“If the ocean is to be an internally organized structure, it needs ways of maintaining such organization. In our bodies of water—be them rivers, seas, oceans or lakes—the water stratifies according to the laws of physics. The incessant pull of gravity discriminates apart layers that get arranged according to their density. This density, in turn, is given by various parameters one can measure in water: Salinity, temperature, and even the very weight of the water column that rests above our sample. Nothing of this applies to a body of floating, immortal dogs. Dogs in an ocean of dogs are roughly isohaline, roughly isothermal, and, given that they are not to be normally affected by gravity, roughly isobaric. Dogs are roughly as dense, no matter the breed. She has been raking her brains about the issue, and I have an idea to present to her. One that, at first, she won’t like…”
—Tidbits of Our Creation, page 14
It was easy to hunt that which one couldn’t see: Ears, whiskers, nose and even one’s twisted spirit worked in tandem to bring the fangs to where they needed to be. The difficulty —nay, the impossibility— uncovered when trying to hunt what could see one. It presented a new challenge for the Murkhound, an ominous one. Never had her prey been able to detect her so easily, from so afar, or to keep up with her midair frolics and leaps between parcels of nothingness. Dread crept up her reticulate spine as she stalked, describing circles over the thinker’s head. Thrice had she charged; thrice had she been chastised. The puncturing wounds in her face bled and the blood, like her, refused to fall. Droplets floated about her face, painted unseen constellations in the air. She panted, pained, pondering. How to hunt that which can see you?
To get acquainted with anxiety wasn’t Dirofil’s idea of a good time. This creature was too careful, too calculating. It forced him to keep the eye of the reaper opened. And while he was willing to perform the forbidden ritual to end her, there was no point in summoning the lord of the underworld just to exorcize a lesser demon. He needed to snuff the Murkhound, and he needed to do it fast. Or to find a way to see it without using the Reaper’s eye. That was a good idea. If it approached again, he would send his cape forth, to tack onto its flesh and mark the aberration for the world to see.
The hand! The eye in the hand had to be the culprit. In her ghastly view of the world it shone brighter than everything else but the thoughtcrystals. She needed to attack the hand first, render it blind. Her instinct edged her to do so, encouraged the line of thinking.
The spirit tendrils grabbed onto another Bernese as he brutally pulled from them to launch his body upwards and follow the distant light of Dirofil’s soul. He almost wanted to kill Dirofil. Grind his body to tiny scraps and shove him into the Spider of Shame. How reckless could the moron be, facing a Murkhound alone, only because the thing had murdered a Splinter. And whilst he understood the thirst for revenge, the sea demanded a cold head from anyone that expected to survive in it. One of his elder brothers had died to save him, and he would not let the other one throw his life again to avenge a crew member he barely knew. His soul already carried the dream of a gone sibling inside. He wouldn’t let it host that of Dirofil too. Mainly, because it was one he could never fulfill.
Dirofil flashed pale light upon an enemy it couldn’t touch. Come, attack me, it said. Consume this thoughtcrystal you desire so much. Attack me!
Attack him. You know you want to attack him. But doing so only rewarded pain! Yet the shining core… so enticing it was. Her tripartite tongue licked the hole where her nose should have been. She wanted to rush at her adversary, tear the cursed eye out his hand. Nothing with a crystal soul should have been able to see her. Nothing.
With jaws open wide and eel-dreads wide spread the Murkhound collapsed onto Dirofil, aiming for the head. It happened in an instant, this charge way faster than the previous ones. But Dirofil’s cape was eager and reacted in time, muzzling the beast, encasing her ugly head in a pliable iron maiden.
The pained howls would drive him mad, and even made Leptos’s eye twitch in his face. His sensible ears were torturing him as he ascended the last stretch to meet his brother, tethered to the brunch of Berneses under his feet. “Dirofil, how stupid can you be? Return to the ship now!” he rebuked as his last thrust pulled him over the catwalk.
The Fourth imagined merely laughed as his right ear was assailed by the thrashing beast’s cries. His cape constricted around the Murkhound’s snout, rendering her incapable to do anything beyond the instinctual act of trying to scratch the encroaching presence off her face. It was almost distressing to hear her desperate cries. Almost.
Parvov’s tendrils of soul lashed out, shimmering bright orange, whips of fire reaching though the night. They coiled around the Murkhound’s neck, legs, and drooling dreads, and then The Third Dreamt increased the amount of energy that he infused into the conjured threads.
Heat. Heat that twisted the air around the bindings, heat that seared her skin and made the pain of the spikes pale in comparison. Heat that ignited her dreads and their tiny mouths.
Dirofil recalled his cape with a mental order, unwrapping it from the disfigured head of its victim. Fire wasn’t good for the enamel.
