The Rise of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  Seven petals from a toxic flower called nidiocory

  But I wouldn’t make the same mistakes I had before. This time I wasn’t going to let my own selfish desire to help my dad interfere with the larger mission. I would search for the ingredients when I could, but never at the expense of the real goal: finding the amulet.

  “Well, just so you know,” Glam said, crouching down next to me on the boat’s back deck. “Captain Smeltfeet spotted land up ahead. She said we’ll be ashore in a few hours. So you may want to finish catching us dinner and get your stuff ready.”

  Tiki and Lake giggled.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll reel it in soon,” I said with a grin.

  They headed back up the stairs toward the middeck. I didn’t follow right away, wanting at least another fifteen minutes of peace and quiet before the real mission began. After twenty-six days on a small boat with the same thirty-two Dwarves, four Buggane rowers, and one Rock Troll, you learned to savor the quieter moments.

  Especially now that we were finally almost to our destination: the remote northeastern coast of Russia.

  Stoney didn’t know the location of the amulet in the same way you or I might know where our hometown is on a map. But he knew how to get there in his head. Or, more specifically, he’d said, “STONEY NAVIGATIONAL FORERUNNER TO LOCALITY OF ROCK ONE WITH RELATIVE PRECISION. PRECONDITION: EXCURSION ORIGINATE MUNICIPALITY DESIGNATED CHUMIKAN.”

  After hours of research using old maps and a set of huge books called encyclopedias, we finally found what he was referencing: a tiny coastal village called Chumikan, located in the Khabarovsk Krai of far eastern Russia. It was a heavily wooded, sparsely populated area that fit the vague descriptions of the magical realm said, in the old Fairy fable, to contain the amulet. A place most Dwarves had since started calling, simply, the Hidden Forest.

  Captain Smeltfeet had been pretty confident she could navigate us to landfall within a few miles of Chumikan using only an old Soviet-era wall map, the sun, the stars, and the horizon as guides.

  I dearly hoped she was right as I reeled in my lure so I could collect my things from my stateroom and join the others on the top deck. I’d never been outside America before and I was pretty excited to get my first glimpse of a foreign land.

  Suddenly the tip of my fishing pole jerked down toward the ocean. At first I figured the lure had gotten caught up in a current, or perhaps the boat’s speed had changed, affecting the drag. But then the tip danced a few more times, and I knew for sure something alive was tugging at the other end.

  I frantically began reeling, surprised at how excited I was.

  My catch wasn’t putting up much of a fight, so I just kept cranking on the reel. There was an occasional jerk, but it mostly felt like a deadweight. After several minutes of reeling, a small green fish came into view about ten feet beneath the surface of the sea. It was hooked through the lip and barely bigger than the lure itself.

  “Fresh meat tonight!” I said aloud, practicing what I’d announce to my shipmates when I walked out onto the top deck holding up the fish. They’d be thrilled. All these weeks we’d been at sea, we’d been eating mostly cured and prepackaged meats like jerky, bacon, Spam, and Vienna sausages.

  But just as the fish got to within a few feet of the boat, a huge shadow appeared suddenly from the depths beneath it. It zoomed up from the deep, faster than my brain could process.

  I was still holding the rod in shock when a massive shark appeared. It opened its jaws and swallowed my fish whole in a single, toothy bite. One of the shark’s glassy black eyes glinted in the sun for a second, before the huge animal spun around and retreated toward the depths.

  The line on my rod began zooming out of the reel as I realized the huge shark had just swallowed my lure along with the fish. I held on for dear life as the rod bent in a half circle, the line unspooling so fast I thought I saw smoke.

  But then, just as quickly, the spool slowed as the shark reached an apparently acceptable depth.

  Standing on the back ledge of the boat, I leaned over and stared into the clear patch of deep blue seawater visible in the boat’s wake. The line went almost straight down, as if the shark was directly below the ferry.

  Then the line suddenly went slack and began floating up in spiraling tendrils.

  I gave a few quick reels and the line kept coming up.

