If the kitchen was sanitary I loved mankind. It was not in character for me, however, to care about the head chef being a pit bull. It was an honest work, the motherfucker looked happy barking orders and mauling some underling now and then, when beef was needed but not available because said underling had, um, redistributed it into his bowels. One is what he eats, and, in the castle’s kitchen, that was taken to such extreme that the average duration of any given head chef in his job was, or so it seemed to me, a week and a half.

Mariana wasn’t treated kindly while she was there, mainly because, every time they tried to rip her throat out, she just got a fashionable collar made out of rabid pit bulls and kept on doing whatever she was doing before, ignoring them, suffering no damage.

I couldn’t avoid, despite all the hustle of dogs cutting vegetables and mincing meats, noticing that grease was really timid in such an environment. It could not be seen on most of the walls, and only revealed itself conspicuously as droplets that felt at home on the old, abandoned cobwebs that hung from the roof.

From left to right, over the counters and around the bags of potatoes, the pits hurried. One of them, so thin you could see his vertebrae, sporting blue gums, was cutting onion. With each passing second, another sliver of his health bar ticked down.

“Who the hell puts a dog in charge of cutting onions?” I asked to nobody in particular.

“I like onions. They are the balls of nature.”

“They are poisonous for you, Mariana. Lethal.”

“I am going to file a snarling complaint against creation!” she said before storming out of the room.

The need for a breakfast, at least on my part, was dire, so I approached the oldest pit bull. He could not be described as anything else than ancient. He didn’t cook, he didn’t even move for the most part: he just rested on his sleeping table, stashed on a corner of the kitchen the other dogs didn’t frequent.

The first thing that stood out about him, besides the age and the spiders that had used him as a foundation for their architectural feats, was that he wore a cape made of ever-fresh dough. He also had an ornamented scepter made of the cooked material, with a giant olive on its upper extreme.

I knelt before him, “Empanada Priest, I have come for your blessing.”

He opened his heavy eyelids, arf’d lazily and closed them again.

“I want three-fourths of a dozen of knife-cut meat ones. Oven-cooked, without boiled eggs, but with green olives. For Mariana, I want two dozen chicken ones, dog edible, you get me? If she dies, I am in trouble.”

He addressed me with a suspicious stare, as if waiting for something.

“…I can pay in belly rubbies.”

The Empanada Priest shifted his weigh to a side, revealing his pink, bare abdomen. My hand approached carefully, not willing to startle the most precious creature on all of Planet. I felt the callous, warm surface, and started caressing it. The dog moved his hind leg a bit, a signal of accepting the ritual payment.

After a while, it snarled, and I retired my hand, because I liked my hand, and wanted to keep it mostly useable.

It was enough, the deal had been fulfilled on my part.

His Holiness stood, shook the dust and arachnids off him, and raised his scepter, holding it, as it was natural, with a nostril. He started singing in low howls, invoking the gods of dough and filling.

Reality started crackling all around. Static filled the air, and a small vortex opened over us. I took some steps back, and from the ominous dark anomaly a tray fell at first, and then, empanadas started raining over it, filling the adequately sized tray perfectly.

As the wound on the fabric of existence healed and the empanadas released delicious- smelling steam, the empanada priest started panting ever faster, until he collapsed, stiff, paws upwards, like a dead fish. Then, his body started turning into a mound of sweet corn with milk and onions.

When his transformation was complete, I fell on my knees. It hurt like hell, so I squealed like a castrati squirrel.

“His fillings were the juiciest ones I have ever tasted, and now he is gone.” I put the tray to a side and crawled up to the table, and thought a long while about how to give him a proper burial. That is, until I noticed a moving bulge under the surface of the remains.

Emerging from the sweet corn mixture, a white pit bull puppy took his first breath. It carried a small scepter equal to the one his antecessor used to wield, and the dough of his cape was as wet as his hairs. Ah, the miracle of life.

