The Rise of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  “The amulet does not exist,” she said. “It is myth. If you go into magical forest, you will find nothing except . . .” She paused as the man spoke, his voice growing low and intense and dangerous. “Except darkness. And death. Creatures not existing for many times, and for good reason. He say even back in time of Fairies, this forest was forbidden to all who wish to be living long and happy life. It is filled with horrors. Pureblood Forest Trolls!”

  The man was standing now, waving his arms in a circle above his head, his expression of disdain replaced by one of fear of the things he was describing. The girl translated more:

  “Danger you face there are unimaginable. If you survive, you still no find object you seek. Amulet is only rumor. Old tale told to child at night. Why you think no animals around here? Why you think people leave? Because they know. They know what is in forest you seek. When world change, the smart people see dangers here and leave. Even animals leave. Too dangerous.”

  Roza stopped as the old man sat back down.

  “But you’re here,” I said, not wanting to imply that they weren’t smart.

  The girl translated, and the old man nodded thoughtfully. Then he said something low and full of regret.

  “He say, we should have left with others,” Roza admitted. “But his pride is . . . is . . .” She paused looking for the right English word. “Nuisance. He cannot leave his home. So we stay.”

  The three of us looked at one another, the tension gone. It was replaced with a sense of foreboding, and I got the distinct impression that the man believed he was sitting across from a pudgy, stupid Dwarf who would very soon become a pudgy, dead Dwarf.

  But I had to continue. I had to try. Going back and doing nothing because of a cranky old Elf’s warning would definitely not result in the world being saved. I needed to find out for myself if the amulet was real.

  “Ty ved` vse ravno poydesh`, da?” the man said quietly, breaking the silence.

  I looked at Roza.

  “He knows you still going anyway.”

  I turned back to the man and nodded grimly, hoping he understood that it was because I had to go and not because I didn’t believe him.

  “Dvum smertyam ne byvat`, odnoy ne minovat`,” the old man said.

  Roza hesitated, looking back at the old man again, as if not wanting to translate.

  “What did he say?” I prodded.

  “It is old Russian proverb,” she finally said. “It mean, sort of: ‘You cannot die twice, but one death is inevitable.’”

  Roza must have noticed the look on my face, because she shook her head and held up her hands.

  “You no understand,” she said. “What he mean is: You are right, go find what you seek, if this what you determined to do. Because you will die someday anyway. We all do.”

  Then the old man started speaking again, sounding kinder than before, as if to confirm what Roza had just said.

  She waited for him to finish and then translated again: “But you no need find Dzhana River. Better to go straight to place of magic. Or where rumor say it is. He was speaking truth before when he say nobody ever travel there. Not then, not now. Unlike Dwarves, he say, we listen to warnings of the past.”

  Then the old man added even more.

  “Khot` ya i chuvstvuyu sebya soobshchnikom v ubiystve, ya skazhu tebe, kak tuda dobrat’sya. Tol’ko chtobi ty ushyel.”

  I waited for Roza to translate, but she only glared at the old man. He nodded at her to translate, but she shook her head. So he sighed and said something else entirely.

  This time, the girl did translate.

  And the old man proceeded to reluctantly give me directions to the magical forest that would, in his opinion, surely be the end of me.

  CHAPTER 8

  My Stomach Helps My Small Intestine Move Some Boxes

  A few hours later, I trudged into the dense Siberian forest alone.

  This was certainly not how I’d envisioned the mission when we’d “set sail” a month ago. I thought we’d all be together: me, my friends, and Stoney, escorted by two squads of the most highly trained Dwarven Sentry warriors on the planet.

  Yet here I was, walking into an unknown forest in an unknown land, completely and utterly alone with no real idea where I was headed.

