The Questian forest had an eerie and magical atmosphere that drowned you with the sweet aroma of flowers and more shades of green than anyone could name. Not a single feral animal dared to make a sound there, nor a branch to creak. It was a beautiful place we would have had time to explore and get acquainted with, were it not for the murderous elf that wanted us a little less than breathing. You may be imagining a beautiful tribesperson with blonde hair and pale skin, clad in feathers and other ornaments, throwing spells at us. Had it been that, we would have fought back from the beginning. No, elves were not a pleasant sight.
She was certainly all eyes and great tits: hundreds of thousands of eyelashes and gray and black and yellow feathers. One beak for every misshapen bird, whose features were intermingled with the others in the nightmarish amalgamation. It had no defined shape, and flowed around the trunks of the trees and amid the leaves of the brush. An accursed tide with irises of every color
It moved toward us, and we ran.
Well, to be more specific, I ran for my life while Mariana pranced around happily, as if the cloud of feathery death that wanted our asses were not a problem at all. And, to be fair, it probably was not for her. The elf was just level hundred-fifty, after all: a mere fly compared to Mariana; a full-fledged cosmic horror from my perspective.
“Kill it at once Mariana!” I screamed like a cowardly little girl. I did not know how long it would be until I tripped over or succumbed to the fatigue.
“Butterfly!” she conveyed with utmost excitement.
Mariana eventually ran right into the elf as she hunted down the butterfly. The mass of birds and eyes engulfed her, to my slight horror. It was a dark image, even if I knew, deep inside, that she had to be right. At least that halted the persecution and gave me time to rest and analyze the situation.
“It tickles,” she said eventually.
The elf chirped furiously and uttered sounds of frantic flapping. It was, for sure, trying to kill Mariana in the same way the universe did on a daily basis. And that included absolute, soul crushing failure of such a herculean task.
“I stand amid the blinks of a bird-tormented ophthalmologic nightmare, and I hold within my paw, wings of a butterfly,”
The bitch within an elf butchered Dream Within a Dream and I decided I was completely done with that. I ordered the zombie bunny to crawl down from my waist, where he had been hanging from the belt, and to charge against the elf. The bunny got Germany-Brazil 2014’d in mere fractions of a second, torn apart by the rabid tits[1].
“Walter, the living nuggets are unsavory, don’t eat them,” informed Mariana.
Her input was useful, to at least, know that she was thinking about food —In other words, she was mostly unaffected by the hostile entity, and actually attacking it. It was just a matter of time until she head-butted her way out.
As for me, I was a necromancer without a single zombie under my command. What would the CEOs of necromancy say if they ever saw me in that sorry state? Nothing resembling praise, I assure you.
Ah, but what could be more dead than a forest?[2] I casted reanimate at the ground. Something had to rise from the compost. A bunch of killer bugs, a deer carcass, an entombed turkey. Something. Anything.
A gnarled branch rose under my command. I could feel its fighting spirit: I was dealing with a very conflictive stick. I had to concentrate to unexpected lengths to tame the will of the wood.
So there we were, me, my wood, and the female elf. That could have been a title for something else but, alas, it was my reality.
I commanded the stick to attack. The stick commanded me to go fuck myself. But I had the advantage, because, unlike me, it was —supposedly— bound to obey.
The elf divided in two masses, one containing Mariana, and another that made her intention to make sweet love to my corpse very clear.
I had to run for she was not my type, and, amongst all my fetishes that implied fatality for my person, being eaten by an eyes-and-birds-mass-elf was, much to my surprise, not one of them. The stick followed, refusing to fight the lords of the forest. Then I realized: I had revived a level ninety piece of wood, something I could not control, or, at least, that would be very hard to use to my advantage.
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Then the realization dawned upon me: a zombie stick was hovering by my side. I did not need it to float, or even to attack. I just needed to say the magic words. After all, I had a stick.
“Mariana, catch!” I cried at the top of my lungs, and then I saw a head most golden —and averagely Retriever— crop up from the still mass of eyes and tits.
I dispelled reanimate, letting the branch fall into my persecutor.
The abomination engulfed the stick, and that was the worst mistake of its life, as Mariana disembarrassed herself from the other half of the elf and then bolted towards us, only to violently enter my enemy and recover the branch, killing hundreds of birds and eyes in the process.
