“Their lives are held in their thoughtcrystals, unlike ours that are held in our bodies. If they break, they will be able to repair. If they lose an arm, a sibling or Splinter will be able to provide another one without any specialized knowledge or training.”

—Notes for Cosmopoiesis, page 10

In the third tide of Dirofil’s slumber, the Reaper alarms blared again, and the ship quickly powered down. Lanidara, the Splinter of Lyssav, was on Psycholocator duty that tide, and she disliked it fiercely. Despite channeling the psycholocation waves outwards, some of them still found their way through the ship, bringing her images of every Splinter. Every splinter of Babesi, in exquisite detail, projected inside her soul. The closest one, with her purple scales, was facing the window next to her, sitting in a psycholocator seat, that resembled the thrones of the spires, but reduced in size and crafted in dog-based metals instead of stone. Said windows were opaque currently: they needed energy to turn transparent, and, furthermore, Parvov banked in their potential attackers not seeing them as a strategy for survival.

The Splinter of Lyssav squirmed in uneasiness with each wave of thought energy that bounced off the world around her. At about one every three seconds, this meant she was in constant distress. Due to this and more she hated radar duty, but the captain had told her that it was like water, and the ship was a fish’s gills. And she understood the essentiality of the task, and the importance of not sharing her negative feelings through the mental link to which all psycholocators aboard attuned to.

“Lanidara, calm down. I can feel your disgust at the Splinters of Babesi, and your fear at what dwells outside.” The Splinter of Dirofil next to her whispered. “But our peers depend on us keeping a metaphorical eye on that Reaper. We are one in this task, Lanidara. Focus.”

A message from the Splinter of Parvov managing them reached all of their minds simultaneously. Cease your chattering. Thoughtlessness awaits the unaware. Keep sending me mental images of the creature, lest I lack an updated answer the next time Parvov asks.

Parvov scoffed and the sound echoed in his room, as he sat beside his unconscious brother and kept guard.

Filbaros, as long as the Reaper keeps circling that point in space, I don’t need you harrying our Psycholocators. And, yes, I was attuned from the beginning. It’s my role as the captain to keep an eye out for threats. The rest of you, keep on with the good job.

Back in the Psycholocation bay, the Splinter of Babesi cackled as she heard Filbaros stomp when he entered the room and paced behind them, clearly insulted by the captain’s intromission. “The all-seeing eye of Parvov caught you being naughty.” She said in a mocking tone, between two pulses of her core.

He insulted her in infrasounds, and the Splinter of Babesi squinted her only eye at him. “Filbaros, we Splinters of Babesi are as observant as the original. Why did you use your voicebox to say nothing?”

“Cursed under my breath.”

“We don’t breathe. Now shut up!” Lanidara chided, trying to concentrate on keeping the Reaper located. “Isn’t it meandering around the point where we mined Puggum a few tides ago?”

She asked the same question through their mind link, and Parvov answered. So it seems. It’s where we picked up Dirofil.

Parvov immediately slapped his brother awake.

“What’s the issue now?” Dirofil mumbled weakly as he returned to the world of the conscious.

“The eye in your hand. The Doctor told me you seem to be able to open and close it at will.”

Dirofil raised his right hand and batted the lids of the Reaper’s eye. “Like this?”

A second later, a message came through the mental link.

Sir, the reaper has changed its behavior! seems to zigzag in our general direction!

“Close it and keep it shut!” He took Dirofil by the wrist and applied a less than gentle pressure.

Dirofil obeyed immediately, not understanding what was happening, or why they were alone in a darkness irrupted only by the light of their cores, but he wasn’t gonna argue with his brother about such unimportant matters.

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False alarm, sir, it has returned to wandering aimlessly, for now.

Thanks a thousand, Psych team. Keep me updated.

He let Dirofil go and loomed in front of him. “You are to keep that thing permanently shut. The Reaper you took it from wants it back, brother. Are we clear?”

“The monster comes after the eye when I open it?”

“We would need more testing to affirm it without a doubt, but this far so it seems.”

In the darkness of the room Dirofil howled with laughter. “Parvov saying we need more tests! That’s something I had never thought I’d hear.”

Dirofil incorporated without difficulty. The three tides of meditation had restored a crucial part of his energy reserves, and while he wasn’t back in top form, he didn’t feel like walking in two legs would end him anymore.

“I am not the same Parvov that departed from the world of spheres and Spires, Dirofil. Few were changed by this sea more than I was. Do me the favor of keeping that in mind.”

