Gregor The Cripple

The tinkle and creak of a two-horse coach sounded among the muted cacophony of midday city life. Along the sides of the road were the storefronts and stalls of merchants, crowded by the customers attending them, and also among the throng were pedestrians and vagrants commuting from whence-ever to wherever, all taking care to avoid stepping in the ever-present roadside excrement.

None in the crowd who parted before the briskly trotting geldings could have been terribly wealthy, else they would be traveling like Gregor, who was protected from the stench and sound of a lively city.

These northern lands to which Gregor had fled were very much distinct from the mild, agrarian territory of his education. The terrain was frosty and alpine, and the air possessed a chill that made him quite thankful for his marvelous cloak, which was enchanted to be comfortable in all climates.

Recently retained as wizard-at-arms and magical advisor to Duke Corle and his vassals, Gregor the Cripple – as people has begun to call him when out of earshot – was making one of his regular trips to the city’s only apothecary.

He knew what people called him, of course, but he wasn’t too bothered by it. Actually, he was rather pleased. As a matter of tradition, wizards are given epithets by others as a result of either infamy or fame, as the case my be. It is the mark of someone who has proven themselves a true practitioner, someone who is capable enough to become widely known for some trait specific to them. Commonly, a wizard without an epithet is not seen to be much of a wizard at all.

More often than not, these names are rather unflattering, like Kaius the Elderly or Festus the Fraud. This trend is not a result of tradition, it is merely because most wizards are unpleasant.

Gregor could not fault mundane people for calling him a cripple, because a cripple he was. Rather, it had become a source of some small pride. He was no longer Kaius’s pet apprentice, but a wizard called Gregor the Cripple.

This title was a result of him exercising his independence and finding magical work after his escape, fleeing far enough north that the trees stopped wearing green in favor of white, for he had no way of knowing how far the demon would be able and willing to pursue him.

In the months since arriving in the frigid region, Gregor had done all the typical wizardly things; bounty hunting, enchanting, artifact appraisal, among others. Eventually, once he became known as capable and reliable, the Duke’s people approached him. They came with commission work initially, then with offers of employment after a period of fruitful cooperation.

Their arrangement was passably lucrative and allowed him such luxuries as his current non-beige lodgings and his rented coach, in addition to necessities like magical resources and research materials, and the steadily increasing quantity of medicine he needed to banish the pain in his stump.

These growing needs were the object of his excursion to the apothecary.

The noise outside Gregor’s coach increased significantly as his driver turned onto the main street of Sine city, the jewel of Duke Corle’s demesne, heading towards the very well-stocked alchemical supply shop, located in the upper mercantile quarter.

‘Upper’ was an odd word to describe something without verticallity, Gregor mused, for the city lay upon an expanse of flat plain-land. It was a remarkably un-hilly area when compared to its surrounds, which were mountainous and grand. The place was not unlike an ugly bald patch surrounded by tufts of oddly abundant hair, save for the southern extremity of the city, which was dominated by a great mound, and was crowned by an ancient promontory fort.

It should be called the eastern mercantile quarter, because it was more east than the rest of the mercantile quarter, which, coincidentally, was the easternmost quarter.

Gregor’s musings were becoming ramblings, which he rather enjoyed.

The freedom for his thoughts to grow beyond their necessary size meant that he was probably actually happy.

For the first time in his life, he was free from the academic tyranny of his master. He was free to choose anything to study, any experiment he could conceptualize and fund was his to conduct. There would be no more scoffing at the insignificance of a potential discovery, or the knowing but uncaring waylaying of plans long-made for the sake of lessons which were seldom wanted.

Kaius made no secret of the fact that he cared little for his apprentice’s preferences. Gregor was to get the best of everything, whether or not he wanted it, and to settle into routine or become accustomed to having requests accommodated was poor conditioning for the mind of a wizard.

After a period of rattling along, the driver halted his vehicle and called down to his passenger, “We’ve arrived, Wizard Gregor.”

Smiling to himself at the appellation, Gregor climbed out of the coach. “Wait here a moment while I make my purchases.”

Obviously, Gregor found his circumstances rather agreeable, and he was very satisfied with this new life away from Kaius.

Upon pushing open the lonely building’s door with his left hand, he was greeted by the tangy-acrid scent of alchemy. Herbs hung in their bunches to dry or sat in preserving bottles on shelves beside carefully sealed vials and flasks, below which were sacks of powdered reagent and other various things an alchemist might like to purchase.

“Gregor? You’re early this week.” Sounded a vile voice from behind the counter. Gregor felt his skin crawl.

He barely managed to prevent himself from sneering in disgust as the speaker stepped onto a stool so that she and her customer might look each other in the eye.

