The Rise of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  “It’s gone,” she explained sadly when she saw me looking at her new weapon. “Lady Vegas is gone.”*

  “Okay, this way, ladies and gentlemen,” Ari announced to the group once we were all packed up.

  Glam and I followed close behind as Ari led us through the forest in a slightly different direction than I would have gone, were I still alone.

  I wasn’t sure the Sentry had heard her announcement over their squabble, but once they noticed we’d resumed the trek, they fell in line a few dozen yards back, somehow still arguing about rank. Which made Glam and me smirk when we locked eyes a few seconds later. Because we both already knew what those four clearly hadn’t figured out yet: their rank didn’t matter anymore. At the moment, there was clearly someone else already in charge: Ariyna Brightsmasher.

  And we all followed her into the depths of the dense forest without a second thought.

  CHAPTER 10

  Giant Talking Spiders, Trolls in Loincloths, and Sarcastic Centaurs Are Every Bit as Scary as They Sound, Even as a Joke

  By nightfall, after a full, exhausting day of hiking, our party of seven became twelve.

  We found five more travelers at dusk, gathered around a cluster of boulders, which wasn’t all that surprising, knowing my friend and his obsession.

  “PRECAMBRIAN IGNEOUS ASSEMBLAGE!” Stoney bellowed, as he hunched over the boulders, pointing them out. “PRECAMBRIAN ORTHOGNEISS! GRANITE 40 PERCENT QUARTZ!”

  “What’s with this thing?” the Sentry warrior behind him complained. “Do we really have to stop at every single cluster of rocks?”

  “Leaveth thy gent be’est,” Lake said. “Hath scrupulous proclivities failingly procured in thyself?”

  Froggy nodded an agreement for the Sentry to leave Stoney alone.

  “Guys!” I shouted, running toward them.

  When they turned and finally saw us, they looked even happier to have found us than we were to find them. The Sentry warrior with them quickly rushed over and bumped fists and single-arm bro-hugged our group of four Sentry. Ari practically tackled her twin brother, Lake, to the ground. Froggy, silent as usual, grinned and gave Glam and me a single, relieved nod. Tiki Woodjaw let loose an excited string of obscure Dwarven curse words as she hugged me and called me a “purbogging hanklebump.”

  “GREGGDROULE!” Stoney bellowed, the rocks forgotten. “STONEY ENVISAGE ORGANIC VESSEL CONVERT ASSIMILATED WASTE AMIDST KRAKEN GASTROINTESTINAL TRACT!”

  He charged at me like a puppy left home alone for too long.

  I tried to dodge him, but the massive Rock Troll scooped me up in one of his trademark near-fatal hugs.

  “Stoney . . . I can’t . . . breathe . . .” I sputtered, my vision blurring.

  He gave me one last bone-cracking* squeeze and finally released me.

  “Happy . . . to . . . see you . . . too,” I said, catching my breath.

  “Tis thine delight of ye night hath descended upon thine company yonder present occasion,” Lake said, patting me on the back as I wheezed.

  “ROCK ONE,” Stoney said. “STONEY NAVIGATE.”

  “Are we close?” Glam asked.

  Stoney considered this as we gathered around him, looking as if he knew exactly how far away we were but couldn’t decide if it was technically “close” or not. Then finally he bared his stonelike teeth in a Rock Troll’s unique version of a smile.

  “CONVENTIONAL PROXIMITY PERSPECTIVE DIMENSIONS, BEARINGS NOT EQUIVALENT PURSUING ROCK ONE,” he said. “SUFFICIENT RESPONSE PROBLEMATIC COHERENT ARTICULATION.”

  Though it was always hard to track exactly what Stoney was saying, the general message of his response was clear: Where we were going, concepts like “a mile away” or “we’re getting close” did not apply. The Hidden Forest apparently did not abide by the modern world’s rules of measurable proximal relationships.

  And why would it?

  That would only make things sort of easy for once. But we were Dwarves, and Dwarves and things being easy couldn’t coexist.

