Gregor The Cripple

Wind and rain howled, the droplets of water were too fat and fast to become snow and not quite cold enough for hail. Gregor stood out amongst it. The weather blew against him, buffeted him. Wetness crept down his neck, bypassing magically waterproof robes and mixing with the immense heat of his body. His heart was pumping heavy and quick, sending the twin poisons of alcohol and opium insidiously to every corner of his body.

It was a cold, sweaty, muggy experience; entirely unpleasant. But the smell was amazing. It was the smell of storms, of wetness, of the earth, of everything. Everything in the air had been churned up and driven into motion by the aqueous bombardment from above.

He stood there for nearly an hour, just feeling the rain and the wind, losing himself in the sound and smell.

There was no maid up there on the roof. Clearly. The slate tiles and lead cladding beneath Gregor’s feet were covered in green grime and mildew. Rarely cleaned, it seemed. No maids could be up here.

If there was no maid, who would show him to his room? He had tried looking for himself, but there were too many empty rooms ready to be slept in. They couldn’t all be his. What was he to do? Gregor could produce no solution. What a grand conundrum.

He felt movement within his robes. Something was coming up and out. Dazedly, dully, the wizard looked down, uncomprehending. Beady eyes and a whiskered nose emerged from his collar, twitching and flinching from the spattering ingress of rain.

“Randolph the rat, my only friend.” Gregor mumbled his greeting in much the same way a debt-ridden gambler might speak to a bottle of spirits.

Randolph squeaked, and the squeak was odd. It was warbling, shaky, it held a piteous tone. Understanding came slowly to the double-inebriated cripple. Randolph was wet and shivering from the cold.

“Have I done this to you? Is it my fault?”

Shame bubbled within, and suddenly Gregor wanted very much to be inside. All his mindless enjoyment at the sensations of the storm began to feel silly. The only creature in the whole world toward whom he felt genuine affection was suffering for the mistake of having been in his company.

The unpleasantness of shame was utterly foreign, and while Gregor didn’t really know what it was or what it meant, he knew that he didn’t like it. He recognized that it was bad, and that his careless enjoyment was also bad.

“Oh no.” He whispered with wide eyes and grave intensity, “I have wronged you, little friend.” The words were stretched out in a slurred drawl that would have defied intelligible interpretation if there were anyone but a rat to hear them.

The mathematical brilliance of a teleportation formula began spooling together in the wizard’s mind. “One must not teleport while drunk. It is dangerous.” He mumbled, “But I am dangerous too, and dangerous plus dangerous equals safe. Furthermore, I am a genius, and safe multiplied by genius equals very safe.”

There was a muffled crack as Gregor appeared in a nearby corridor. It was no more than ten feet of travel, yet he almost collapsed from the effort. He was exhausted, inebriated, and magically drained. The day’s exertion had not been light.

Gasping and disoriented, he stumbled to the wall for support. An unfortunate woolen tapestry became a casualty to his wet, grasping hands. It depicted some ancestors of the duke doing something somewhere for some reason, probably.

He decided then that it was finally time to get some sleep, and that a fire must be started to warm Randolph.

Using the tapestry as a handhold, Gregor pulled himself up and gazed about in survey. Before him stretched a finely decorated hallway, typical of the duke’s estate.

There was an intricately woven Tumari rug along the length of the passage and some nice portraits of once-important people evenly spaced along the wall in concert with a few east-facing leaded glass windows, as well as two mannequins bearing antique arms and armor. At the end of the hall was a singularly large and fancy door.

“A grand door for a grand chamber. A grand chamber for a grand wizard. That must be the room prepared for me.”

Still leaning against the wall, Gregor shuffled awkwardly forward. Finding purchase against it with his stump, he pushed himself toward a decorative suit of armour, which held a poleaxe in its stiffly articulated gauntlet. This weapon he grabbed and wrenched roughly toward himself.

“A fine staff for a fine wizard. Every wizard needs a staff, especially a cripple wizard.” It seemed quite odd to him that he didn’t have one already.

Plodding along with the poleaxe as a walking aid, Gregor the Disheveled made for his door. An uncomfortable heat was building under his cloak in absence of the cool wind which buffeted him outside.

