The morning unrolled over the land like a rug of dew and dream-killing light. Droplets glittering upon golden stalks that the wind swayed to and fro. The honey farms had been long left behind, and now the sweet aroma of flowers —of variants of jasmine, lavender, roses and even banana trees— had been replaced with the pungent stench of manures —of variants of cows, pigs, horses, and even humans. Yes, there are variants of humans. You have men. You have women. You have, gods forbid me, lawyers. You have vegans. You have, and may heavens smite me for uttering this sentence, hermaphrodite vegan lawyers. The ducks on the ponds sprinkled across the land were fine. Just fine. Their fluffiness was not legendary, some of their beaks were slightly crooked, too long, too short. Their corkscrew body parts didn’t follow the golden ratio. Three-point-five star ducks, or only three if we are being rude.
The mints looted from the bandits were making wonders for the microclimate inside the Rottweiler wagon. Samari patted her chest as she thought about things only a prodigious mind would find a way to entertain. It makes no sense to call them boobs, they should be beeb. Tooth becomes teeth; foot, feet. It is only natural for the plural of boob to be beeb. Conversely, the singular of sheep should be shoop. One shoop, two sheep… no, sheep should stay sheep, lest we risk the sanity of every person with insomnia. Still, grammatical coherence is probably worth a few million minds. Perhaps a single Arcagnostic, one powerful enough, could change the language for the worse or the better, depending if you are among the acceptable casualties or not. I am not. I’ll add it to my bucket list. Fuck the insomniacs.
Kalon circulated his vital energy through his spirit channels. His last breakthrough had been half a year ago, and he didn’t feel he had advanced much. He had come to good terms with his avatar, and that granted him a flexibility many cultivators of an equivalent stage lacked. He could fight, and someone else would make the plans and enact the techniques for him. And if the Avatar slacked…well, that’s what the Samari Button was for.
“I am not your slave, Kalon. An Avatar is a symbiotic guide for some, a parasite for others. I aid you out of my own volition,” the Avatar reminded him, but talking into Kalon’s mind and talking to a wall were about as productive. “Ah, screw it, you are a relatively good host. I like you. Furthermore, you are paving this road, Kalon: you have a trailblazer’s privilege. I exist thanks to you, my personal idiot. Your immortality is mine, too, and, as a dog-based concept, loyalty is not foreign to me. This means—”
“Shut up or I will tell Sam to pick us. I am trying to meditate.”
The avatar howled and squirmed its way into the deepest crevice of Kalon’s mind, his chaetae-whiskers pressed snugly against his body.
“I’ll behave!”
Jagger eavesdropped the mental conversation while pretending to sleep. He had nothing better to do, and Samari was too engrossed in her own thoughts to pay him attention.
Suddenly the caravan came to an abrupt halt, and, as the Rottweilers had been running until then, it caused the wagon’s passengers to be thrown off of it, landing on the road, among the horse-sized dogs.
Brunhilda came out of herself to complain, “Burr.” And then she reingested her body, as she felt very cozy inside her own stomach, probably due to the Live Laugh Refine Your Neighbor’s Weak Teenaged Daughter into a Pill sign she had swallowed some months ago.
Samari raised her head from the dirt to see what had caused the sudden strop from the trotting Rottweilers. Among the settling dirt she beheld it: a carcass. The bleached bones of a canid lay in the middle of the seldom transited road, smiling with the mirth only they who will never pay taxes again can wield.
Kalon poked the bones with an exploratory finger. “These rocks look funny.”
“We are too late: the scavengers got the best parts,” Jagger lamented the loss of a potential meal. It was too young. Too tender.
“You guys are irredeemable. I think this is… or was, a dog,” Samari said, crouching next to the bones, ignoring the fact one of the Rottweilers that had been pulling from the wagon was drooling all over her shoulder.
“It was a Rottweiler; I can feel it. And it was not a mothered one,” the Avatar told Kalon, and Jagger immediately relayed the information to Samari. “This cannot be but a manifestation of the Road in the world. A way to Heaven paved in Rottweilers.”
