After a couple of minutes of a drunkard’s walk evading concealed holes, barely visible wires, the cadaveric remains of Brunhilda’s enemies —that littered this land and those far past the horizon, collections of rough leather dried by the scorching sun encasing bones broken by both natural forces and Brunhilda, a sorry sight for mothers that should have cried before they let their sons bribe them into the easy life of a narco mama— and, last but not least, a couple landmines that Samari had found in a suspiciously intact shed and decided, yep, losing a leg once in a while was worth the added safety, they arrived to a hastily built shanty, about as derelict as the structure of this sentence. The uneven planks with blackened borders that made the skeleton of the little refuge were joined together with whatever Samari had found to tie them with: shoelaces, vines, ropes that were spared from the fire, and even a docile ferret that enjoyed life as a knot. It was a simple life, to be a knot: you were cared for, almost appropriately fed with a diet of leftovers, and predators didn’t even look your way, because it would be stupid for a knot to be made out of ferret. To become better knots was the rational step in ferret evolution, but that was just a pipe dream: evolution was known to forgo Occam’s Razor and jump through hoops to achieve even the most minimal of feats. Whales, look at whales. You took a sea animal, subjected it to harsh land conditions for more than three hundred million years, making it develop legs and homeothermy and a set of complex ear bones —you know, the thing not needed when you are submerged in a liquid about as dense as your skull— that you scrapped from the jaw as you finally noticed having a sole bone in the part that bears the force of the bite is kind of neat, and then plucked that animal in a coastal environment where it waded back into the sea step by step, promoting adaptions that made this air-breathing monstrosity whose gills you had all but neglected and reshaped into more useful mounds of flesh a better swimmer, erasing the heterodoncy that you granted mammals so long ago because oopsie-whoopsie teeth are not cash money to eat zooplankton or suction fish by the school, and moving its nostrils to the upper part of their head because gods forbid you add external accessory gills like you did for the amphibians, as you also messed around with the mammalian heart, metabolism and lungs too much by this point to go back, and cetologists know what else, just to make this slightly modified landfish back into a “proper” fish because some asshole in a white coat told you fish weren’t a real, monophyletic group. And you didn’t do this just with whales, no, no, no, you tried several times with reptiles until you arrived to ichthyosaurs—for the record, just to kill them the fuck off— and then, unsatisfied with that, you cast a fish addiction into these newly fangled dinosaurs whose arms you had reshaped into ugly flying appendages, took away their flight, shaped their bodies like a torpedo, and what you made? Bird-fish to feed the black-and-white mammal-fish that you allowed to keep the teeth (Ah, but then you got tired of them too, and condemned them to life sentence in Sea World). No, ferrets wouldn’t evolve into easily knottable forms anytime soon, not under that management.
That paragraph went to several places. Like Jagger would have if he had stepped four centimeters to the left in the minute prior to arriving to the shanty. To the dog, that sorry hut that smelled to mud, sweat and attempts at crafting gunpowder that failed due to minute details. Not a drop of piss scented the air. Shame.
Samari’s scant belongings were spread about the place, past the aperture that held a series of vines for drapes. Among them were included a single kettle, a widowed pot, their bastard offspring, and a crude drawing of an Arcagnostic training whistle pinned to several planks that served as a makeshift wall. The cultivator as his dogs sit in front of the exit.
“Feel free to look around, there’s nothing of value to steal and I don’t keep traps inside the house. What would my mother say if she saw me doing that?” Then she lowered her gaze towards the pot and sniffed. “‘I am dead, so I cannot ground you.’” She then smiled again and sat by a third-wheeling pan. “But don’t worry about my orphan status, it builds character. By eighteen I will have almost a decade of experience surviving in the wild to put in my resume. Kindergartens love people like that.”
Kalon considered her carefully, elevator eyes pentagramming elevator music with their ups and downs. “You are every chatty for a truffle impersonator.”
Jagger swiveled his head to look at Kalon, and his owner didn’t notice. “If you followed the Road of Insanity you would be the most powerful Cultivator alive, friend.”
“I am not insane; I am just…” Kalon paused for a minute. “Slow, like mom used to say.”
Samari crossed her fingers, making a pinecone of her hands that she raised in front of her mouth. “This boy must have a… condition.”
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“We come from Valelike Vale.”
“That’s a condition.”
Samari grabbed a bowl of water and poured its contents in the kettle. Then, she added a few dry leaves from a ceramic platter of them that she kept around, and pointed back outside. “I need to go outside , light a fire —that is, set some wood on fire {this is, ignite it [make it burn (hot hot)]}— and get the water near boiling point so the tea is made. Do I make myself clear?” Jagger admired the concern on Samari’s face as she said this.