  We set up camp for the night in that very clearing, alongside the cluster of rocks and boulders Stoney had been admiring. The forest had been getting denser and denser as we’d trekked through a sloping valley at the base of two mountains. Which meant there was no telling when, or if, we’d come across another suitable campsite.

  We made two fires.

  The five Sentry set up their own at one end of the large clearing, where they sat around it yelling ceaselessly at one another. Their argument over who was the ranking officer had become even more vigorous with the addition of a fifth soldier to the group. They’d been standoffish all day, refusing to tell us their names and barely speaking to us at all outside of purely necessary questions related to the mission. Even back on the ship, during our voyage over here, the Sentry had made very little effort to interact with anyone but themselves, sometimes even going out of their way to avoid us. But actually, we were glad their evasive ways meant we could stay out of their incessant and petty power struggle.

  We even jokingly started calling their separate campfire the “adult fire,” and our own the “kid fire.”

  Stoney sat away from everyone, near the boulder pile. He seemed to be lost in his own thoughts as he ran his thick, craggy fingers across the various boulders, perhaps entranced by the knowledge that we were drawing ever closer to the fabled Rock One. Its technical name was Corurak, the rarest mineral in the universe. So rare, in fact, that the stone said to be at the center of the amulet was the only quantity of it in existence. At least in this known universe.

  “So what was the deal with that deserted village?” Tiki asked, the firelight making her face glow with strange shadows. “Chumikan or whatever.”

  The six of us, Glam, Ari, Lake, Tiki, Froggy, and me were gathered around the kid fire in a circle, sitting in the dirt, trying to soak up its warmth.

  “I have no idea,” Ari said. “I’ve been wondering that all day.”

  “The residents probably cleared out when the world ended,” I said, not mentioning that the Elven man in Chumikan had told me as much.

  “The world didn’t end,” Glam corrected me. “Some would say it’s only now just beginning.”

  “Yeah, but for most Humans, it probably felt like the world ended when Magic came back,” Ari said. “I mean, suddenly there’s no internet, no phones, no Instagram, or Netflix, or cars, or any of the things that made their lives worth living.”

  We nodded somberly in agreement.

  There was no denying the struggle Humans faced in adapting to this new world. And I’d have been right there with them seven months ago, back when I still had no clue I was really a Dwarf.

  “What do you guys think the Hidden Forest will be like?” Ari asked.

  “Well, based on the last lame fantasy movie I saw, I’m expecting a bunch of clichés,” I said, trying to make a joke instead of telling them what the old man in Chumikan had told me we’d find: death. “You know, like giant talking spiders and trolls in loincloths and sarcastic centaurs and talking trees and stuff like that.”

  But my friends didn’t laugh.

  Aside from a courtesy chuckle from Tiki, the joke actually seemed to make them more nervous than ever. Because even if those things were clichés, if they turned out to be true it wouldn’t make them any less scary or dangerous in real life. And we all knew it.

  “Thy own personage doth be’est enthusiastically pursuing discovery ye roots beholding thine heritage,” Lake said, breaking the nervous silence. “Tis ye nearest semblance ye domain thyne peepers hath beset yonder proximity ye lyfe doth Separate Earth!”

  “It will be cool to see a part of this earth wholly untouched by the modern world,” Ari agreed.

  “I personally don’t care what we find,” Glam declared. “As long as I get to smash stuff!”

  Though she loved smashing things, Glam cle
arly meant this as a joke, and we all burst out laughing.

  “Hey, quiet down over there!” one of the Sentry called out to us from the adult fire.

  “Yeah,” another added. “You trying to broadcast our presence to the world? Huh? To any Elves or monsters nearby, listening in?”

  After scolding us, they went back to their deafening, expletive-laced arguments over who was technically in charge. I even heard one of them try to build her own case around the fact that her toe most closely resembled that of Borin Woodlogger, from the only known remains of a statue of him.

  At the kid fire, we all rolled our eyes and smirked.

  “Would your Sentry warriors tell you their names?” Tiki asked. “The one we washed ashore with wouldn’t even purbogging introduce himself!”

