Samari’s calf rested on her knee as she lay on the bed of the abandoned house. The morning sun came in through the shattered window and fell perfectly on the yellowed pages of the novel she was reading. It was a count’s account on a counter canteen cunt and accountant, which wasn’t precisely interesting to the majority of the people, but she could recognize the telltale signs of an author versed in Arcagnosis. It wasn’t a single thing, no: many authors could have any of the vices Arcagnostics tried to turn into virtue. Several of them at the same time, even. But there was a breaking point, an imprecise limit where the coincidences became too much. A carbonatic shell alone doesn’t make a mollusk, and not all mollusks have them; but when you have a shell, evidences of a mantle and a meaty foot or siphon or both, and a tongue with chitin teeth in it, you cannot be dealing with anything except a mollusk. Or maybe one of those weird sea dragons that evolved a mollusk-like convergence and existed for about seven and half years in the Cretaceous of Cabaret. Dragons do that once in a while, they try to fuck up taxonomy by evolving into short lived imitators of other animals, plants, fungi and even bacteria. Pyrodracoccus[1] is a unicellular, prokaryote dragon, and that’s why this supposed bacterium breathes fire.
But I digress.
The fact of the matter was that this book had all the hallmarks of an Arcagnostic writing it, and when they did, there often were secret messages to be found. They were regarded as people jealous of their secrets, but it was nothing further from the truth: many Arcagnostics loved riddles and puzzles, and spread in them little bits of their knowledge. Samari had tried common ways to encode information. She had taken note of the first word of each page, of each sentence, up and down, forwards and backwards, and all she recovered was nonsense.
But, far from being frustrated, this excited Samari. Maybe the author of this book was already dead, and here was she, practicing the kindest form of necromancy, talking with the dead like the most mundane of mediums. It had been worth to sift through that heap of erotica garbage that was the house’s library.
Samari called forth her incunabula and stared at her dancing spirit tendrils as she thought. What to test next? There were as many ways to hide messages as there were snails in the ocean. Fish, you expected fish? No, I am on a Mollusk state of mind today. Complain once more and I am going to fucking eat your face off with my superior cephalopod beak.
The author called me the mollusk equivalent of a furry. He dares. At least my economy is stable, unlike his. Hope you starve, fucker.
Back to Samari, right. She sliced her brains thinking about her next move. What did she know about this book, besides the theme, plot, characters, author’s name and publisher? Well, she was almost sure the man or woman who wrote it was a peer of hers. She had taken note of every grammatical error she had come across and perceived. They seemed truly random, except for one that looked like an obsession of the author to write “avode” instead of “abode”.
She passed pages while thinking about what else to check. There was —at least that she knew of — no definitive process for this, as checking known methods one by one would take forever. Sure, she had a good chunk of time, as Kalon had gone into meditation on the prior week and had still not come out of his literal hole in the ground. Yet finding out what was written was likely to be just the first step to deciphering the message, as Arcagnostics were widely recognized as fans of being carelessly cryptic.
Jagger entered the room with a calm aura around him.
“Samari, there’s a man with a shotgun demanding to know who has been eating his corn cobs. He is outside. He is angry. He has a shotgun and he is angry, if it wasn’t clear enough. He didn’t care about me being a talking dog for more than a second. Remember he has a shotgun. He didn’t kill me for reasons. And, I almost forget: he carries a shotgun,” Jagger said, calmly.
“What’s your problem with shotguns?” Samari asked, as if common sense weren’t dictating the most likely issue with a person that doesn’t like you wielding a shotgun and pointing it at you.
“They hurt my ears.” Jagger shot common sense in the chest — and what a chest she had — and threw the body in a ditch to make way for dog-on sense.
Samari yawned. What a chore it would be to let the book go to attend this matter. She was already getting in the flow, in the correct mindset. Not that of a mollusk, but still right for her situation.
She put on her shoes like they were slippers and shuffled her feet out of the ruined house, to meet a burly, unshaved man with a check-patterned shirt pointing a colander maker at her. And, what to say, she didn’t feel like becoming a colander that particular day.
“Sup angry farmer,” she greeted the man.
The farmer scratched his brown, unruly hair. “The dog said he was going to fetch an adult.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Samari acted all innocent, as if she weren’t an up and coming monster slayer. “You may have interpreted him wrong. The only adults among us is one of the dogs. I am nine, my friend is fourteen and down in the bottom of the well, meditating since about a week ago. So we need something to eat until then, and thought you wouldn’t mind a few cobs going missing.”
The man lowered his shotgun. “Well, I do care, so don’t do it anymore children, where are your parents?”
“Well, I am from Diamonter, and my mother is all around town.”
The man raised his gun again, pointed at the unamused Samari. “Diamonter town was destroyed like a year and some ago. There’s no way your mother can be around it, liar.”
Samari smiled without showing her teeth. “Oh, but she is all around town. You can find one of her tarsal bones on the street, a rib by the river, a fingertip by some untouched shed. You know, things that happen when you fight cultivators and they don’t promise to leave an intact body.”