“I prefer my people opaque,” Kalon honested, delivering such a blow to Samari’s spirit that it could have been compared to crippling her cultivation potential.
“I tried. I tried so hard. You child of the lambs of the gods.”
“Dog, translate.”
“She considers your pistachio-brainess painful.”
Kalon raised an eyebrow, and then examined his open, dirty hands as if they were stained with blood and it weren’t his. “But I feel no pain, she is wrong.”
“Yes, Kalon, you are right dear.” Samari sneered with seething rage boiling under her porcelain face.
Jagger gestured to the mask that hung from the girl’s neck: it seemed to have a constellation carved across it, sky scarred through a wooden visage. “Why hide your face? I know humans are pretty visual, but you are like a… rather civilized child of the wild, if that makes sense. Nobody that comes to this dead town will recognize a random girl.”
“Ah, but they high above see me, and they like my mask. Without divine providence I would be dead, and I am no prophecy-chosen hero nor anything of the sorts. This mask lets them know I am performing, and I got the little bit of my soul I have hitherto elucidated engraved on it.”
Jagged stood and circled around the standing child. “Are you older than you look?” he asked after a moment of inspection.
“I got tortured for five straight days and three gay ones by a cultivator. I could tell you about it over tea.”
“I don’t think torture can cultivate a lexicon far wider than the one your peers harbor.”
“No, that’s from raiding mom’s library, because I am a very weird child. The book smarts kept me alive, though. I can identify edible plants and shrooms, read the bodily language of some of wolves around here —the intelligent ones, like Ruth— and, as you witnessed, build elaborate traps.” She crossed her little arms and inflated her chest. “I have become very self-reliant.”
“Well, yes, but I have a living mother. Presumably,” Jagger spouted, no mercy nor remorse.
Samari’s brain ducked to dodge the dog’s ill-intended remark. “I’ll go outside to start the fire. Hope you two like honey in your tea, as I am all out of sugar.”
And so the knotted ferret saw his landlady go back out, not paying attention nor tithe to him. Next time, he would eat. Next time.
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Dogs and idiot, sitting around an extinguished campfire, watched curiously as the nine-years-old scrambled about a mound of leaves, searching for something. Her hands moved deftly: she was like a mole that had been carrot-plucked out of the ground trying to get back in.
“Aha! Here it is! Phoenix Down’s!” She raised the orange-shining vial and let its slick and lazy liquid fire glisten under the sunlight. “A few drops spread across a piece of wood are enough to initiate a forest fire.”
“Are you using feathers of legendary bird as a copulating match?” Jagger asked, safe-for-workedly.
Samari, with eyes unblinking and satisfied smile, shook her head. “These aren’t feathers of a legendary bird to be used as matches.”
“You said it’s the down of a phoenix, likely powdered or dissolved in something to make it liquid.”
“It’s not the down of a Phoenix. I was pretty clear in my wording,” Insisted Samari, and Jagger began thinking she had so many lose screws someone was funding their hardware store merely by selling said stray goods.
“Wait a second… is it the inferior part of a phoenix?” Kalon asked a reasonable question after carefully contemplating the conundrum.
“No, it’s distilled from phoenixes,” Samari snickered and removed the tin screw cap of the bottle. She rolled a single, globular drop of fire onto the tip of her finger, and it remained there, held by both surface tension and its own inability to care. Then, Samari smeared the droplet of fire around the tinder, and used some dead leaves to clean the last remains form her hand.
“Well… will it burn the tinder?” Kalon made the second reasonable question in a row, and the god of Status Quo hid under his bed, scared to death.
“I need to ask it nicely,” Samari said, imitating the bullshitting tone of her dear mother. “hey, Phoenix Down’s, could you heat up the tinder for me? I am a cold little girl and I would be very grateful for your help.” Samari concluded her act by winking and blowing a kiss towards the wooden sticks and dried leaves.
Smoke rose from beneath the surface of the tinder, and she blew some air on it to feed the newborn flames.
Jagger opened his eyes like golf balls. How could he be so blind? It was so obvious! “Is that the extract of a developmentally arrested phoenix?” he dared to seek confirmation of his suspicions.
“Not of the bird as a whole, only of its condition. Arcagnostics far more powerful than I milk the trisomy out of the phoenix, distill the product and bottle it. It can be used as a pretty effective retardant, as smearing it on things is harmless until something triggers it, and it sets the ontological status of whatever it covers to ‘ablaze’.”
Samari tossed the kettle over the flat-topped rock that occupied an elevated position amidst the fire. “Wait some minutes and we will have some delicious tea, my guests!”
Jagger let out a little whimper. He wanted to go home. Some home. Home they didn’t have.