  At first I figured the shark must have either spit out the lure or snapped the line. But if that was the case, I should have felt a sudden release of tension. This was more gradual, almost as if . . .

  . . . the shark was swimming back toward the surface.

  The realization hit me just as I saw the pointed nose and the wide grin lined with triangular teeth appear below me, rocketing up at an impossible speed.

  The two-ton shark breached as I took a step back, falling onto my butt on the deck. Its razor-sharp, serrated white teeth snapped together as it fell toward me.

  Only a Dwarf could manage to get eaten by a shark while on a boat.

  But just before the huge shark’s head landed on my legs, the ocean under its tail exploded. The shark was suddenly soaring even higher into the air, clutched in the jaws of a monstrous sea creature that I didn’t recognize.

  We had done a unit on water-based species in Monsterology class, but this beast didn’t seem to fit the description of any that we’d studied.

  It had two heads. They fought over the seventeen-foot shark, easily ripping it in half. As more of the massive sea creature’s whale-size body came into view, I realized with terror that it was large enough to capsize our boat.

  As if on cue, I was abruptly propelled into the air.

  The world became a spinning blur of dark water, blue sky, clouds, and glimpses of our ship flipping end over end like a huge propeller.

  Then my face collided with the surface of the cold sea. My vision blurred as salt water stung my eyes and poured down my throat with briny bitterness. I had been caught midbreath, so my lungs were already on fire as freezing water gushed in and seemed to swallow me whole.

  With my clothes soaked, my natural buoyancy was gone and I began sinking into the depths of the Sea of Okhotsk, too shocked by the freezing temperature to struggle to stay afloat.

  The light above faded.

  Dark clouds seeped into the corners of my field of vision.

  I’d die the same way as my ax, the Bloodletter: in a watery grave at the bottom of a sea. Fitting, I supposed, since I was the one who put him there. At least it wasn’t my own best friend who’d thrown me overboard.

  So, in that way, my death was a lot better than his had been.

  And it was probably more than I deserved.

  CHAPTER 3

  Here Sinks Greggdroule Stormbelly: A Pretty Lousy Fisherman, but a Pretty Epic Failure

  Essentially, my only job on this mission had been to keep a Rock Troll company.

  And yet I’d still found a way to ruin the whole thing before it even got started. The boat had capsized, I was about to die a pretty unremarkable death at the bottom of a Russian sea nobody has heard of, and my friends were likely being devoured by a Dwarf-craving sea monster at that very moment.

  Someday there’d be a buoy placed above me, bobbing on the surface of the dark sea. My floating tombstone* would read: Here sinks Greggdroule Stormbelly, a pretty lousy fisherman, but a pretty epic failure.

  Or something like that.

  Greggdroule.

  The familiar voice cut right through my drowning brain like a magical blade.

  Bloodletter? I thought back. Carl?

  But how could that be? Distance affected our magical telepathic link, and he was currently sitting at the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. I was literally halfway around the world.

  I chalked it up to near-death-induced delirium.

  You’re not delirious, but you are definitely ab
out to be dead if you don’t DO SOMETHING, you smidgy kunk! the voice said.

  It was definitely the Bloodletter’s voice. Or, well, as much as an ax can have a “voice,” that is.

  I can’t believe the Dwarf I selected to be my owner, the Chosen One, is going to die in a simple fishing accident, Carl continued. If I’d known what a spineless Gwint you were, I’d have picked someone else. Maybe even that one kid in your Metallurgy class who accidentally encased his hand in solid steel last year. At least he had the wherewithal to get his hand into nose-picking formation before it became permanently fixed.

  But what am I supposed to do? I thought back weakly, seconds from unconsciousness. I’m drowning—too far down to possibly make it back to the surface.

  My magical ax somehow actually sighed in my head.

  Use magic, dummy, he said.

  Oh, yeah. Magic.

  I’d almost forgotten I could perform magic anytime I wanted now. Since its full return, those of us with the Ability could cast spells at will. We no longer needed to directly ingest the swirling fog we called Galdervatn. It was everywhere now, it had fully seeped into the atmosphere, the elements, and the cells of every living creature.

