On the dawn of the third week after Kalon’s detox, Jagger walked into Yggdrashell’s hospitable hole to find his owner boxing against the air, probably losing because he was… Kalon. But this was not the fat little Jagger it had been a month ago. Time had changed him, a lifetime of experiences now lived and suffered had hardened his body, mind and spirit, causing… oh, come on, he was a puppy, those things grow damn fast, people!

Resuming, he wasn’t the fat two month and some puppy anymore: standing about forty-six… wait, let me convert that to proper units…. Standing about thirty to thirty-one churro diameters tall and weighing about three hundred fifty golf balls, he had become a healthy, non-obese pup at last.

As for Brunhilda, she was still the same old Rottweiler hag, holding the world record for most peerless ancient relics and/or drug dealers eaten.

Jagger marched up to Kalon’s side and stared up at the boy’s face, tail wagging. “Do you feel like dying today?”

“No, Jagger. Thank you for caring.”

Jagger’s tail stilled. “Yeah, caring, yes… that was the purpose of me asking.”

He turned and licked his balls so Kalon wouldn’t see him crying out of impotence. Why was death so far, so unavailable, so double-blue-checkmarked to him?

Brunhilda came to Jagger’s aid, examined his peer with a mother’s care, and with deft heaving she vomited a blister of tramadol for him to consume. Then she retched a little more and puked out a double-blind, peer reviewed study about the side effects of the drug. Somehow, the ink was still intact, despite the mucus and saliva covering the paper.

“You are an angel, hag of holding.” Jagger thanked his senior with some appeasement licks. “An angel of death for narcos and pharmacists, but an angel in the end.”

Then Brunhilda curled into a veritable sea urchin of a Rottweiler, and began snoring a few seconds later.

A sapling sprouted from the wooden ground to catch their attention. It shone golden, with its nutiledons and tiny leaves adorning the still white nutwood of its feeble stem and branches. “The time for you to venture underground has come, Kalon. Deliver me from the pests and awaken the next stretch of your road.”

“What should we look for down there? Living coffins?” Kalon asked a sensical question, context considered.

“Why would there be living coffins down there?” Yggdrashell countered.

“Yggdrashell, to be fair to Kalon, why wouldn’t there be? We are talking with an entity made of nuts.”

“You have a point, dog.” The tree then hummed and the sound of creaking wood surrounded them. “There aren’t. The pests are the ones I left behind. Angry at being exiled from their home, these figments of myself have grown envious, hateful. Feral, even. They won’t react kindly to invaders of their sanctuary among my roots. I mean, probably. I speculate, as I have never sent anyone down there. Hardly anyone not interested in selling drugs crosses the desert anymore.”

“Too many words. Dog, resume.” Kalon abused his authority as an owner.

“Yggdrashell through wood chipper, splinters angry,” Jagger obliged and then went back to his resigned ball licking.

“That works. Also, Brunhilda has to stay here, as she is a non-sentient dog—”

Brunhilda the Black Fluffy Donut took exception to that, and farted in protest.

Yggdrashell ignored it as it did anything that proved it wrong. “—and I have my cats down there.”

“Your cats? As in, cats? Meow meows?” Jagger asked incredulous. “Not… catalytic converters made out of nuts?”

“The felines. They aid me in aerating my roots, and I—”

Jagger raised a paw to cut out the tree. “I am not doped enough to hear the rest of it.” The dog placed the blister between his paws, lay on the ground and chewed it just enough to get a pill out and swallow it. “Now I am. Go on.”

“Don’t. Touch. My cats. I need them. Alive.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Jagger considered mauling a feline for the first time in his short life. “Understood.” He didn’t lie, but understanding something didn’t mean accepting it.

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The aperture to the caves under Yggdrashell was hidden on its west side, a murky hole nested between its gnarled roots of nuts. It was the sort of eerie darkness that robbed the brave of their valor, the cunning of their wits, and the rest of us of our wallets. Luckily for our heroes, Kalon was naturally devoid of all three and Jagger, being a dog, had an easy time when entering dark places.

The cave entrance was several churro lengths wide, and approximately triangular, it’s frame defined both by sandstone and nuts of roots.

It was a harsh slide downwards for Kalon, and a leisurely painless roll for Jagger. Sure, the pup got bruises and scrapes, but tramadol was his shepherd, so he felt nothing but gentle caresses of the stone.

A lone ray of sunlight still accompanied them when they reached a level surface, down below, but it quickly got snuffed out, and then denuded of its belongings, by the encroaching darkness. Jagger’s ears twitched as he picked up a low rumbling sound. His nose also acted before his eyes got used to the darkness, making him aware of the musty smell of felines.

