Gregor The Cripple

Grey clouds. A shattered sky at fresh dawn.

“Gregor?” Came the voice of Mildred. She leaned over him, head in the clouds, face cast in young shadow.

“Huh?”

“You’re just laying there and looking up.”

“I’m awake?” At some point, Gregor seemed to have woken without noticing. It hadn’t been a sudden thing. There was no distinct transition between awake and asleep, but rather, the two had felt so incredibly similar.

“Probably.”

Muddle-headed, he ran his hand over his chin expecting to find beard-beginnings to stroke thoughtfully, but discovered himself to be cleanshaven. The price of doing business.

Gregor had dreamt of war, a weeks-long campaign in defence of some fuzzy objective. It was an unimaginably grand conflict – so grand that he felt disappointed for having woken and ended it – and he had been one of its principal actors, a brilliant fantasy, though he only retained a general sense for the details.

“Have you ever had a dream that you didn’t want to end?” He asked in idle contemplation, gazing up at her.

Mildred’s eyes widened a little and her ears wiggled ever so slightly. “Gregor, that is perhaps the most human desire I have ever heard you express.” She was still looking down at him, and so he took this opportunity to admire her face. “You might not have noticed,” she continued, “but you’re a lot less insane lately.”

“It hadn’t occurred to me.”

“Well, I count it as an improvement, so keep it up Mister Wizard, because I might just run away if you start acting scary again.”

Something in those words tickled his remembering meat in an aggravating way. Someone had previously intimated as much, he gathered.

There was an event to be recalled, but he couldn’t remember what it was. His meat wouldn’t do it, and the tip of his tongue grew heavy with the enormous weight of words that would not come. It was… distantly something to do with the dream. He felt it there, probably, tied in with all the hard-to-remember slaying of nightmare armies.

“Although,” Mildred amended, “I suppose it’s fine if other people find you terrifying, just not me.”

“I think I can make that concession.”

“Good.”

“By the way, where’d you get that scarf?”

What? Gregor followed her gaze down to find a slab of neatly folded fabric sitting on his chest, right beside Randolph.

“…Magic, I assume.”

“You can summon scarves?”

Gregor then blinked, and found that he remembered just a little bit more.

***

“You know,” began Mildred, who now had a light blue scarf wrapped around her lithe neck, “I like the cold – though it isn’t that I like being cold, but rather that you can only really enjoy being warm when it’s cold. I suppose you might say that I enjoy being warm, but I don’t. At least, not when it isn’t cold. Being warm when it’s warm is just as bad as being cold when it’s cold.”

“You’re rather talkative today.”

“Perhaps I am. Perhaps you could say that I’m looking forward to something.” She was again pressed into Gregor as they rode, the awkwardness of the arrangement now diminished enough that they hadn’t bothered to obtain another horse when they passed through the town, thought there would have been little point if they had, being so near to alternative transportation as they were.

“The train?”

“It might seem mundane to you, but today I am going to ride a machine. It’s quite something.”

“I suppose so.”

It was funny, but compared to the majority of her journey post-petrification, notable exceptions noted, she found that this short day-long leg of travel was far more suspenseful. After all, a train waited at her destination, and if it wasn’t currently there, it would soon come to be there, which was something she still found to be particularly remarkable.

It was a big metal building, really, a building-sized machine, or a building full of machines – a factory, she supposed – and it could move across the breadth of a country. No magic at all, just cleverness. It was almost as impressive as her father, who was probably also a variety of mobile machine in the view of some obtuse perspective.

The pair rode their way through heavily agrarian country, which made for stark contrast against the remote wilderness of the shard.

Here, every piece of land was claimed by somebody, or so Gregor had said, and cleared of trees to make more room for fields and grazing animals. The roads were busy, and at all times she was able to note some sign of current or former construction in the slowly passing landscape.

This wasn’t an alien circumstance to her, and she had been to places like this before, but it was odd to consider that they weren’t in land that supported a city. It was all just for a town.

With trains on the mind, Mildred suffered an excited little epiphany and came to realise that the excessive scale of the agriculture here wasn’t just to feed the town or other nearby places which might need feeding. It was food that might go anywhere, because the existence of the train made it possible for things grown here to be moved to and sold wherever at all it might happen to be the most profitable, and this precise circumstance was alien to her.

Goods certainly moved from place to place in her time, but not at such scale, and not nearly so far as trains made possible. This was whole new paradigm of possibility for her – a fundamental difference in the nature and behaviour of civilisation. The list of implications was long.

It certainly made living everywhere a little more comfortable. Food should be cheaper in general, regional specialities would travel further, local droughts shouldn’t spiral into famine so much anymore, and though she wasn’t quite familiar with the quantities involved, Mildred imagined that it was now far more possible to live in non-coastal areas where local agriculture was unfeasible. Mountains and deserts, for instance, where valuable minerals liked to hide.