Unpleasantly, the shopkeeper was a dwarf, and the ugliest creature whose company Gregor had ever been forced to endure. She had more facial hair than most human men, which was actually rather common among dwarf women. Her eyes were obscenely far apart, and between them was set a nose, upturned enough that Gregor was forced to notice the slimy forests of hair which dwelt within. This aperture was surrounded by a mountainous landscape of wrinkled and pitted ‘skin’. On the lower half of her face were grotesque, mustached jowls which drooped heavily above her always-open mouth.

After his first meeting with this foul thing, Gregor had mentioned her in passing to a male dwarf acquaintance over some pints at the local public house. The diminutive fellow shook his head and commented on her unnatural beauty. ‘A model specimen of the female species’, he had claimed. Baffling.

Gregor now held that dwarfs had the worst aesthetic sense of any race.

Although she was hideous beyond any notion of sophistry or hyperbole, he did not begrudge her for it, as he ought to. He treated her as well as he could manage because she sold a wonderful medicine called ‘Laudanum’ which had been his saving grace these past few months. It was a tincture of a miraculous plant extract called ‘Opium’.

Sometimes, Gregor’s stump would ache and sting, at other times it would throb and burn. Often when it did not hurt too terribly, he could almost feel his right hand as thought it were still there. The physical and mental anguish were unbearable. The pain inhibited his concentration and made it almost impossible to sleep.

No spell that he cast, nor elixir that he imbibed, nor medicinal ointment that he applied to the wound was able to grant him escape from the pain. That is, until he was introduced the dwarf apothecary – whose name he never bothered to learn – and her fantastic opium.

“It seems that I ran out of medicine more quickly than expected.”

Gregor could barely stand the sight of her, so, in pursuit of a quick transaction, he forewent pleasantries and directly stated his business.

“I require twice my usual order of laudanum, twelve drams of your mercury-lead paste, and four pounds of salt.”

Now accustomed to such taciturn interactions, the inconceivably ugly dwarf woman began arranging his order without further conversation.

According to her advisement, opium could be administered in food or drink or inhaled as smoke. Gregor’s preference was the former, usually as laudanum diluted in water. Additionally, for his purposes, it must be taken in small but regular doses. If he took larger, more spaced-out doses, the effect would last longer but it would also be so intense that he would stop feeling everything, rather than just the pain.

Previously, a few drops at morning, noon, and night were sufficient. However, he recently caught himself using more and more of the stuff unconsciously. Whether it was because his pain was worsening, or because he was developing some kind of resistance to the effects, he couldn’t be certain. Both prospects were grim.

In an effort to better supply himself – and because Gregor wished to see as little of the dwarf woman as possible – he had increased his order.

The diminutive apothecary returned with his purchase, muttering some polite small-talk which was acknowledged with a slight nod, but not reciprocated. He rendered payment in large denominations, as had recently become his custom, and exited the store.

Entering the waiting coach, he ordered the driver toward their next destination, the Duke’s fort, which overlooked the city from its elevated vantage.

***

Gregor was beyond displeased at having to work with the thoroughly unintellectual slab of meat opposite him.

Captain Skud, often called ‘Captain Crud’ by his poorly disciplined men, vegetated placidly atop the thing he falsely called a chair, with his gloved hands steepled and elbows resting upon the few planks of unvarnished wood that he managed to convince himself were a desk. Gregor stood, because there was nothing for him to sit on.

The room was furnished according to the strictest budget possible, possessing only the solitary table and chair, as well as a single bookshelf which held no books.

“Huh?” Uttered Gregor, incredulous.

“… Mister wizard?”

“You want me to kill a monster in the cellar.” stated Gregor, brow raised.

“Well, yeah.”

“Tell me, why do you spend all of your money on weapons and armor?” If the state of the room was any indication, every last bit of the garrison’s allocated funds must have been spent on equipment.

“To protect the duke and his property, I s’pose.” was the dull man’s dull reply.

“Then why am I here?” Really, there was no need to call Gregor to deal with something like this.

While it was true that monster slaying is a fairly standard task in the course of a wizard’s employment, it was also true that two doors down the hall were a roomful of angry men with swords and firearms, and killing monsters was also a regular part of their jobs. Surely they could have handled it instead of calling him all the way over here.

“Well, we tried to kill it, obviously. But we couldn’t find it when we went down there, which is impossible. Door was locked, and no holes in the walls neither. We figured it went invisible or telee-ported or something. More of a problem for you than a problem for us, I reckon.”

Gregor produced a small golden flask from thin air, which uncapped itself with a small pop. It was a ten-to-one mixture of water and laudanum, which made it one percent opium by weight. He took a sip contemplatively.

Skud scoffed, “That stuff makes you smell like a woman.”

Feigning shock, Gregor gasped, “You know what a woman smells like?”

