“What has ten legs, one laboratory, strides in the sea and picks up thrashed-up siblings of mine? Do you have any idea, little Mor? A small tip: it’s made chiefly out of corgis!”

—Parvov, after helping his tired, confused and gladly surprised brother deal with a Pugilist.

“Let’s return to the ship.” Morbilliv ordered, but Dirofil was too busy searching for something in the dog’s throat. “I said—”

“I heard. Let me figure out how to steal their power first.” Dirofil’s hand kept fabricating wet sounds as it palpated the folds in the mutant’s gullet. “Do I need to absorb the lungs too? Just the vocal cords...” Had he had eyebrows, they would have raised in incomprehension. “Any idea, Morbi?”

“Brother, I’d love to indulge your wish for power, but we mustn’t linger. The Corship is the safest place around, and even in there safety isn’t a guarantee”.

Dirofil dedicated an eye to each task: the one in front of his head peering inside the dead dog’s mouth, and the one he had relocated to the back trying to read Morbilliv’s expression. “Can I carry the cadaver there?”

“Why do you ask? A decaying corpse should have no impact on the crew’s wellbeing nor the ship’s integrity.” Morbilliv strode up to his brother and slung the dead dog over the relatively wide shoulder of Parvov. “Will you come now?”

Dirofil nodded, returning his eye to where it was meant to be, and glimpsing out the Reaper’s, just to know it was safe to indulge in the satisfaction he felt without turning their recent victory into a pyrrhic one. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw through the Reaper’s thousand, and it was far away for now. Snaking its way through the same layer as them, but hanging out close to the collies. Thinking about it, he realized there was something about it that could be useful to Morbilliv. “The Reaper is between us and Babesi,” he said as they dropped off another ledge, seeking safe return to the cold and welcoming atmosphere of the Corship.

Morbilliv stopped. “You mean Babesi’s survival wasn’t a sick test to make sure I wasn’t Parvov?”

“No. I wouldn’t lie about that. Besides—” The distraction caused by chatting caused Dirofil to misstep and take a shortcut, back first, to the ship. Morbilliv shrugged and jumped after him. The Doctor would repair Dirofil’s back if the idiot broke anything.

Dirofil arrived safe and sound to the ship, and the first thing he did was snatching the dead dog from The Captain’s grasp and rushing to the laboratory. In it he found Doratev —who had been building himself a new body tirelessly during the last tides, and seemed to use the calm of a captain-less ship to finally make the transition— laid upon the examination table, submerged deep in meditation. The Original did the sensible thing: carefully placed the dog on the floor, joined his left arms back into one, and then used said strong arm to sweep the Doctor off the table, making him slump on the floor, the back resting against one of the table’s rectangular legs, his body bent at the waist, rear pointing blasphemously at the absence of heaven, and his feet gracefully cascading to the sides of his head.

It must be said, Dirofil was pretty impressed by the Splinter’s talent to maintain meditation when subjected to a mildly hostile treatment. Curiosity jabbed him with a long claw, seeding in his mind the idea to test Doratev’s limits. Naturally, he soon shook off the vile thoughts. Need to antagonize the good doctor there was none. He had taught him, answered the questions the recordings weren’t able to. And had done so with magnanimous patience!

Every question he had asked his Splinter across tides past came back to him. Every little inquiry answered, every tiny doubt dispelled. Doratev had been excellent to him.

And so had he been to Parvov. To the Parvov of the world, the one long thoughtless, and to the Parvov of the fiction, that he himself had murdered a while ago, resuscitating the Morbilliv he had thought as lost as Parvov now was. How curious was grief, that hit harder when hope had been allowed to blossom before its strike. It was not that he loved Parvov more than he loved Morbilliv —If anyone asked, his feelings for his brothers couldn’t be compared, despite being described by the very same word— but that the Parvov that had fished him from the sea, at whose feet he had knelt and professed how deeply he valued his family had been… retconned. From the very moment he had awaken and until the conclusion of their chase outside the ship, the image of a slightly weird and pain-twisted Parvov had to be definitively, irrevocably replaced by that of Morbilliv puppeteering a body that didn’t belong to him, and trying to make it look like he was the real thing. How curious was grief, that recovering someone thought gone couldn’t counteract the pain of a loss that, at a glance, seemed equivalent.

He dragged the metallic cube he used as a stool during classes and sat in front of the cadaver that sprawled on the floor. “I envy you.” He told the dead dog. “Have you ever known grief, creature? Were you aware of loss?” He caressed the short green fur, finding it soft and warm, despite the corpse’s natural cold. “Your kind is the damnation of mine, my erstwhile enemy. I killed you before you killed me, that simple is our bond. I wonder if the creators knew we would be pitted against each other. If the pain I feel and the pain I inflict have been preordained. Or if —and I like to think this—It’s my refusal to accept the end that led to yours. Maybe it’s your kind that’s in the right. Maybe the world belongs to the dogs now, and we Thinkers are rebelling against the rightful order of affairs.” He pulled his hand back and held the dead stare of the pooch, whose wounded tongue dangled out of his open mouth. “This cannot be a healthy way to cope.” His gaze drifted back to the sleeping Doratev. The Doctor remained imperturbable, admirably so. Right, there was a reason why he had thrown the good Splinter off his bed. A good one.

