The Curse of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  “You know, Greg,” Foxflame said. “Elves and Dwarves, actually, are not so dissimilar from one another in our original beliefs.”

  “Really? But we’re so different in almost every other way . . .”

  “Are we?” he asked, and then laughed. “I would argue that things like Elves preferring vegetables over meat, or being slightly taller and thinner on average, or even having different values on the whole, are all superficial characteristics, at best. Those aren’t the things that really make us who we are. Even major differences in belief systems are meaningless—that’s where the Humans have it all wrong. Take my ancient religion after all: Alaflusy Celority. It’s virtually identical to the Dwarves’ original religion.”

  “I didn’t even know we had a religion,” I said.

  “Well, in both of our cultures many of these old ideas became lost with time,” he said. “In Alaflusy Celority, the fundamental belief is that the universe was created from a single point of light by four gods: Bitrix, Keeper of Death; Onja, Keeper of Hope; Igmir, Keeper of Love; Kymtos, Keeper of Life. These are the four guiding principles of being—the only things that are assured in any form of existence. These deities guided the physics of the cosmos, creating life as part of a chain reaction, a virus that moved from one separating piece of energy to the next, constantly evolving and changing on each one in new and different ways. Life was never meant to worship a higher being, but rather to celebrate its own existence and the joys and happiness that consciousness can bring if experienced with a pure spirit. Life is about a constant search for harmony.

  “Your ancient, original religion is called Vapigar drung Struzen. Which means the Followers of Eventuality. The fundamental belief was that all life started with the earth itself. At its core was a single point of energy. The original Dwarven gods, Woohr, God of Elements; Ereus, God of Light; and Xuntar, God of Dark, collectively planted life there, like a seed. And from it bloomed the planet itself, layers upon layers of rock and soil and geothermal forces that were once considered mystical. From there it spread throughout the universe, like a flower blowing pollen across a field with the wind, life following with it. Your religion was also never about worshipping gods, but rather about worshipping the elements, the light, and the dark, and all the things they bring to life. Are you seeing the similarities now? Of course, neither race has much use for these types of fantastic tales anymore.”

  “Don’t you believe in them?”

  “In a way,” he said. “I mean, whether they happened exactly like this or not doesn’t matter. It’s the spirit of them that I admire. And wish we all still believed in. But mostly, my new one true god is . . . ice cream. Good Lord Univar the Almighty himself do I love ice cream.”

  He looked at me, his dark youthful eyes so serious. And then we both exploded into fits of laughter. Lixi looked up at us from a nearby pew where she’d been reading and rolled her eyes with a grin.

  “The point is, Greg,” Foxflame said, “just love as much as you can. Even if it’s things like ice cream. If we only celebrated the good rather than dwelled on the bad, everything would be different. It sounds lame, but if this were a universal trait we all shared all the time, it would actually work.”

  “I agree,” I said. “But you can’t tell people what to do . . .”

  “Of course not!” he said, and laughed. “These aren’t realistic hopes of mine. Just fanciful visions of a world with sugarcoated rainbows and cotton-candy clouds, right? But a guy can dream. Anyway, want to see me do a sick plasma spin flip into a salad grind on the front railing over there?”

  He held up his skateboard, that flighty grin planted on his face.

  I nodded, smiling in spite of everything.

  Through it all, though, meeting new Elves, even becoming friends with some of them, I still never forgot about my Dwarven companions. My nights were tortured wondering if they were okay. I had led them to New Orleans on a rogue mission, after all. If they were indeed hurt or worse, it was a simple, undeniable fact that it was my fault. But in the moments I could get past that, and convince myself that they were still alive, I thought a lot about how amazing it would be for my friends and other Dwarves to come and live here for a little while. They would see firsthand that most Elves were not at all inherently bad. In fact, they were just like us in most ways. In the ways that really mattered: they cared about their friends and family and helping one another survive more than anything else.

  But I knew that wasn’t possible. You could change a Dwarf’s or an Elf’s mind one at a time. Maybe. But it wouldn’t be fast enough. It would take too long, and even then there’d be certain Elves (like Locien Aldaron or Dr. Yelwarin) and certain Dwarves (like Ooj the Leprechaun) who would never fully change. Never let themselves see the truth.

  And that was what broke my heart. Knowing that war was still probably inevitable, whether I wanted it or not. Whether I had changed or not.

  And that my new Elven friends would one day again (probably sooner than we all expected) be my enemies.

  CHAPTER 34

  My Dad’s Magical Utopia Gets Even Farther Away

  Eventually Edwin was back.

  I think it was roughly eleven or twelve days after our first chess game. But like I said, keeping track of time as a prisoner in an old concrete cell was difficult. Before long the days began to bleed together, especially once I started enjoying my time with Lixi and Foxflame and the other Elves.

  But it was definitely in the morning when he showed up at my cell again. I know this because he woke me by shaking my shoulder and repeating one of our favorite bad puns (one that was so bad and nonsensical we couldn’t help but to laugh every time we heard it) back from the good old days when our friendship was simpler (and still intact).

  “Egg morning,” he said. “It’s a brewtiful sunrise and I like you a waffle lot.”

