Gregor The Cripple

The chamber was ovular and without ostentation.

The walls and floor were smooth and flat to a remarkable degree, and now that Gregor had a reason to consider such a thing, he noticed that the ceilings were only comfortably high; eight feet or so. No higher.

In the centre of the room was a loose ring of stone slabs that might have once been part of some furniture assemblage, as the seats of benches or the tops of tables, presumably supported by now-vanished wooden legs. They encircled the danger, and the formation suggested to Gregor something like organised study or worship.

The presence was stronger inside, and had grown into something almost physical, like a tangible pressure radiating from something significant. Even with his eyes closed, Gregor would be able to point to the cause in the centre of the room.

There the danger floated, a foot above a thin star-stone pillar. It was a colossal finger, about twice the length of a human hand. Slender and pointed at the end.

Seeing it, Gregor thought inevitably of his own severed appendage.

Whatever had happened to his right hand? It was possible that the demon had kept it as payment for the trouble of crossing realms. They were anal about matters of payment, even more than wizards, some said, though Gregor thought it unlikely.

It might also have been kept by the demon as a vector for curses and divination, so as to enable collection of its intended prize, but Gregor had taken precautions against that long ago.

He would very much like to have that hand back.

Stepping cautiously forward, he began to examine this curious remnant of a comrade in amputation.

It didn’t look like flesh. It looked like clear glass holding back impossible gulfs of blackest space, replete with blinking stars – almost exactly like the hide that bound the grimoire. This old observation he reprised with the new context of the stone that made the walls around him, black and crystal-flecked. In the spirit of this new context he added that it might also appear as onyx or obsidian did, absent stars, that is.

Producing Kaius’s grimoire, Gregor compared it to the finger. They weren’t a match, but it was a close thing.

The finger was duller than the hide, and the stars less pronounced. Supposing that the severed appendage indeed came from the same kind of creature as the hide that bound the tome – and he was certain that it did – it was possible that the extremities just had different degrees of brightness than the more central parts of the anatomy, or perhaps the dulling was a product of a difference in the age of the creatures, or a post-mortem quirk of whatever bizarre biology could produce such a Starbeast.

This would require research. It had been so long since Gregor had properly bent his mind to research. He was eager.

The thing appeared to be mineral, with a glossy, polished sheen reminiscent of gemstone, and the star-stone walls supported that conjecture, but it was not made. It bore the imperfections of life: wrinkles worn into the skin, obvious joints beneath that skin, tiny striations and growth-marks in the nail. It was too perfectly imperfect to be carved.

Further, when comparing the finger to the star-stone, Gregor developed the distinct impression that the latter was an imitation of the former, and not some distant bio-lithic relation. He was confident in this. The finger had stars, while the stone simply sparkled in the light.

Finally, the hide bore the same mineral appearance, but was obviously organic underneath his touch.

But Gregor was getting ahead of himself. First, how to remove the finger which allegedly curdled flesh?

Perhaps it curdled other things too; there was probably a reason for it to be suspended by levitation rather than simply resting on the pillar. So then, magic could touch it, but mundane matter could not?

Another thing occurred to him, and Gregor frowned. The hide of the grimoire was safe to touch. Was it adulterated to make it safe, or was the finger changed to be dangerous?

Hmm.

Lifting his hat, Gregor withdrew a sword that he had picked up somewhere. The steel was mundane but sharp, and such things were handy to keep around. Mildred looked on with a raised brow, not finding the impossibility of the sword fitting inside the hat nearly so remarkable as she once would have. Repeated strangeness seemed to have numbed her to Gregor’s casual bizarrerie.

Passing it to her so that his hand would be free – he wished to rest his strained telekinesis – he reached back in and began rummaging around. The hand came out holding some jerkied hare. Gregor had no fresh flesh except the stuff he was wearing on his bones, so this would have to do.

The meat was skewered with Mildred’s assistance. He walked into the circle of fallen slabs, sword outstretched.

The nearer he drew, the odder things felt. It was with sudden surprise that he recognised the feeling.

Space was slightly convex here, and the degree of curvature grew more drastic upon closer approach to the finger. The growth wasn’t linear, but seemed to increase in proportion to itself. If the relative strength at the circle was taken to be one, and the strength half-way there measured at two, then the strength at three-quarters of the way to the finger would be four.

Was there a limit to the magnitude of curvature? There must be, or else…

Hmm.

Was the finger itself subject to this distortion of space? If so, what form did it take when undistorted? The same question applied to the rest of the Starbeast.

Gregor was at a loss to even guess at the insane conditions that could bring such a creature into existence. Perhaps it came from a plane where spacetime was in flux, and required some mechanism to self-regulate, but then, how could it even exist here?

There were no answers.

Once close enough to the digit, he pressed forward with the sword. He didn’t feel the weapon make contact, but in an instant the tip of the sword shattered, the jerky curled in on itself, and he felt the hilt flush warm from the heat of violent friction.

The shards of blade fell away in strange spiralling orbits that decayed into regular trajectories after a short distance.

With blood running down his cheek from a shrapnel impact, Gregor decided that this finger was not a thing that should be touched.

***

The star-stone was useless. It shattered like the steel.

Telekinesis worked a little, but the grip was uncertain, and Gregor didn’t trust that he’d be able to find somewhere safe to put the finger down once he picked it up. It seemed to explosively disagree with physical contact – something to do with differences in relative densities and tensile strains within objects who expected themselves to be mostly uniform in these aspects. What would it do when submerged in liquid?

He considered trying to touch it with the book, thinking that perhaps Starbeast flesh might be somehow immune to the spacial distortion, but that theory didn’t pass muster and the risk to the grimoire was too great. He wasn’t willing to lose it.