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

He lifted the dead Basenji onto the examination table, and then gave an unceremonious kick to The Doctor, to see if the …picturesque individual would come back to the world of the conscious.

Doratev opened his eyes when he felt the intrusion of Dirofil’s talons into his flesh, penetrating the mucilage on his back, barely missing his newly crafted spine. “Ah, if it isn’t my favorite non-optical pupil.”

“Brought you a gift. Help me figure out how to assimilate the sound weapon of a Yodeler and whatever remains is all yours to do as you see fit,” Dirofil explained, resolving not to offer a hand to help Doratev stand, out of respect for someone trying out a new body.

The Doctor came to his feet with a maladroit act of contortion. If something had to break, it was better for it to break sooner rather than later. He plunged a clawed hand into the blob of his own head to fish out one of the eyes and adjust it so it looked forward. This one had a slit pupil, compared to the round one of the Dirofil models.

“You fashioned yourself an eye after Lyssav’s?”

“Yes. Both she and her Splinters have a visual advantage in dark environments. She even has a reflective surface inside her eyeballs, analogous to a tapetum lucidum. I tried to add an actual tapetum lucidum to my eye once, but Thinker and dog parts don’t mix…” The doctor then made a silence and scratched the place where a chin would be in a man or woman. He was considering Dirofil’s… talent. “Well, normally don’t mix. Whatever your core does to them, I have no idea how to replicate it. Ah, but who’d be better than The Fourth Imagined and his fine-tuned control of his form at proving my preconceptions erroneous!”

“Leptos has a better control of his body,” Dirofil immediately countered, feeling a pang of jealousy towards his imprisoned brother.

“That’s not what Parvov told me. He said Shadiran and you flowed like water into each other, melted your forms together to play over the spheres as your bones intermingled and your thoughtcrystals danced in a deformed parody of your figures. What he told me Leptos has, is a nigh-perfect control of his soul that lets him detach himself from his body completely, ignore it as it didn’t exist. And it rings true in his Splinters: that’s why they are such good legsteerers.”

“Parvov was never good at lying about these things. But I still feel incredible pain at trying to assimilate parts from Splinters of Lyssav. I get reduced to a primal state where I cannot command my own parts as easily. I discovered it in Babesi’s cave.”

The Doctor’s eyes opened wide and he joined his hands as if in prayer. “Babesi lives? No!”

He jumped onto Dirofil and took him from the shoulders, the height difference between original and Splinter less than a head. “Please don’t tell the Captain!”

“Already did. What’s your problem with my sister?” Dirofil asked calmly. The Doctor’s aversion for Babesi was most likely born out of interacting with her Splinters, and not because he had conspired against her. Babesi, after all, had given no clue of knowing about the Corship.

“Whenever something is stolen from this very laboratory, the culprit is, nine times out of then, one of the vermiform bitches,” Doratev trembled with emotion as he spoke. Dirofil could almost swear that the Splinter would invent a puggum-loaded gun just to use his own head as a practice target, if only that would achieve a suicide instead of an annoying splatter of slime all over the laboratory that the head-blown doctor would then have to retrieve. “Some Splinters of Lyssav and Parvov have a penchant for backstabbing, but they are not nearly as annoying as the randomized bullshit Splinters of Babesi have pulled off on me. They are a serious threat to the ship’s survival.”

Dirofil snorted and dismissed the Doctor’s worries with a light, playful shove. “You are one for exaggeration. Come, help me with this and I can aid in the survival of the ship by straight out murdering whatever threatens it.”

“Including the Avatar of Arson?” The Doctor said, its tone letting Dirofil know he wasn’t referring to a mutated dog.

“I’d let Babesi light me on fire before even thinking of threatening her, so no.” Dirofil jabbed towards the body with his not-chin. “Help me with this.”

“You know, I was very enthusiastic about adding a self-destruct mechanism to the ship, but the Captain reminded me Splinters of Babesi were a thing, and since that day I cannot fully indulge in my creative side…” The Doctor continued ranting as he went around the table to admire the specimen.

“Focus, Doratev, you are acting like Babesi!”

The Doctor stiffened his arms, straightened the neck of his coat of metal flakes and readjusted his wandering Lyssav-like eye. “I have heard few things capable of offending me in my life, and this one tops the list.” But seemingly his offense was short lived, as soon he lifted his weight as he leaned over the table, examining the dead dog. “I have no idea if the magic they use is in the body, or if, like us, it resides in a sort of impermanent soul. Taking the respiratory system from the larynx down seems like the safest bet, if it resides in the body.”

“Well, thanks. Want to open the body and extract those to make sure I don’t destroy your precious study material during the process of assimilation?”

“No.” Doratev nodded pensively.” But I will for the sake of knowledge.”

Dirofil hitched up his spiny cape and let his arse fall onto the cube-shaped seat. “I’ll meditate in the meanwhile. Wake me up when you are done.”