After travelling two-thirds of the corridor, Gregor paused, fancying that he could hear something. It was decently audible, such that a lucid person would have noticed it immediately.

His powers of observation were feeble, and he almost entirely lacked the wherewithal to speculate on the origins or nature of the sound, but it tickled his beleaguered brain with the delicate sensation of familiarity.

What was it? He could feel the answer sitting there inert, locked beyond the recollection of his conscious mind by a wall of dull, cottony fog which seemed to absorb his every penetrative effort.

The wizard stood there dumbly with his pointy new staff, teetering back and forth on the spot while his mind folded in on itself in an attempt to wring out the answer.

“Oh,” Came the conclusion of many minutes’ hard work, “Screaming.”

Screams were very familiar to Gregor, who had caused and been party to many. He realized that some woman behind the door was wailing and moaning in anguish very excitedly.

His mood flipped and he started forward anew.

This would not do! Somebody was being brutalized in his chambers? He was incensed, enraged, truly furious. He was contracted to the lord of the household in his capacity as a wizard! That some mystery attacker would commit their crime right under his nose was an insult to his pride. No doubt they thought he would be lax in carrying out his duties, or was otherwise supremely incompetent.

An insult toward a wizard was never a one-sided transaction. A wrong had been committed, and a debt incurred. It was now within the realm of Gregor’s ethical discretion to seek repayment.

An overwhelmingly arrogant and contemptuous sneer grew upon his face. Cretin. I am not to be overlooked. A singular intent to purge the offender took hold.

Charging forward as swiftly as his faulty balance would allow – and nearly tripping several times – Gregor arrived at the door.

Reaching for the large brass handle, he discovered once more that his right hand was missing. Looking to his left hand, he found it grasping a poleaxe that he seemed to have picked up somewhere. The cripple snorted derisively and focused his mind, relishing in the knowledge that he was magically powerful enough to ignore the impediment of bodily disfigurement.

A curious shimmer surrounded the door’s handle, which rotated under the influence of Gregor’s telekinetic grasp.

Ever since the incident at the tower, his telekinetic abilities had steadily improved from frequent use. In this area he was shockingly even more exceptional than usual.

He often reflected that Kaius would not be proud of such proficiency, since, unlike any other wizard’s master, being better than normal was his baseline expectation. However, the ancient man might just approve of Gregor’s ability to completely disregard the life-changing effects of his injury, with the exception of his poor pain management.

Gregor found the notion of this hypothetical approval to be wholly repulsive.

As the handle turned and the latch came away with a clunk, the shocking nature of the violence within became clear.

Revealed to Gregor was a well decorated room, cast in dancing hues from a window-side fireplace. The walls were bedecked with all the furnishings a young lady could ever desire, with an impractical quantity of dressers and mirrors strewn about the place. In one lonely corner was a piano with stacks of books collecting dust on its covered keys – a clear sign of abandonment.

In the center of the space was a grand four-poster bed, clothed in garish pink and far larger than anyone could reasonably require. Intertwined atop it were the two naked belligerents of Gregor’s imaginary conflict.

One, a bulky, scar-covered man of inestimable ugliness – though ugliness was hard to gauge in the low light – was bodily pinning the other, a small and probably annoying woman. Both were vaguely familiar to Gregor.

They noticed him instantly, of course.

The woman gasped and pressed her hands to her face, trying in vain to preserve some shred of anonymity, but was given away by her voice. “Eeee, Greg!” She shrieked.

Gregor blinked placidly as his foggy thoughts took the long way around the many folds of his mind. They trekked leisurely between each pink-gray gelatinous hill before settling reluctantly into his forebrain and identifying the woman as Barbara.

The man pushed away and turned, kneeling at the footboard of the bed. Considering neither modesty nor anonymity, he made no attempt to cover himself.

“Shit.” He began chuckling in an entirely humorless manner, trepidation evident in his features. “Greg mate, keep this between us, yeah? Corle’ll be pissed. Probably try to have me killed. Probably by you. We don’t want that, do we?”

Barbara was presently attempting to hide her face in a mountain of pillows and discarded clothes.