“Did you know them before they entered the sea? The Splinters? Because you would need to if you are to assure that, Parvov.”

Parvov placed a finger on his brother’s face, right between the eyes, and the claws buried into Dirofil’s slime. “I watched our dear brother sacrifice his very existence to save mine. The shrapnel of his anima may have lodged deep into my core. Don’t get surprised if you notice grief gifted me with a few of his virtues, vices and mannerisms. I have no other way of keeping him alive… at least somehow.” The bulky hand fell like a flower that withers. “Worry not about the darkness. If you keep that thing closed, the crisis should only scrape us by. Rest, because as soon as the ship’s normality is restituted and we mine a few materials, we are amputating that tainted appendage of yours and building you a new one. A clean one.”

“No.” Dirofil crossed his arms in defiance, looking up at his brother’s four eyes. “I have gained this eye, assimilated it like I would a part of another thinker. I can see through it, and it minds not any wall. Probably, not any normal dog. It makes out the outline of mutant ones, it seems…”

Parvov listened intently as he rubbed his knuckles. “You saw the mutants outside the ship while looking for me? We detected none, but the small ones sometimes get around psycholocation. Chihuahuas?”

“No, a pug. The one you have in the laboratory.”

Parvov lowered his arms, his fingers twitching to curl into fists. “Thinking about it, brother, I do dispose of a spare arm I could give you right now.”

“I intend on keeping the eye, Parvov.”

Parvov lumbered his way out the room, and answered once he was deep down the corridor. “I´ll give it to you anyway, in case you change your mind!”

Dirofil let his body slump back into Parvov’s throne and focused on weaving thoughts. The sea of his psyche soon swallowed the darkness about him, submerged him into a prison of his own making as his soul unfolded in two: the engine of sapience, that which created pure ideas and gathered its energy on its core, and the coat of sentience: all of his sensations, opinions, and even the very ability to know what he was thinking in real time. A home knows not who inhabits it. A thinker does not know their thoughts as they sleep. They only know that some they will forget; some they will remember. Some they will know they forgot. Some they won’t, and can only conjecture that they existed.

Dirofil remained in the described state several hours, until the dink of metal clashing against metal roused him back into a state of soul unity.

He regarded the bent bones and plates in front of him, something that even in the corelit murk of a sleeping Corship was readily recognizable. the mauled body of the doctor lying thoughtless in front of him. a Parvov covered in blood —presumably, from the mutant dog— and holding the Doctor’s slime-covered core in his right hand seemed to expect a response from his brother. “If you need parts, feel free to take them.”

Dirofil’s gaze bounced from the body to the core and back to Parvov’s face.

“The Doctor is on timeout for misbehaving. I warned him to not do this again, and he persisted, probably thinking that I would let it go as I did so many times.” With the aim of providing Dirofil a good look at it Parvov raised the Doctor’s trembling core, whose tendrils of smile flailed in the air, trying desperately to find a body to hold onto. “Maybe I should allow him to retain the voicebox and an ear.”

Dirofil blinked and felt around not-his eye with the fingers of the left hand. “Could you give it back to me? I don’t care what you do to discipline your underlings, brother. It’s the only body part I’d like to recover. I feel Leptos’s presence with this eye, with the tail, with the arm. It is unnerving at times.”

“I’ll gladly take Leptos eye in exchange for yours, Dirofil. I have use for knowing if my siblings are alive, unlike you.” Parvov inserted a thumb and other three fingers in his orbit, and pulled without showing any sign of pain, until the one of his four eyes that was different form the others plopped out his gelatinous flesh. He held the metallic orb like one would a stack of coins and extended it to Dirofil, whose right hand awaited, palm up, for his brother to return that which he had loaned so long ago.

Dirofil received the eye and only then proceeded to bury his fingers into his flesh to rip off Leptos’. The lack of a skull made it comparatively easier for him to pluck eyes, or even ears or his voicebox, out of his head. And so, without further ado, he let Leptos’ eye fall on Parvov’s waiting hand, where it sunk onto the flesh and began slowly traveling up the arm, attuning to its new owner bit by bit. Dirofil, on the other hand, just slapped his eye in the little depression of his flesh where the other used to be, before it filled back in with slime.

Soon enough, his old eye began relaying visual feedback to his core. Parvov nodded and readied to leave once more. “I’ll put The Doctor somewhere safe. Rest another while, for the Reaper is insistent on lingering around in this terrible tide.”