  “No,” Glam said. “It’s weird, right?”

  “They won’t ever reveal their names,” Froggy said, speaking for the first time in hours. “Because they don’t have names.”

  “What do you mean they don’t have names?” Tiki demanded. “Everyone’s got a klonking name!”

  “Not the Sentry,” Froggy said, as we all leaned in. Even Glam seemed unaware of this bit of Dwarven history and tradition. “They all had names. Once. But they gave them up as part of the oath they took when they joined the Sentry Elite Guard.”

  “Why would anyone bloggurgin want to do that?” Tiki asked.

  “I think it sounds cool,” Glam said. “A bunch of nameless warriors!”

  “Where’s the sense in it?” I asked. “Why would having a name matter?”

  “Because a name implies individuality,” Froggy explained, already having said more words in the past two minutes than he had in nearly the whole month on the boat. “Their belief is, in a war or a battle, there’s no place for names. For individuals. Armies aren’t made up of individuals, but of intertwined components that function as one mechanism. A name creates a person, an individual with their own thoughts and feelings, which in turn comes with baggage that distracts from objectives and such. The Sentry Elite are the most effective combat unit among Dwarves because each member pledges an oath devoting their whole life to the larger cause. They relinquish their individual existence to instead become a part of the Sentry Elite, which is devoted only to the protection of the ongoing Dwarven race and nothing else.”

  “How do you know all of this?” Glam asked.

  “My dad told me,” Froggy said, referring to our old mentor and combat instructor Thufir “Buck” Stonequarry Noblebeard. “He used to be in the Sentry Elite.”

  “Used to be?” Ari asked. “I thought you said it was a lifelong commitment?”

  “It’s supposed to be,” Froggy confirmed. “But he was expelled when he met my mother. Getting married and having a kid is bad enough. It’s already grounds for a dishonorable discharge. But the fact that she was an Elf, well . . . he’s lucky he and Dunmor go way back or else he might have been expelled from the Dwarven sect entirely.”

  A long, loaded silence followed. The only sounds were the crackling of the fire and the ongoing argument over rank at the adult fire. So that was why Buck hadn’t lived in the Underground when we first met him. And also partially why he always seemed so perpetually angry with the Dwarven political infrastructure and, well, pretty much everything else.

  I finally cleared my throat and brought the conversation back on track.*

  “Did you guys see any sign of Elves the past couple days?” I asked Froggy, Tiki, and Lake.

  Lake shook his head.

  “We’ve seen nothing but the bloggurgin wilderness,” Tiki said. “Not even wildlife, which is plorping weird.”

  I nodded—she was right: that was weird.

  Ever since magic started coming back, animals across the globe had, for some reason we still couldn’t fully explain, been attacking Dwarves at random. In cities, in zoos, everywhere. And now we were deep inside a remote forest that should have been teeming with wildlife, and yet we hadn’t seen a single squirrel, or even a bird, in days.

  The old man in Chumikan had told me this was because the animals sensed the dangers within the nearby Hidden Forest, now that it was once again accessible from this world. They had fled, hoping to escape impending danger. But again I chose not to share this with the group, as I didn’t see the point in scaring them even more.

  We all fell silent, letting the sounds of the fire crackling and the Sentry arguing fill in the spaces.

  Froggy’s revelation about his dad’s past made me wonder about my own parents. The truth was, I barely knew anything about my mom. She died before I could remember, and my dad almost never talked about her. I didn’t used to question this very much, but as I learned more about my true heritage—being a Dwarf and everything—I couldn’t help but wonder what she had actually been like and why my dad never talked about her.

  Eagan once told me she was an Axebrew and came from a long line of weapon enhancers. But that’s pretty much all I knew.

  And it made me wonder if perhaps my true calling was to be a weapon enhancer, and not some legendary hero. Maybe that was why I was so bad at this: I was meant to be a simple weapon enhancer like my mom. (I mean, if Dwarves were supposedly so enlightened in treating women as equals, why did all the kids get the father’s last name? And their father’s predetermined skills and destinies?) Or what if I was neither of those things and was merely Greg: an epic failure at pretty much everything except somehow making things worse? Or what if I was just supposed to become a dentist or something?

