It wasn’t a pleasure to whomp! It wasn’t a special pleasure to see oneself beaten, to see one’s puppyflesh blackened and changed. But this time Jagger wasn’t the only one colliding against the practice doll. The other Rottweiler puppy, the one made from vital energy, was also getting used by Kalon as a sort of improvised club. Jagger wondered if the other felt pain.
The other, called Burio, actually enjoyed the pain, because it meant he was alive again. It was Burio’s purpose to be a weapon, to splinter training dolls and remain unblemished while doing so.
Kalon was picking up certain deftness with his weapups. His hits had more rhythm with each passing cycle, a greater accuracy. They had begun hitting where they needed to when they needed to. Sometimes. Almost never.
But, slowly, he was getting there. Even meriting a single glance and nod from the village Elder.
Eventually, an idea sprouted inside Kalon’s mind, and began crying because she was going to die there, all alone. The idea, however, got picked up by some sort of discriminating process that wasn’t exactly sure what it was dealing with. The idea-organizing-process shirked its responsibility and categorized it as a memory of an egg, and, all of a sudden, Kalon spouted out the following words:
“We can hit this using Burio as an egg!”
Jagger began to whine like a scared puppy. This was due to a couple of reasons. Chiefly, it pertained to the ontological one: Jagger was a scared puppy.
Burio was elated. He was going to be crushed, reduced to a broken mess of cracked bones and dog white and dog yolk. To die was addicting, to be a weapon was what life was about.
I, personally, began to believe Burio was not exactly well in the head. I meddled inside his skull and in found everything in order: It was just as stupid as the soul from which he had been born forth.
Kalon placed Jagger to a side. “Stay,” he told him.
“Try to boss me around again and I will recite the alphabet.” Jagger threatened, and began making his way to a nearby ditch to drink some stagnant water. The mosquito larvae added the protein boost he needed after such a thorough beating.
Kalon, not hearing what his real puppy had said, was raising the Mil(the vital energy)-made puppy, holding it with both hands, at the ready to slam it against the head of the practice doll.
“Do it, do it, do it!” Burio chanted, anxious for getting the snot beaten out of him.
Infused with extra Anga (the delicious vital energy) Burio descended upon the practice doll with the fury of a lignophobic axe.
Jagger paid no mind to the marvelous transformation of Burio into a bloodied rag somewhat shaped like a dog. He was too busy taking small sips of the ditch’s water and moving it all over his tongue and teeth. “Definitively, this is a last-week’s-rain harvest, the mosquitos are most likely Aedes borgesi, known for living in infinite libraries and behaving uncountably. There are some earthy notes… Probably a result of that bloated, dead blue frog floating right there. All around, this swampy water could have a little more heart put into it, both in a figurative and literal sense, but it for sure is no amateur work. Cheers.” He concluded his tasting with this bittersweet verdict. When it came to being a stagnant water sommelier, Jagger was unparalleled.
The puppy detected an alarming smell coming down from the mountain, and turned to look at the source of it. “I think there is a bright spot right there,” he commented, exerting his eyesight to its limits. “Hey Kalon, is that a forest fire?” He asked, pointing at the fiery burning spot in the face of the mountain.
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Kalon stopped beating the happily panting, bone-mushed Burio and rubbed his eyes. “Gods, the trees are cooking their own! Let’s warn the elder. ”Then, Kalon cupped his hands in front of his bullshitting box. “Elder! Fire in the mountain.”
The elder closed his issue of Culito-vator’s Magazine (Which he read in broad daylight, because most people in Valelike Vale were so awestruck by the fact that he could read that failed to notice the detail that the respected elder was consuming porn), stood from the rock he was sitting on, and dignified a stare towards the mountain face. He yawned. “Yeah, shit’s ablaze. If the village starts burning, I’ll have a little chat with the fire,” he dismissed the issue and went back to admiring Li-Luan’s curves.
“The elder has it covered, Jagger,” Kalon informed, giving his friend a thumbs up.
Jagger stared at the mosquito larvae in the pool before him. “I envy you, motherfuckers,” he lamented before inhaling a supposed last time and dunking his head into the ditch. Maybe this was it. A chance to escape life. To escape Kalon.
Sadly, the instinct to pull the head out and breath was stronger than him.
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Burning wood cracked all around, pernicious walls breaking down under the weight of purification. Crusadina played the flamethrower as other young delinquents would an electric guitar: carelessly, with a rhythm that obeyed solely her deep desire for destruction. Of walls.
She laughed like the cutest of maniacs and satisfied her inner catapult by bringing down the limits of xylem, phloem, cork, procambiums, meristems and varieties of parenchyma alike with her tool of flaming justice. How dared they? Plant cells, to erect walls in her presence. Photosynthesis was all good and dandy, but not in those conditions. Done by soft cells adrift on the surface of a lake, that’s how oxygenic photosynthesis had to be made. None of that multicellular, or even vascular haughtiness.
And the critters who got caught by the lashing tongues of flame her quest for a world without walls had spawned? They had walls inside them. They, too, were contaminated. Down to the bacteria that inhabited the compost under her feet, life all around had evolved walls. It wasn’t DNA that needed life to spread, no, it was her lethal enemy. DNA was just another tool of walls to reproduce.
And what if, she thought, a wall was made of wood because she neglected to burn a tree? A wall made of walls, a wall squared, even if it was given a round shape. That would be disgraceful, sinful even.
But once things burned… then they had no walls. Ashes were like liquid, they conformed to the recipient they occupied. Sometimes, volcanic ashes lithified, and that was a reason to investigate them, but she lacked the power structure needed to enforce anti-wall fascism. But, was it fascism? No, Fascism was not this fair, Fascism allowed walls to exist, and even encouraged its existence. This had to be a new sort of political organization, neither left nor right leaning, because both of them were allies of Big Construction, and allowed the erection and survival of walls.
Democracy? No, she quickly discarded it. Democracy gave people the vote, and the vote required elections. Elections required ballots, and ballots implied dark rooms. And what were rooms made of? Walls. And inside the voters? Walls, too. Giving vote to the people was giving the vote to the enemy. Perfidious walls were at the very core of democracy, corrupting it beyond salvation.
She needed to minimize the influence of walls in politics. Totalitarianism with a wall-hater as the head was the only way. And who better than her to hate walls with her whole being? Only she would take decisions. She, that even tainted could see the truth; she, that wasn’t the perfect being yet, but strived for it; she, that would lead the world towards a perfect reality where the wall-less earth was covered by a lone syncytial entity.
She manifested her catapults and made them load trees and bushes ablaze on their buckets, to then fire the payloads towards still-green regions of the mountain. This wildfire would spread like a plague of justice, a first step in her realization of paradise.
She walked proudly through the scorching inferno, her Pomb (The vital energy) creating a thick, fflowing layer of protection to preserve the young cultivator. Katie rolled behind her.
“Don’t you think you are taking this a bit too far, dear?” Katie asked.
“Do the walls bribed you too, Katie? Do you side with them now?” Crusadina turned with silent rage, the battering rams in her eyes desirous to pummel her adversaries.
“I just think Moderation may be the way, dear. One step at a time.”
“The enemy is everywhere, Katie. Walls won’t be moderate with us. We have a duty to strike while we have the upper hand.”
Crusadina smirked when she heard another burning mass being launched towards greener pastures. “We shall burn the world, Katie. Release it from the Tyranny of Walls,” she declared, and then began laughing like the righteous brat she was.