After a good bath, a healthy session of annoying Cornelio with endless jokes about eyes, a crude tug of war with Mariana for the dear life of the towel, and grabbing some supplies, we departed, teleporting back to the desert of Notmibia. I had traced in my mind our way from there to the hidden town that jealously guarded the library.

I guided our water-waterdog through the scorching sands. Eventually Mariana granted me enough control to be able to drift on the leeward side of dunes. How she did that, I had no idea, but I had the time of my life dicking around, riding a giant, aqueous newfie.

Even in that monotonous landscape, I had the sun to guide me. It didn’t really matter if it went from “east to west” or “west to east”. Any coordinate system is relative. I just had to move to, what to me, was northeast: dawnward and to the left.

“Mariana, I just thought about it, don’t you have a summon or call able to fly?”

“Call Forth Hell Sled!” she answered after a few seconds.

“How much fire are we talking about,” I said, mainly because I trusted Mariana’s common sense to be on holidays.

“One point two times ten to the minus nine Australias,” she informed almost mechanically. She then farted and the bubbles lazily rose out of the newfie’s body. Thanks Mariana.

“That’s a lot of fire. Probably not good for desert daytime.”

“Are invokes okay?” she asked in a sudden burst of brilliance.

“How many categories of non-necromantic summons are there?”

“I have no idea, Walter, I picked up all the spells I could without reading them. I have to search every time you ask,” she whined, and then howled in disgrace.

“How many spells do you have, Mariana? In total.”

“Enough to solve any situation that arises, I am sure!”

I think its high time to apologize for the thorough abuse I am subjecting exclamation marks to, but they are Mariana’s favorite punctuation. I tried to introduce her to appropriate use of dialogue tags in her telepathic terrorism attacks, the ones she calls “normal communication”. But, as you may imagine, the default model of Golden Retriever does not include an indoor voice (or indoor telepathy) nor the capacity to understand why sounding excited all the time is an undesirable trait.

“Invoke something not lethal to me that can fly us to the Library City.”

She warned me to stand back and, once the newfie and I were far enough, she raised her snout and howled.

Her cry shook the land and stirred the skies. Clouds gathered and dressed like the goth sluts they always were. Thunder rolled. It didn’t roll a six like in Discworld, no, this was thunder that refused to role play. Boring thunder. The sands shifted uneasy, maybe even distressed. The air fizzled around me. I told it to shut up and watch. It mumbled insults against my dear mother and kept on fizzling.

Then, I had to stress my eyesight to behold the head of a black Chihuahua that popped up from the sands.

“Spoiler: Be not afraid,” said the Chihuahua. “Trigger warning: Afraidfuling things.”

Then the trembling became a full-on earthquake, and rings of concatenated dog heads rose from the sands, one at a time, some intersecting each other perpendicularly, some floating inside the sphere defined by the bigger ones. If you looked the at heads in one particular way, they were spinning, but if you tried to change your perspective of them, they were still, but in turns, the head of a, let’s say, German Shepherd, mutated instantly to those of a Rottweiler, while the Rottweiler next to latter mutated to a Beagle, and so on.

The core was made of dog tails arranged like feathers on wings. There was, if one wants to call it so, a central spine that united a wing of tails. The tails swerved once and again, changed both their directions and movement patterns, but, more than anything, their shape. The Chihuahua was just a sort of ornamentation on the inner circles. The core of everything, with fiery eyes and an ass many would kill for, was a Corgi. A Corge, if it strikes your fancy.

“Be not afraid,” said the Corgi

“How can I be not afraid when you are ominously thicc?” I am sorry I ever uttered these words, being terminally online does things to a man’s mind.

“You look so calm.”

“How do I look?” asked Mariana.

“Small and frail.”

“Is that good or bad girl behavior.”

The Corge turned to me, searching for answers. Sadly for him, my eyes held none.

“You are more dog than us. Before you we bow, Virgin Mariana.”

