“Chihuahuite makes for great fragmentary ammunition, and the Splinters of the Devil I used for target practice can attest to it. Arguably, so do whole Chihuahuas, but firing a mutant Chihuahua cannon is expensive, puggum wise. And the Splinters of Babesi are easier to hit with small weapons anyway…”
—Doratev, in one of his recordings, being Doratev.
Leptos hadn’t commented on the dog-sourced insertions, but he had to have noticed. Dirofil had wondered, one too many times, why his brother whose tranquility and amicability presented as peerless, called him the kind one.
His cape hung from his shoulders with pride, his left arms were split and ready to salute with delicacy. Every sensory organ inside his head floated in the place it was expected to, and so did his voicebox. Across the thick orange smoke he thought he had seen something move, around the Spire of Parvov, but with Leptos awake, it could be one of the countless echoes his brother projected into the world. It could also have been an excuse conjured by his mind, a way to avoid the rendezvous with the sister he loved the less.
The Fourth Imagined tried to remember, remember how many were the steps up to Leptos throne. Once, he had counted them. The throne chamber that stood further from the spire base was, for reasons unbeknownst to him, Babesi’s, but only if one measured by number of steps. If one added the height of each step to the number of them, the first place was taken by Morbilliv’s, as the steps in Babesi’s spire clung close to the ground, kept a low profile becoming of the little sister.
He knew him and Lyssav shared the number of steps, but not the height, and yet the irregularity of the staircase in Lyssav’s spire meant their thrones rested at exactly the same distance from the base. Hers was not a centimeter higher, his was not an inch lower.
He still couldn’t remember the exact number of steps up to Leptos’ room. Yet under the gaze of the deformed snakes he took the first one, and then the second. It was an ambling ascent, the talons meeting the felsic stone on their own terms.
The Spires enjoyed few to no windows. That differentiated them from the stylish Palaces of the edge, with their obscene openings, their lavish balconies and their refined columns.
Lavish. Refined. Obscene. As if those words held any meanings intrinsic to the reality they inhabited. Riches were mere fantasy, as it was sex. Thinkers warred not for food, not for water. Not for mates. Not for territory. Barring exceptional circumstances, conflict wasn’t something they needed to concern themselves with, as there existed nothing to nourish it. The creators had the kindness of sparing them of these evils, the knowledge provided about them merely didactical, one could say.
Dirofil wasn’t even sure what the utility of gender was supposed to be, speaking of Thinkers. To facilitate and vary the use of the inherited language, a possible explanation. Another was that it, like many other things, was an inheritance for the sake of its own preservation. It had meant something to the creators, and thus they had been created as a means to keep it alive when the world before the world ended.
But it isn’t the job of a last breath to preserve the lungs that exhaled it. To expect such behavior was not only naïve, but cruel, at least in Dirofil’s opinion. Yet if the creators had willed it, it was ingrained in their nature. They were forced to carry this inheritance. To muse about it as they ascended spires to meet equals they didn’t want to.
The marble of the steps exemplified cold. Their whole world lacked the slick warmth of the sea. And this meant nothing.
And cold, likewise, was the triangular stare that met him when he ascended a few more steps. Tilting his head back slightly he regarded The Second Envisioned in silence. He wouldn’t be the first one to speak, not even when met with the imposing presence his sister commanded.
Lyssav’s mouth curled, half into a smile, half into a frown, and neither side seemed to be influenced by the other. “Leptos said we’d have visits. But I expected Parvov instead of you,” She began walking backwards, upstairs, as Dirofil advanced slowly. “It’s no less of a pleasure to have you instead, Dirofil.”
“Stop expecting him, Lyssav,” the Fourth Imagined forwent looking her in the eyes while speaking. “Not for now. In general.”
One of Lyssav’s arms shot to grab Dirofil’s arm as he tried to slip by her side. Her eyes burned with an anger he wouldn’t entertain. “Your dear sister has a little score to settle with him. Don’t tell me how to work through my feelings.”
“I know he imprisoned you. I know of the chains, of the vials of water.” Lyssav recoiled at the mention of the vile liquid, but Dirofil kept looking at the next step. “But you won’t get a revenge. I am not telling you that you cannot because he is our brother. I am telling you that you cannot because he was our brother.”
Lyssav’s grip pressed onto his metallic bones and her claws threatened to pierce his shoulder, but eventually she let him go. “So we are six now?”
“Five. I am telling you we are five.”
“Six,” Lyssav insisted, the ire in her eyes giving place to defeat. “There’s a new one.”
Every cubic millimeter of slime in Dirofil’s body shifted sideways to face his sister. “You are kidding.”
“No, they gather around Parvov’s wailing Spire. The Splinters of the Seventh.”
“Seventh what? If I have a new sibling, I want to know their epithet.”
“Seventh something. It doesn’t speak. Leptos told me to show you. Follow,” she commanded as she dropped her bulging, centipede-like abdomen down another couple of steps. She didn’t turn to address her little brother this time: “And I mean it. Follow.”