“That’s really stupid.” Samari took in the semi-buried skeleton, and, squinting, decided to extricate her spirit to tinker a bit around with the ribs. “It does feel unnatural for bone,” she concluded after a few seconds. “It’s likely a vital energy construct. But by who?”
“Kalon is the only walker of the road of the Rottweiler in the world,” Jagger informed.
“So… this is a dead pup?” Kalon asked, earning the judgmental stares of everyone present.
“Useless gods in heaven, my maker is a dual-roader. He walks the Road of the Rottweiler and the Road of the Brainlessness simultaneously,” the Avatar caviled. “Oh the canity.”
“Yes Kalon, it is,” Samari said with a dead tone. “But, most important, this should mean there is some magical source of Rottweilers around here. Now, if we can track it down, it could help you advance to the next stage of your cultivation, Kal Kal.” She touched the wet dirt and rolled it between her fingers, feeling the coarse little grains and the little pebbles pressing against her skin. “I have no idea why I did that, it just seemed cool. Jagger, is your nose picking up anything of use?”
“Shit, Sam. Shit all around. Shit of all kinds of herbivores and carnivores and shitivores.” He tasted his own saliva for a few instants. “Brunhilda, get your ass out of your head and track this thing down for us, will you?”
Brunhilda emerged from the depths of Brunhilda, shook her own saliva and gastric juices off with an energetic burst of movement, and took in long sniffs of the local air.
Brunhilda’s ears perked up and she shot off eastward, jumping into the maize fields. The team followed, running and giggling, their spirits still hoisted by the horse stew they had cooked the previous night. Boots sunk in the dung and stepped over dead stalks, residues of the last harvest. Paws made their way over the field recklessly, minding not puddles or pebbles. The morning sun watched them over as they followed the psychopathic bitch and it hummed satisfied. All that starts well…
Crossing the fields guided solely by Brunhilda’s pup-in-peril seeking skills took a while. Swatting away maize stalks, despite what it could see, was a daunting task for Samari, and she had begun sweating profusely. Kalon, way more used to demanding physical activities, would have had no issue with it, but he just advanced, letting his strong frame do the dirty job for him. The dried parts of stalk wouldn’t scratch his toned and hardened cultivator body, so why bother at all?
They exited the field into an abandoned farm where the terrain got steeper in direction to the decayed farmhouse. Samari wondered why a cared for field would be next to an abandoned building, but then considered that maybe the fields had been left empty for so long that a neighbor had taken its chance and made use of the land, which was probably illegal but out there, without anyone to complain and with nobody to enforce the law, it was a low risk, high reward move.
Brunhilda, despite what one might think of her, bee-lined in direction to the house’s stone well. She peeked over the cobblestone and began barking downwards, her deep voice echoing through the hole. And when her barks died off, the whines gushed out.
“A Rottweiler well… “Jagger said. “Brunhilda, the card!”
Brunhilda puked out a bingo card and a pen, and Jagger was swift to cross out “Rottweilers as subterranean water.” He was a couple surreal events from winning an all-included grooming from Brun Brun. With a happy ending (which for a dog means food). he hoped.
Samari and Kalon reached the well at the same time, and stared down the darkness simultaneously. The only difference was Samari’s excited panting.
“I can hear puppies down there!” Kalon state the obvious.
“Yes, we need a bucket to get them out,” Samari looked around, and despite the broken planks, fallen bricks, heavily rusted tools and decayed straw that had dropped from the house’s roof, she found none.
“Not necessarily” The Avatar boasted, wishing Samari could hear him and appreciate his superior intellect. “Jagger, tell her we are going to fish the puppies out with a rope made out of Rottweilers.”
Jagger didn’t obey, because he considered the idea was not worth of the saliva expenditure.
The avatar snorted in indignation. “Fine, Kalon, you tell them.”