“I order you to fly us to wherever Walter says!”

“As you wish, my fair lady,” answered the cangel, solemnly.

I started levitating towards the Corge.

“I didn’t consent to having my gravitational field messed with.”

“You behold a Cangel, mortal. My sole aura is a blessing upon the living,” He yelled at my face, the sound coming from every direction at once. “Where do we go?” he added, playfully.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

I pointed with my hand, and the Cangel levitated Mariana, who started making a swimming motion with her legs.

“Why do I feel like swimming?”

I caressed her head when she orbited close to me. “Because you are stupid, Mar.”

The massive being gently soared into the skies, with us held in place by what seemed to be nothing but its divine will.

“Fasten your faith, don’t stick the hands past the outer rings, don’t touch the Corgi’s butt,” he informed, flatly.

We rose above the dunes and the cacti became green dots on the sand canvas. The curves of the dunes were clear from our vantage point, and their ridges were a multitude of gorgeous asymmetrically bicolored snakes: one of their halves golden, one shaded. Was the Atacama or the Sahara so beautiful from above? Were the deserts that belonged to us as gorgeous as this loaned one, whose fate was to disappear for our benefit?

“Walter, look, a ball!” Mariana tried to swim down into the desert.

“Mariana, you could not possibly see a ball from here.”

“I have ball sensing skills since level one.”

It made sense, she was a Golden Retriever. I, an Argentinian, had resistance to most homeless stabby-happy people. I was floating thanks to a Biblically Accurate Corgi, so complaining about the logic of the situation was uncalled for.

Mariana kept trying to reach for the ball as we flew past the spot it was on.

“No…” she said, and trailed off into a whimper.

“Next time we are in the castle remind me about the ball with the word ‘idiot’ on it.”

She reanimated like she was one of my belts, “Yes!”

And so, for about an hour, we kept on soaring the desert skies, finding no cloud in our path, watching the object of forbidden desire (Squishable Corgi butt) wiggle in front of us.

----------------------------------------

A veces me dan ganas de iniciar la narración en mi lengua madre. La que oí al crecer, la que mi padre y mi madre siguen hablando al día de hoy. Esa en la que descubrí a mis autores favoritos, en la que me enamoré por primera vez y la cual you, slew of subhuman waste, don’t know how to read.

For fractions of a second we could witness the library’s settlement, an ephemeral mirage floating adrift on the sea of quartz and feldspar. It ebbed and flowed out of existence, a mixed breed of stroboscopic light and seashore.

In those instant images the variety of architectural styles stood out. On some buildings the round shapes ruled, where others were faithful believers of the angle and the edge. The one that resembled a gothic cathedral rested next to a minimalist, colorless erection with four walls and a flat, if slightly slanted, roof.

All the books in one library, all the towns in one city.

“Land somewhere safe and far enough from the city to not cause trouble,” I barked some orders to the Cangel. “Mariana, dismiss your invocation as soon as we start walking towards our destination. But dismiss him for real, don’t crash him on some unsuspecting motherfucker’s home.”

“That’s a complex order.”

I sighed. “Solve for the roots of 4th degree polynomials to entertain yourself in the meanwhile.”

She started wagging her tail with a violence often unheard of outside of the Israel-Palestine border.

“Now that’s an easy order!”

We descended in a way comparable to the tetracorallia population at the Permian-Triassic boundary. The rings of dog heads impacted first and collapsed in a serial fashion. To this the Corge just shrugged, accepting his catastrophic fate before colliding with the ground and exploding in a wet-dog scented cloud of light. As for Mariana and me, she enjoyed being shoot against a dune. I managed to stabilize myself before impacting the sand by making an improvised parachute out of my belts. The belts complained, but breaking a couple of my own bones was not in my bucket list for this trip.

A tail sprouted from the nearest hybrid of dune and crate impact. It oscillated, and it was the most mirthful of metronomes.

