“He decided to give the inhabitants of the core six original names and bodies, and to shape all others after said group of siblings. They are to have titles indicating their nature as children of a mind: The First Pictured, The Second Envisioned, The Third Dreamt, The Fourth Imagined, The Fifth Conceived, The Sixth Conceptualized.”
—Notes for Cosmopoiesis, page 4.
The thoughtcrystal shuddered once, and then twice, as waves of luminous thoughts gathered around the immobilized head. The Fist Pictured gasped back to wakefulness, stirred out of his deep meditation by a brother’s call.
A pair of eyes cast in a brass-like metal opened, revealing irises carved out of labradorite. The mouthless automatons were unable to exchange a wry smile, but that did not mean the occasion was less deserving of a pair of those.
With a slow but uninterrupted motion Dirofil rose to his feet as the frozen Elder examined his own situation. “Take your time, First Pictured; the end may be nigh, but it rushes not to collapse upon your spire.”
“Dirofil, Fourth Imagined, would it be correct to assume that your spire has collapsed?” The elder cracked out muffled words: like most of his body, his voicebox had been encased in his overgrown core. “Sorry is your state. You used to have a trio of hands, if memory serves me faithfully.”
Dirofil took a single step forward, revealing the remains of his third arm, emplaced beneath the one at shoulder height, everything that should be there absent except for a mistreated, dark golden stylopod. “Like the tail, it was taken. Parvov asked for my eye while I slumbered, and in the stupor of the wake I accepted giving it to him.”
The eyes of the imprisoned elder scrutinized the form presented before him, up and down. Time had taken its toll on Dirofil’s cranium-less skeleton, taken some of its glint away. “Parvov climbed into the sea long ago. He visited me before his departure. The Third Dreamt said he had thought all that he had to think.”
“Such a boastful statement. I am afraid he may have rushed into his own oblivion” Dirofil lamented, tilting his head slightly forward. “Yet I have come to ask of you the favor he long ago asked of me. I am incomplete, Leptos. Would you spare your tail? Would you spare an arm? I am afraid this is something I can only ask of you, or of Lyssav. And I believe she still sleeps.”
“And you wouldn’t dare wake The Second Envisioned up. So it falls to me, enshrouded by the power of my own mind, to sacrifice a body I should have no use for anymore, Dirofil?” The elder said, twitching his free fingers as waves of light kept coursing through his crystal covering.
“Precisely,” Dirofil sentenced, and silence settled between the thinkers. Then, he knelt once again, wrists crossed at chest height, head low. “I have a promise to fulfill, Leptos. The sea is dangerous. What awaits me beyond the Retrievers, I know not. You may keep on thinking until the sea takes you, your core may even be powerful enough to fend danger off without the need of a body. But I do not wish to simply find a bubble of peace among dogs where I can think for the rest of time. I wish to cross the ocean, bottom to top.”
“That used to be a doable goal. However, we haven’t received visits from the others in a very long time: the window has closed. Whatever may happen inside the ocean of dogs, in its central layers…” He made a pause: his thoughts, thick and powerful, choked his words as they flowed around the voicebox. “…forestalls the rendezvous of our peoples.” The elder continued, not making any deal of the brief interruption. “What do you possess that everyone else who tried lacked?”
There was no hesitation in Dirofil’s answer. “Nothing.” He stood and sheathed himself in his cape of chains. “I refuse to pretend that a promise can sew shut the jaws of the beasts that may dwell deep up there. That’s why I ask for your parts. I have nothing special, and I need every advantage I can get.”
Leptos regarded him in silence. Under that cape was an old body. A mistreated body. A body that would be torn apart by the abominations of the sea if its owner dared try. It wasn’t Parvov’s; it wasn’t Lyssav’s. Parvov asked nicely once, twice if he felt generous. Then he repeated the question with a demanding air, and it was in one’s best interest to reconsider. Lyssav would simply skip the whole asking business. But Dirofil… Dirofil was polite to a fault towards his elders. If he didn’t acquiesce to give up his parts after a few attempts of the Fourth Imagined, the poor thing would go into the ocean mutilated as he was. Yes, Leptos preferred Parvov’s method. It involved a lower level of cruelty.
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“You are incorrigible. Humility and a core of gold won’t aid you, either. Take my tail, take an eye, and take an arm, if you can pull them off of my crystal heart. And, Dirofil, overall…”
After noticing the Elder waited for him to speak, Dirofil stared right into Leptos eyes. “Yes, First Pictured?”
