Nuts. There has never been in the English language a word so useful to solve crises, not even close. Famine? Harvest more nuts. Inverted population pyramid? Bust a few nuts in the right place. Villain getting cocky? Crack his nuts. Villain is female? Make her go nuts. A bank goes into bankruptcy? Nut our fucking problem.
Talking about nuts, the trees that grew in the desert past the tallest peaks of the mountain range that preserved the world from the horrors inside Valelike Vale had evolved with nuts in mind. The leaves had been replaced by nuts. The trunk was a long, hard , giant nut surrounded by a bark composed mostly of small nuts and cork, that was nothing but a matrix of microscopic nuts cemented by a paste made of nuts, both produced by an adapted phellogen with nut-shaped cells.
And how did these abominations of nature photosynthesize, when every centimeter of their surface was lignified? They didn’t. They had developed their own form of autotrophy powered by a resource even more abundant than sunlight: stupidity. It was carried by the winds from Valelike Vale and accumulated in the environment, a thick layer of goopy scatterbrainess that sometimes gathered in pools that light dared not interact with, and thus were invisible. But the nutroots had learned how to seek it, how to take it in. The nutleaves were covered with inscriptions of vague electoral promises, so to condense stupidity upon them.
Once inside the tree, stupidity was faced with a battery of conspiratoines and moronitase, that bent and cut it into two forms: one capable of breaking the covalent bonds of carbon dioxide, and one that fixated the released carbon atoms into glucose. And where did hydrogen come from, in an environment so dry and unforgiving? It was made ex nihilo, condensing stupidity into matter. This, as you may imagine, made thermodynamics fall into a severe depression from which they have yet to recover.
And you may wonder “hey, did you just infodump several paragraphs about trees on me and I enjoyed it?”
Yes.
You are welcome, victim, you masochist for shiterature.
But it’s high time to talk about our heroes, isn’t it? Well, here goes nothing…
Kalon was fighting his inner demons, if we make the following set of small concessions: the inner demons being external, the inner demons being innumerable and, lastly, the inner demons being sand-grain-sized compounds chiefly composed of silicates, mainly quartz and feldspar.
This dune, all high and mighty, stood before him, migrating across the trunks of the nutrees while paying Kalon and the dogs no mind.
Prone on the ground, Kalon looked at the mound of… inner demons… with hatred, and swore to one day kill the dune’s whole clan. Jagger was rehydrating by sucking Kalon’s sweaty hair. Brunhilda had buried herself in the sand, tilting her head so only one nostril, eye and ear were kept above the surface.
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“We have to carry on. You sweat is getting saltier, uncomforting to ingest,” Jagger informed flatly.
“My strength is gone, Jagger. I cannot carry on and the trees have no water inside them.”
“We can always eat you after you die, and then return to the vale. We are not exiled. You are.” Jagger reminded him, but Kalon didn’t listen, for he had already departed from the world of the conscious.
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“Hoo boy, you are cooking under the sun.” The avatar of the Road, personified as a Rottweiler head hanging from a gong frame, addressed the visitor in this so familiar darkness.
“Guh, do I taste good at least?”
The avatar blinked and hung in place, perplexed. “What.” Then it remembered who it was dealing with. “Listen, Kalon, dying is… double plus uncool.”
“Guh, I don’t want to be uncool. What’s a plus?” The cadence with which Kalon said this fit him like a glove, creating a sort of naturally-sounding non-sequitur.
“Get up and hit me with the mallet,” he said, looking at the sorry mop on a stick that served as the tool with which the Gong needed to be struck.
“Mallet?”
“…the thingy.”
“Ah.”
No dialogue tags were used in the exchange above because I am well aware that you can feel the frustration of the avatar on your very flesh. If you were a Rottweiler, I am sure you , too, would be in want of a good owner-mauling session.
Kalon dragged his feet up to the mallet, picked it up gave a lick to the mop, had a coughing and spitting fit due to the taste, and then used the wrong end to hit the Gongweiler on the nose.
“Holy heavens, why?” The nose-pricked dog head counted to ten, inhaled, then exhaled. Those anger management classes were finally paying for themselves.” Kalon, Are you really this stupid?
Kalon nodded effusively. “No”
“Well, wake up or you will die and Jagger and Brunhilda will eat you up.”
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Kalon woke up to a tender tongue exploring his ears.
“This wax is acceptable in quality, Brunhilda. I have eaten shits that tasted better but, then again, some turds are works of culonary art.”
Brunhilda growled softly.
“Oh, Kalon, you are awake,” said Jagger, stashing his tongue back in his mouth. “I was trying to prevent a brain parasite from starving by getting trapped in your skull,” he deftly lied.
Brunhilda dug herself further into the sand, the golden (not retriever, though) grains covering her like celestial dandruff.
Kalon felt the warm embrace of a hard, unwelcoming, thorny survace around his leg, and Jagger wondered if it was his legal obligation to warn his owner about the nutrees roots and how they had been growing towards him. No, he was a dog, so he had only rights, no obligations.
Kalon soon realized the trees meant him no harm. The roots just slapped him when he tried to think, so he received only three slaps as they dragged him into the heart of the forest of the desert.
As the trees passed Kalon’s feeble body from one unburied root to another, the dogs followed at their leisure. In the distance stood a massive nutree. It was so big even its nuts were made of smaller nuts.
A voice boomed from the massive plant at the horizon, shaking its smaller cousins “Ygdrasshell welcomes you, beacon of idiocy.”
“Welp, Kalon is falling upwards in life as he is in a literal sense, that’s for sure,” commented Jagger, unimpressed. “Come, Brun, let’s see if there are any chances for a quick death inside that monutmental tree.”
Brunhilda barked in agreement, and so, they followed Kalon in what could have been as well been a trap.
Sadly for Jagger. It wasn’t.