I plucked Mariana out of the ground. And so I held her in my hand, a sandy, squirming, carrot of a bitch. She was barking in a low voice, and her eyes were closed.

She had fallen asleep in the few seconds it took me to recover from the fall and search for her.

I left her go and she collapsed to the floor, snoring.

“Wake up, couch potato in training.”

She made noises unbecoming of a creature of God, kicked a bit, and settled back into her sleep.

Running out of alternatives, I picked her up from the lose skin of the neck and dragged her all the way to the city.

The closer I got to the settlement, the longer the images lasted.

“Halt!” a man in white plate armor shouted at me when I got some dozens meters away from the first building of the settlement.

“Word to the wise: If you are aspiring to be a Grand Wizard or Dragon or Titan or whatever, you were born with the wrong color palette,” I advised the good, probably misguided fellow.

“Sir, you fit the description of a wanted man. Would you mind answering some questions?” he asked, ignoring my brilliant recommendation.

“Is the man you are looking for that Walter motherfucker?”

He nodded.

“He dresses in belts, just like you, and has a Golden Retriever. Just like you.”

“You have the wrong man: This is a goldador,” I skillfully bullshitted.

“A what?” he asked, inspecting me from head to toe.

“Mix between Golden and Labrador.”

Mariana opened her eyes wide and stood like a flash.

“I am no dirty goldador! I am purebred!”

“A consequence of being a mixed breed is that she is in denial. And breedist.”

“I don’t buy it. Come with me.” He tried to grab my arm, but I stepped back.

“Listen, reason it: both her parents are purebred, a Labrador and a Golden. Most of her half siblings are purebred.”

“My father was no Labrador!” kept on complaining my little piece of hell.

“She believes her mother cheated and lied.”

The brown skinned man scratched his shin. I kept glancing at his hideous pointed helmet every few seconds.

“My brother is the same, you know. My mother is a fine black lady, and my father a fair skinned gentleman, a foreigner. My little brother, who fosters a hitherto unheard of hatred for the skin decolored, holds that mom had him in an escapade with a strong, millenary lineage, dark-as-the-dungeon-cells-skinned fellow.”

He unsheathed his mace. I backed several steps and let Mariana go, so she stood on her own.

I spat to the side and put on my best grimace of disgust.

“My name is Ignacio Gallardo. Walter and I have the same blood running in our veins. The belts are sort of a shared interest between Walter and I. I want to kill him, as he ruined my life,” I said, and made an effort to not chuckle.

“Dog, is he lying?” he asked without lowering his guard.

“Yes, I am purebred!”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I mean, dog, is your owner’s name Ignacio?”

“Yes,” Mariana said the truth.

He started circling us, weapon still in hand. “Is he related to Walter?”

“Indeed.”

“Are you saying the truth and only the truth?”

“Yes, I am purebred,” Mariana insisted on her crusade for dog racial purity.

He pointed at me with his free hand. I was unable to bite his finger off due to the gauntlet, so I refrained from trying. It was a shame.

“Did Walter ruin this man’s life?”

Mariana looked at me, then at the guard, and then at me.

“No one did more damage to my owner’s chances at success than Walter.”

He crossed his arms behind his back.

“Well, be warned, Walter is supposedly coming to this city to find some awful information. He shall not reach the Library, and we were told to give him a beating if we find him.”

I went down on my knees and made a reverence to the sky. “Good, I love a nice family reunion. The best thing that can happen to a man lost in the desert: being guided to a clash of fates!” I faked a bit of a madman tone.

He scratched his stub.

“Why do you weirdos always come in pairs? Is it inheritable? Anyway, follow me, we need to do some paperwork where you declare to be Not-Walter and a pass will be issued… you know how it goes.”

I considered revealing the truth to avoid the bureaucracy. A battle where I could die or cause a commotion that would get me expelled for the city seemed a better prospect than filling forms for hours on end.