“Oh, he resurrects from the humita. Makes sense…” I did a double-take “A revival spell?”

I snatched the puppy from his table and stashed him on a belt-pocket. I grabbed the tray with the empanadas and rushed out of the kitchen, passing by the already cannibalized carcass of the onion cutting dog, that probably died when he realized the onions had changed shape, turning cubical.

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

With the Empanada Priest in my hands, I waited before the door of Mateo’s room. The puppy, still not opening his eyes, snore softly most of the time, just to eventually stretch, yawn, summon a teat shaped empanada and suckle on it for a while.

I felt a touch on my shoulder, and it was Mateo.

“Ah, you weren’t in the room. I have bad news about the Empanada Priest.” I handed him the pooch. “I made an order and he died, just to revive from the humita he left behind.”

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“Walter, why is it that, every single fucking time you come searching for me, the very first thing that comes out of your mouth makes me question my faith?” He said, taking the dog in his hands. He was wearing a lab coat. Laboratory coat, not a coat made of labbies. Nor a coat made for labbies.

“I am your cannon fodder for absurd situations. Or a cannonball made out of absurdity magnets,” I answered.

He stared hard at the little priest, and sighed.

“Sorry, every day I wake up being ruler of this dreadful place, and I allot the taxes and expenditures of the realm, and maybe decree some new law. I use a special mind-interface for that, before you ask. Soon enough I will have spent more time here than on Earth, Walter, do you get that? I want to go home, now, blink and be there, wake up next to my wife and forget this nightmare,” he ranted for a few solid seconds, growing more vexed and tired each instant.

“So you aren’t angry the empanada priest died?”

“Didn’t he just rejuvenate?”

“His health bar disappeared after turning into filling. Then returned from the void when the pup began moving under the surface.”

“This would be the only resurrection spell in existence, if that’s the case.”

So Matador hadn’t lied to me about revival spells. Shame.

“Let me guess: he can revive like that because the flag-faced motherfucker finds it hysterical.”

He stashed the pup in one of his pockets and crossed his arms.

“How did you meet the last demiurge?”

“I dreamed about him.”

“So, in the dream, did you two…” and he made a gesture that involved his index passing through a circle formed with the fingers of the contrary hand.

“No, everyone was a giant isopod.”

“Why?” he asked, puzzled.

Maybe committing regicide was not the worst of ideas. But I needed him to return to Earth.

“The price of avoiding carcinization,” I said, grabbing my chest with dramatic emphasis.

“Walter, be honest with me: how many girlfriends have you had in your life?”

“As many as I would ever want.” We remained silent for a few seconds, as if we were waiting for Mariana to barge into the conversation and headbutt us into another subject. “That’s… that’s zero,” I admitted, looking down at my feet.

He placed his hand on my shoulder and gripped it steadfast. “Do you want Florencia’s hand? She is going to stretch the leg anyway when we destroy the world. She is… special.”

I gestured him to not worry by raising an open hand. “I have got two of my own.”

My gaze became fixed on the shades, not on the first pair, but on the ones below them, the shades behind the shades. They, in turn, had another pair behind them, compressed by some foul magic into the space of a single pair. Perhaps that was the power of the Dark Lord, perhaps that was how one brought eternal darkness upon the world.

“How do you equip so many sunglasses at once?”

“Have you noticed how we have a realistic amount of accessory slots for jewelry and such? I use them all on sunglasses.”

Were I a caricature, a lightbulb would have lit above my head, “Do you reckon I can revive them?”

“What?” He seemed confused.

“Plastic is made out of dead algae.”

“Walter, you could search for fossils and revive a Tyrannosaur. Why belts and shades?”

The bridge of the foremost pair of shades was victim of an indecent contact, and my index finger was to blame.

“What is easier for your enemy to wear, unaware of the fact he is giving you a critical advantage?”

I felt a burning sensation my finger. The magic was refusing to flow into the plastic frame. The belts began to laugh and whistle.