She felt a little silly for her wonder at this realisation and thought unbidden about what Gregor might think. For him, this was just the way the world regularly worked, but for Mildred, it was as if she had stepped out of her home to find her familiar little garden replaced by an ocean of unknown possibilities. Why was there an ocean in front of her home? She had no clue. Were there other new oceans in previously familiar places? She feared that there would be, which was exciting.

The town which spurred her epiphany appeared as a jagged scrawl on the horizon by midday – a large place by Mildred’s estimation, though an average one by Gregor’s.

Continuing towards it, they came across an ancient oak, too large and with roots too deep for removal to be an approachable undertaking. It stood lonely beside the road, the sole tree of size to be seen for miles.

“Gregor, grab a branch.” She said, thinking another biggish thought.

“Hmm?”

Gregor was a cripple, now more than before, and he seemed unwilling to make accommodations for this fact. Perhaps he saw it as some admission of weakness, she didn’t know. Regardless, if he wasn’t going to look after himself, Mildred the Responsible would need to do something about it.

“For your leg, as a cane or staff or something. We’re going to be ditching the horse-”

“I can manage.”

“I don’t care if you can manage, because I don’t want you to need to manage. Grab a branch.”

“…You’ll compensate me for this.” He said in begrudgement, obliging her and magicking down a staff-sized limb from the oak.

Mildred hmphed, very slightly indignant at his attitude. “Wizards have staves and cripples have canes. There isn’t anything unusual about this at all.” She said.

“All the same, I shall be compensated.”

And so, the still-stinking horse carried them into town, Gregor busy with scratching little snaking runes into his new staff. Mildred supposed that she could see some of them wriggling slightly, though the movement seemed to revert entirely when she blinked, so it must have just been a mistake of her eyes and the undulating locomotion of the animal.

Wood, he had explained, is relatively poor for holding enchantments – primarily because the runes are so easy to scratch and scrape, but also because wood is porous, and thus susceptible to warping from moisture and heat, which is just as much of a problem for the runes in the long view as the scraping. But, by ‘holding enchantments’, she couldn’t help imagining that he meant ‘holding them still’ so they didn’t squirm so much.

They obtained directions to the train and clip-clopped over.

Deciding in light of his conversation with Zimmer that it would be best to keep abreast of happenings on the continent, Gregor opportunistically snagged a newspaper on the way.

***

The ‘station’ was really just a bench-strewn platform of wood with a roof and no walls and the ticket master’s booth at one end. There had been a line for tickets. Not a large one, but enough that the place seemed busy.

The train wasn’t home, which was a disappointment to Mildred, but it was to arrive in a few hours, or so the clerk had said. And thus they waited, with Gregor reading his grimoire and Mildred struggling to read the newspaper though the distraction of excited anticipation.

They’d foisted their horse upon some young hostler for cheap, owing to the odour.

A handful of other commuters were around, chatting, sleeping, and some left, Mildred assumed, to find a place to eat or some other diversion to occupy them in the time before their conveyance arrived.

She found further distraction in eavesdropping on the conversations people had with the large old man in the ticket booth. There were lots of innocuous things for her to learn there, like the names of new places and how relatively far away they were and how that matched with her old understanding of the country, but curiously, quite a few of the people who came up to the booth weren’t there to buy tickets.

Some came with letters and packages to send away, which she could understand, but others came to ask for ‘telegrams’ to be sent.

“Gregor?” The wizard felt a nudge on his eyeless side and looked over at Mildred. “Explain telegrams to me.” She said.

“Hmm.” He reached over to the paper, which was almost impossible to manipulate with one hand, and leafed through a few pages while she held it for him. “Here.” He eventually said, pointing with one finger to a small advertisement oversigned ‘Telegraph Office’, which detailed prices for the service according to distance and wordcount. “Messages signalled over a distance, like a heliograph or a semaphore, but using coded electrical impulses over a wire.” He then watched her face, appraising the degree of her fascination.

“Oh. Clever.” And that was it. As she studied the paper, no wonderment occupied her expression. Gregor had just informed her of perhaps the most revolutionary technology of the time in both civil and military realms of application, and not only did she seem to have very easily understood it, she was unimpressed.

She was unimpressed at this, but trains intrigued her endlessly. She was a strange girl, no doubt. Although, now that he thought about it, perhaps telegraphy wasn’t such a new idea, and there were magical alternatives. Trains, on the other hand, must be a completely new and radical class of thing for her.

Either way, she was still very odd for having the capacity for such remarkable interests. Not that he was one to talk.

There came a distant toot and she was up on her feet, tall and graceful, attention glued to the track.

“That isn’t ours.”

“I know.”

The giant came steaming and screeching into the station, and when it slowed close enough to stopping, an engineer jumped from the locomotive to operate the boom on the track-adjacent watertower.

How heavy must it be, how perfect were all those smoothly moving parts, and how absurdly robust were those brakes?

A few people got off, a few got on, and another grimy engineer waddled around with a bag of coal.

It was brilliant.

“I want one.” Declared Mildred, eyes bright.