The man lowered his gun again, and this time, he put it away, strapping it around his shoulder as a backpack. “I am sorry to hear that, I suppose you and the other are survivors without a home, then?”
“Oh, no, I am an Arcagnostic. Novice, but I can summon my Incunabula.” Samari turned and pointed at the abandoned well. ”And the guy down there is a cultivator, he hails from Valelike Vale.”
“So the dog fetched the most intelligent human of the group?”
“Indeed.”
The man crossed his hirsute lumberjack arms and cleared his throat. “Whoever sent the girl to lie, come out and face me, coward!”
“The only one in the house is the dog, sir. Jagger. We are two children and two dogs travelling to grow in power.”
The man spat to the side. “I saw only one dog around. You are not very good at lying.”
“Well, the other is very… self-absorbed. She’s full of herself.”
“Does she have a strong recall?”
Samari nodded effusively. “Yes, Brun Brun is quite the obedient team member when there aren’t scary things near”
“Then call her, so I can at least believe you have more than one dog, little girl.”
Samari looked around until she found an adequately shaped rock in the floor, and with it, she began drawing a pentagram in front of the man. “What are you doing?”
Samari’s index shot up to let the man know she wasn’t to be annoyed during the ritual. “Shhh, let me beget some drama and tension. Don’t interfere. I am bored.”
“I just asked you to call the dog, girl. Do it or I will go inside the house and your tutor will have a very bad time.
Samari finished drawing the pentagram in the dirt and stepped back. She raised her arms to her sides, smiled like a demented acolyte and kneeled. “Come, Brunhilda, lady of blackness and dead Narcos, Come!”
A bear passed and nothing happened. The man began giggling. “Okay, very funny, I am going inside the building.”
“Brunhilda you fuck come out of yourself!”
The man stopped in his tracks when he heard the soft “Burr.”
Horrified he beheld how, completely outside the pentagram drawn specifically for her summon, Brunhilda had started puking herself out of herself. “Gods in Heaven, what foul thaumaturgy is this?”
Samari shrugged. “I have not the palest idea. Brunhilda is not a cultivator nor an Arcagnostic nor a magic beast. She just… behaves like this.”
“The dog came out of her own mouth! She is covered in her own drool and panting happily!” The man protested, and Samari dismissed his worries with an amused pfft.
“Burr,” Brunhilda elaborated before she began chomping on her tail, ready to return to her own stomach.
He raised his hands in the air, showing his roughed up palms. He was sweating like a Coke (And yes, Pepsi is, for once, okay) fresh out of the cooler on a warm summer day. “I don’t want trouble; take all the corn you need. It’s clear you are an Arcagnostic, even if not a child. I am sorry if I made you feel disrespected.”
The man watched with trembling eyes how Samari began to guffaw, and how Jagger soon Joined her. “I am a child! It’s the dogs that are weird.”
“How am I weird?” Asked the talking dog. Talking dog. Talking dog… “ah right, the speech.” At last.
The man was going to speak, but when he saw a blackened and furry tentacle with flowing eyes and teeth come out of the well, he ran away faster than mainstream superhero comics would when chased by the concept of a single, concise storyline. He slapped corn stalks left and right to clear out as soon as possible, evidently not caring enough for his crops to warrant turning Samari into a colander.
With the aid of his newly improved puppy scarf (now liquid!) Kalon climbed out the hole he had been sank into for the past week. Inside his head, his avatar hummed proudly: in only a few days he had mastered the liquid Rottweilers, a most impressive feat. Granted, Kalon had the unfair advantage that he didn’t need to empty his mind of thoughts to meditate, as it remained constantly in a vacant state.
He emerged wearing a suit made of the liquid Rottweilers, that covered his chest snugly, marking the shape of all his muscles, and turned into a sort of dress of darkness and wagging tails at waist-height. The lower end consisted of frills of solid puppies, chained like his scarf had known to be.
“I am done meditating, team. I am hungry. I am tired. Let me rest a bit and we can be back on the road.”
Then he collapsed next to the well and started snoring. Samari left him be and returned back inside the building. “Follow me, Jagger, I may need another set of brains to think something through.”
And, after bouncing suggestions on how to interpret the text to find the hidden meaning for about an hour, Jagger had a really petty, stupid complaint. “This author needed to be put into a reeducation camp for his wanton abuse of verba dicendi besides ‘said’.”
Samari checked them out just for the fun of, and laughed like a maniac after discerning a pattern. Sometimes, you just needed a stupid complaint to crack a code.
----------------------------------------
[1] Author’s note: This was Pyrococcus at first. But I googled it and, guess what? Pyrococcus is already a genus of extremophile bacteria found in hydrothermal vents. Then I tried Pyrobacillus.
My luck being my luck, it also exists.
SO FUCK IT. IF PYRODRACOCCUS EXISTS, IT’S NOT THE NOVEL THAT’S WRONG, IT’S REALITY.