The Rise of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  “Neat,” Edwin said.

  I nodded.

  And then we waited.

  I could only imagine the turtle’s head gagging and spitting up a bloody piece of my shirt. Only imagine my friends at first thinking this confirmed the turtle had indeed devoured me and was now just burping up the leftovers. Only imagine the moment Glam grabbed it and clutched it to her face, finally seeing Edwin’s writing. Only imagine half of them getting excited and the other half nervously certain this was some sort of trick. Only imagine the debate that ensued. Only imagine the first of them to throw up their hands and step forward and recite the same riddle answer that we had. And I could only imagine that person would be Ari.

  Several long, agonizing minutes went by as I imagined all these things.

  “Do you think it even made it out?” Edwin finally asked. “Maybe we should just press on alone?”

  “A few more minutes,” I said.

  Edwin nodded.

  As if on cue, several seconds later, we heard a girl screaming. It got louder and then Ari flew from the left tunnel and landed softly on her feet between us. She grinned at me and pushed us out of the way as two more howls echoed down the tunnels. Glam and Lixi both emerged and landed on the ground moments later.

  One by one, our companions arrived, sliding down the chute after being swallowed by the massive turtle’s heads outside. The last one down was Rhistel. Based on his expression, as he landed on the ground, I figured he was not the sort of person that enjoyed carnival rides.

  “What about Blob?” I asked, once Rhistel confirmed he was the last.

  “He wanted to stay out there,” Glam said. “Made up some story about patrolling the perimeter or something.”

  “Well, I gotta say,” Edwin said, “I’m sort of relieved. Can you guys even imagine what he’d smell like inside a confined space like this?”

  We all laughed uncomfortably, then turned to face the passageway opposite the neck tunnels. It was roughly carved into an uneven oval. Beyond the opening, a few feet of tunnel could be seen by the glowing light from the green crystals embedded in the walls. After that, it was pitch-black.

  “Between you and me, Greg,” Ari whispered as she stood beside me, “I think Blob was scared. Being trapped alone inside of a rock for so long definitely had some sort of psychological effect on him.”

  I nodded, realizing she was probably right. Blob didn’t seem like the sort to be afraid of much. But it was hard to argue that he might think twice about being coaxed into a confined space in a rock again.

  “Well,” Edwin said as we all stood at the entrance of the unknown caverns within the mountains, “I suppose I can lead the way this time.”

  He drew his sword, and the blade ignited with magical blue fire, like it had when we fought on Navy Pier. Even though that had only been roughly six months ago, it felt like years with everything else that had happened.

  Edwin held up his makeshift torch and stepped into the tunnel.

  CHAPTER 33

  We Find Out Our Existence Is Insignificant and Meaningless and Nothing Really Matters Anyway

  I bet you expect we encountered a maze—a labyrinth of impossible tunnels straight from an M. C. Escher drawing, complex and impossible to navigate.

  Or perhaps a long-dormant dragon, sleeping in his chambers.

  Or maybe a booby-trapped floor, into which one of the lesser-known people from our group, like perhaps Wrecking Ball, falls to his death.

  Or maybe a mutated Gollum-like creature with glowing eyes and shiny, slick gray skin and sharp teeth covered in rotting flesh.

  Well, sorry to disappoint, but this time there was no maze. No monsters. No booby traps.

  The tunnel extended several hundred feet straight ahead, along an uneven but surprisingly accommodating floor. Edwin’s flaming sword lit up the whole thing, what with the highly reflective green crystals in the walls. Eventually, the tunnel led to a huge cavern filled with stuff, such as: a treasure trove of, well, treasure (including gold coins, gems, jewelry, and more), old books, scrolls, weapons, pottery, cups, chalices, crowns, scepters, chairs, tables, couches, and almost anything else you could imagine.

  The cavern was the size of a massive sports stadium, and it was literally piled, nearly wall to wall, with stuff. Some of the stacks of books were thirty feet high or more. Other piles (like one particular mound of old bronze coins near the back) towered even higher than that, so high that the light cast from all the burning torches on the walls didn’t even reach the top of it.

  But the cavern was large enough that plenty of it was not covered in stuff. There were walkways and rows and spaces among all the junk, almost as if it were some sort of library or antique store (and not just a storage facility), where people could walk around and browse at will.

  It almost looked like one of the huge flea markets my dad used to take me to as a kid, the ones that took place inside college football domes, or on commercial parking lots. Except, unlike those, where hundreds or thousands of shoppers picked through the junk and haggled with the vendors, there were no people here. And most of this stuff was not junk. Even the old books and scrolls almost certainly contained some valuable history or information or records. Most people probably wouldn’t stash meaningless books alongside piles of treasure and fancy weapons inlaid with gold and gemstones.

  Nearly everything inside this cavern held at least some value.

  “How are we going to find the amulet among all this crap?” Glam asked.

  “We start digging, I guess . . .” Edwin said softly.

  “But it will take years!” Ari said, even as she admired a well-crafted lance resting on a weapon rack to her right, near the door.