“Lmao, uncool necromancer…” said the gamer belt, who crowned the sentence with a newfound homophobic slur.

“Y ahí estaba yo, boluda, iba re puesto, acelerador a fondo, dosveinte en la panamericana…” began another.

Another one was singing Down Under with a botched Australian accent. It was interspersing “Cunt” every two or three words, just for good measure.

“Do they ever shut up?” He asked, commiserating me.

“No.” And I wanted to add that, most of the time, they were just background noise.

I stopped trying to reanimate his glasses and fell to the floor like the soul had just been taken out of my body. Ending up in a really uncomfortable position, I was thoroughly unwilling to cut my acting short.

Mateo took the empanada Priest out of his pocket and caressed his head while talking to him like the little dog was a human baby.

Back onto my feet, I snatched the precious puppy priest from his hand and stashed it back between the belts.

“Will his empanadas be just as delicious as the ones from the old dog?”

He disregarded my question with a haughty gesture of his hand.

“I am a chemist and a dealer, not a magic-phoenix-dog specialist.”

“And a gardener, by what I have heard.”

He lowered his hands to his waist and inspected me from head to toe.

“Well, I need to get my reactants from somewhere, and the chemical makeup of plants on here is not exactly the same as on Earth. The garden is a work of a lifetime, Walter. And by what my daughters and Mariana have told me, you are… well, let’s put it like this: I would not leave a pedophile in charge of a kindergarten.”

With no choice left but to flip him the bird, guess what the fuck I did.

Nothing. I did nothing, because the ventilation ducts blessed us with a Golden Retriever delivery once more. The Hindenburg made dog fell between us, smeared with soot and grease, with the grace of a cat with severe otitis and an even worse case of death. If you are imagining a cat-zeppelin exploding midair and plummeting into the miserable souls beneath, congratulations to me, I did a good job with imagery.

Mariana recovered with a swiftness seldom seen. She shook, laying upon both of us the blessings and gifts of the vents. Pantene models would have envied her hair’s capacity to remain smooth like silk and vibrantly blonde despite the punishment.

“Mariana, what were you doing?”

“Ontological bureaucracy,” she answered, to surprise of neither of us.

“You turned the onions cubical, didn’t you?”

She nodded.

“Excuse me, but, and I think this is the question that would make the most sense.” Mateo slapped me because I happened to be there and Mariana is cuter than me. “How?!”

“I talked to the Demiurge, demanded an explanation to why onions were poisonous to dogs and spherical. I Insisted: this cannot be, this goes against the very constitution of reality, and I quoted it right there. He said reality had no constitution; I proved him wrong: lawyered up, represented myself because I am a smart girl, and won. Only then he made onions cubical.”

“You sued the Demiurge and won?” asked Mateo.

I took a pair of fingers to his lips, so he would not further express his low IQ.

“The real question is: how the fuck did you find god in the vents, and what kind of court acts against a deity?”

Mariana tilted her head to the side, like dogs do when they are trying to decipher their owner’s words.

“What would be the problem with those two things? You find a lotta things in the vents. And justice is equal for all.”

Mateo picked up MY bitch and started shaking her in the air.

“You found a way to contact the demiurge without destabilizing reality. Tell us how!”

“I just filed a complaint against reality and he agreed to discuss the issue.”

I punched Lord Matu in the face to save MY pet and picked her up. Then, I shook her.

“How did you do that?”

“I just did! I am a dog, we howl, not how. I wanted, I acted, it worked, what else do you need?” She didn’t say this with an angry tone, but rather a servile one, “Why did you stop shaking me?”

A groan escaped my mouth, and I resumed Mariana’s earthquake simulacrum.

“Have you ever thought how would this result if she was filled with nitroglycerine?” casually dropped the ruler of the land.

“Yes. Satisfactory. Liberating.”

“Well, it seems we are going to end the world anyway. Come, plant fucker, let’s see the garden.” And he walked past us with hurried step.