Kalon poked Samari’s stout cheek with an exploratory finger. Was she dead? was she alive? Were the whistles coming out of her the wails of tortured souls of roasted animals, welling from her entrails, finally let free after years of torture? Questions, questions.
Samari opened her eyes and proffered the screech of a rat that knows. Something was poking her butt. When she turned, that something was Kalon, and her startling fright got replaced by cold anger. “Kalon, give me a reason about why you are poking my derriere. And it better be good.”
“It’s the part one pokes with a stick in animals because the butt and the mouth are far apart and the butt generally lacks teeth.”
Samari’s anger got manslaughtered by Kalon’s basic and innocent response. Worse yet, the answer was even logical. She then noticed an oddity in Kalon’s statement.
“Generally?”
The boy nodded with a gravity seldom seen when a man speaks about ass. “I have heard some butts are man-eaters. How can you eat a man without teeth? You can’t, men are made of meat. You need to chew. So there teethed asses hunting us out there, Samari. The world is an ugly place.”
Samari decided not to ruin his childish innocence by telling him that was most likely a euphemism for anal sex. Or maybe —just maybe— people in Valelike Vale had evolved anthropophagous butt cheeks. They were the kind of population where genes know each other so intimately that the only way they have to get some spice and variety in their life is with accelerated mutation rates.
She decided to change subject as she sat on the bed and stretched her arms. “What did you want from me, then?”
“Well, you are earning most of the money and used a bunch of it to help me in my cultivation, so, I think it would be only fair to help you with your… uhhh… non-cultivation.”
Samari, with a soft smile, placed her calloused hands on Kalon’s shoulders. “Don’t worry about that. Arcagnosis is a path to power that generally takes a mentor to be learnt or advanced, at least until higher levels of proficiency. But I am Aunara Stradeajo’s child, and she taught me many tricks to become self-reliant. Besides, just because she is dead it doesn’t mean she cannot teach me anymore.”
Kalon’s smile vanished. “Don’t you miss your mom?”
“Sometimes. But it’s best not to. She sook immortality, and now she is dead in some ways. The traditional one, mostly. But, unlike rabbits or… rats…” Samari lowered her gaze. She had unexisted those poor rodents with her questions. “People don’t live on only through their body. You can talk with the dead, Kalon. Read their words in pages, converse with the memories they left in someone’s else head. And my mother was the kind of woman that asked questions to herself, and answered them in the paper. Our conversations from now on may be predetermined, the amount of questions she will ever be able to answer me limited. But, Kalon, isn’t the number of questions you can ask anyone limited too? Most conversations with dear ones aren’t to learn new information: they are to listen to their voice, lest we forget what they mean to us.”
A mighty need to ruin the moment pumped through Jagger’ veins, so, popping his little head from between the sheets of Kalon’s bed, a mole of a dog among a land of cotton, he said, “Third person pronoun used to refer to groups of people or a single person of an undetermined gender.”
Samari regarded Jagger with the expression that’s generally reserved for that elusive, flying cockroach that you have been hunting for the past three weeks, developing a sort of friendly rivalry that will inevitably culminate in the death of either you, or the insect.
“Thanks, Jagger. I am welcome.” She stole the chance to be polite from Jagger, because she believed he deserved it. And he did.
Jagger Stood in his forelegs, extending his tiny paws to see how much he would need to jump to slap Samari’s face until it was cooked from the resulting heat. In his heart of hearts[1] he knew he would , himself, make a worthy cultivator, with all the little bits of psychopathy that implied. But a cultivator’s chosen weapon couldn’t cultivate: the heavens would never allow that, for the heavens were against pyramid schemes of power.
Kalon was deeper in thought than he had ever been: he had dipped his toes in it, and already felt like giving up and drowning. “If someone killed my mom, I would want them dead.”
Jagger’s jaw dropped, “He used a conditional, and the statement in it is rational!” Then, he ran for his life and, with a last second leap, took refuge under Kalon’s bed. There he found a fat, lazy duck, whose quack was so slow and heavy that it lumbered in Jagger’s direction, it’s steps thudding onto the floorboard before reaching the puppy’s ears. Jagger greeted the duck. The duck dropped a racial slur. This way, they became besties. For a while at least, as the duck secretly thought of Jagger as an emergency ration for the rainy day when his breadcrumbs stash dwindled.
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Samari lay back on her bed, her hands cupping the back of her head with her hands. “It’s not that I forgive. It’s not that I forget. It’s that I just don’t care, Kalon. They killed everyone I knew. Big deal. Most of them would die one day anyway.”
Kalon began pacing around, fidgeting with his fingers. “That’s horrible, very horrible. Horrible much, Samari. Very bad.” He repeated tirelessly.