  Sure, the old man had given me “directions.” But calling them directions was a bit generous. It was more like he’d pointed me vaguely toward a general area roughly the size of Rhode Island. He’d been sure to clarify many times that since the Hidden Forest existed only with magic, and since magic had only recently come back, there was no way to be sure exactly where the magical realm began, or how to get there, or even how to get inside. But he’d also said there were areas within the vast Siberian forest that had always been rumored to be mystical places, even going back to the indigenous tribes that had lived on this land for tens of thousands of years. These mystical spots were said to have once been entry points into the Hidden Forest back in Separate Earth. Now that magic was back, perhaps they were entry points again.

  “Inside magical forest realm,” the old man had said (through Roza’s translation, of course), “you are on your own. Nobody here believes amulet exists, which mean I am no help finding it within magical forest. If you are lucky enough—or unlucky enough—to find way in.”

  But I was still immensely grateful for his help. I wouldn’t even be this far along without the generous assistance of the old man, whose name I was never told, and his granddaughter, Roza. In addition to letting me bathe and warm up, feeding me, washing and drying my clothes, and providing a lumpy but soft couch for me to sleep on, they’d also sent me on my way this morning with several tins of pickled herring, thick winter socks, and an old jacket that was a few sizes too big and hung down my stumpy legs nearly to my knees.

  The whole interaction had been even more proof that this cold war—soon to become a hot war—between the Elves and the Dwarves was completely senseless.

  But, alas, I trudged along, alone, into the thick forest.

  I was heading vaguely northwest, inland, and deeper into the mountainous wilderness, where there were no towns, settlements, roads, or people for hundreds of miles. I would have felt a lot better if Stoney and my friends were with me. Not just because Stoney knew where to find the amulet, or even for companionship, but mostly because then I’d know they were okay and had survived the shipwreck.

  Walking through uninhabited wilderness for hours on end with nobody to talk to was really boring. I deeply regretted, more than once, throwing away the Bloodletter. He may have been a savage, bloodthirsty weapon designed to kill, but at least with him I’d always had a companion.

  In fact, the ax had almost never shut up. But his incessant urging of me to destroy things and endless string of macabre dad jokes would have been better than the lonely sounds of my feet crunching across dry foliage and rocks.

  The relative silence did give me time to contemplate (read: second-guess) what I was doing out here in the most remote forest in the world in the first place. We were taking a chance going after the amulet, trying to reach it before Edwin did. Our mission either assumed that:

  My dad was right about the nature of magic and its ability to bring lasting peace, or

  The Separatist Dwarves were right that Elves were inherently bad and could not be trusted with the amulet.

  Anything outside of those two potential truths meant we were wasting our time and energy. After all, even if we did get to the amulet before Edwin, then what? At least he had an actual plan for an object that powerful. The entire extent of the Dwarves’ plan, as far as I knew, was to get the amulet first so Edwin couldn’t have it.

  But what would we actually do with it?

  Maybe the amulet was the key to bringing about peace. The missing part of my dad’s theory. It was, after all, supposedly the only object in existence with t
he ability to control and harness the essence of magic.

  But all of that was assuming the amulet was even real to begin with, and this was far from certain, especially considering what the old Elf had just told me: that its existence was nothing but a myth.

  By nightfall, I must have hiked at least a dozen miles deeper into the forest.

  As I made a bed out of Yeddo spruce and silver-fir branches, I tried to figure out what to do about my food supply. The old man had estimated it’d take me at least three full days to hike to the region where one of the long-rumored “mystical spots” was said to be. A place where the Hidden Forest could theoretically be accessed. As a Dwarf, I was already hungry all the time, anyway. And now that I’d just hiked a full day on nothing but two small tins of pickled herring, I was so famished I felt like I wanted to burn down the whole forest in a hangry fit of rage.

  My stomach grumbled so loudly, it almost sounded like it was talking to me as I huddled on my bed of branches next to the small campfire I’d started with magic.

  Feed me, Greg! my stomach growled.

  I can’t, I thought back. I have to preserve my last few tins of herring. I still have at least two days of hiking. And who knows how many more once I finally enter the Hidden Forest.

