“With the pests gone, you are not welcome here anymore, Kalon.” Yggdrashell said, his voice that of a mother that was saying goodbye to her children as they packed to begin their lives as college students in another state. Gaseous, because she did that as a nuclear bomb fell on their city, but you get my meaning.
“But… I didn’t thank you?” Kalon tried to parse the tree’s words while he sadt on a giant tracheid that had bent from the walls of the tree’s hollowed out chamber.
“We have decided to go on a diet, for you own good,” the tree added.
Kalon stared up, higher up, then down, lower down, to the left, and to the right, and then to the left again, and to the right again. “Ba,” He finally protested, his understanding still null.
“Kalon, dear airhead, we cannot keep eating your stupidity alone. We are adapting to it, and specialization to eating only your particular brand of idiocy would be the downfall of us. I shall look after my family, the nutrees, and also after you, as I took you under my branches. If you stay here your growth as a cultivator will stagnate: I have nothing I can offer you to push your limits further.”
“Hey, hey, what about the nuttar?” Jagger asked the most important question.
“You could replace it with chocolate milk,” Yggdrashell suggested.
“That would kill me. Which would be all good and dandy if I would stay dead, but that’s not the case.”
A handheld container full of weathered papers fell from the roof and in front of them, cracking open and spilling its lawyer-lingo ridden contents all over the floor of solid wood.
“You saying?”
Jagger decided to go silent. The sheer foresight of the tree to prepare such a joke had to be unparalleled.
Something clicked inside Kalon’s mind. Maybe his last thought had broken its own neck to escape hell. “So… I am getting exiled? Again?”
“Oh, no, no. You may come visit whenever you like. This is merely an eviction.”
“In people words now?” Kalon demanded, forwarding his lower lip.
“You are being ousted from my body.”
Kalon’s stare was still that of a freshly connected microwave finding out someone had left a fork inside him. “Trees have bodies?”
“Jagger, teach some botany to this boy, will you?”
Jagger yawned and tasted his own saliva, missing the sweet kiss of mosquitoed water. “An ovule is just an indehiscent female gametophyte,” he spouted pure, unaltered fax.
“See, people words, I understood everything about that,” Kalon pointed out, patting a bemused Jagger on the head.
“Tell me you didn’t. What’s a gametophyte, then?”
“It’s the stage on the haplodiplontic cycle of plants where, following a meiotic division of the sporophyte, a new plant destined to support the gamete producing cells is born.”
“Sacrosanct intercourse, he knows!” Jagger exclaiming, and his legs , acting on their own, made him back a few steps.
“Of course I know, I learned it during the day at school!”
“Back in the day, you meant?” Yggdrashell suggested.
Jagger dedicated a commiserative stare to a random spot of the wooden walls. “No… he is being honest and making himself perfectly understood. He went to school a day. A whole day. Supposedly.”
“A single day?”
Jagger nodded while closing his eyes.
Yggdrashell wished he had a nose bridge he could pinch. “I won’t pursue this thread of conversation. I need to evict you three.” The tree cleared his sieve tubes and continued. “I will not be sending you to wander aimlessly, however: There’s a town not far from here, average in stupidity, so much that I cannot detect it while Kalon is present. They have a guild that could use Kalon’s monster hunting talents. Many things out there are more dangerous than chloroplasts, yes, but many are far less so, and people still pay good money, in the local currency of course, to put them do… so someone kills them.” Yggdrashell remembered he was talking to Kalon, so he tried to be as explicit as possible in his speech.
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“What is the use of currency?” Kalon asked, getting us this close, and I am pinching my fingers, to getting sued by the state of certain musician named after a monarchical title.
Since when do I have fingers?
Plot hole, disregard and carry on with the reading.
“Jagger will manage your finances,” the tree stated, matter-of-factly.
“I am a dog!”
“Good boy, you even mastered the identity function!”
Jagger grunted. Being sassed by a tree made of nuts was not what he had signed for when he desisted from strangling himself with the umbilical cord.