The only thing that Gregor could think to try was to put the finger into a space that could afford to be compressed. He wore one of these on his head, but he wouldn’t do that, not to his own hat, and not to his master’s hat either. It might not work and both were far too important. He couldn’t bear to lose them any more than the book.

So…

With a light sigh, Gregor reached into the folds of his cloak, holding one side open with his stump. From within, he extracted a truly gargantuan garment. The brim had a diameter that easily eclipsed the breadth of his shoulders and was perfectly flat and rigid. It was Labourd’s hat.

The possibility of ruining any hat was unpleasant, no matter who had worn it, but it was better to risk Labourd’s than either of his. Kaius’s hat was to sit on the head of his future apprentice, after all.

“Any ideas?”

Mildred was clever, perhaps she could offer an alternative.

She was observing from a prudent distance, lips pursed in thought. “Is the levitation part of the pillar?” She asked.

Gregor nodded. There were spidery runes scrawled atop the flat surface beneath the finger, though it must only seem flat because of the digit’s distortion. The runes were an unknown script, but their function was obvious.

“Then we take both.” She shrugged.

He wanted to. Even without the finger, the runes were interesting enough, but that was rather difficult.

“It looks quite heavy.”

“Well, just take the levitating part.”

A good idea, but it didn’t really solve the problem. Gregor didn’t just want to move the finger and appease the Deeptrolls, he wanted to possess it, which introduced the issue of safe storage. In the end, the hat was the only real option.

Hats were important to wizards, but sentimentality was not. Hat in hand, Gregor went forward into the region of curious curvature.

Once close enough, he suspended it above the finger in a telekinetic pinch. The brim appeared to bow and pull down, but of course, it was exactly as straight as before. The space it inhabited just happened to be convex relative to the space where Gregor stood, which was really quite safe up until a certain threshold. This observation caused him to pause and wonder at the state of the space inside the hat. How might it be affected? Perhaps this coming conflux of spacial distortion would be similar to the benign interaction between hat-space and tower-space, or perhaps it would violently degenerate in hyper-dense cavitation and tear a hole in the world.

Gregor didn’t know enough about the workings of the finger to be sure.

He dropped the hat, reasoning that safety was probable.

Down it went, the brim bending inward dramatically as if reaching out to welcome its soon-to-be cargo. They came close to touching, but not too close. And… fwump. Labourd’s hat came to rest upon the pillar. The chamber’s warped space returned to normalcy with a sound that Gregor hoped soon to forget, and no world-rending catastrophe followed. The hat seemed fine too, perfectly flat of brim.

Operating under the assumption that the levitation could still reach the finger through the aperture of the hat, Gregor very carefully picked it up, raising it just a little, and very swiftly pulled it away from the pillar. Nothing bad happened. The hat held it in.

Any other man would have sighed in relief.

Once the influence of the finger was removed, the top of the pillar went from flat to irregular and domed. Carved to appear flat under the warping effect of the digit, Gregor guessed. The previously perfect floor and walls also grew to bear slight humps, though only slight, being that they were far enough away from the finger to only suffer slight distortion.

Gingerly, Labourd’s hat was sequestered back into Gregor’s robes.

“How does that fit in there?”

“What do you mean?”

It was fairly obvious what she meant.

Ignoring Mildred as she repeated her question, Gregor began to consider his options for the pillar. It was a ready-made stand for the finger – a convenient aid for future study. He could make his own, of course, but why go to the trouble?

“I’m going to break the top off. A pity that I never made time to learn any masonry spells.”

“There are masonry spells?”

“There are masonry spells.”

There were spells for everything, but not even Gregor knew them all, much to his chagrin.

A small hammer and a magic-sharp chisel appeared from somewhere – really meant for bone rather than stone – and he began telekinetically tap-tapping at the thin pillar. A minute of effort produced a small divot in the sparkling rock.

Gregor held the chisel there and exerted himself considerably to telekinetically lift a stone slab from the ring around him. Turning it so that only the thin side had to contend with air resistance, he swung it back to gather momentum, and then violently forward, slamming it into the chisel as hard as his abnormal strength could manage.

There came a tremendous crack! as both pillar and slab split neatly along the point of impact. Gregor dropped the slab, feeling quite wan and feeble from the exertion. The stone struck the floor like thunder and Mildred had to lurch forward to catch the domed head of the column before it fell to its doom.

He didn't dare throw it into Labourd's hat haphazardly and risk destruction if the wrong side met the finger, so he stored it in his own hat.

Business concluded, Gregor shuffled haggard from the chamber behind a not-so-nervous-anymore Mildred. Time in the dark had made her bold.

Passing the battle murals, they decided that the finger almost certainly belonged to one of the tall figures, and Gregor couldn’t help but wonder if the impossibly large dragons also existed outside the realm of fiction. Mildred didn’t think so, and he was inclined to agree. At the very least, they couldn’t currently exist. He would know, and she probably would too. They were both uncommonly qualified to speak on the subject.

They briefly checked the other passage before exiting the breach, walking for almost half an hour before meeting the dust and rubble of collapse.

Tramping back out into the meatcavern, the pair was forced to trust their memory of the entrance’s direction. They met a wall – evidently those memories were faulty – and followed it along the rough-hewn edge of the space. An opening appeared eventually, and the thinking troll with it. The deeptroll stench, dim and distant in the vault, was once again fresh and horrible in their noses.

“Spike-hat, danger-gone?” The cannibal thing chirped.

“It is.” Replied Mildred in Gregor’s stead. He was tired enough, she could do the talking.

The thinking-troll quirked its head birdishly, glancing between spike-hat and the other one, trying in vain to determine the specifics of their alien hierarchy. It bowed low in acquiescence after a moment.

“Come.” It addressed Mildred. “Talk-a-lot with Deep-King.”