The wizard narrowed his eyes under the strain of cogitation, trying to figure out exactly what he had discovered.

It seemed that this hideous man had been forcing himself upon the Duke’s daughter in open and unrepentant disregard for Gregor’s abilities, and yet now upon discovery he was attempting to coerce Gregor into silence. Could there be any greater insult?

Gregor was still standing vegetatively in the doorway, silently calculating the identity of this mystery assailant. Skud was quick to act upon the wizard’s cognitive delay.

“Listen Gregor, you’re drunk. This, well- it isn’t what it looks like. Me and Barb just tripped and all our clothes fell off. That’s all. It’s a pretty embarrassing situation, and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anybody.”

“You’re a horrible liar.” Barbara offered meekly from behind a tightly clutched cushion.

“What else would I say to him? You give it a try.” Retorted Skud with a helpless expression.

This mystery man’s pathetic mitigation and bargaining disgusted Gregor. One should not be in the habit of committing crimes they didn’t have the power to justify to others. When Gregor did anything, criminal or otherwise, he did it with the complete assurance that his reasons were sufficient. He didn’t much care what others thought, because if they disagreed with him, they were obviously wrong.

With a sickening twist and pop, Gregor telekinetically wrenched the man’s head from his shoulders. His neck practically exploded, being grotesquely stretched beyond any normal range of extension. Giblets of flesh and droplets of blood were flung everywhere.

In a horrible crime against laundry, it went all over the bed, the furniture, the finely patterned cushions and all the frilly pillows. Everywhere. And all over Barbara too. She was spattered from naked head to naked toe in the sticky-gooey gore of her dead lover.

This made her very unhappy, so she screamed. It was a shrill shriek, far louder and more panicked than the previous screaming, which had Gregor curious. Should she not be thanking him? He had just executed her assailant, she was in peril no longer, so why did she scream?

Ah, he realized, it must be the blood. Given the characteristic puerility of her mind, excessive squeamishness seemed likely.

The sound of many feet on stairs thundered below, no doubt the servants and guards were rushing to investigate the frantic screaming.

He approached with his extant hand outstretched, “Be calm Barbara, I have spell for washing away blood.” He donned his most reassuring expression; a nice, calming smile, which looked to Barbara like some defective variety of grimace.

She didn’t calm down. She scrambled away from his advance and began frantically rummaging through the piles of discarded clothes that surrounded her. Happening upon the object of her search, she drew with shaking hands Skud’s loaded pistol from its belt and pointed it toward Gregor.

It was an ancient thing, terribly out of date by the standards of the most modern militaries, who had stumbled into the clever idea of putting the projectile and the propellant together into a little pill of death, rather than loading them into the gun separately. This, however, was not a modern part of the world. They were in the sticks, the boonies. The tide of technological progress had not yet washed this place with its fresh horrors. As such, relics were mostly the best they had.

Barbara pulled at the trigger several times to no effect, having no idea that the gun needed a purcussion cap to fire.

Gregor quirked his head to the side, adopting a quizzical expression. Was she trying to kill him, really?

Barbara dropped the pistol and becgan rummaging for Skud’s knife, huffing and puffing and screaming in panic all the while.

She was trying to kill him. How odd.

Many thoughts and feelings sprang up and began madly competing for brainpower. Puzzlement was the front-runner for a while, at least a second or two, but Barbara found Skud’s knife and began swipe-stumbling toward Gregor, then anger took to the fore. How dare she!?

Other people didn’t kill him, he killed other people! That was just how it went. Furthermore, Gregor was certainly owed some gratitude for rescuing this obviously distressed damsel.

It seemed that Barbara meant to spurn his kindness for some mad reason, and furthermore, she was acting as if she actually had a chance at killing him. Did she really think him to be so incompetent?

This act of hers was supremely insulting. Gregor’s anger reached a peak.

“Fine then, burn for your offenses.”

An orb of flame burst into being above his splayed palm. A swift flick sent it hurtling toward Barbara, onto whom it splashed in a very un-flamelike manner.

In general, it is very difficult to ignite people who aren’t wearing clothes, which is one of the many nuances of killing that most people never consider. Human flesh has a very high ignition temperature, so flames will quickly starve if there isn’t any other fuel present.