  “Oh, so you think if you find a room full of items, you can just take whatever you like without asking?” a voice boomed, echoing off the walls as if it was coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  The voice had natural authority, yet still sounded old and worn, as if it hadn’t been used in hundreds of years. It was also prickly and angry and sent chills down into my bones.

  “Is that normal where you come from?” the voice demanded. We looked around, trying to find the source. “Simply taking what doesn’t belong to you!”

  I wanted to defensively lie and claim that we weren’t going to “just take” anything. But Dwarves don’t lie, at least as much as we can help it. And so I tried to think of another way to reason with this person, whoever it was. But Edwin beat me to it, having no trouble lying at all.

  “We had no plans to take anything without asking,” he said, looking around the huge room. “We seek an amulet, and we will pay handsomely for it.”

  “You cannot lie to me, boy!” the voice seethed, not getting louder, but certainly more ferocious. “I know all!”

  “But we will pay for it!” I countered. “We’ll give you anything and everything we have. Please? The world depends on it.”

  “Oh, does it, now?” the voice asked, calmer, almost mocking. “And how do you know this?”

  “Well, because . . .” I started, but then stopped, realizing I wasn’t sure I did really know anything.

  “There’s a group of Elves amassing an army,” Edwin began. “They go by the name of—”

  “Verumque Genus?” the voice interrupted. “Oh, yes, I know all about them.”

  “Well, then you must know what they’re up to,” Edwin said. “That’s why we seek the amulet! It’s the only way to stop them from unleashing their army of monsters on the world.”

  The voice didn’t respond at first. And I figured maybe we had gotten to it, maybe it was actually considering what we were saying. But then it finally spoke again and dashed those hopes.

  “Well?” the voice sneered.

  “Well, what?” Edwin shot back.

  “I’m still waiting for you to tell me how the world depends on you s
topping the Verumque Genus,” the voice said.

  We looked at one another, flabbergasted. If it knew so much, how could this thing not see the harm the Verumque Genus Elves and their army of monsters posed?

  “Their army will kill millions in their quest for power, maybe even billions,” Edwin finally said. “How is that not clear?”

  The voice laughed, cold and bitter.

  The laughter stopped abruptly as a figure came walking into view from around a pile of fancy wooden chairs. It was a lanky old man, perhaps Human or Elven, hunched, limping, and wearing a faded brown robe. His hood was up over his head, but wisps of white hair and the edges of a beard were visible, poking out near the neck. Glimpses of wrinkled and worn skin could be seen by the torchlight if you looked closely enough.

  He stopped thirty feet away and then looked up, his face still mostly obscured by shadows and the hood.

  “It’s quite clear that the Verumque Genus’s plan would indeed result in the deaths of many,” the old man finally agreed. “But what is less clear is how that would affect the larger world, as a whole, to the point where it would end.”

  “Billions of people will die!” Edwin nearly yelled. “I would call that affecting the world in a major way!”

  “Yes, the deaths of billions of creatures would surely be tragic, but the world would not end,” the old man said calmly. “Far from it. I assure you the world will go on either way. Damaged? Yes. Scorched? Perhaps. Bursting with tragedy? Surely. But it will continue to exist. And eventually the Verumque Genus and their monsters will die themselves, or be unseated, and then another group will take over. Perhaps this group will rule with even more terror and destruction than those before them. Or perhaps they will pretend their society is peaceful. Either way, the world will go on. Even once this planet is a shell of itself, and no longer suitable to host most living beings, the world itself will continue. So to say the world depends on anything is, frankly, just incorrect.

  “Life in this universe has spanned billions of years before this, and it will span billions more, no matter what any of you do or say. Do not be so self-centered as to think the very nature of existence revolves around you! It does not know you or care about you. Existence is merely that, a metaphysical continuation of events, bound by all life everywhere. One person, one race, one planet, one galaxy, none of these individual parts matters; only the whole matters. So no. The world, literally, does not depend on you finding or retrieving anything from this room.”

  The old man finished ranting, having taken several more steps toward us in the process.

  We were stunned into silence, perhaps knowing that, ultimately, he was right.

  Theoretically.

  But to reduce our existence to something so insignificant was unfair, even if it was technically true. Because to us it wasn’t true. We only knew and experienced our own lives, and we should not, by definition, know or do or see anything beyond that scope.

  “But you’re disregarding the experience of our own existence,” I finally said. “The heartache and pain that people on this, or any other, planet feel matters. It’s real to us, and it’s all we have. It is our world. Your nihilism shouldn’t justify allowing evil to prevail! Even if we are but one small part of the world. It’s the only part we know and—”

  The old man silenced me with a savage snarl and a wave of his hand.

  “What you say matters not!” he hissed. “When you have been stuck in here for as long as I have, the mortality of individual life becomes meaningless. If you were to live this long, and see the things I’ve seen, you’d have the very same beliefs I do, trust me. But all of this is beside the point; for you see, nothing in here is for sale. Nothing can be taken or removed without permission. And I do not grant it! In fact, you are all trespassing!” The old man’s voice was rising to near thunderous levels, which didn’t seem possible from such a frail form. “And trespassers, according to ancient Thurian Law, can be killed on sight!”