“You’d be surprised at the women I’ve smelt.”

“You’re right, I probably would.” Before the man of little wit could synthesize a retort, the wizard proceeded in a more professional direction. “What manner of monster lurks in your cellar?”

“No clue.”

“Well, what does it look like?”

“Very terrifying, no doubt. The lads who found it couldn’t say much else.”

“What? Nothing?” Gregor was very seriously doubting the quality of Skud’s men.

The big fellow shrugged, “It’s a wine cellar, they were pretty well marinated when they popped out.” At Gregor’s frown, the captain waggled his finger and added, “For which I shall punish them very severely!”

Feeling numbing bliss wash over him, Gregor dismissed his little golden vessel and found that he could no longer bring himself to care about this man’s boorishness or his pathetic subordinates. There were a number of creatures that could be the monster in the cellar, quite a few of which would present an actual threat to the people of the fort, not to mention the damage they could do if they got out into the city.

“I will look.” He declared, turning to the door. “But if there is nothing, those men can expect a visit from a very real monster.”

***

Gregor peered down the dark and dank corridor. It was thin and squat, more of a hole than a hallway. There were steps which proceeded down the ten-meter passage at a slight grade, hugged tightly by stone walls which supported an uncomfortably low ceiling.

It was very dark; there was no window near enough to allow for natural light and it would be impractical to keep torches burning. Ordinary people would need to light their way with the tallow lamp kept by the door.

Eschewing such mundane methods, Gregor removed his handsome hat and entered, alert and in his element.

According to his experience, if there were a monster in the cellar, it would most likely be some kind of shadow creature. They were uncommon and inconspicuous enough that normal people seldom noticed them, even when their populations grew large enough to cause significant damage.

Shadow-things are not merely spirits or creatures which resemble shadows, as one might suspect. They are actual living, animate absences of light.

No scholar – be they an alchemist, philosopher, scientist, or sorcerer had ever been able to adequately explain how such a creature could exist.

Lacking mass, they are not subject to the limitations of their own bodily dimensions. These creatures can live in any crack or crevice cast in darkness, regardless of the available space. One might hide under a chair, behind a bookcase, beneath a person’s hat, in the gaps between teeth, or within the various other cavities of a body.

Naturally, as living creatures, they must eat. However, shadows have no way to consume and digest things internally because they have no insides. Instead, they must feed by way of external absorption.

This absorption does not appear to be a to be a conscious action, given that they have been observed to cause structural damage to buildings, with tiny gaps behind or between things growing into cavities with seemingly no cause. If they were able to gain sustenance from eating stone and mortar, why would they bother exiting their safe hiding places to feed on the living?

Fortunately, they eat very little. After all, these creatures aren’t really corporeal, having no mass and no discernible body to feed. Their presence is often mistaken for erosion or weathering in instances of incidental consumption, and for disease in living victims. These effects are rather minute, and require a significant infestation of hundreds of shadows to really be noticeable.

The method for killing such creatures is rather obvious – illumination. Centuries of professional interest and refinement have produced spells specifically for the large-scale extermination of these tenebrous vermin.

These spells, unlike most methods that wizards employ for large-scale extermination, were rather ideal, causing no collateral damage to people or places which might be the victim of an infestation. However, they were particularly exhausting.

In order to ensure total annihilation, the illumination spell must cover every inch of contiguous surface area which is cast in darkness. This might not amount to much when dealing with a single room with a few dark corners or one infested person, but it is a gargantuan figure when dealing with a space like the cellar.

It was a large room with cracked and craggly walls, filled with rows of shelves containing bottles, cured meats, eggs, cheeses, sundry other food goods, many barrels of miscelania, and principally, tens of kegs of wine and ale, some freestanding, others not, all in various states of fill. To magically illuminate the contours of every single one of these objects, both inside and out, including all their various cracks and surface imperfections, would be an immensely draining task few sorcerers could accomplish.

Gregor could do it, obviously. But he would severely overdraft himself, and the presence of a shadow infestation was mere conjecture based upon the dubious testimony of a drunkard.

Kaius wouldn’t care about such minuscule magical expenditure. He would simply cast the spell then hobble in to see if some other monster attacked him, thought Gregor, unbidden and much to his own chagrin.

He snorted, a grimace curling its way onto his face. “I need no longer compare myself to my master, because he is dead, and I, the victor, am alive.” He spoke aloud, because it felt more meaningful that way.

He was not Kaius. Kaius was an ancient doddering monster of of very extreme power and ability. However, it seemed that all he amounted to in the end was an impressively tall tower of cards. Gregor, in contrast, felt himself to resemble the foundations of a very grand tower of stone, metal, and mortar wrought by master artisans imported from the Golden Empire – not as tall, but the certainly beginnings of something far more substantial.