“We are going to make a rope out of Rottweilers and make them bite Brunhilda’s tail. Then, we send Brunhilda down and she picks the puppies up with her mouth. When a puppy is secured, I pull her out and repeat the process.”
Brunhilda nodded, appreciative of the idea. “Burr!” she showed her support for anything that including sending her down dark, potentially perilous holes.
Samari shook her head in disapproval. “What are we going to do with them, though? You could just use them to meditate around them and take in their essence, but then… well, it seems useless to take the pups out of the hole.”
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“What do you mean?”
“You could meditate in the bottom of the well and then get yourself out by climbing,” Samari suggested, palms up, as if it were the obvious course of action. “Puppies are expensive to keep, we already need to feed four mouths in our team, and eating puppy every day is out of question. So, I know it isn’t optimal for your cultivation, but we could stay here today, and while you meditate down the puppy well I will see if there is anything worth stealing inside the house.”
Jagger removed a bit of dirt with his snout. “Remind me, Sam, since when are we criminals?”
“Whenever we need it, Jagger dear. I am a minor, therefore considered unfit to plead. I am in the golden age to commit crime.”
“Well, but what about us?”
“You are a dog: unfit to plead. Kalon is from Valelike Vale: unfit to plead. Brunhilda is: probably fit to plead, but no jury on Cabaret would dare condemn her.”
“Burr.” Brunhilda’s soft voice came out of the nowhere that was her current place in the world.
Kalon straddled the thick wall of the well and took a peek down the tunnel.
Samari’s attention was caught by a whistle from the moron. “What are you doing? You cannot just jump down the hole.”
“Why not? I won’t get hurt by the fall.”
Samari began listing with her fingers: “First, because when it comes to you, gravity behaving as expected is merely a possibility. Second, because you may have a strong body capable of taking inhuman punishment, but the puppies down there don’t. Third, because I am the one who makes the plans here, and if I don’t want you to jump and make rustic puppy puree, you don’t. Understood?”
Kalon desisted and got his foot out of the well, while still sitting on the wall, facing outwards. “No. Too many words.”
“Just don’t jump,” the Avatar said, and Samari knew he was intervening by the thoughtful look on Kalon’s face. “By the love of all that’s meaty, don’t make her angry.”
Samari tried to put it softly. “Listen. Use your puppy scarf as a rope and climb down, okay? If it can strangle a griffon, it can stand your weight without breaking.” Good job, Samari, you didn’t insult him. Good job.
Kalon pumped vital energy through his neck and into the scarf, feeling the spiritual fluid rushing out of the channels of his soul and into the very essence of the puppies. The puppies, on the other hand, felt like an enema of burning power was being infused into them, making its painful, tingling way towards their heads and then being discharged into the tail of the one they were biting. They didn’t whine: they were used to this. They had been born for this very purpose, and how could they spurn that which so many searched for all their lives? To have a definite purpose, to serve a higher power, was a privilege they remained unwilling to forswear. Well, all of them but the last one at the head-end of the scarf, who shuddered and feared in wait of what was to come, of having to birth a sibling of his through his mouth. IT was painful. It was stressing. It could go wrong. And it was bad for the teeth.
But abortion was not an option — drop the torches and pitchforks, this is not pro-life proselytism. Well, it could be, but then the pro-lifers would hate me too — when you were a spirit-puppy: the head-end Rottweiler closed his eyes, and, shedding tears in the way an Australian swimmer sheds lethal jellyfish when coming out of the water, started pushing the newborn link of the puppy chain out of his guts., stretching his throat to its limits, making him wish for a death that wouldn’t come. And so a newborn puppy got added to the end of the scarf, and the process would soon repeat itself with the newest addition, in a way about as gruesome to witness.
Samari turned and headed to the doorless frame at the front of the building. She would not force herself to observe Kalon’s art any further.
When the puppy rope had extended enough, Kalon beckoned for one of his carriage-pulling Rotties to come and act as an anchor. The animal slammed his heavy butt against the earth, making it quake slightly, and it took the scarf carefully into his mouth, with Kalon pulling a bit to make sure it was properly secured.
