“I told her about my idea of having the dogs be able to be refined into various materials. She was almost as horrified as when I described Lyssav’s looks and situation. But she agrees not everything can be joy and puppies in our world.”

—Tidbits of Our Creation, page 9.

“Hitherto I had my doubts, but after losing both my left hands to an explosive pug I am certain: The world was made on drugs.”

—Doratev, moments after discovering Puggum.

Dirofil felt that the stool he was sitting upon had been rushed. The seat was slightly slanted, and it was more like a slice of a column than anything else. But he wasn’t one to complain about such trivial matters. In front of him Parvov had strapped a Pembroke Welsh Corgi to an elevated platform. The orange and white dog squinted at him distrustful and stressed without a good reason. Dirofil didn’t like to think about it, about why dogs impervious to damage would suffer from distress. It was a leftover, a consequence of the secondary nature of their world. Of it being a world created by entities imperfect. The dogs of the creators lived only for a short period. The dogs of the sea lived, period.

“Go ahead, brush the Corgi’s hindquarters,” Parvov urged, tapping his fingers upon his brother’s scapulae as he watched from behind.

“Why not process the whole dog?”

“Takes too much energy, and some breeds are rare to come across, so we release them back into the sea in hopes of them regrowing their hair. We extended the practice to every breed to avoid overexploiting resources whose renewability remains unknown. Corgis are a good starting breed to learn refining: Corgite makes up most of the ship’s structure and is used on D and L alloys.”

Dirofil reached and scratched the squirming dog under the ear. “The letters are our initials, correct?”

“Indeed, Dirofil. According to our analysis of your Splinters’ bodies, you are mostly composed of Retriever Gold and Retriever Rust, with a nice potion of Corgite and a smidge of Dobermannite. We haven’t discovered the dogs that make up the skeletons of Babesi’s Splinters yet.”

Dirofil elbowed his brother onto the chest. “It’s ominous to hear you explain things calmly, Parvov. Where’s the rage?”

“Allayed by this big family all around us.” He gestured at the toiling Splinters with an open hand, as they processed corgi hair in their working stations. Then he palmed Dirofil once more. “Go on, be of use to your lifeline.”

Shy fingers closed over a tuft of fur standing out on the Corgi’s thigh, and then pulled from it softly, letting the loose hairs come free from their equals.

“Use the brush,” Parvov said, frustration evident in his tone.

“First, I want to figure out how to process this. Could you give me some pointers?”

After a single laugh Parvov incorporated and headed out the room. “Yes, I can. I need to get something first.”

Dirofil dedicated this spare time to actually brushing the dog in front of him, gathering the hairs on a pile next to the bowl where he was expected to drop the pellets of Corgite. It didn’t take long for Parvov to return, pushing a container on wheels, like the ones the miners had brought in with the pugs the tide he had first awoken inside the ship. From this wagon popped up a quartet of dog heads, revealing long jowls and droopy ears painted white and liver.

“For the love of… Tell me, Parvov, that you don’t have English Pointers in stock just to make this joke.”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” Parvov unloaded the wagon, lifting the docile dogs with a single hand, taking them out two at a time. “Pointer hair is used to make Pointerine, which serves as glue. It’s used as a structural component of the ship, and to concoct solid explosives when mixed with puggum. The ship’s defensive spikes can be suddenly actioned by detonating loads of this explosive at their bases.”

“Stop explaining things calmly and get angry and impossible to deal with when I don’t know something. You weird me out otherwise.”

“You have to accept I have matured, Dirofil. Everyone who enters this sea dies, one way… or the other. I don’t wish to quarrel with you three anymore.” Parvov shuffled his heavy feet until he could crouch in front of his brother, across the platform where the corgi was strapped to. The pointers behaved properly, and sat in their place, yawning and panting with little to no baying. “We lost Morbilliv. We lost Babesi—”

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“Babesi’s thoughtless?” Dirofil asked without looking at his brother in the eyes. “Have you found her cadaver?”

Parvov shook his head silently, and Dirofil deflected the passing thought of the front horn calibrating its aim to dig into his very flesh. “We don’t need to. We have searched high and low, from her spire to Morbilliv’s and back, through the Retriever, Collie and even the Bernese layers. Unless she still gambols in the space between spires — which would be both stupid and a very… Babesi thing to do — Babesi is gone,” The Captain lamented and cupped his face in his hand. “It’s heart-wrenching to be surrounded by the Splinters of our dead siblings every day. To command and serve these… tokens of grief at every waking moment.”

No Splinter around them turned. Dirofil got the sensation that, despite hearing how Parvov spoke about them, they knew better than to turn their heads.