  Turning to stone probably won’t help much at this point, though, I thought.

  I sure hope this bout of idiocy and weakness is from the lack of oxygen to your brain, Greggdroule, the Bloodletter said. And not just that you’ve gotten that much dumber.

  What do you mean?

  I felt myself slipping away, surrounded by darkness.

  Dwarven magic is limited only by the natural elements around you! the Bloodletter screamed, so fiercely it zapped a few more seconds of life into me. You went to Human school for at least a little bit, didn’t you?

  Yeah, so?

  So what did you learn in chemistry? What is water made of?

  Hydrogen and oxygen, of course.

  Of course!

  The Bloodletter was right: I was being a bloggurgin idiot.

  With my last ounce of energy, I put all my focus and magical will into the oxygen atoms that I knew were in the water all around me. With seawater, there’s also sodium and other odds and ends, but Dwarven magic is about genuine intent and need. It’s not about the precise nature of chemistry at all. I didn’t need to know the exact composition of my surroundings.

  Suddenly I was forcefully vomiting out all the seawater I’d swallowed, spewing it back into the sea like some kind of supercharged sump pump. Once it was all out, instead of somehow taking a breath underwater, or growing magical gills, I realized I simply didn’t need to breathe at all. Whatever Dwarven spell I had conjured was allowing the oxygen in the water to be absorbed directly into my bloodstream without the use of my lungs at all, as if through osmosis.

  There you go, Greggdroule, the Bloodletter said. Now what are you waiting for? Get back up there and help your friends!

  I kicked toward the surface. No longer drowning, I was able to swim like an Olympian, and I vaulted up toward the rays of sunlight filtering down through the water around me.

  After what felt like mere seconds, I exploded up and out of the sea, taking a deep breath of real air with my lungs. As I bobbed on the water, it took only a moment to reorient myself and realize how far I’d drifted from our boat’s wreckage.

  The field of debris and floating Dwarves was almost fifty yards away.

  But even from this distance, I could tell they were in trouble. For one thing, the huge two-headed beast that had destroyed the vessel was still present, its massive form thrashing in the water.

  I swam toward the chaos.

  As I neared, I got a better view of the creature. It looked like two bloated sea snakes, each one as thick as a semitruck, entwined and wrapped around each other like tangled shoelaces. As the slithering forms flailed and twirled on the surface I saw rows of fins lining the length of both, from huge dorsal fins at the tail end to smaller flappers up near their heads. It was hard to tell where one ended and the other began, or if they were even technically connected, or rather two separate creatures merely braided together.

  Where the serpentine bodies separated, two long necks emerged, each topped with a separate head. They were similar, but not identical. Both looked sort of like an alligator with an extremely short snout. Dozens of long, uneven teeth stuck out like lances from their stubby jaws. One had a beard of slithering tentacles, and the other had bony spikes on the sides of its face.

  The creature (or creatures?) slithered across the surface of the water toward a particularly large chunk of wreckage. Seven Dwarves perched atop the platform of wood watched the sea monster approach. One of them was Glam.

  She stood up and taunted the beast with a fist raised into the air.

  “Just come and try, princess!” she shouted defiantly. “I’ll untie and filet you with one hand, while using the other to prepare a marinade!”

  The creature’s heads screeched as it glided toward them.

  Glam’s fists turned into Glam-smash boulders, but I knew they would do little to stop this monster from devouring the lot of them in a couple of quick bites.

  I swam desperately toward them, trying to summon a spell that would get me there faster. But unless Dwarven magic allowed instant teleportation (which was highly unlikely), I’d be too late. Both of the creature’s heads were lunging at the survivors, and I was still over a hundred feet away.

  But suddenly the beast was twirling up into the air.

  At first I thought I might have unwittingly summoned a spell that had saved the day. But then I quickly realized it hadn’t been a spell at all.

  Instead, a second sea monster had collided with the beast from below, propelling it up and out of the water. The two-headed-snake thingy shrieked as it soared through the air, crashing back into the sea at least fifty feet away.

