Gregor The Cripple

The rain hadn’t stopped by the time they made it up to the cave. Frozen in exclamation, the stone maw of the mountain yawned dark and jagged, its contents cast in shadow by the clouds and the hour.

Reaching the terminus of the path, the pair came upon a gleaming marble obelisk, which notably wasn’t a mineral native to the area. ‘Here Dwells Gargantua’ was carved into the miraculously smooth face of the erection, making no secret of the occupant.

“Your father is Gargantua?” Asked Gregor, avoiding very intentionally the word ‘was’.

Mildred didn’t answer, because the answer was rather obvious, but instead she remarked, “This thing is new, it wasn’t here before.” And despite what the statement might imply, she had a decidedly neutral tone. “You should stay here.” She continued.

“I should not.” Gregor responded, because he obviously shouldn’t.

“This cave is big and deep, and it goes down almost as much as it goes in. Your leg-”

“I choose to suffer.” He responded, which was a very Gregor thing to say, Mildred thought.

She felt different in the aftermath of the fight, braver perhaps, or more sure of herself. After the excitement of brutal violence, she had the definite feeling that her relatively calm troubles were more approachable, and she dared to believe that she would be fine no matter what lay in the cave.

Was this a common post death-struggle epiphany? Probably.

And so they entered the cave. It was almost abyssal at the entrance, dropping precipitously down after a very slight lip. The home of Gargantua was not some little pimple of space on the side of the Shard, for the elder dragon was truly large. He dwelt in the roomy abyss of an ancient lava tube, bedecked on all sides by countless little bubble-chambers and heat-warped rock-ripple rooms, which could hold safely many things, like gold and jewels and enchanted swords and daughters.

They descended the sheer wall of the cave – which would eventually slope up to become a floor – on flat claw-cut steps with Mildred half-supporting and half-carrying Gregor. He insisted that it wasn’t necessary and that the pain of walking on a bullet-punched leg was ‘good’ somehow, and ‘prevented failure’, but she told him to stop being silly and did it anyway.

“You know,” she said, “It isn’t really that deep, but I once built a dumbwaiter to take myself up and down so that I wouldn’t need to use the stairs every day. It broke before I left.” And then she was sad, but it wasn’t a paralysing, choking sadness. She wasn’t pushed closer to tears. It was more of a sober tone behind her thoughts. The village was gone. She had lost it when she left. She had lost a lot when she left.

“Your father is Gargantua.”

“He is. Why? Do you know him?” She asked owlishly, and then in a smaller voice, “You haven’t heard anything, have you?”

“I only know him as a figure from history; he’s the reason we have a word for things that big. People think that he’s been dormant for centuries.”

They then reached a landing in the stone staircase, which was really just a large boulder scythed smooth by gargantuan claws and set into the cave wall.

The rain was reticent now, and descended the depths captive in clever gutter-channels which had been scratched across the wall. The thunder rumbled on, echoing down to ring their ears.

A door was hung uncertainly in a recess in the grey rock, seemingly hidden from the worst of time’s ravages by the dry depth. It wasn’t in good shape, but clearly still served the purpose of a door impressively well for something of such antiquity. Mildred identified this as a workshop and they moved on, down and downer. The suggestion of sky disappeared as their path became more lateral than vertical, and the main chamber opened up before Gregor’s light.

There was nothing. No slumbering beast of ancient metal stirred, no boundless horde of dragon-wealth glimmered, and there weren’t even any wailing princesses awaiting their rescue by valorous knights – the collection of which was a legitimate pastime of lesser dragons, though probably not Gargantua, who was an elder dragon and apparently liked having daughters instead.

There was nothing, save for a little run-down cottage built blocking the entrance of one of the many offshoot caves. Rainwater trickled by its door in a claw-cut stream which ran down from gutter claw-marks along the walls of the chasm.

Mildred’s distress began to leak out through her brittle bravery, but they didn’t halt.

The main chamber was more like the generations-carved mountain hall of a dwarf king than the happenstance creation of nature. Up above, the ceiling had a high peak which swooped down to meet the walls in a rough arch devoid of stalactites, likely the result of ancient collapse, or perhaps… renovations. Did dragons renovate their caves? They might, Gregor allowed. He felt the dangerous urge to ask, but his stunted powers of delicacy proved somehow sufficient to prevent that mistake.

They continued down to the flat, and Mildred found a little rock to sit on. From there, she sat staring at the place her father should have been. The place still smelled the same.

For a minute, there was not a thought on her mind. She just sat there with her hands in her lap, straight-backed and business-like with red eyes. How was she meant to act? With anger? Violent sadness? She wasn’t in the mood.

The all stress and anxiety of the journey was meant to be over, but now there was yet more to feel at the end? It wasn’t fair. She felt numb.

There was nothing here.

What was she going to do? Her goal was reached. She was home, but her home was empty. No father, no friends, no safety, no more home, not really. It was all gone. She truly had lost everything. She had become irreparably separated from everything she had ever known on the day of her departure, and she’d been living all this time under the false assumption of hope, marooned on an island of ignorance by her own stupid choice to go out and see the world.

That was over now. She felt hollow.

Mildred then looked to Gregor, and fresh feeling bubbled to the surface of her mind. It was something like anxiety, or perhaps guilt, she couldn’t tell. She realised that she had incurred a debt to return to this empty home in safety. Gregor was owed a healer, but she was freshly out of a father to foot the bill.

It was impossible to pay him.

He ought to be compensated, she felt, not out of fear that he might collect the debt in some rude way, but because he had earned it. Undeniably, there would be no Mildred without the intervention of Gregor.

The man had just been shot in the leg for her sake was walking to follow her. It simply wasn’t fair that she couldn’t pay him.

