Taking a sip from his elixir of true beauty, the cultivator stared at a purple sunset. Violet clouds gathered and frolicked about the sun, over the pink mountain peaks. It was a dreamy image for sure.
Then he took out the shades, because he preferred a run of the mill, orange sunset.
With a toothless smile and his face resting on the dorsal of his right hand, he spoke.
“Cute thing is the sun, Oracle. Do you think someone tried to fuck it already?”
The Oracle, a small legless skink that inhabited the cultivator’s poet shirt’s upper pocket, dignified the world by poking his head out of his home between the fabrics and considered the flaming ball in the horizon for a second.
“As in, the goddess of the sun?”
“The hot light thingy,” the cultivator expatiated.
The skink carefully considered the situation. “Why are you like this?” was the wisdom dispensed by him.
“I dunno, I am immortal, I am bored and.” he looked at the cloud he was standing on. It was dispersing. “About to precipitate towards the nearest valley at an high speed.”
Oracle inhaled slowly. It was always like this with him. Every single day he had to hold on to the shirt for dear life, using magic of course, because he was the sort of being you cannot precisely disarm; because evolution saw it first and decided that, yes, limbs were absolutely not Gucci.
“Listen, Cutbastra, there is no need to walk on clouds and fall when they disperse: You are capable of flight.”
Cutbastra the Red-Tinted-Hair-Dagger-Dealer shrugged. “Yeah, but I don’t get hurt by falls anymore either. I yearn for pain to remember what it feels to struggle. Your words haunt me every day.” Cutbastra paced around thin air, hands rubbing nervously in front of him. “No man woman born nor woman woman born nor woman man born nor man man born shall fall you!” he said with a thin thread of voice, trying to mock the acute tune of the skink.
“If death is what you seek, the one able to kill you has been already born, and he lives in a backwater place called Valelike Vale.”
“What is their caramelization index?”
“Three. Some households reach a four.”
Cutbastra observed the panorama. The mountains stood somewhat weary. Mountains of old, mountains that slouched, mountains in need of a vacation or a meteor strike. The trees coiled around their feet like sewer water with a double serving of leeches. It’s not that the landscape was hideous. It was rather well-favored for them who observed at a distance. But it was the knowledge that every single thing he saw would die before him that soured the picture. Even the sun would, and Cutbastra would not.
Yet he didn’t yearn for death, or rather, he wished for something he feared. Threes and fours were people capable of engendering children with enough gray matter to pose a threat. Yet it made no sense for no man or woman could kill him.
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Then, he had a terrifying idea. “Are you saying an intersexual was born there?”
“The gift of prophecy is bigoted and binary. Intersexual individuals should be contemplated in my previous statement.”
Some things on heaven and earth—particularly in earth— made no sense, and Cutbastra was well aware of it. His blue eyes had seen uncountable vows broken, laws that even gods should have obeyed violated for the pettiest reasons. His blond hair had been tousled by winds born from the unholiest of phenomena. His swollen pride debased by those who had sworn faithfulness unparalleled. In other words, he knew sloppy-toppy demons of all sizes, colors and shapes. “Then, does it merit our worry?”
“Prophecy is capricious, sometimes a vision doesn’t give many specifics. I’d reckon some sort of ‘less than human because the poor thing is too stupid’ fuckery could be taking place.” Oracle then licked one of his eyes. “Sorry, I needed to moisturize my orb.”
“I am going to eat you on a salad one of these days if you keep calling eyes ‘orbs’.” Cutbastra gave Oracle a little tap of his tiny head with a mischievous index finger. “Doesn’t matter, we have something more important to fixate on. What’s the name of this menace to my immortality? Did your gift whisper it to you?”
“Jagger,” the little legless lizard spat, annoyed by the touch of his companion. “I feel some sort of connection to this… child, I guess. We could be in presence of another seer. In which case, chasing him will be interesting.”
“Oh, children…” the cultivator said, smiling softly and caressing his manly yet refined chin. “Those are no men nor women, technically. If that’s the case, I could wait a couple decades until nature does its thing and they become adults. No need to get my wondrous nails dirty.”
“We don’t know if we are dealing with that ‘children clause’, we only know that somewhen in the last twelve years, a menace was born there.”
“How kind of prophecy, giving them a twelve-years head start on killing me. They may not even know I exist. Should I deal with this, Oracle?”
“They who may put an end of your long life need not to know you. Prophecy doesn’t speak of murder, nor of accident, nor of assisted suicide, because, yes, you were going to ask if I didn’t clarify.”
Cutbastra sat on a passing cumulus, and felt the soft chill of the cloud under his jeans. “I am a tad immature sometimes, yes…”
“You act as if you had a twentieth of your real age. Other quadricentennials act like almighty lords above or the incarnation of nigh unreachable goals for their disciples. You… are you,” the skink concluded his chiding with a redundant—nevertheless true— statement, for a sore lack of a better word.
“The path I follow requires me to be fresh for the ladies.
“So, back to the business at hand, I guess I will have to do the cliché villain thing and go to a small town and murder several inhabitants just to leave the one that will kill me alive because I didn’t double check if he was dead. Is this correct?”
“Yes, friend Cutbastra.” The skink let out a tiny villainous laugh. “I have been practicing that. How did I do?”
Cutbastra swiveled his open hand from side to side. “Eh, four out of ten. You need to feel it well up from your soul, and it lacks…aristocracy.”
Cutbastra exemplified what he said, and laughed a laugh so haughty and high-class that, out of a sheer feeling of inadequacy, the trees in a circle below him quit slacking and began quickly evolving into mahogany ones.
“Masterful display of lung control, friend. Shall we part for Valelike Vale?”
Scratching the head of Oracle with a single nail, the cultivator spoke, “Yes. We can walk there, right?”
“It’s like three thousand kilometers away…”
“An hour long leisurely walk? Splendid,” he inhaled, taking in some of the cloud he was sitting on. “Do people there marry?”
“I guess.”
He smirked and, with a splinter of ice extracted from the heart of the cloud, he began cleaning his shining white teeth. “Then I may be able to cultivate some. We will have a good time after committing a lil’ bit of reluctant infanticide, Oracle.”