But Samari couldn’t care. The people in Diamonter town didn’t deserve to die, and she didn’t deserve to be her mother. But life was not about deserving things or not; life was the Lottery of Babylon, with the gods only interfering with it whenever it pleased them. Life was chaotic, impersonal and capricious as only a universe that learned to have opinions along humans could be. And yet, she could interpret the massacre of Diamonter town as a fortuitous event for her. From Samari’s conception to the last day of her life, Aunara had aimed to make the girl grow into a nearly perfect reflection of herself. In the day before she lost her mother, Samari had learned how deep that obsession ran, how what she had always thought of as a mother’s imperfect love was just a narcissist’s self-serving fixation. And now Samari was free to be… Samari. Not the little Aunara, not the child that struggled to survive, alone among wolves and fearing roaming cultivators. She had been spared from her mother and cast into a life of scary freedom. Because no matter how many lose: it’s not a lottery if there aren’t some who win.
“It could be. But not all mothers are loving, albeit imperfect, Kalon. Not all mothers deserve the title. They killed the woman who gave birth to me. But the illusion of this woman being my loving mother disappeared before they blew her head up. If I lost a mother I never had, who should I seek to retaliate against? The ones who showed me the truth in the last instance? The ones who took from me nothing I should care about?” Samari’s countenance filled with sadness as she stared at the ceiling of the inn. “I miss my mother. But the woman that gave birth to me killed her, as a last act of kindness with me. I miss my mother, Kalon.”
Kalon´s eyes darted to the sides, not knowing where to hide. “I… don’t get it, Samari. I am slow.”
She sat up and crossed her arms “Well… do you know how babies are made?”
“You do a ritual I will be told about when I am more old, a stork brings a vegetable, — preferably a cabbage — and when you peel it you find a baby inside.”
Samari regarded him with amused incredulity. “Fine. The babies in Valelike Vale must be made differently.”
“Or maybe they lie to children as young as you to protect your innocence, Samari,” Kalon patted her in the head, as he did with his dogs. Samari resisted the urge to bite his fingers off.
“Fine, fine. Anyway, Kalon, if you want to help me with my Arcagnosis, we need to amass money for travelling. If you help me with this, I can help you advance faster in your cultivation, optimize your path down your road and turn…” Samari made a pause. “Rottweilers…” another pause. Was she proposing to refine dogs into pills? Unbelievable. “Into elixirs.”
“Burr.” Brunhilda placed her heavy head on Samari’s right thigh.
“I won’t turn you into a cultivation smoothie, Brunbrun,” she assured Kalon’s sensei.
“Burrrrr.”
Samari was taken aback by the dog’s willingness to become a cultivation implement. Strange were the preferences of Brunhilda.
“Okay, but you will need double factor authentication and a seventy-two hours consideration period before being turned into a pill.”
“Burr!”
“Human hours, not dog hours!”
Burnhilda, offended by the concept of having to wait three whole dog weeks to get pillifyed, stormed out the room, casually tearing out the throat of the local dealer on her way out the inn.
“Brunhilda sensei! Come back here!” Kalon followed her, screaming like a madman.
Jagger lost a game of Lovers and War Crimes with the subbedian duck. This game, invented in times immemorial by ducks and dogs, consisted on assembling a strategy to seduce the rival “Military” board — whose pieces were dust specks drawn from a deck of carefully selected dust, built by each player before the game —into killing every “civilian” piece of the allied board. For this, you had to use Lovers — whose pieces were dust mites sometimes, and the concept of a dust mite when either the economy or the fates weren’t kind — to flirt with the enemy soldiers and generals, whose stats, as well as those of the lovers, were divinely randomized and communicated to both players via heavenly revelations at the beginning of each match. Then, with a combination of turn-based moves of pieces, mites draws and risky declarations of bedroom intentions to units that could have the false sexuality displayed — which often resulted in the lover piece being killed — the game went on until a player ran out of civilians (thus winning) or surrendered (thus losing).
The duck, being a bad winner. Kicked the game pieces away and insulted Jagger’s mother.
A snarl from the puppy followed, and then, a few pecks from the duck. Defeated, our valiant dog abandoned the battlefield, just to be picked up by Samari as he emerged from below the bed.
“What were you doing under there?”
If Jagger could, he would have pouted. “Disappointing my dear ancestors.”
“Then you are my perfect pet, Jagger.” She joked, placing the puppy over her bald head. “Now, let us follow Kalon and Brunhilda. We need to take more jobs, and I need Them to kill anything that isn’t a dog or a cultivator.”
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[1] Jagger’s heart contained a single heart in its structure, for the record.