Gregor The Cripple

The government men had said ‘one day’. Gregor was fairly certain of this.

It had been more than one day. He didn’t know how long exactly – the hours had become odd to him, but it was long.

By the time he found himself standing before the waystation, a few days had passed which he couldn’t account for. Two, maybe. Perhaps he had wandered off the road in his delirium, or perhaps his body had forgotten how to sleep and wake reasonably.

It was becoming hard for him to keep track of himself in the mud of his mind. He felt as if he was struggling to resume his place in a book he hadn’t read in many months.

There was a fever, likely the child of an infection in his ruined eye. It made him shiver and sweat in spells despite his climate-controlled robe. His joints ached, and there was a monstrous gnawing in the pit of his stomach that not even the entirety of his meager food supply had been able to banish.

Nestled in a cleft between two shrub-crusted mounds of earth stood the waystation, a dilapidated thing. It was slouching into the wet ground on unstable foundations.

Trudging toward it, Gregor felt the chill air on his face as a stiff breeze blew. Randolph scampered from cold shoulder into warm collar, hanging with his small body inside and fuzzy face poking out the top. Gregor could feel the rat’s tail tickling the bottom of his ribs.

It was cold here, but warm compared to Sine, which sat high in elevation atop a vast plateau. They had descended, though Gregor couldn’t specifically recall much of the trek, and were now in the lowlands – a vast basin of moors broken by rocky copses of bramble and oak. This was a land where nobody lived, being that the ground was hostile to both cattle and crop.

Drawing near the antique outpost, he spied three tethered horses and a buckboard in the lean-to outside. Reasoning that one horse should belong to the proprietor, Gregor figured that there would be two fellow travelers resting their legs withinn. This was a lonely road indeed, and that suited Gregor just fine.

He straightened himself and strode over to open the rough-sawn plank door. It simply wouldn’t be acceptable for his handsome self to be feeble in front of others.

Against expectation, the door didn’t squeak as he opened it, instead it scraped, for its hinges were wooden.

Sitting just beyond the doorway was a portly little man in overalls, wrinkled all over with a great bulbous nose. Creaking at steady intervals, he rocked back and forth on a much-used chair, his hands busy at whittling to life a creature of uncertain shape. The shelves and windowsills were all aclutter with little wooden figures.

The old man’s hands halted as he blinked himself out of reverie, “Eh?” He sniffed heavily before wiping his colossal schnoz on a yellowed sleeve.

Looking up, he took stock of Gregor as Gregor surveyed the room. It was a smallish place, about the length of two horses in every dimension. All wood, save for the little stone hearth in the center. In the middle of the back wall was a doorless opening, presumably leading to the other necessities of habitation.

“Yer a wizerd?”

Gregor’s eye drifted to the man. “I am.”

“Seen a few o’ your like come through ‘ere. Goin’ for the witchwood, all o’ em. You any diffrent?”

Gregor shook his head.

The little man made a sound of absent interest, adding another mark to his mental tally.

“You need a bed, and food?”

A Nod.

“S’ a cot down the hall. Food’s at sundown. Try not to fight with the other one.”

“The other one?”

“Got another wizerd stayin’ the night. Rude fella, him.”

Gregor quirked his brow. He didn’t know of any other wizards who did business in this area.

“Did he give his name?”

“Called himself Labourd.”

The man was unfamilliar, which meant that he either wasn’t worth knowing, or that he was foreign to this part of the world, possibly both.

“I make no promises.”

After awarding the hostler a large silver coin for his services, Gregor continued on past him, out from what seemed to be the main living space, and into the corridor behind.

The whole building was exceedingly drab, with none of the decoration that Gregor had become accustomed to in his life with Kaius and his employment under the duke. There were no windows. The rooms that adjoined the hallway had few doors, with most bearing simple curtains.

Back when Kaius was alive and they regularly went out wizarding together, as was ‘required for his growth’, they never needed to stay in a place like this. Kaius had been the creator and owner of a true treasure – a vehicular tangent plane.

By replicating some of the spellwork of the tower, he had been able to fit the floor plan of a rather large residence into the interior space of a two-horse coach. Of course, it wasn’t merely for eating and sleeping in comfort. That would be a terrible waste. Its main function was as a mobile laboratory.

Thinking upon it further, he he made a mental note to reclaim the coach and a few other items of significance from the tower.

Hopefully the demon had decided to play psychopomp to Kaius and dragged the ancient wizard’s soul off to whichever hell-realm best suited the both of them. Gregor was uncertain if he would survive another encounter with the thing, but that was a problem for future Gregor.

Current Gregor had enough issues of his own to deal with.

Upon reaching midway in his trek down the corridor, he spied an open room – one with a door. Peering inside, he found no signs of recent occupation, which made it his.

It held a coarse approximation of a bed and a chair – nothing else. He entered the room and closed the rough door.

Taking a curious little knife with a yellowed blade from one of his cloak’s many internal pockets, he began scratching a messy association of runes about the door. His feverish infirmity and shaking hand did not permit the high standard of spellwork that he would have otherwise produced, but Gregor was not so incompetent as to botch a simple muffling cantrip.

The work complete, he went over to gingerly try the rickety chair. Upon finding with surprise that it could hold his weight, Gregor removed his hat from his head and released it to its own buoyancy. Then, he reached inside with a hand shaking from fever and withdrawal to retrieve a pocket mirror.