  The man lifted both hands then, and suddenly the old chairs in the pile next to him were flying toward us at impossible speeds, a tornado of twirling wooden legs and backrests.

  Before I had a chance to react, or even think about casting a spell, one of the heavy wooden chairs collided with my face, and I dropped to the ground like dead weight.

  CHAPTER 34

  What Do Sir Neel the Jackal, Nobleman Rainaldus the Honest, and Ranellewellenar Lightmaster Have in Common?

  Thankfully, because Dwarven bones are so strong, my face did not shatter on impact with the hard chair.

  But that didn’t mean it hadn’t hurt (it really had). Or that the cartilage in my nose wasn’t broken (it definitely was). Or that I wasn’t completely dazed for several seconds as blood ran down my chin (I don’t really remember).

  Then the inside of the cavern exploded with Elven magic and arrows.

  I looked up just in time to see every single spell cast and arrow fired miss the old man by a wide margin. It had to be defensive magic of some sort. I’d seen Edwin and his Elves in battle before, and their aim was deadly accurate.

  The old man reacted to the attacks as if he were sipping hot tea. His movements were slow, almost bored, yet graceful and probably a lot quicker than they appeared.

  He countered our attack by sending hundreds of bronze coins from a nearby pile whizzing at us. They zipped past like little bullets. One coin splintered a chair in half next to me, as if it was made of balsa wood and not varnished walnut.

  I quickly transformed myself into stone as more coins pelted the area. Several bounced off my granite exterior.

  I turned back to flesh-and-blood Dwarf and climbed to my feet just in time to see an entire ten-person dining room table hurtling toward us, spinning end over end.

  I dove behind a pile of books as the table crashed down onto the stone floor with a horrible screech.

  I peeked around the corner.

  The old man was still exactly where he’d been standing when the attack began, totally unconcerned by the arrows clattering to the ground around him.

  I quickly summoned a wind spell.

  A burst of air rushed past me from the entrance of the cavern, so powerful that it toppled a stack of books nearby.

  My wind spell collided with the area where the old man stood. Debris and junk went flying behind him in all directions.

  Yet he remained totally unmoved and unaffected.

  He looked right at me, and beneath the shadow of his hood, I saw an amused smirk.

  Was this funny to him?

  My nose was broken!

  Then I saw Glam and Lake emerge from behind piles of old chalices and sacks of coins and charge toward the man from both flanks. Glam had her ax at the ready, and Lake was pinwheeling his own around his head like a propeller.

  The old man, still looking right at me, casually flicked a hand in each of their directions. Glam and Lake both went sprawling backward as if hit by an invisible fist. Their weapons clattered to the floor.

  I was about to pull my new sword free and charge him when Blob suddenly appeared to my right, at the mouth of the cavern.

  “Hey, guys!” he said, his unfortunate stench following him inside. “I got lonely waiting outside, so I finally decided to answer the riddle and . . . Hey! What’s going on in here?”

  Everyone stopped and stared at the smelly blob that had just stumbled into the middle of our battle. Even the old man. In fact, he hadn’t just stopped fighting, but had also finally taken a few steps forward and pulled down his hood.

  A strange expression formed on his gaunt and ancient face, framed by that long wispy white hair and long white beard.

  At first I assumed the old man was just shocked to see a talking, sentient blob. But then I saw recognition in his eyes.

  “Blob,” the old man said in a hoarse whisper.

  “Master?” Blob responded, sou
nding shocked.

  “This is your old master?” Ari asked, peeking out from her hiding spot behind a pile of parchment scrolls. “The one who enslaved you and was always so mean?”

  “Well, I did sort of deserve it,” Blob said, rolling slowly toward the old man.

  “You did,” the old man confirmed, taking a cautious step forward himself.

  Which meant this nihilistic, ancient (yet undeniably powerful) old man was really Blob’s old master. The Human knight once known as Sir Neel the Jackal, then later known by the name Nobleman Rainaldus the Honest. Which, if he really had just been performing magic, meant that some Humans could apparently perform magic as well. But that couldn’t be right either. If this was the same guy, then he’d be like a gazillion years old, and Humans didn’t live that long.

  “Why did you trap me in that rock, Master?” Blob asked, still rolling toward him. “I know I was a failure, but I always tried my best.”

  “Ah, my dear old friend, Blob,” Sir Neel or Rainaldus or whatever his name was said. “How many times do I have to tell you to stop calling me Master? I never owned you . . . You were my, well, my friend, I suppose. My traveling companion at the very least.”

  If blobs could cry, Blob was doing it, as little streams of funky-smelling liquid ran down his curved sides.

  “Then why were you always ordering me around?” Blob asked.

  “Because you were always telling stories I’d already heard so many times!” the old man said. “Giving you jobs gave you something to do, something to shut you up for a while.”

  The words themselves were a little mean, but the man said them with fondness—and I think Blob recognized that.

  “But why did you seal me inside a stone?”

  “For your own protection,” the old man said. “I had a duty to uphold. A new mission to embark on, given to me by the Fairies, that would change everything. Had you not been protected by the power of the Sword of Anduril, you likely would not have survived.”