  There was humor in his eyes. And for a moment, I almost believed we were back in the good old days, in his room having a sleepover, the past four months having all been a bad dream. But of course that wasn’t the case. And the prison bars behind his grinning face reminded me of that right away.

  “Not even a pity laugh?” he said.

  I managed a grin.

  “Okay, good enough,” he said. “Come on, let’s go get some breakfast.”

  I followed him to the prison cafeteria, which was empty, either because it was too early for anyone else to be up eating or because he’d wanted it that way. A standard American breakfast of bacon, eggs, toast, and hash browns was already laid out on two plates.

  He didn’t seem outright friendly, but he was definitely treating me differently than at our last meeting. I wondered if part of him hoped that my time here with the Elves had allowed me to see the truth: that they weren’t naturally evil—just as he’d been telling me since the moment I’d found out I was a Dwarf. And now that my mind was clear, maybe he hoped we could begin to rebuild what we once had?

  As we ate, I noticed something different about Edwin. Underneath the friendliness, he also seemed worried. Stressed. Perhaps even afraid—of what, I had no clue. I still didn’t know where he’d been, or what he’d been doing during his nearly two weeks away, but he looked less confident than when he first told me he would save the world.

  I could see it in the way he was wringing his hands together between bites of eggs. Or in the way that, every time he wasn’t looking at me, his face formed into a deep frown. And most of all by what he said to me after a few silent first bites:

  “I think someone is trying to stab me in the back,” he said. Then he quickly smiled and shook his head. “No, not you. I mean, whatever damage you caused, I know you didn’t mean to. That doesn’t mean I’m fully over it, but I know you didn’t intend to harm me or my family.”

  “Oh . . .” I said, completely unsure of how to respond.

  This surprisingly made Edwin laugh, but it faded quickly and
he wrinkled his forehead again with concern. And in that brief silence, I noticed for the first time that there wasn’t a single guard in sight—it was just me and him alone in the cafeteria—surely not by accident.

  “I think I have a mole here, a double agent,” he said. “And they’re trying to sabotage my plan. That’s the thing about Elves, Greg. We’re not exactly like the Dwarves think we are, but you guys are right about one thing: We’re good liars. We’re masters of deception. I just don’t know who I can trust anymore. Except you, oddly enough, as hilarious as that sounds now, given our circumstances. At least with Dwarves, they always say what they mean, for better or worse.”

  I sat there stunned.

  There was so much I wanted to say and ask him, but I didn’t. Partly because I didn’t want to break this spell. This moment at breakfast was the closest I’d felt to being friends again since it all went wrong back at the former Hancock building. But also because his long, tired sigh sort of told me he didn’t really want to talk about it anymore.

  He confirmed as much a moment later.

  “I just need a half day to relax like old times,” he said, his throat tight. “Being a leader is hard, Greg—which is the understatement of the decade, surely. I just want to play chess and joke around for a few hours. Can you do that with me? Even if you’re only pretending?”

  I nodded slowly, still struggling to find any words.

  “Of course,” I finally managed to say. “That would be awesome.”

  During the rest of breakfast I told him that I’d been treated very well in his absence. Our conversation eventually shifted into us laughing fondly over what a character Foxflame was, and how funny Lixi could be—sometimes so subtly that you didn’t even realize it until hours later. Edwin called her undercover funny.

  Afterward, he led to me an office deep inside the prison. A chess game was already set up on the small desk, with two chairs facing each other. We sat down and started playing without saying anything.

  I was white this time, since we always alternated. The last time he’d been white and had destroyed me despite using a bizarre new strategy that I never could have envisioned working, regardless of who was using it.

  This time around, he played much more like he used to. He followed the book lines and made logical, if not conservative, moves. Then again, Edwin rarely played anything exactly the same way twice. My motto in chess took after my dad’s: Master one opening before moving on to more. But Edwin always had a different perspective: Keep the enemy guessing and explore all sorts of avenues toward victory—you never know what you might stumble upon.

  For most of the game, the conversation was light like Edwin had requested. We talked about old times. Things we had done in the past that had made us laugh.

  Like the time we stayed up all night watching this weird, but oddly compelling Korean TV show on Netflix about a female pasta chef and her misogynistic boss, who also happened to be her love interest! It had started out as a joke: Let’s watch one episode, just out of pure curiosity. But then before we knew it, we had stayed up all night binge-watching the entire first season. And by episode four we were barely chiming in to make fun of the cheesy production values and melodrama anymore, but rather simply enjoying the story.

  Or like the time we rode around the city on our bikes on May 5 wearing Santa costumes that Edwin had bought. We carried huge, red-velvet sacks chock-full of Wendy’s hamburgers that we passed out to pretty much anyone who would accept them—which was surprisingly just about everyone we asked. In fact, we emptied our bags so fast that we next hit up a nearby McDonald’s to reload, and then a local burger joint called Fatso’s Last Stand for the third refill.

  After that, it sort of became a tradition—we did the same thing the next two May fifths. Except we changed up our outfit each year. In year two we dressed up as Mario Kart characters, complete with fake Mario “karts.” And in year three Edwin dressed up in a giant foam novelty-burrito-mascot outfit, and I wore a huge panda-bear costume.