I saw the hp bar of the elf dropping like Bitcoin after a tweet from Elon Musk, and thus I smirked. I hugged a tree and inspired: it had ended, no more fear of tripping, of a maladroit step leading to my death. The elf was dealt the worst of fate’s hands. There were few disgraces comparable to being the movable object in the trajectory of the unstoppable force I affectionately call Mariana.
The agent of chaos I raised came to me with little, happy jumps… and covered in blood and whatever the eyes had inside.
“Well, crisis avert—”
Hunting horn. Out of nowhere. In the middle of the forest. It could only mean good fucking news.
Were I an honest person, I would tell you what followed with excruciating detail. How Mariana gave the coup de grace to the elf by waging her tail into it a bit too fast. Or the first encounter with a tall and beautiful blonde woman clad in heavy, dark and spiky armor, armor that was probably ineffective. I could talk about the fiery pit bulls that accompanied her, or her stern and judgmental stare towards my person and the erection it should have caused. Yes, I could talk about that.
But, my friends, meanwhile the female form is a gift for humanity, the tree I was embracing was one from God. It seemed to have the curves in all the right places, with its small, partite leaves, each composed of dozens of delicate, lanceolate pinnae. The bark sparkled nostalgia inside me, for its roughness was familiar enough. At my feet, laid by mother nature, were its fruits: vertically flattened, ligneous pancakes, similar to those stored in my memory, yet not exactly equal. And amongst them —as if it were a rainbow and I, a tired and hopeless Noah— a purple flower, abandoned by the parent tree, slowly withering away. I picked it up with extreme care, and, on my cupped hands, I admired the marvels of creation. Each dwindling petal, a painful reminder of the home long lost. Oh, Argentina, how I miss your unstable economy! Your mate! Your Jacarandas! But this tree, it was not a Jacaranda, the details were slightly off, to the point of them bordering the insult. Each second of contemplation revealed more bits that were unforgivingly off. The angles of the leaves, the shape of the seeds visible inside the open fruits, the lines in the bark…
“Sir, you killed an elf, you have to come with me,” the blonde said with utmost assertiveness.
“Bitch don’t interrupt my treesighting!”
…the shade of green of the stems, no, it was wrong, very wrong…
“Sir, the lord of the land will want to speak to you about this incident.”
… how could a creation be this beautiful, this close to flawlessness, and yet so cruel in the distance it deliberately kept from perfection?
“Sir, please. I am new at this job. Cooperate, I beg you.”
“And I am new at inspecting this tree, you botanically illiterate harlot. Let me explain,” I cleared my throat and prepared myself to educate the ignoramus, and only then I began pacing around with the aim to enhance my image of intellectually gifted individual, “it appears to be a traditional jacaranda, but it is not, oh it is not. It is a sorry attempt at one, for sure, and would have fooled a neophyte on this delicate subject. Not me, however. I am well versed on jacarandas: I played among them, I climbed one back at my childhood house. I know every little stupid visual detail about those trees, to the point of obsession. This abomination can’t hold a candle to the real thing.”
“Sir, can you follow me so I am not scolded by my dad?” said the most intelligent blonde bitch I had seen that day —but keep in mind she was only awarded that title by virtue of her only competitor being Mariana.
“I can. I refuse, but I am certainly capable of it. Leave me alone, I am too busy watching this sin made tree.”
“I understand, trees make sticks. Sticks are nice,” said Mariana, and I could notice in the girl expression that she was also communicating with her.
“The… the dog talks.”
“And thus I am stuck between two bitches fluent in English.”
“Talking dog, please, tell the sir to come with me. I will give you treats if you do.”
“Now we are talking! Let’s negotiate in treats per mile traveled!” said Mariana, the wagging of her tail about to break several laws of physics.
“I have about three to spare.”
“I swear, Mariana, if you sell me out for three fuc—,” I managed to say before she casted a paralysis spell on me.
And then, as I beheld the canopies, Mariana dragged me towards my destiny as if I were nothing more than a bag of potatoes full of blood and organs. I never saw a potato with flesh inside, but I am pretty sure some Peruvian variant —going by the law of the big numbers— has to, at least, fit a similar description.
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[1] It would be a lie to claim I ever woke up thinking that sentence had even a slim chance of existing, but, what can I say, here we fucking are.
[2] Whoever comes up with an answer that implies two or more forests is getting thrown into a pit full of elves and Borges fanatics. This is your only warning.