  You’ve always got excuses, haven’t you? my stomach complained. Well, guess what, buddy? I don’t care. Just get some food and put it in me. Now!

  Get it yourself!

  Well . . . maybe I will!

  Good, do it, then.

  Okay, watch me!

  Fine, let’s see it.

  . . .

  Well? I thought.

  Shut up.

  No, you shut up.

  I was gonna go, I swear. But then your small intestine needed my help with something. So . . . I couldn’t. Now I’m busy.

  Yeah, whatever you say, stomach.

  No, really! She needed me to, uh, help her move some boxes. And hang a picture on the wall.

  So now there are boxes and photos of stuff inside my GI tract? Explain how that works.

  Um, well . . . You know what? I don’t need this! You wanna know what I think?

  What’s that?

  You’re gonna feed me.

  No.

  Yes. Yes, you will. Because if you don’t, then I’ll give you a whole night of THIS to look forward to.

  Suddenly, my stomach twisted into a knot so painful I almost rolled into the fire. My toes curled and my fists clenched as my guts burned and ached like they were being stabbed with a hot blade.

  Do you like that? Huh?

  No, please stop!

  I will . . . You just gotta give me some more of that herring!

  I must have rolled and writhed and had a semi-delusional conversation with my stomach for nearly an hour before I finally gave in. I could figure out my food dilemma in the morning. But I knew if I didn’t get some sleep, I’d never be able to make it the distance I needed to the next day.

  So I dug inside the small nylon bag Roza had given me and removed my second-to-last can of pickled herring. I cracked the seal, rolled open the tin lid, and devoured the little fillets of oily fish one after the other like I was chowing on bottomless popcorn at a movie.

  As I curled back up on my little bed of spruce and fir, my stomach practically purred with satisfaction.

  See? Was that so hard?

  I sighed and wondered if I might really be going crazy.

  Now, why don’t you go ahead and open that last can? Okay? Greg? Greg? Come on, Greg.

  My stomach began gurgling again.

  I was so frustrated and lonely, huddled there on those branches with an annoyingly Dwarven stomach, that I almost started crying. But the first Universal Dwarven Rule was: Dwarves never cry. The second was: Dwarves don’t lie. Which, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that keeping rule one oftentimes meant breaking rule two.

  The urge to cry is natural, a release of pent-up emotion. And forcing yourself to keep emotions in is essentially just lying to yourself, and to those around you. It’s you betraying your own emotions.

  I wondered, as my stomach finally gave up and let me drift off to sleep, if any other Dwarves had ever noticed that before. That the two foundational rules of our very being were at complete odds with each other.

  If something so basic and simple as two straightforward rules to live by could be so flawed in their very design, then what other Dwarven beliefs might be incorrect?

  In fact, the more I thought about everything Dwarves believed, the more I realized we might not actually be right about anything.

  In which case, what was I doing in the Siberian wilderness all by myself, huddled up next to a campfire, arguing with my stomach?

  Was I really on a mission to save the world?

  Or was I about to do the only thing I’d observed to be a universal tendency of Dwarves: Fail miserably and just make everything worse?

  CHAPTER 9

  The Way Sunlight Filters Through a Thin and Feathery Mustache Can Be So Beautiful

  The smell of cooking meat is the easiest way to wake a Dwarf.

  Which is why I bolted upright less than a second after the luxurious odor of searing pork fat hit my nostrils. At first I figured I was still dreaming, or maybe it was my brain playing a cruel trick on me. Or perhaps I’d rolled onto the fire sometime during the night and was smelling myself being cooked alive.

  But then a familiar voice told me I wasn’t dreaming.

  “Hey, buttercup,” Glam said. “Want some bacon?”

  She was hunched over the dying embers of my campfire, delicately balancing a cast-iron pan filled with bacon on the coals. She grinned at me, and when the morning sunlight filtering through the tops of the trees hit her face, I’d perhaps never been happier to see a glowing mustache.