For the first time in the Murkhound’s life, she was illuminated for all to see, baked alive by the abhorrent might of Parvov’s spirit.
The flesh boiled, the smoke rose. The cries died off and the fire soon followed, letting a charred cadaver fall piece by carbonized piece into the void. The threads of flame disappeared without major fanfare.
“I kind of… wanted to assimilate her parts.” Dirofil said, the eye of the reaper shutting close. “Let’s hurry back to the ship. We need to depart before the Reaper arrives.”
“The moron makes sense for once.” With a heavy hand, Parvov pushed Dirofil off the ledge, and watched it plummet several dozens of meters until he got a hang of a dog’s tail. “Meet me in the bridge as soon as you return to the ship! We will have a little… talk.”
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Parvov had submerged in deep meditation by the time the clinks of Dirofil’s steps announced his presence in the bridge. The heads of the Psycholocation and Legsteering teams had tasks to tend to in their respective areas of the ship, and the only Splinter that lingered in the room hung from the ceiling, not unlike the tension Dirofil felt in the air.
“Doratev,” the original greeted the spider.
“Dirofil. Parvov wants me to teach you about the abominations we know of. He intended to spar with you, but it seems the Murkhound crisis exhausted him.” The lone eye of the spider shot around the slime of its body, bouncing like a rubber ball inside a bag as the doctor tried to find a way down the ceiling.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Dirofil unclasped his cape and extended it between his hands, with the inner side, the one devoid of spikes, upwards. The Chihuahua teeth interlaced with his fingers, securing the piece of armor in place. He raised this extended platform high, towards The Doctor. “Let yourself fall. I refuse to fail at catching you.”
Doratev didn’t trust Dirofil, but hitting the floor wouldn’t be too much of a problem, either, so he let himself fall anyway. And Dirofil kept his word, quickly cradling the Spider of Shame in his cape.
“Parvov would have let me smack the floor.”
Dirofil squinted in glee. “Then you better be glad that my brother isn’t me. Do I carry you to the laboratory?”
The spider jumped from the cape and landed on its four legs. Legs of pale shine, each of their three segments creaking at the hinges when they moved. “I will stretch these legs a bit, so long as the noise of my walk results innocuous to you.”
“Of course, Doctor. Lead the way.”
And thus, he slowly tailed the skittering contraption up and down corridors and sphere stairwells. After coming down the second staircase, Dirofil decided to ask: “Isn’t there a more direct way to the laboratory?”
“Yes, but the mechanism of a bulkhead broke and I haven’t gotten around to fixing it. It’s probably just a stuck or shattered gear preventing the bolts from sliding properly. Nobody cares about the lab but me and sometimes the Captain. But he is too busy grieving for his… your brother and sister to grieve for a door. Since Morbilliv was rendered thoughtless, dear Capt. hasn’t been the same.” The Doctor made a pause to consider the path ahead and took a turn in an intersection.
“So you know.” DIrofil kept following. He enjoyed Doratev’s company, despite his quirks.
“Of course I know. I am part of the original crew. I built this ship along Parvov. But said Parvov is gone. The Reaper took more than he says that day. That one in the bridge is my Captain. But, hark what I tell you, he isn’t the Parvov that saved my life and then mercilessly beat me up for putting us in that situation. There’s hesitation in his violence now. I’d rather have the old one, and not because I am masochistic or anything… ah, here we are. Time flies when you converse.” He said, arriving in front of the sliding door of the laboratory.
“If it helps, I think he feels he needs to live both for himself and Morbilliv now. Embody them both.” Dirofil made a pregnant pause. “Maybe even that it should have been him, and not Morbi, that died that day.”
“Indeed. Take a seat, Original. The floor is wide enough, and you have so much to learn. Or, rather, we have.” The Doctor pranced onto his desk like a gracious gazelle and began using one of his forelegs to rummage through the manifold trinkets resting upon it. “Now, where did I leave that thing…” Then the little spider moved its one eye down to its rear to look at his interlocutor. “Ah, and tell me where you got an ear from a Parvov model, please. It was a most curious finding when I examined your unconscious body after your arrival. A rather… subtle modification.”
Dirofil leaned against the doorframe, his cape sliding to a side to let his back touch the frame directly. “So you know. Who else?”
“You, me, and whoever figured it out on its own. I am not giving Parvov this information unless he asks explicitly. It’s in my best interest to contribute to the general wellbeing of the ship and crew. But it’s also in my best interest to avoid nipping drama at the bud. This place is boring otherwise.” After a bit more of rummaging, he found one of his recorders, a contraption consisting on structures similar to the ears and voiceboxes of the Thinkers: a little dotted dice of black for the ear, and a considerably bigger oblate sphere with grooves on the upper side for the voicebox. A Morbilliv-like voicebox, Dirofil thought.