  But the more I’d thought about all this during the long nights aboard the Powerham, the more I’d realized how little sense traditional Dwarven family lines actually made.

  As Dwarves, were we really all predestined for a specific career or hobby based solely on our family line? Was all we would become predetermined based on our last name and our ancestors’ skills? Did any of that really matter? Didn’t we still have a right to do whatever we wanted? Could we, should we, turn our backs on skills we were supposedly destined to be good at?

  What my name was shouldn’t have any bearing on what I am or would become or would do.

  The only thing I really knew was that I almost certainly was not supposed to become anything great. I’d already pretty much rejected the idea of predetermined legacies. I’d made the decision to avoid that path back in San Francisco, when I told Ari to throw the Bloodletter overboard.

  But that was part of what made this new mission so scary.

  When the Bloodletter chose me as its next owner, I’d thought my “destiny” was to save our race, fulfill my namesake, and be a brave, courageous warrior. I was supposed to lead us all to triumph over the Elves and any other foes. But if I didn’t believe that anymore, it meant that anything could happen.

  That my failure was as likely as my success.

  More likely, even, considering my propensity for failure.

  Which meant there was a decent chance, even as we closed in on the supposed whereabouts of the Faranlegt Amulet of Sahar, that we were all doomed regardless of what we found.

  CHAPTER 11

  The Sentry Throw Their Weapons into a Lake

  That’s it?” Glam asked incredulously. “Really?”

  “CONFIRMATORY,” Stoney replied.

  It was late afternoon the next day, and we all stood at the supposed threshold of the Hidden Forest, a magical realm of enchanted lands that had been cut off from the outside world for thousands of years. A realm supposedly containing a great many dangers, unspeakably terrible creatures, and an amulet so powerful it could either save or destroy the world, depending on the owner’s whims and fancies.

  But I sort of agreed with Glam: on the surface, it was pretty underwhelming.

  That morning, we’d gone partially up the side of a small mountain, and then down into a valley between it and another peak. The valley was heavily wooded, and we
had to pick through dense rows of spruce and fir trees until we finally reached a clearing at the edge of a small, clear lake fed by snow runoff from both mountains. We walked around the lake and reached a thick line of trees at the convergence of the twin peaks.

  Don’t get me wrong, the view itself was spectacularly pretty—unlike anything I’d ever seen, or could dream of seeing, in Chicago. But beyond that, we were on a rocky beach at the edge of a remote mountain lake, staring into a row of tall, spindly Ajan spruce trees. It was pretty, sure, but it certainly didn’t look like the doorway to a long-lost enchanted realm.

  “You’re sure this is it?” Ari asked again.

  “PRECISELY,” Stoney bellowed, the delicate word sounding unnatural in his gravelly, loud voice. “PERMEATE YONDER FOLIAGE ADMITTANCE HIDDEN FOREST.”

  “That’s it, then?” Sentry Five asked. “We just got to walk past those trees and we’ll be inside the Hidden Forest? What are we waiting for?”

  “AFOREMENTIONED UNDERTAKING PARADES SPURIOUSLY HUMBLE FACADE,” Stoney warned.

  “How so?” Glam demanded, taking a few steps forward. “It looks pretty simple from here. See trees, walk past trees. Easy as shaving a Buckletooth Felinity, as my grandpa used to say!”

  We watched as Glam marched ahead toward the trees. It seemed for a second as if she’d prove herself right: that there was no trick needed for passing into the ancient magical forest, aside from simply walking into it.

  But when Glam was ten feet from the nearest tree, she suddenly spun around and took a few bewildered steps back toward us.

  She stopped, her eyes wide.

  Glam turned around and tried again. Once more, she spun back toward us just as she neared the trees.

  “What in Hagglewheat’s beard is the meaning of this?” she shouted at the sky.