  I turned my attention to the new arrival and immediately recognized it from the old drawings in our Monsterology textbooks.

  A Kraken.

  Human pop culture often portrayed Krakens as massive beasts with tentacles that resembled enormous octopuses or squids more than anything “mythological.” But that’s a modern take, inspired by tales of sailors seeing actual giant squids out at sea.

  Real Krakens, the ones from Separate Earth, were much different. They had colossal bodies with huge horizontal tail fins, almost like a whale, but even fatter and larger. This Kraken, for instance, was nearly twice the size of an adult blue whale. It also had a gaping mouth. Krakens used a set of razor-sharp claws at the ends of two tentacles attached to their bellies to pluck prey from the ocean and toss it into their gullets whole. They also had four spindly legs, which folded up along their fat bodies when they swam. They were like giant crab legs, but more gnarly.

  In short, Krakens sort of resembled an enormous whale-crab, but with more spiky parts, and they were a lot deadlier.

  The Kraken and the two-headed-snake thing wrestled in the water, basically fighting over the spoils of the shipwreck (i.e., whoever won got to eat those of us helplessly bobbing on the surface of the water).

  The fight was short-lived as the Kraken promptly snipped off one of the snake creature’s heads with its huge claw. Bright blue blood sprayed everywhere, like an untended fire hose. The remaining head howled in anguish as it retreated beneath the surface of the ocean and back down into the depths.

  The Kraken spun its massive body toward the wreckage, where Glam and several other blue-blood-soaked survivors stared in shock and horror. Two claws slithered out of the water on powerful, long tentacles, hovering above the Dwarves as if taunting them.

  I had to act.

  Thankfully, I had paid attention that day in Monsterology class. So I remembered that Krakens, although technically smarter than fish, were still easily distracted by flashy things that sparkled in the sun. They were not deepwater creatures, but instead stay
ed within a few hundred yards of the shore, where they would perch on the bottom of the ocean, using the sun’s light to help them detect prey swimming past near the surface of the water.

  I removed my dagger, Blackout, from my belt. It had the power to remove all light in its proximity for a short amount of time. Temporary total darkness would create the flashiest burst of light possible.

  I held up the dagger, willing it to do its thing.

  Screams, gasps, and the rumbling roar of an angry and confused Kraken marked the onset of total blackness. But the cold ocean was still there, and so were the sounds of my friends and the angry sea creature trying to eat them.

  I kicked my legs in the darkness, treading water as I held Blackout straight into the air. I knew that at any moment, the flash of light returning would happen.

  Even through closed eyelids, I saw a brilliant burst as Blackout released light back into the world. It was more intense than a camera flash in a dark room.

  When I opened my eyes, I immediately noticed my plan had worked. The light reappearing had completely distracted the Kraken. It was no longer about to eat Glam and the other survivors floating on the debris. In fact, it wasn’t even near them at all anymore.

  Instead, it was now swimming right toward me.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Thanksgiving Day Parade Kraken

  I wish I could say I acted heroically.

  That I slayed the Kraken with just a small dagger and a little bit of Dwarven magic, saving everyone.

  But you ought to know me better than that by now.

  I was so frozen with panic and awe as the monstrous sea creature barreled toward me, creating a wake so violent it could have easily capsized the SVRB Powerham all over again were it not already in pieces, that I just kind of floated there, treading water, unable to look away.

  Up close, the Kraken’s eyes weren’t like those of the shark that had tried to devour me. The shark’s eyes had been empty pools of black where nothing resided but predatory instinct with an operating program for survival, as nature intended. But the Kraken’s four eyes, two on the sides of its head and two on the front, almost seemed Human. I know that sounds crazy, especially since every single one of its eyeballs was bigger than a small car. They didn’t even look Human. They had massive silver pupils surrounded by varying shades of bright yellow. Just the same, as I peered into the Kraken’s eyes, even as its mouth opened up, displaying thousands of spiky “teeth” flexing out from its throat to grip me and shove me down its esophagus, I swore I saw a conscience. Emotions. Perhaps even regret.