“This place is purring.” Jagger stated with unwarranted seriousness.

“Must be the cats Yggdrashell mentioned,” Kalon observed. Thanks, Kalon, have a golden star.

Jagger stalked around, head low, approaching a turn in the tunnel. Then, he peeked around it, and saw a thousand yellow eyes like candles in the night, staring at him. When the cats saw the dog, they started hissing, and some of them even speaking.

“Sugoi,” said one of the pairs of eyes.

“Nekorare, desu,” elaborated another.

“Boku no oppai blitzkrieg,” propounded a third cat.

“Okay, that one is yellow.” Jagger sentenced after parsing what they had said. HE referred, naturally, to an orange-coated individual.

Slowly but surely Jagger’s eyes got adapted to the darkness, and his jaw dropped when he beheld the true nature of the cats before him. Turning his head, jaw still loose, he looked at Kalon, who saw nothing but the reflection of light in his companion’s eyes.

“What happens, Jagger?”

“Well, the… cats…are… in the roots. In them. Compounded. Fused. And they speak Japanese to boot.”

“What’s Japanese?” Kalon asked a reasonable question, which made his brain overheat and his hair to briefly catch fire, dimly illuminating the place.

“I have no fucking idea,” Jagger tried to not stare at Kalon while the boy slapped his head to get the flames off. “Hey, Hydroshawl, bring your shiny nuts down here.”

The tree obliged, and, incrusted in the roots, some of the nuts began emitting a bright yellow light, driving out the darkness as if it were a bunch of merchants in a temple and the nuts Jesus wielding a whip.

What was revealed shocked Jagger, but not Kalon, whose brain was still trying to make out the image in front of his eyes. From the surface of the entangled roots snaking through the sandstone all around burgeoned the heads of toothless cats. Their nostrils were widened to comical extents, and the whiskers had decayed into mere bumps on the faces of the felines. Their eyes were bigger than usual compared to their heads, and they went “Nya nya”.

After a second, something clicked on Jaggers brain, and he started guffawing.

Kalon stared confused at his companion and weapon. And then Kicked him in the butt, a mere test of good health for dogs. Jagger, immunized to pain by the power of opioids, ignored the hit and kept on laughing. “They are Nekorrhizae!”

“Uh? That’s a word?”

“That’s a pun, Kalon. A play on… forget it, you illiterate intercourse.” Jagger paused, merely for effect. “And that was alliteration.”

The nekorrhizas kept on mewling and purring, their heavy breathing providing Yggdrashell with valuable nitrogen, as the cat’s lungs had adapted to take it in instead of oxygen, and its vascular systems had intertwined with and intruded into Yggdrashell’s cellular nuts, a symbiosis most particular of animal and plant.

A droplet of a viscous liquid fell upon Jagger’s head, one of the places where his tongue couldn’t reach, such that indignation rose inside the dog, making him look upwards.

After a second of contemplation followed a second of internal whatthefucking, and after it a second of contemplating the benefits of warning Kalon against the benefits of letting him die. Arriving at the conclusion that there probably were no opioids in heaven, Jagger shouted, “Kalon, watch out!”

Kalon looked towards the exit, seeing nothing out of the unusual. “Guh?”

Jagger sighed. “Follow my gaze, moron.”

The boy obeyed, and, for a second, his mind couldn’t process the mound of transparent green goo filled with discs of a solid, cleared green piled together, the piles joined by threads of the same material. So his mind gave up and instantly forgot he had seen it. “there’s nothing up there. He said, looking back down.

“Look again.”

Kalon did, and gasped in surprise, but, after staring abck at jagger looking for answers, he forgot. “Why am I confused.”

“Giant rabid chloroplast above,” pointed out jagger, and so Kalon looked a third time, and tired of forgetting, his mind caved in and remembered.

“Guh!”

Freeing itself from the ceiling with an agile bounce, the mass of green landed in front of the boy and his dog, With Jagger instinctively getting between the menace and Kalon, and stiffing his tail upwards. He wondered what he was doing when he noticed, but not fast enough to avoid Kalon grabbing him from the tail and infusing his body with vital energy.

“So these are the pests we should kill,” Kalon said, smiling as he brandished his Rottweiler as if it were a bastard sword.

The cats kept on purring, the nuts on glowing, and the slimy organelle swollen with hatred began a silent monologue about being betrayed.

Kalon got in position, one leg in front of the other and Jagger pointed forward. He had been sparring with branches as a part of his rehabilitation, and felt confident about beating this strange foe.

“Come, chorroblast, and meet death by my hand and his paw!”