  Sadly, year four had been just a few weeks away when our friendship imploded. We’d been discussing a few different costume options for that year, including the two burglar villains from Home Alone, or Jason from Friday the 13th and Michael Myers from Halloween.

  But our conversation as we played chess wasn’t stuck totally in the past. We also talked about all the funny theories we’d read or heard about that Humans were coming up with to try to explain all the weird magic-related stuff happening lately. Some of our favorites involved a race of aliens called the Reptilians, who just happened to look like, you guessed it, giant lizards. And then there was the one in which it was all a conspiracy orchestrated by the Australian government to bring more attention to some koala crisis.

  Edwin even updated me on the state of things at the PEE. A lot of kids had dropped out when his parents died—which made sense since it was a mostly Elven school and many of the associated families went into panic mode and still hadn’t fully calmed down.

  About thirty minutes into the game, I looked down at the chessboard and realized we were still tied. Which was shocking. I rarely beat him, and even the six or seven times I remembered doing so, I was pretty sure he’d let me win. And I couldn’t remember beating him, or even getting a draw, since at least the end of sixth grade, which was hundreds of matches ago. But yet here I was, approaching endgame and still tied in total material.

  He must have realized the same thing, because pretty much all conversation ceased at that point and we both just focused on the game. And even though I got to an endgame where I thought I might at least manage a draw (he had his king, three pawns, and a bishop versus my king, three pawns, and a knight), he still managed to eke out a win by slipping a pawn past my pieces to get a new queen.

  At that point, I resigned, knowing even a draw would be impossible.

  “Well, I’m impressed,” Edwin said afterward, almost looking a little shocked he came even that close to a draw. “I thought you said you haven’t been playing much.”

  “I haven’t,” I said. “Or, well, I’ve been playing against my friend Lake, but he’s honestly pretty terrible. And my dad would still be good if he could ever make it through a whole game without an episode.”

  “Well, you played really well,” he said. “And I had a lot of fun. This has been just what I needed. Thank you, Greg. I mean it.”

  I nodded.

  And that’s when I ruined it all.

  In my defense, I didn’t mean to. It all started out innocently enough. I mean there we were, playing chess and joking around like old times. And it was really giving me hope that our friendship was salvageable. For some crazy reason, it gave me the confidence to bring up magic again.

  So I did—even quoting my last conversation with Foxflame, sharing with Edwin his belief that we’re really not all that different, and how it tied in to his fanciful vision for a better world. I pointed out that it wasn’t so far off from what my dad has said about magic.

  “I mean, my dad still could be right,” I said. “Maybe magic is the way we can get other Elves and Dwarves, and Humans and other creatures for that matter, to see the truth. To realize that we’re all more the same than we think. That the specific differences between us all are meaningless when it comes down to what really matters.”

  “We don’t disagree about any of that,” Edwin said. “Just on the how to achieve it part.”

  “I think magic could actually do that,” I said. “Magic could be, like, the ultimate Hallmark card come to life? I mean, we can’t really know because we’ve never known a fully magical world.”

  “No way,” Edwin said. “Like I said before: so far magic has only brought death and destruction. And it will get worse when it comes back fully. Right now it’s only been strong enough to affect small areas for limited moments in time. But what happens when enough magic has returned to start making planes lose power midf
light and fall from the sky? Have you thought about that?”

  I shook my head.

  It was a good point. But I still thought it was a shortsighted way to think of things. After all, Edwin was approaching this from the perspective of the modern world. But the return of magic would mean a global shift away from everything we thought we knew. There wouldn’t be any planes to fall from the sky soon enough. Especially not if we showed the world what was coming before we got to that point. If we got the planes out of the sky before that could happen.

  I explained all of that to Edwin. And then I went even further.

  “The world as it is now, without magic, has a ton of problems,” I said. “Just because Elves have it good as the überwealthy elite doesn’t mean war, terrorism, starvation, disease, poverty, etcetera, aren’t killing hundreds of thousands of people every year. You’ve been living in a virtual wonderland, but what about everyone else? Are you really going to just accept that you have it good and others don’t and be fine with that? As long as number one is covered, then, oh well?”

  “Well, unfortunately that’s just the reality of the world,” Edwin said. “I don’t like it, but that’s how it’s always been. Even back in Separate Earth. You can’t please everyone—you would drive yourself insane trying.”

  “But maybe you can!” I said. “That’s my whole point. What’s the one thing that we’ve never tried in history to solve all the world’s problems? Because wars and religion and industry certainly haven’t done the trick. Not for all people.”

  “Oh geez, I see where this is going already,” Edwin said, rolling his eyes.

  “Right,” I said. “Magic. So maybe that’s the one thing that will actually work? Who’s to say the New Magical Age would actually be worse for most people? There have been plenty of horrible wars and violence over the past so many thousand years without magic, after all. So we don’t have that much to lose by trying. I mean, you guys got your mansions and luxury cars and private jets, you could lose all that stuff, but what about the billions living in poverty or in daily violence? They have nothing to lose.”