Kalon stared a last time down the hole. It was dark. Darker than he would prefer. And little lights twinkled at the bottom. Probably the eyes of the puppies looking upwards. He straddled the wall once more, holding tight to the rope with his strong hands.
“Avatar, how do I climb down?”
“Follow my instructions down to a T. Okay, first, get your feet against the slimy interior of the walls, while still holding onto the rope, don’t let yourself fall.”
Kalon did just as instructed and let out a little squeal when one of his feet slipped, but the rope and the Horseweiler’s grasp kept them from falling down.
“Good, now, step by step against the wall, try to climb down. Letting the rope go one hand at a time and always having it grasped with at least one of your monkey paws.” The Avatar tried to be as specific as possible. And, to his surprise, it worked!
The firmament slowly became a little dot to be seen through the musky, hot currents of air that wafted up from the bottom. Moss and dirt covered the walls, with this crust they formed cracking, peeling off and falling over the ostensible puppies at the bottom whenever Kalon touched it. And the whining got stronger as Kalon descended, the cries of the pups ascending like scalding water form a geyser, enveloping him as he got closer and closer.
“It’s so dark down here.”
“Let me transform your eyes. Dogs have great night vision.”
Kalon nodded, letting his avatar take control of his eyes, changing their internal shape into that of a dog’s making his day vision considerably worse, while enhancing his capacity to see in the dark. This is, to see while in gloomy environments, not to be able to see the Sonata Arctica song. Synesthesia is not something most dogs are known for.
And what got revealed to him was not a bunch of fluffy, huggable balls of fur drooling and shitting over each other in a sea of smelly love. It was more like a pond of Rottweilers. A puddle. A pit, in the sense we give when talking of tar, which the hairy fluid where the facial features of several puppies floated and bubbled resembled. An amber eye there, a floppy ear here. A snout and a nose drifting apart and twirling as they sailed through the mass of liquid Rottweiler essence. It was like somebody had melted a bunch of puppies inside a fur-nace.
Kalon reached for his face with a single hand, and noticed he could feel his heartbeat around his eyes. What was this dread he felt? Why did he want to escape? He wasn´t a coward, so why? why did he fear the image he was seeing?
“Kalon, appease your spirit, it’s just a pool of molten puppies,” the avatar chided as if this situation they had gotten into was an everyday occurrence.
But the energy the poolpies exuded stirred Kalon’s soul, shook it to the core. Evil, they had no trace of, but wrong, wrong abounded in them. Like methanol is to water, an existence so similar to that which gives life, and yet so fundamentally wrong. To be more specific, it felt like finding methanol vapors when you seek liquid water to appease your thirst: it isn’t only an impure form —in the case of methanol, a hydrogen of the water molecule gets replaced with a methyl group— of what you need, but it is in an unusable state. Because the puppies were not pure Rottweilers. They were a muttified source, one that needed to be refined and purified.
Kalon tried to climb back up, but the Avatar paralyzed his arms.
“Drop into the pool, Kalon.”
“If I do, I may fall upwards,” Kalon argued in a surprising bout of common sense. “Wait, I may fall upwards!”
Kalon let go of the rope and fell as one expected non-Kalon things to fall. He had forgotten a key component of his gravity defying feats: they were never intentional. And now he had to pay the price. He was submerged up to the waist into the pool of puppy tar. It had splashed onto him, imbibed in his hair and covered his chest face and hands. He could see teeth and tongues and noses sliding off his skins and below.
He watched in horror how his puppy rope dispersed and returned to his spirit. “We are stuck here, like it or not, partner.” The avatar said, and then laughed, distressing Kalon further, making him wail and scratch the walls trying to climb out and hyperventilate, feeling he would suffocate in his own misery.
“Let me out! Avatar help me out!”
“No, Kalon, no. This is a chance for you to become more powerful. For us to advance further down our road.”
“Samari, Jagger, help!
Jagger stared down the hole, sighed and went away.