  “You’re alive!” I blurted out.

  “Of course I’m alive,” she scoffed. “You think a two-headed snake or a Kraken could take me down? Ha!”

  “Well, Greg did save you from the Kraken at first, remember?” another familiar voice said.

  Ari was kneeling on the ground, reorganizing the contents of a huge backpack.

  She grinned at me.

  “Yeah, I guess,” Glam admitted.

  As I climbed to my feet to hug them, I realized there were others as well. Four Sentry Elite warriors—two men and two women—stood off to the side, having a serious-looking discussion.

  “They’ve been arguing over who’s in charge all morning,” Ari whispered to me.

  “Commander Thunderflower is dead,” I said.

  “Yeah, we know,” Glam said. “And these four have been spending the whole time since we washed ashore arguing over who gets to be in charge now. Meanwhile, Ari and I have been discreetly ordering them around all along, and they haven’t noticed.”

  “But it will be good to have their extra muscle once we’re in the Hidden Forest,” Ari said.

  Glam nodded.

  “Wait, is there no one else?” I asked, so panicked my belly was aching all over again. “No other survivors? Stoney? Lake? Froggy? Tiki?”

  “We don’t know where they are,” Ari said. “But we think they’re okay.”

  Glam held out the pan of sizzling bacon. I grabbed a slice and let it cool in the morning air for a second, watching the steam unfurl from the crispy edges. Then I stuffed the whole thing in my mouth. The salty, fatty, smoky flavor was so amazing I almost passed out.

  “How do you know that?” I mumbled through the meat.

  “Well, we only saw the Kraken eat you, the commander, and a few of the other Sentry,” Ari said. “Which, by the way, Greg, we all thought you were dead. When we followed the smoke from your dying fire and found you sleeping here, I screamed so loud I’m shocked you didn’t wake up—”

  “Anyway,” Glam in
terrupted. “We saw Stoney and the others swimming toward the shore while we battled with the Kraken. But in the chaos that followed, we lost sight of them.”

  “Stoney can swim?” I asked.

  “With some help from like ten life jackets,” Ari said.

  “We figure if we all keep heading northwest, we’ll run into them eventually,” Glam continued, offering me another slice of bacon, which I happily accepted. “Since we’re all going to the same place.”

  “We hope,” I said. “Stoney is the only one who knows for sure.”

  “Not exactly,” Ari said.

  I gave her a confused look.

  “While you were wasting so much time fishing,” she explained with a grin, “I spent a lot of time with Stoney in his room, discussing the location of the Hidden Forest and the amulet. There’s a lot I still don’t understand—Rock Trolls interpret directions and spatial awareness a lot differently than we do—but I at least know the general area we need to find.”

  I nodded, relieved that I wasn’t going to be walking in a vague direction anymore. And it definitely seemed like we were all heading to the same spot the old Elven man had told me to go to.

  “Hey, kids, time to get going!” one of the four Sentry warriors barked at us. “We got a mission, in case you forgot.”

  “Don’t talk to them that way,” another said.

  “I’m the ranking officer here,” Sentry One responded. “I can do as I please.”

  “No, you’re not. We’ve been over this!” a third chimed in, and then they were all speaking at once, their argument over rank resuming, clearly far from resolved.

  I helped Ari and Glam repack their bags, which they said they’d found in an abandoned hunting cabin a few miles back.

  They had salvaged more supplies from the boat than I would have guessed possible, including several packages of bacon and other cured meats, sleeping rolls, tents, cups, and a few cooking tools. They’d also collectively managed to save several weapons from the SVRB Powerham’s cargo hold before it sank. Two of the Sentry had battle-axes, one had a Dwarven broadsword, and the last had a huge mace with stout spikes on the end. Ari had her dagger and a battle-ax. Glam also had a battle-ax, but it wasn’t her own.