“Some people think our maker—or makers—keeps a watchful eye over us. If they do, it is not with the loving stare of a mother, or the concerned glare of a father, but, perhaps, with the same eyes my little heartworm has when he faces a dying puppy. Cold, distant, analytical. He needs those eyes, for compassion won’t save the poor thing, as compassion didn’t save my father. Another possibility is that our creators were as imperfect as we are, and didn’t foresee cancer. The third is that they don’t play favorites, and like my beloved said once, why would my father’s life be worth more to an inhuman creator than the one of his emancipated cells? Or, rather, why is any life worth anything at all? Bearers of souls or of the delusion of having one, we think we matter. If cancer cells could think, who in their right mind would think they would pray for their deities to save the host instead of saving them? They would pray to enter the cancer heaven! To be held in a perfect embrace, immortalized in the holy petri dish! Created from my father—being my father itself—the damned illness won, killing them both. In one of his clumsy attempts to make me feel better, my fiancé called it my unicellular siblings, said that the cancer was more a son of my father that I could ever be his daughter, genetically speaking. I slapped him, despite knowing he wanted to make me see things with the hard, cold googles he often stares at the world with. He’s not happy wearing them, he’s not in control, and that terrifies me. Nevertheless, he manages and finds reassurance in the dullness of it all. He told me life’s not to be happy —or, in his words, ‘life isn’t for anything, it just happens to us. It happens to tumors, too.’. My father was an upstanding man. His cancer was, quite likely, a good cancer.

I digress. Life will happen to the thinkers, and life will happen to the dogs, even the mutant ones. It’s not our job to save either from each other. It would be cruel to determine a winning side just because it resembles us more than the other. Which side resembles us humans more, however, could be up for debate…”

—Notes for Cosmopoiesis, page 22

Lyssav came out of her tower and stepped into the Retriever light, wings spread wide, pupils reduced to thin lines. The surface of her body welcomed the hankered-for radiance, and the whole world glistened in painless hues for her to see. Her meal had revitalized her, lulled her spire into a blissful dream. She looked across the orange miasma, and towards Leptos’ spire, that stood and withstood silent and serene. But past it she heard the resentful cries of an angry spire. Parvov’s was in pain, but a pain she could only infer and not directly feel. A pain she couldn’t savor. What an affront this fact resulted to her.

She would not dwell on it, though. On the offense of the spires being immune to her gift. She hadn’t come out of her home to bitter up. So long had been her imprisonment, so long had she thought in vain. Now, perching like a dragon over his hoard around the wall of her spire, she prepared to take air. The wings didn’t beat at first; they caressed the rarified atmosphere gently. The soft breeze that rose from the core of the word lifted her higher as she rode the currents in circles, a vulture of sorrow waiting to scavenge a tragedy’s aching cadaver.

She glided Leptoswards, and her form cast a shadow over the heart of creation, and said shadow sunk in the darkness below, devoured like the caster would a puny morsel of penance.

Tilting her wings, she maneuvered midair, having nothing to envy from the bat whose anatomy the appendages almost mirrored. She flew around and around her elder brother’s dwelling, descending upon its pristine platform, tainting it with her presence. Using two arms as legs she dragged herself along the white surface, turning her head to glance at the kissing snake statues at the entrance. If Lyssav knew one thing about the creators, it was that they had been generous with her. The world was scheduled for its finale, and an apocalypse always hurts, because if there’s nobody to harm there’s no world worth ending. A climax of pain, massive, all-encompassing. A rain of delightful dolour wetting her frame, massaging her slime into a blessed drowse.

Beyond the statues, beyond the arch, and up the stairs rested her brother, and she would always remember that time she had asked him, in all his wisdom, if he believed her to have been created wrong.

“Am I evil, Leptos?” She had asked, the liquefied core of a Splinter still dripping from her guilty maws. “Am I undeserving of the camaraderie fostered by the others? I don’t wish for it, but to be undeserving of something so simple is an affront to my pride.”

“The others, Soothing One, are our siblings. It’s true that the three of them relate more to each other than to us. They love each other in their own ways, as much as they love us. You included.” Then Leptos had made a pause, straightening his back and looking down the chasm at the edge of Lyssav’s spire. “They may not visit us often. They may not have the lovely inclinations of Babesi. If our family has three generations, if you and I are the first, dear sister, and they are the second, don’t you think it natural for them to hold each other the dearest?”

“Would Babesi be the same if she had siblings around her age? Is that what you are saying, dearest brother? I’ll let you know that despite my feigned annoyance, I enjoy her visits. They amuse me.” Here she had paused, imitating her older brother before glancing at him sideways. “But you didn’t answer. Am I evil?”

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Leptos had let out a satisfied hum and projected the light of his soul over the void, creating a bridge of luminous tiles for them to walk above, one that gradually disappeared behind them as they advanced towards the center of creation.

“Before determining who’s evil we need to figure out what evil even is, sister. Who arbiters our morals? Nobody. How can you be evil then, darling?”