Newly independent, he was very eager to direct his own actions according to principles and ideas of his own devising, untainted by the particular operational perspectives of his former master.

In fact, he almost couldn’t bear doing things as Kaius would. It felt like an admission that he couldn’t perform well when left to his own agency, and that Kaius’s methods were the only reason for his competence.

In this instance, he opted to try caution and prudence, two things Kaius had little reason to consider.

The space around Gregor’s eyes began to shimmer and spark as he stepped out of the narrow stair-way and into the dark cellar proper.

Revealed to him by magical aid were three cramped aisles of shelves which lead toward a battery of kegs stacked against the rear wall.

Feeling a slight twinge in his stump, Gregor summoned his flask, took a quick swig, and stalked forward with that unique pomp and swagger particular to self-confident youths, scanning his surroundings as he went.

The attack would come, if it ever came, once he reached the middle of the room. The space was not overly long in any dimension, given that the builders had to concern themselves the massive weight of the fortress upstairs, so he reached that point rather quickly.

Disappointingly, he remained unmolested, and his darkvision could detect no abnormality.

If it were a shadow creature, this would be odd, and it would be concerning if it were some other monster.

As a rule, monsters which dwell in the dark have senses unhindered by low light. Whether by use of specialised sensory organs, like very large eyes or particularly sensitive ears, or by employing some magical means like Gregor, any monster in the cellar would have noticed him by now. Thus, given that he hadn’t been attacked yet, whatever was there must have chosen not to dumbly rush at him like a beast.

This implied some measure of intelligence, which perhaps meant that he was dealing with something particularly dangerous. It might have somehow recognised that he was a threat, or maybe it was waiting in a clever spot to ambush him.

Or, much more likely, it didn’t actually exist.

Sipping again from his flask and continuing forward with the latter assumption in mind, Gregor decided to help himself to some wine and cheese – compensation for his troubles. He was sure Skud would understand.

As he reached up to claim a fat piece of Camembert from the row to his left, his keen eyes spied movement on the shelf below. He was not alone!

He observed in clam alertness as the creature exited its hiding place between two massive wheels of Emmental. It would be a great shame to attack in haste and ruin the cheese.

It had shiny, almost glowing eyes, four sharp claws on each greedy, grasping limb, a long, grotesquely hairless tail, and great gnashing teeth which could be seen as it raised its head, cautious of its visitor.

It was… a rat.

Gregor snorted. Was this his monster? Had those drunk militia men been terrified by a cute little rat?

The beast reared up on its hind legs, blinking and sniffing the air. Gregor could see the little fellow’s massive rat testicles. He nodded in approval, impressive. The tips of his fingers were buzzing with numbness in the bliss of laudanum.

He nodded toward the rat. “Don’t worry, I won’t take your cheese. The whole shelf is yours.”

Perhaps by way of reward for the wizard’s intentions toward his cheeses, or by some good-natured whim, the rat lifted his tiny, furry arm and pointed to the space behind Gregor, squeaking rapidly.

Gregor, despite his natural prejudices against following the directions of another – never mind his feelings about whether or not a rat could possibly give such directions – turned just in time to catch sight of a truly gargantuan shadow slithering out from the cracks in the floor.

There are several different varieties of shadow. Some are dumb, docile things that placidly live out their lives absorbing whatever happens to be underneath them. Others are true predators, which seek prey in a more proactive manner.

The thing lurched toward him with speed unconstrained by corporeal mass, but slammed impotently against a shimmering blue barrier.

As an intelligent ambush predator, the shadow sought to escape immediately after its attack failed. However, the wizard had acted. Scintillating radiance erupted from his remaining hand, striking the creature and reducing it to mere wisps of darkness, and then further to nothing.

Bewildered, Gregor looked back to the rat, brow furrowed and mouth slightly agape. “I think… you might have just saved my life.” Oddly, shockingly, he started giggling with an uncharacteristic degree of whimsy.

Probably time to put away the opium. He reasoned, then took one last swig for good luck, and then another simply because he wanted another, before banishing the flask back to the flask dimension.

“I am in your debt, rat. Surely a rodent of such tremendous intelligence must have many desires? I am a man of considerable wealth and authority, you know. I can satisfy whatever ratly desires you may possess, you need only to make your request.”

Obviously, the rat failed to furnish him with any kind of intelligible response, merely squeaking a few times

Uncomprehending, Gregor frowned. “Well, this is a problem. How about I take you upstairs after I’m done purging this place. If you see something you want, let me know somehow and I’ll grab it for you.”

The little rat squeaked in a tone that he intuited to be something like assent, which was good enough for him.

“You can sit on my hat. Rat on a hat, hah!”