But what could possessionless Mildred give to Gregor that was of value commensurate to the risks he had taken? Gargantua was rich beyond belief, but his horde had gone away with him. She had no healer, and nothing else of much worth besides the hammer, but that was half-his anyway, or more than half, given that she didn’t really do anything to earn it.

She thought hard, searching the corners of her mind, looking for something which she had that he might want, even if it wasn’t worth nearly as much as he deserved.

Abruptly, she rose and began toward the little cottage in the rocks.

The door was eaten and the structure most certainly wasn’t sound, but she strode her way in with the floorboards crunching underfoot as if she owned the place, which she did. This was Mildred’s cottage. Gregor went limping along after her, not really minding that she’d absently forgotten that he was more crippled than usual.

She arrived at a door which was no longer much of a door and pushed in, invading considerably her own privacy.

“This was my bedroom.” Mildred declared with a dispassionate gaze about the place. “All of my things have turned to dust.”

She’d never had a boy in her room before, and even after Gregor ambled in, she still wasn’t sure that she had. He might not count.

“Your bed survived.” It was pristine and dust-free, and heretofore untainted by the eyes of boys, for the proximity of the dadgon had scared away all the boys who might have once been potential room-visitors, not that there were many of those, given that the fatherly threat loomed ever-present outside the cave as well.

“There’s some sort of enchantment.”

As she jumped onto the bed, Mildred observed idly that Gregor was undoubtedly the kind of boy her father would have prioritised scaring away.

Her boots sunk in and creased the covers as she walked wobbly to the bedhead. One is not meant to walk on beds with boots, but that didn’t really matter at the moment.

Mildred grabbed the headboard and, using it as support, began kicking the wall behind the bed. Propelled by a taut-muscled leg, her heel punched through the lacquered planks to reveal a rusted safe embedded in the stone behind.

Gregor’s brow fluttered up. “Were you worried about burglars? Down here?”

“Well, no, though people do try to steal from dragon hordes.” She began fiddling with the mechanism. It held the last of the possessions of her past, which was an enormous thing to consider. “Making a safe just seemed fun, which it was. I put it in the wall because the idea of a secret safe held an irresistible appeal to the mind of ten-year-old me.”

It wouldn’t open – the lock was rusted to inoperability and she didn’t really remember the combination anyway. Fortunately, she had a versatile everything-opener on hand.

“Can you open this?” She asked the wizard, helping him onto the bed.

Gregor had found himself in the den of the predator he wished to bed, and here they both were, on the bed. At first he had harboured fleeting hopes for their activities atop that bed, but this was fine too. He melted the hinges off the safe and Mildred had to smother the little sputter-born fires with an ancient pillow. The small door went clattering away, revealing the treasures a littler Mildred had deemed suitable contents for a secret safe.

There was a rather large feather, a little book, a few pretty shells, a ring of gold too small to wear, and a cherry-red ruby the size of a plum. This cherry-plum she plucked from home and held out to Gregor.

“Here.” She said, then pursed her lips. “This is yours. Is it… enough?”

He grasped the red rock. “Enough for what?”

“For compensation. I know it isn’t what agreed on, but I don’t have any other way to pay you…” She trailed off. As Gregor’s eye flicked between her and the stone, she slowly grew embarrassed at the offering.

In these few weeks they’d spent together, she suspected that she had come to understand him. He was a bizarre bundle of wizardliness and madness, though no longer as mad as before. He cared about odd things and carried himself upon odd proprieties, for which she felt she had a budding intuition, and so the more she thought about it, the more this makeshift reward seemed like an insult. It was only a pretty rock, one of seemingly infinitely many in her father’s horde. Gregor’s services were worth more than that, and he should certainly think so, given his high estimation of himself and the risks he had taken in supporting her.

In light of this understanding, she guessed that he wouldn’t consider it unfair to refuse outright, and she wouldn’t hold it against him. Even if he accepted it, the ruby wouldn’t be enough to clear her debt.

What else might he demand?

Given the coincidental convenience of the bed they stood upon, Mildred had some ideas, and she’d certainly hold those against him. There was a proper order to things like that, and that order involved passing the Dadgon Deterrence Test.

“I accept.” Stated Gregor, who didn’t even consider the job finished yet, and who had honestly harboured only minuscule hopes of receiving the agreed-upon reward.

When he went on to demand nothing further, she squinted in suspicion. “…Really? That is enough? I don’t owe you anything else?”

“Mildred, this is probably the largest ruby in the world. It could buy you anything anywhere.”

“What? It’s just a rock.”

“People really like rocks, I suppose.”

She kept squinting her bloodshot eyes, gazing into Gregor with a furrowed brow. She clearly didn’t believe him, and probably thought that he was accepting a loss out of pity.

It seemed that growing up between piles gold and jewels had left filthy-rich Mildred with a poor sense of value.

“I am a wizard.” He rubbed his stump in pause, unsure of how to communicate his… unique perspective in a comprehensible way. “When we do things for money, we are not… doing the things for the money.” Gregor halted briefly so that Mildred might digest his wizardly wisdom. “We are doing the things to do the things. We enjoy the exercise of power. The reward is a… token which we insist upon, mostly to give the unmagical masses a way to quantify the greatness of the things we do, and to give ourselves an excuse to do those things.”

At this, she ceased her squinting to blink her big blinkers, considering this new perspective into the activities of wizards. She nodded after a moment of thought. “That tracks. You’re weird.”

“On this day, and on this bed, I, Gregor the Cripple, have claimed Mildred’s cherry in reward for services rendered.” He said, maintaining a straight face and holding the ruby up to his eye, noting the clarity.

She gave him the look for that, and then her house exploded.