“Well, for starters, I devoured a Splinter of Morbilliv before you came to visit. I am, at the very least, a predator. A villain. Don’t you agree, Leptos?”

“You act according to your nature just like our siblings act in accordance to theirs. Parvov is brilliant but short of temper; Dirofil promises to destroy creation while kindly asking for a favor or two or melding bodies with Shadiran; Babesi can talk with dogs…”

“Babesi can talk with dogs?” Lyssav had raised her gaze to the little clusters of puppies that grew bigger each day, so far above, blotches of fluff between the Spires and the Palaces. “Interesting.”

“She believes she can. I may have embellished the statement a bit much. The point is, little sister, that if you are evil, we all are. But evil or not, we all love you, Lyssav.”

Lyssav had crawled onto the same platform she was now standing on, in front of the same statues, and a little rumble had manifested in her voicebox. “I also hold you all dear. Some more than others. But one day the little dog patches will join in a mighty sea and swallow the world. What will be the use of love then?”

“The same as the use for hatred, Lyss. Exactly the same.”

And now that she could watch the sea descend upon her head, alone, she wondered if she should climb the ivory stairs and pay Leptos a visit. Said train of thought resulted short lived, for a glance towards Parvov’s spire made her aware of subtle movements. Beyond the orange mist silhouettes danced like cockroaches gathering around a platter.

On the edge, with digits sending little fragments of the crumbling rhyolite on a one-way trip towards the core of the world, Lyssav watched as the figures, that spilled from the pillars that reached deep into the miasma, climbed them and hung out from the underside of Parvov’s spire’s ground. Head down, with an amount of limbs that she estimated between six and a dozen despite the distance and the blurriness of the images, the things made their way to the edge, and clambered up with few difficulties. Their bodies were prolate, and their backs sprouted a sort of spikes or protrusions of a nature she couldn’t make out. Whatever they were, their bodies seemed too solid and opaque for a Thinker.

Ignited the spark of curiosity, she took air again. Frayed wings beat vigorously, the atmosphere, in spite of its oppressive tyranny, giving in to let the Second Envisioned intrude the space between spires. Leptos’ spire didn’t try to drag her in, and neither did the dark core of the world. Nature respected Lyssav, or nature feared Lyssav.

As she drew closer the image of the creatures grew clearer. Ten metallic legs. A dull grayish hemisphere on their fronts. A bulky orange body covered in scars that, to Lyssav, seemed inflicted by teeth. They whirred as they paced. The things enjoyed means for making their own light, placed around a circle and reminding Lyssav of the one that surged from the Retrievers. To round it all up, their size precluded them from going through the already magnificently tall doorways of the spires.

She thought she could live inside one of these, and comfortably, if she managed to hollow it out. And so she landed next to one of the creatures, four arms contacting the ground before her abdomen and legs did.

“What are you?” She muttered, circling an idle one that kept following her with eyes emplaced on the palms of its hands or… pincers, maybe. Lyssav knew those eyes. Babesi and her Splinters had the same sort. “Why do you bear an eye like that of my sister on your limb, bug? Do you understand me?” Lyssav lashed out against the creature, her claws finding the underside of the solid carapace and rending a little gash on it. “Do you understand me?” She repeated, her deformed mouthpieces rearranging into a sadistic smile.

Then she pulled back, shocked by a sudden influx of alien pain. Thinker-like pain, washing over her. Not the suffering of the dogs, of the biological, but that of her siblings and their Splinters. Her head whipped around as she looked for a new spire, in every direction, to find only the old ones, dilapidated, sometimes lost beyond the horizon where the miasma met Cynothalassa.

She felt her eyes quiver as the creatures mindlessly surrounded her, seemingly without any ill intent, but with a bothersome presence anyhow. “Splinters of whom are you? Of whom?!”

She had a new sibling, a new… Thinker of the Core had been born. This was irrefutable proof of that, the birth of new Splinters with a hitherto unseen body plan. But they were too weird. They seemed… designed to contain something. They psycholocated constantly, assailing Lyssav’s well-nourished soul with the essence of their young and weak ones. And they headed up Parvov’s spire, climbing the outer walls with clumsiness unmatched, one falling here and there, as their hands were big, designed to grab onto something the size of…

The size of an average dog.

Lyssav let out a raucous laugh and spread her wings. She fluttered up the back of one of the Splinters and carved a way inside with her claws. It couldn’t be what she suspected.

Inside she found rooms with small tables bearing manacles, corridors barely big enough for her to crawl through, pipes, lines of little lights. Rooms, with doors. Once she reached the tight bridge, she clawed a way out through the glass, spat a blob of her own slime back into her thorax, and let another bout of laughter rip off. How absurd! A ship! A Ship had come to life and projected countless clones of itself onto the fabric of reality. How delightful. A ship. A ship!

And the ocean called them, apparently. And the ocean called her too, because she had to see the original now. And where else would a creature shaped like a bizarre submarine dwell, if not in the depths of Cynothalassa?

But before that, she owed a visit to Leptos.