Dirofil decided not to press the issue of Babesi any further. If Parvov didn’t know yet, it could benefit him to reveal it later. She had chosen to live with the Dachshunds, and she was doing pretty well on her own. To spur his brother and the crew of the ship into action to save her when they clearly had problems of their own would be to do his sister a disservice.

“Do they respect you or do they fear you?”

Parvov looked over his shoulder, at the Splinters behind him, and then back at his brother. “I already answered Morbilliv that question back in the tide: There’s no difference. Now, the Pointers are eager to be groomed, Dirofil.”

A Splinter of Babesi traversed the room at full speed while holding a contraption Dirofil couldn’t recognize in her only hand. Neither him nor Parvov thought much about the event, because it was a Splinter of Babesi.

Dirofil knelt next to one of the bird dogs his brother had brought and scratched its head, to which the Pointer reacted by licking his nose and nudging his head further into Dirofil’s hand. “They are used to this, aren’t they?”

“Yes.” Parvov pushed the tetrad of dogs apart as he made his way back to the bridge. “It’s safe to keep them on board as long as the group of four isn’t broken. So learn to process their hair and their hair only, Dirofil. Are we clear?”

“Transparent, as far as flesh goes.”

Parvov made a mental note to remember that joke, in case someone ever spoke to him like he did to others. Lyssav. In case he survived after bringing Lyssav on board.

Dirofil proceeded to brush the dogs and gather their hairs. Learning to refine materials from dogs would help him in his journey through the sea; or maybe if he helped around the ship enough he could convince Parvov to take him to the top of the sea with the Corship. Some resource of interest could be discovered on the other side, after all. The creators had endowed the world with knowledge of about three hundred breeds of dogs. He didn’t know how many had been studied by the crew, but there were bound to be many applications of dog-based materials yet to discover. And if they could be combined, then the possibilities increased exponentially.

But first, before considering such courses of action, he needed to learn to refine dog fur. His flesh encroached a hairy ball and began pushing it upwards his left arm, like a cockroach crawling under the skin of one’s arm. It circulated without issue past the parallel elbows, and by the conjoined metal humeri. Reaching the armpit, the hair took a sharp turn and negotiated the curved and flat ribs that defined Dirofil’s perinuclear cavity. It got admitted into the heart of the automaton nearly immediately and once inside it refused to change. Dirofil tried to convince the substance to alter its nature, begged with his soul relentlessly. And it was in vain. The hairs were hairs and refused to become anything but hair. So he expelled them though his chest, letting the threads rain over his legs.

A Splinter of Lyssav approached, dragging her burgeoning abdomen over the flat floor. She smiled softly, imprinting an unbecoming expression on a mouth that had been devised for violence. Her wings were folded tightly against her back. “You have to command them, not simply ask in a kind manner with your soul. Your Splinters oftentimes have issues with refinement. Channel hatred into the raw material, if you feel the need to.”

“Why do you help me? You are in pain. Unbearably so.” Dirofil tilted his head to watch her face and see her reaction. She smiled.

“We Splinters of Lyssav don’t know a painless existence. Neither we yearn for it. Nor we wish to. Haven’t you wondered if your state of calm or even bliss is a torture for someone else, Fourth Imagined? If your peace of mind is your sibling’s pain?”

“No.” Dirofil answered, honestly and unmoved. “No, but it isn’t. Lyssav was created wrong. That’s all.”

“Or maybe she was created right and the creators intended for us to be painbearers.”

“If that’s the case, they better hope I never find a way to meet them.”

“Veranda, get back to work!” Barked the splinter of Parvov that was overseeing the operation. “The Chihuahuas will gnaw this place to the ground if you people slack in the production of Corgite.”

The temptation of swinging a Pointer against the supervisor did not elude Dirofil, but he suppressed it for the greater good. “Go back to work, Veranda. You have my gratitude. I shall apply your teachings.”

And mere minutes after veranda had returned to her working station, Dirofil managed to produce his first load of Pointerine: sticky, colorless, and, in his opinion, unworthy of the trouble. It stretched between his fingers as he kneaded on it, and not long after immersing himself in the pleasure of playing with the substance he had turned his hand into a sort of temporarily-webbed paw that brought to mind the images of ducks.

“By the creators, the Original is a moron. Wasting resources like that. If I did that, Parvov would put me into the spider of shame, few questions asked,” the overseer grumbled in a voice Dirofil wasn’t supposed to hear.

He did nothing about it: it wasn’t worth it to reveal he could hear them just to make the Splinter stop complaining.