Kalon finally accepted reality and headed outside the hollowing. Once he could behold Yggdrashell’s canutpy high above, tarnishing the blue sky, he kowtowed, his forehead touching the pollen-covered ground. He wanted to express his belated thanks, for he had not done so enough in the last two years and some, and he wouldn’t be able to do it tomorrow. He also wanted to do it fast, to avoid looking like a pansy. Thus, he came with a masterplan: he would use a portmanteau to minimize the amount of words needed to convey his message. He believed himself a genius for this.
“Latitude,” Kalon said, still kneeling.
Yggdrashell had to do a double take on the boy’s word before answering. “Twelve degrees south.”
“Guh!”
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The goodbyes to the tree were crisscrossed by streaks of unmanliness, both from Kalon and from Brunhilda, who, for the record, was still female. Jagger remained a total stoic, because he was dead inside since long ago.
The walk through the merciless dunes was significantly easier than that day almost three years ago when they had migrated out of the vale. Now Kalon’s muscles were toned, his skin tan, and his body sued to the dry heat. Brunhilda carried enough cocaine capsules inside her stomach to power through any obstacle out of sheer willpower. And Jagger had reached a sort of opioids-mediated illumination where he had been desensitized to pain, not in the sense that he couldn’t feel it, but rather that he had learned to not care about it.
Particular dunes, as if picked at random, were obliterated as Kalon smashed them with his puppy whip-scarf. Kalon could have been a total dolt, but he was still a cultivator, and if he had promised to exterminate that one arrogant dune’s whole clan, he was sure as heaven’s fall going to do it.
“Why are you attacking random mounds of sand?” Jagger asked.
“They deserve it,” Kalon said, his gaze bloodlusty as another blast sent fragmented clasts flying across his face.
The puppies of the scarf felt how trauma gathered in their eyes. This was their life now, forever biting their brother’s tail, forever being a weapon used to reduce sand to dust.
Hell hath no fury like a main character scorned, and Kalon was the perfect example, deviating from the path Yggdrashell had told them to follow to go from dune to dune, sparing the ones that didn’t look like the offending party, and leveling the ones that did.
Mother dunes hid their little ripples on their backs as they tried to migrate away from the offended beast, but they seldom escaped even a little sliver of his rage. Nine generations of dunes, wiped from the desert as their sand turned to silt when struck by the cultivator’s fury. Bystanding dunes remained there, inanimate and unhelpful as the massacre unfurled.
There was no escape to Kalon’s undying odium, as if the sand had been weathered from their mother rocks just to be crushed until his Rottweiler puppies, all in a clash caused only by the perceived haughtiness of one that had acted like a dune ought to act before a dying child.
But that child had survived, and now his reprisal would fall upon the sands with the wrath of a volcano filled with angry dragons so compressed that the volcanoes they fostered inside their bodies would need to be unzipped to erupt and produce more volcano-stuffed compressed dragons.
The sun leisurely travelled through the skies and settled on the horizon, painting the desert as red as the blood that would have been spilled had dunes been vertebrates.
By the fifth hour of pointless sandboxing, Jagger felt the need to speak against this behavior. Night was falling, and it came with the bone gnawing cold of that one ex. The one whose head you keep in the freezer. The one whose organs you fed to the pigs you later turned into bacon and ate for Christmas morning. The one that gave you the prion disease that has you on your death bed. That cold-headed bitch. The point is: Jagger didn’t want to freeze to death just to revive due to Kalon’s vital energy, and Kalon could cover himself in enough spirit-pups to face the desert’s chill with no problem. As for Brunhilda, well, if frost came to bite her, she would bite back, and nature knew better than to mess with her.
But Kalon wasn't going to listen.
And so the night sprawled all over, with their blue and blacks and silvery moonlight splattered across a desert with less dunes that it had yesterday, that it would have come tomorrow.
Kalon became a synonym of elation. If this is how retaliating felt like, he would need to make sure he got offended way more often. Each contraction of his arm as he held the free tail of the whip was a moment of expectation; every violent release a worthy climax, a satisfying resolution.
Come morning, no dune in the desert would even remember the one that had, so long ago, provoked the sole walker of the Road of the Rottweiler.