“This is where I recorded some notes about the abominable dogs. Feel free to listen to its contents. Take into account a base breed can abominate into different final forms, and we do not know the base breed for some of the beasts. The mutation goes too far, too deep: the original appearance gets lost. Becomes unknowable by means of examining the creatures or their carcasses. That’s why I try to get specimens that would allow me to construct ontogenetic series, when Parvov allows. Which is rarely, I must add.”
Dirofil listened in silence as Doratev droned on and on. He wouldn’t interrupt his Splinter. Or, well, the soul of his Splinter stashed inside the spider… A.C.C.U, Artificial Core Carrier Unit. “You seem to be very passionate about this. Why?”
“My usual excuse is that our survival could be contingent on it. That one satisfies Parvov. The truth is that there’s a world we cannot reach beyond the veil. No material we may extract or power we may call forth can take us there. It could be gone—it probably is. Imagine our world as a shadow, a cheap trick of the light of creation, consequence of illuminating a world more complete, more cohesive. Cast a stone, Dirofil. Cast a stone if you can, if you find a proper stone, and not a fragment of the spires or spheres. Show me andesite, or a pegmatite! Better yet: build an hourglass.” The Doctor reached among the rubble on his desk and rolled a little glass vial onto Dirofil’s sight. “We can get glass from dogs. We know how. You just need sand. Find sand, Dirofil.”
Dirofil reached for the vial and shook it a little, watching the limpid liquid swirl inside. “What substance does this contain?”
“You had to curtail my excitement, didn’t you? Water. It’s water. That thing over there is, among other things, a distiller.” The spider stretched a leg to point at a complex arrangement of glass tubes, ampoules and recipients attached to a table not very different from the desk in confection. “We boil blood or drool to make water. We rarely have a need for it.”
“I haven’t seen water used at all in this place. The Pointers don’t need food or drink. Do you give them baths?” Dirofil asked, striding over to the distiller, relocating an eye to the back of his head to address The Doctor.
“No. The biggest batch of water we distilled was to imprison Lyssav in her spire.”
Dirofil turned slowly, his fingers curled like claws, hands suspended in the air, as if touching anything would shatter the delicate fabric of the world. “Imprison Lyssav? Why would you do something so stupid?”
“In The Captain’s wise words: So we know where to find her just before her spire falls.”
“Lyssav has a thoughtcrystal far stronger than mine, Parvov’s or Morbilliv’s, not to mention Babesi’s. Only Leptos could stop her if she decides she wants revenge, and he would never do that. The gap between her and us cannot be overstated. I defy Parvov because I know I am only at a slight core disadvantage if things escalate.” Dirofil’s hand met each other behind his back. “If Morbilliv lived, we would be on nary equal footing on that regard. I’d lose a fair fight against him for sure, because his grasp wasn’t one to forgive. But Lyssav? To taunt her is to poke the bastard born from an orgy between a lion, a Great White and a hippopotamus. It’s complete madness. Suicidal ideation and action. Has Parvov told you what she did to Desmodus?”
“Desmodus the Skyborne? The elder brother of Shadiran?” Doratev asked, jumping off his desk and into a nearby stool of brass-like metal. The question had piqued his interest.
“Have you ever seen a core get eaten?” Dirofil asked, and immediately shook his head. “Not by one of the dogs, I mean. By one of us.”
“No, I have met no murderous splinter.”
“It’s terrible. They don’t shatter and explode in a nova of light when it is a Thinker that eats them with theirs. It’s…” Dirofil raised his right hand and gestured at the eye of the Reaper. “Like this. Like I subsume dog parts into my body or adapt sibling parts to my anatomy, she absorbed her suitor’s soul, obliterated his psyche. And she used the teeth. The molten crystal descended like a froth from her jaws for days on end.” A violent shudder invaded Dirofil when he recalled that event in detail. Every time. “Shadiran cried so loud and for so long that I thought she wouldn’t be happy ever again.”
The Doctor scratched the underside of his front end with one of the legs. “Why did she do that?”
Dirfofil slumped to the floor and pulled his head back, fidgeting with his fingers as he weaved the answer in his mind.
“She never answered that question herself. Not honestly. I think Desmodus wanted to take her to the Edge, to meet the ones that had no reason to come down to the Core. What matters is that Parvov is insane. Lyssav will kill him at the very least. Unless…”
Dirofil stood in a hurry and headed for the door.
“It’s not time to bother the Captain, Fourth Imagined. Come, sit and learn about the monster outside. The monster below can wait.”
Dirofil’s hand let the doorframe go and he retraced his steps. Parvov was already incensed by his encounter with the Murkhound: it wouldn’t be productive to bother him until later.