A common solution to this uncommon problem is to ignite the target’s hair, which will cause instant panic and is a very useful trick in a fight, but won’t often result in death on its own, and very rarely results in whole-body immolation.

The best solution, in Gregor’s very well-informed opinion, is to enchant your flame with a simple vacuum spell, such that it constantly draws a great quantity of well-oxygenated air towards itself. Of course, most people wouldn’t do such a thing. No sane mage would ever create an enchanted, self-feeding, self-bellowing flame. That would be crazy.

Unfortunately, Gregor was a wizard.

The little flame globe attached itself to the flailing woman like a parasite and whooshed up into a great conflagration despite her frenzied attempts to snuff the thing.

From behind the wizard came a susurrant cacophony – the sound of many blades being drawn – and he turned to find the hallway filled with furious men. Some had pikes, many had sabers, and there were more than a few antiquated firearms leveled in his direction.

Among this bristling throng was teary-eyed, rage-faced Corle. “Gregor you bastard, they bought you out, huh?”

Gregor had no idea what the big fellow was going on about. He far was too pre-occupied with considering the guns and the threat they posed. He could summon a barrier that might stop one shot, but that was it. That was all his current condition could accommodate.

“Was I not paying you enough? Did you really need to be so sadistic as to wait until she was home, and we were happy? How could you be so cruel!? I’ll cut all your other limbs off! Kill him!”

In that same instant – by complete coincidence, for intoxicated Gregor could not have possibly reacted to Corle’s command in time – the wizard winked to the other end of the hallway, behind the group. All the lights save for Barbara’s writhing form went out in unison, and the night filled with screams.

***

Gregor gradually gained awareness. He was in a place that was not a place, blank and expansive. Everything was hazy, transient. He felt as if his existence here was very tenuous, as if he could evaporate at any moment.

Everything around him stank of odd, wispy magic. Nothing here was real, yet it existed. The air that was not air, the ground upon which he lay that was certainly not ground, and the odd twinkling stars that hung above and below, all were things constructed of some obscurely tentative flavor of reality-fabric which he could not identify.

What did that mean? What did it signify? He had no clue. This was beyond his extensive learning in the areas of both knowable and long-lost unknowable arcane secrets.

He could not move. He could not look around. He could not breathe. He felt his awareness fading fast.

Suddenly, the was a voice. “What is to be done? This is no small act of slaughter.”

“He was not himself. This development does not necessarily reflect poorly upon his growth." Defended another.

The first responded, “The boy was addled because he chose to be addled. This evil deed is a product of his intentions.”

Gregor could just barely see the speakers standing over him. They were hazy, indistinct. They did not seem to know that he was observing them. The first voice was smooth and cold, like the calm surface of a lake, while the second was warm and viscous, like thick, syrupy honey.

“Perhaps his questionable intentions aren’t such a bad thing.” Suggested the second.

“How do you mean?” Asked the first.

“Notable exceptions aside, the people under us are far too moral.” She paused. “There are good deeds only devils can commit.”

The first nodded, seeming to consider his companion’s words reasonable. “We have far too few agents who can be trusted to autonomously make difficult decisions. He might be able to lighten my workload.”

“In spite of the monstrous outcome, his intentions were not malicious. He might not be a good person, but he isn’t evil. He is a creature driven by pride. For him, right and wrong boil down to a rather simple equation of benefit and injury to personal interests.”

“He will be changed after this. Great growth is possible, but not probable.”

“It pains me, but I suppose we’ll have to leave him to fate’s tender mercies.”

“He’s valuable. The enemy will come to claim him.”

“They’ll be rather rude about it, I expect.”A broad, toothy grin split the otherwise indistinct features of the hazy figure. “I imagine Gregor will be violently offended at the notion that he could be made to serve.”

The first was not so pleased. “This is a risk. They’ve begun to interfere with the Norn somehow, and her machinations no longer produce sure outcomes. We might lose him.”

“We have no choice.”

“I suppose not.”

There was more said, but Gregor could not hear it. He felt as if his consciousness had slipped free from his body and begun tumbling down through the void.