The lightning did hit a Rottweiler, but it wasn’t Jagger. It got intercepted by Brunhilda’s jaws, and before the mass of electricity noticed the abrupt stop, it was already being shaken from side to side, bleeding sparks everywhere as a very angry female Rottweiler mauled it to death. Brunhilda felt the unearthly heat, and her skin should have burned, but her cells didn’t dare suffer damage, lest they vexed Brunhilda. Ten thousand degrees weren’t an excuse to die, not in Brun Brun’s watch. So, crunching her own cells into immortality, defying physics to be able to bite a mass of electricity, Brunhilda fiercely guarded Jagger, tearing chunks from the bolt, causing it bleed blue heat all around.
Slammed against the cobblestones, thrashed from left to right to right to left to left again as Brunhilda turned her body to keep throwing it around, the lightning Bolt regretted the choices it made in its long life. It had lived more than most of its kind, enough to develop a sense of self. A sense of anguish. It lacked the capacity to feel pain; still, existential dread creeped in. It wasn’t alive, yet it didn’t want to die, because it was soulless. Once it’s electrons dissipated, there was nothing else for the bolt. No heaven nor hell awaited its kind, no cycle of death and rebirth. The world would be gone for it. It’s very self would be undone, a crime far more atrocious that killing the souled, those of immortal essence. To kill a lightning bolt was to obliterate it, to delete said entity.
Granted, as far as morals and ethics went, Brunhilda, in classical dog fashion, didn’t have any. No one would tell her she was a bad girl for killing that which shouldn’t have been alive in the first place. After a few more bouts of shaking and shredding and tearing and struggling, like a bloodied snake the lightning bolt lay on the road, bleeding plasma onto the stone slabs, seeing its life pass before it’s draining mind. The life was mostly black darkness, a world of electric potentials alone, with no light nor sound to guide its path. And now, it had seen that there were things that burned more than the unleashed rage of the storm. Why couldn’t it stay? Why couldn’t it hang onto the skies and illuminate the good people of Valelike Vale? Why? It didn’t want to go now, considering how cruel it was that the fates had bestowed life upon that which couldn’t seize it!
Then, without a soul ascending to heaven, without a death rattle, and without a chance to prove it deserved to exist, the Lightning died, electricity dispersing into the air, Making the hairs of everyone present stand on end: two black, dog shaped hedgehogs, Kalon the Sleeping Discount Shonen Protagonist, and Samari , Holy Tiny Patroness of Madhouse Escapees.
Talking about Samari, she was silently crying. “That lightning bolt was alone and scared…” Were the only things she said before crouching and fixing her gaze on a brick with nothing noteworthy about it.
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“I am more surprised by the fact that a common dog mauled a force of nature,” Jagger commented, not particularly moved by the events. “I died, was reborn, and now Brun Brun mauled the lightning. I hope the rest of this week will be relatively boring.”
The fluffy Brunhilda sat down and began panting. She had had a good workout.
“I feel its pain on my spirit still. That bolt drowned in a sea of suffering and then… then it stopped. Poof. It was no death; it was a deletion. Death doesn’t feel like that: I killed cultivators, I killed squirrels, I killed ants and I killed plants. I squashed worms and crushed beetles. And nothing, I assure you, nothing dies like that. There’s a weight lingering in this air, there was a soulless spirit that became undone. There’s…” Samari snapped her roughed up fingers, looking for the words. “A sort of ontological hostility tarnishing this air we breathe, these cobbles we step onto.”
Jagger rolled onto his back and lowered and eyebrow. “Are you sure you are nine?”
“Yes. Why, aren’t existentialist concerns adequate for my age?”
“Girl, you need a therapist, and that therapist will need, in turn, a therapist of their own.”
“Burr.”
“Yes, Brunhilda: therapists all the way down. Thanks for traumatizing our new pet.”
Bruhilda raised a paw, a sort of “Don’t mention it” gesture. “Woof.”
Kalon slept soundly and sonorously over an pseudanthium bed that, naturally, was quite full of shitty flowers.
“I shall ignore the fact a dog considers me a pet,” Samari noted. “You dogs are impervious to what Brunhilda has done, and Kalon could feel it if his cultivation was advanced enough, but I doubt he would be able to interpret it. This is something you feel on your spirit, and only if one is attuned with it. I may stand on the lower echelon of Arcagnosis, but I am still an Arcagnostic. And the world is far more horrible when you develop an extra sense.”
Jagger tilted his head. “You mean it is better to be blind than to witness vileness and debauchery?”
“I mean that suffering permeates every possible aspect of reality, and the more you sense about your surroundings, the more you suffer.”
“Burr.”
Jagger hastily translated “Brunhilda says ‘except when you are a sociopath like me’.”
Samari pushed forward to the city. There was no point to be made by talking to them anymore. You cannot explain the colors to he who has been born blind, cannot convey the beauty of music to the deaf. “Come, let’s drag Kalon to Honeytown. I need a bath. I need a book. And, overall, I need to progress.”
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The God of Tribulations woke up from his beauty sleep and knew, just knew that his lightning bolt had been mauled to death. Sweat drops fell from his forehead and the tip of his nose, down to the earth: He slept upside down, bed thunderbolted to a cloud’s toned midriff, because falling from bed in a common way made for no worthy tribulation.
His nails dug in his scalp as the visions of Brunhilda mauling the lightning bolt arrived like a deluge. He uttered words most divine. “What the Cutbastra[1] did I just witness?”
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[1] Collective noun of “fuck”. An unkindness of ravens, a dole of doves, a Cutbastra of fucks.