“Take care, kind one. Don’t let the dogs render you thoughtless.”
Dirofil knew that was a question he couldn’t formulate, not now. He wasn’t as young and bold as he had been when the ocean closed over their heads. And the elder wasn’t Shadiran. “I’ll try to my last idea, First Pictured.” With a funereal slowness Dirofil approached the brother he would soon scavenge, climbing up the flat steps that led to the ivory throne. “I thank you beyond dreams, Leptos.”
“Make haste. Don’t rob me of more thinking time. There’s no better way to show gratefulness than to allow me to think the few thoughts the world has left.”
“Understood. I will try the tail first. The lack of it stirs a stalking anxiety deep within,” He excused himself as he began circling the throne, following the edge of one of the circular steps. The rhythmical clanks of his feet against the white stone invaded the expansive chamber, lulling Leptos into a blissful stupor as he lost himself in the chasm of his own mind.
Once he faced the back of the throne, Dirofil examined the deformed and overgrown lump of crystallized psyche, and found the dawn hues of Leptos’ tail. Only its tip budded out of the sprawling tumor of his mind. He reached down and with trembling fingers touched the sharp piece at the end of the tail.
His only eye opened wide when he sent in a pulse of his own psyche, through his arm and into the tail, and found no resistance. Leptos’ mind wasn’t pushing against his attempt to take possession of the tail. Dirofil found himself admiring such fine control of one’s being.
Dirofil’s will was channeled further, seamlessly flowing from the tips of three of his fingers into the tail’s metameric segments. He pushed on until his soul grasped the base of the tail, and shortly after the appendage detached painlessly from the base of its owner’s back.
Suddenly the long tail seemed to take on a life of its own, and jumped forth, using its stinger to penetrate into the Fourth Imagined’s palm, snaking under his transparent skin and around his metallic skeleton. With spasming fingers he watched in delight and pain how the body part reached his thoughtcrystal and wormed its way in, attuning with him, yet retaining the unmistakable essence of its original bearer. After nesting for about a minute in his heart, the tail emerged by the crystal’s posterior end, and went straight for the socket in the back, emerging first, and then attaching its base to said opening.
Dirofil gave the tail an order to rise and bend until the tip was in front of his face, and it did without a single complaint. It was his now, as his as the core it had harpooned through. “I missed this one more than the arm.”
He leaped twice on his four extremities to end up in front of the elder, the new tail always returning to the offensive position next to his head after each landing. With unwarranted excitement his only eye darted across the Elder’s six arms. To take the middle left one was the most logical of choices. He stalked like a predatory cat, ready to pounce on its prey. There was only one little problem.
The arm he wanted was completely embedded in the Elder’s core. Emphasis on the problem being just “little”: The new tail rushed forward and wounded the crystal, shedding through like a rampaging bullet. A current coursed through his whole body, a brief reaction from the Elder, but barely enough to numb his sensations for a brief instant, and not to cause real harm. The tail dug deeper in the crystal until it curled around the upper end of the wanted arm. Then, still using his hands as an extra pair of legs, He crawled down the steps, pulling, stretching his new tail as much as he could. His claws and talons scratched the ivory floor once and again as he attempted to get more traction. He would rip that arm off the crystal, and if he couldn’t, then the tail wouldn’t be enough help to survive in the sea. Dirofil pumped energy though his new appendage and into the arm he was trying to acquire, and once again found minimal resistance from Leptos.
The arm popped out and got practically expelled by its prismatic prison. Consequently, Dirofil fell on his face, and rolled down the steps, prompting a little laughter from the elder.
“Amusing, Fourth Imagined. Brutish, too.”
But Dirofil was spellbound by the forearm and hand he had just purloined. The details in its surface, the care with which his skeleton’s patterns were carved. It was beautiful to him. He wouldn’t process it through his core, it had already been a chore to do so for the tail. Thus he just used his tail to violently butt the rear end of the stolen arm on his stump, joining them. He would pump thought energy into it for a while now, and then the arm would be as his as the tail. A slower process, but way less taxing.
Now he had to take an eye. He could take an eye. But he sat on the step before the throne, and sent pulses to his new arm, trying to get it to obey him.
“Mind if I stay until the arm acclimates?” he asked, turning towards the imprisoned thinker.
“You are welcome to stay until the dogs take us, brother. Keep the silence, and let me think. That’s all I can demand from you.”