History… Perhaps.” Upon searching his memory, the wizard found that he truly knew nothing about these diggers and their strange architecture, or their ancient battle. This ignorance annoyed him, but again, the world was older than memory could account for. Oddities like this were to be expected.

Continuing on from this strange scene, they shortly came to a little antechamber. Here, the star-mural continued.

A single dragon was dead, and masses of the oddly proportioned men lay shattered around it. Only one man of stars stood intact, and separate from him was a collection of human-proportioned people, about half as tall.

Gregor frowned at this. The scale was off.

Assuming that the regularly proportioned people were indeed human, the ‘little’ men that fought the dragon would be about twelve feet tall. The dragon, then, would be far too large. Ludicrously large. Even elder dragons weren’t that big. In fact, it would dwarf every single dragon alive today. Artistic embellishment, Gregor was sure.

Unfortunately, the murals ended there, dooming his curiosity to whichever purgatory curiosity went to when it wasn’t on the job.

A proud pair of stone doors stood sentry on the opposite side of the room, flanked on the left and right by long-dead light fixtures faintly radiating an ancient and exotic magic. There was something beyond these doors, and even Mildred could feel it. The air seemed to hang heavy, and she felt that queer anxious awareness one feels when they’re sure that a home intruder is hiding under their bed – something like the alertness of prey in the presence of a predator.

Gregor strode toward the doors feeling that same odd perturbation, but was too Gregor to care. Rather than caution, this strange presence inspired considerable interest in the young wizard. It wasn’t quite magical, but it felt similar and this confused him greatly. As a matter of common sense, things that a wizard could feel in the ether were magical and could be nothing else. But this was different; one-quarter magic, three-quarters unknown. It was wrong, incorrect. An anomaly – an aberration.

Feeling a degree of excitement that he thought to be extinct in himself, Gregor tried to open the doors.

Stone is heavy, and stone doors have stone hinges which do not work very well at all. First, he pushed at a door with his hand and, finding his strength insufficient, then graduated to telekinesis. Slowly and with much grinding, it inched open. His mind blurred under the strain – a testament to the difficulty of the task, given Gregor's significant might.

Once the gap between the doors was wide enough to step though, the pair entered with their light.

It was then that Gregor and Mildred came upon the danger.