Outwardly, it was a rather boring thing, small and unornamented. But not to a sorcerer. A skilled sorcerer would perceive that it possessed a certain magical weight; a gravity that was instantly noticeable. It radiated a clear indication of powerful enchantment.

This little curiosity was a product of ancient artifice, procured by Kaius during his time in the Empire. Like most ancient artefacts, it was entirely unclear what function it performed, if it even functioned at all.

Gregor kept the thing around out of idle curiosity, and because magical mirrors still serve the purposes of regular mirrors.

Bringing the reflective surface up to his singular functional eye, Gregor angled it so that he could see his other optical organ, which was stubbornly refusing to do anything except throb.

An ugly purplish-red eyelid met his gaze. A scabbed gash began at the corner of the eye and terminated just before his ear. Some blade had evidently scraped against the side of his head in the chaos of the fight.

He really should have died that night. Inebriated and exhausted, it was nothing short of a miracle that he escaped with only a destroyed right eye.

Gregor clenched his jaw, took a deep breath, and forced the blood-crusted lid open with his telekinesis. Instantly, a deep ache stabbed into his brain as the deflated orb slouched downward a little, no longer possessing its former firmness or the support of his eyelid. The optical muscles had probably been partially severed as well.

He observed calmly that the cut began in the middle at the pupil, with the blade having been drawn cleanly to the right through the sclera, after which it must have bounced against his skull and bounded out of the socket.

The skin surrounding the wound was a pale red – which signaled the presence of an infection. The saggy eyeball itself was yellowing and black to brown. It was necrotizing, clear as day. The tissue was dead and would soon be lost to rot.

Gregor had once been presented with an actual, still-bleeding cross-section of the human body by his master. And he thus knew that the eye is connected directly to the brain by the optic nerve, through which the infection and the necrosis would both eventually spread, killing him.

He had to get the eye out. Quickly.

“Shit.”

Upon verifying that he would need to gouge out his own eye, Gregor could not stop himself from thinking of opium and its divine ability to extinguish pain.

Any cut made to the eye itself would be almost painless; the thing was dead and eyeballs do not possess pain receptors, but the muscles which held it captive and the optic nerve from which it sprouted would need to be severed, and the entire socket would need to be cauterized and cleaned to prevent the spread of infection. It would be agony.

Most people only suffered that much when they were subjected to life-ending manglement, but Gregor expected himself to keep living in pain for a while afterwards. Could he really do that without opium?

Of course he could. Gregor had severed his own hand. He was no stranger to unimaginable agony.

Not daring to contemplate the issue further, for he knew that procrastination in the face of a daunting task is just as addictive as blessed opium, Gregor pushed himself from the chair and made his shuffling way to the bed.

Adopting a kneeling position next to the rough thing, he retrieved Randolph from his sleeve. He placed the rat at eye-level before him by hand, and delivered his mirror to the rat telekinetically. Randolph sat up on his hind legs to support it, with his nervously twitching snout poking over the top to regard Gregor in curiosity.

“Randolph, I need you to hold that steady for me. I won’t be able to manage it.”

The precocious rodent gave a squeak of caution, which Gregor somehow interpreted correctly.

“This must be done. If I leave things as they are, I won’t live long enough to find a healer.” After that firm assertion, he repeated, “Hold it steady.” And began maneuvering his head, tilting up and down, left and right, trying to find the perfect angle from which to conduct his surgery by reflection.

He found the position after a moment. Taking from his hat a magic-sharp dissection knife – which he kept very clean – and a corked bottle of ethyl alcohol, he summoned a flame which hovered in the air.

Grasping the knife with his telekinesis, which was steadier than his hand by far, Gregor held it to the flame while he uncorked the bottle in the mundane manner.

The wizard’s jaw tightened. He knew from his experience with amputation that he shouldn’t try to work himself up, or to steel his resolve. The trepidation and anticipation would grow into monsters. Instead, his best course of action was to proceeded quickly and swiftly.

So he began.

With every muscle in his body clenched, Gregor brought the knife up to his pinned-open eye in an unwavering telekinetic grasp. Experimentally, he pressed the tip of the knife into the ruined organ. Though it hissed and smoked, he felt nothing save for the perpetual ache.

Breathing deeply, Gregor drove the short blade sizzling between the eye and the side of its socket, pushing in deep until he met the resistance of bone.

He gave a muffled scream-grunt through his clenched teeth as tears began streaming down his face, clear on the left, crimson on the right. The runes on the door proved necessary.

No longer quite looking at the mirror, he dragged the knife though himself by intuition, tracing a rough circle around the gelatinous orb in an effort to slice the strands of muscle which held it captive.

As he shuddered in the throes of extreme agony, Gregor felt the sickening sensation of his own eye bouncing around in his skull, and knew that he had succeeded.

Tugging on it with magic – miraculously having maintained the presence of mind to be gentle – he used the resulting space to angle his knife inwards and get at the optic nerve, which was thick and sinewy and took two gruesome sawing motions to bisect.

Finally, after three long seconds of excruciating mutilation, Gregor’s right eye plopped out.

The wound was bleeding minimally, with the blood vessels having been seared into obedience by the knife. He took the open flask in his uncertain grasp and messily upturned it into the newly empty hole in his head. It stung like a spike of ice driven into his brain.

Huffing exhaustedly, Gregor collapsed onto the bed, shaking all over with his head clutched to his chest.