Kalon tried to raise his hand to attract Jagger, but the avatar sent a pang of pain coursing through him, making him kneel, getting him stuck further down into the puppy tar.
“You asshole! Help me get out!” He kept clawing the slimy walls in vain as the avatar kept on laughing.
“No. Meditate, Kalon, meditate and feel the tainted essence you are submerged in. Shape it into purebred Rottweilers. This is your kingdom, show them why you are king!”
The puppies gurgled and bubbled around him, trying to climb onto his neck in slimy waves, licking Kalon when a tongue drifted by.
“It’s so icky. So disgusting and miserable. I feel them trying to intrude my soul, I am not going to open them the door. Get me out.”
A stone dropped from above and hit Kalon on the shoulder, making him yelp, more from surprise than from pain, as it had caused almost none.
“I think I missed the head,” Jagger lamented, looking around for something else to hit Kalon with.
Kalon didn’t wonder why Jagger was trying to knock him out. His friends being assholes was par for the course.
“Meditate, Kalon. Purify this pool of filth,” The avatar urged, all of his heads smiling, like a dog-hydra nesting inside Kalon’s mind. “Meditate. I’ll guide you.” Then his tone changed to an annoyed one. “And, Jagger, stop that!”
Then Kalon closed his eyes, and, noticing his owner had accepted to follow the avatar orders, decided to not drop down another rock. It was time to see what Samari was doing.
And so Kalon fell deep into a contemplation of the self and of the tarnished pool he had sunk into. Bit by bit he attuned his energy with that of the Rottweiler playdough around him, trying to discern the Rottwheatlers from the chaffmuttiness. Then, a particle of Rottweiler essence got filtered into his soul, becoming part of who he was, increasing his understanding of the liquid Rottweilers by a marginal amount. And while you didn’t understand water merely by swimming on a lake or drinking a glass of it, he had a teacher to guide him. His Avatar added, with no words needed, with no words spoke, it was comprehension, pure and unadulterated, being directly forged into Kalon’s psyche.
“Good, good! Take it in, understand the Rottweiler’s like they seek to understand you. We will master the liquid dogs together, Kalon.”
Kalon thought a yes and smirked. It was disgusting, but he could feel it would pay off in the end.
Meanwhile, Jagger made his way into the house, and crawled below a Cupboard that had been caught by a wall during its fall and vomited expensive ceramics all over the floor, and reached the girl, who was checking the contents of the house’s library.
“Have you checked for valuables?”
“My priority is finding any book with information I deem worthy of learning. But most books here are fiction. Shitty fiction, at that. Half of the volumes feature bare-chested barbarians on the cover.” She said, unwarranted indignation permeating her voice. “How many copies of derivative schlock on the vein of…” She reached for a book to check its title. “‘Taken by the Demonic Cultivator’ do you even need?”
“Samari, jewelry, money, or something like Monsters and Conjurations cards.”
“I found a Control deck and I hid it out of sight. That shit may be worth good money, but I am not helping someone play such a heinous archetype. I have moral boundaries.” Samari lied. What she had was a figurative hate boner for control players in trading card games. She picked up another book form the dusty shelves, and, after blowing off the layer of dead skin and mites over it, read the title and grimaced. “I swear as soon as I discover how to change my sexuality I am making myself asexual. I have until puberty to learn.”
“Samari, with all due respect, you would be shooting yourself in the foot. Sexuality is useful for women. You can have men bending over backwards if you are ever so slightly sexy. Willing slaves may help you attain your goals,” Jagger said, with the honesty and lack of tact only a dog could muster. “You could even use Arcagnosis to enhance your boobs and ass and have even more slaves!”
The nine-year-old battled her instincts to not give Jagger a corrective. Mind over matter, Samari, mind over matter. He is just a dog, he doesn’t know better, he is just a dog… there, you are controlling yourself pretty well. Mind over matter…
But in the end, her indignation was stronger than her will, and she caved in, speaking a single word out loud, one that confused the hell out of Jagger:
“Beeb!”