Lyssav didn’t need the object pronoun. Were it up to her, there would be no use to modifying such a verb. Because, when one thought about it, what else was there to follow but her? Or, rather, what else was worth to follow?
Dirofil complied, unwilling to anger his elder. This elder. He kept his eyes on Lyssav’s wings, if only because they were the less grotesque of her features. If Lyssav was rabies, the wings were supposed to imitate a bat’s. Long ago had he realized how disparate that comparison was. Lyssav should have had three arms, if one wished to akin the wings to that of a chiropteran. But when reality was prodded for an answer, it answered five. Lyssav had, then, seven forelimbs, breaking the pattern they all shared. The first was born with six hands. The sixth was born with only one.
But that held true only so long as one respected the homologies. Lyssav’s wings resembled those evolved from hands, but that didn’t mean they were. Lyssav’s wings, in their reality, without the context provided from memories alien, were, and had always been, wings, not hands. And therefore, they were as wrong and deformed as the rest of her.
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“I have seen horrors inside the sea.” He said as the light cast from her core enveloped them and turned the white stone around them into a lurid rose gullet. “The worst of them don’t compare to your horrifying presence, sister.”
“Flattery won’t get you anywhere, Dirofil,” she descended another step, and the impact of her psychosarc hitting the floor provided an echoic voice to the throat engulfing them.
“I am well aware. You know how I think of you. What I think of you. When I think of you. I wish I saw your face in theirs whenever I have to kill them. That would make it easier,” Dirofil lied.
Lyssav turned her head half a circle, like an owl would. “More flattery from the one that added bone spikes to his cape.”
“They are teeth. From mutant Chihuahuas.”
Lyssav froze in place, and due to their slow pace Dirofil could avoid bumping into her. “Chihuahuas? Beyond the Retrievers?”
Dirofil opened the eye of the Reaper and showcased it only for a second. He hated what he saw through it. Even Lyssav’s soul looked mangled. “This one attracts the worst mutant I know. It’s like night hunting after you. One of those killed Parvov.”
Dirofil had never witnessed what happened then. Lyssav’s visage adopted a smile that wasn’t a grin. A gesture of genuine excitement.
“Do they suffer?”
“I make sure the Chihuahuas do. Hate the things.”
One of Lyssav’s long claws aligned with the space between Dirofil’s eyes. Her body still faced the way down. “The sea sounds like fun. A perfect place to rule over.”
“Cynothalassa isn’t a place.”
“True, true.” Lyssav set her head straight and gargled a chuckle. “Subject is the correct word.”
“You seem rather unbothered for someone that just found out her brother is dead.” If poking bears were they, he would poke the bigger one, just to honor Parvov’s memory. To elicit Lyssav’s anger was a terrible idea. But to hear her speak against the sea with such emotion was downright atrocious.
“Parvov’s demise pains me, and chokes out my need for retribution. The first is good, the second up for debate.”
They finally reached the exit and the light of the retrievers fell on them, overcoming that of their ancient cores. Time had passed through them like silt through a sieve. Now the final clock, golden and beautiful, hung over them, and in its entrails it gestated nightmares. One of Dirofil’s digits sprung in direction of the waves.
“You think such vastness could serve you? That those old coats and the warmth they give off can obey us? The structural, so to speak, dogs are impervious to damage, Lyssav.”
“The gross of the sea is boring. Copied. I will manage, little brother. Worry not.”
Lyssav seemed to be unfazed by his criticism, and Dirofil couldn’t parse if she was mocking him or displaying some surprising honesty.
“You’ll manage. Manage to end up like Parvov if you aren’t careful. Those things eat souls, Lyssav.”
Lyssav glanced at her brother through her crown of arms. “That means we are on equal footing. Besides, you survived the sea, didn’t you? You even incorporated part of it to your figure.”
“Not alone. There’s a ship. Made out of corgis. By Parvov and a crew of Splinters.”
Lyssav stopped the walk towards the edge of the Spire’s base. “I see, so that’s how it is. How did they animate it?”
Dirofil unsheathed his arms from the cape and stretched casually. “Animate what? The ship has legs actioned by Splinters infusing their souls into them, using some metal clasps that hold their cores still.”
This brought the Snake Jaws to Lyssav’s mind, the ones she had seen while… investigating. She spread her parodies of wings and began beating them without the tiniest regard for her sibling, who had to step back to avoid getting hit by his sister’s appendages. “Stay here. I’ll show you something.” The way in which Lyssav had intoned the last word made Dirofil’s flesh shudder and his bone to rattle softly.
First Lyssav became a blurry image, and then a shadow seen through clouds fo orange, a tiny dot approaching Parvov’s Spire and the shapes that seemed to move on them. Dirofil decided to point the eye of the Reaper to said place, but stopped himself before opening it. There was no immediate danger, and curiosity was no excuse to keep the thing open when Babesi was to be found between him and the creature.
Moments later, another shadow. Spiky. Growing. Fast. Describing an arch through the air and in collision course with him. Dirofil raced for the doors of the spire in all five, more out of instinct than out of reason. The sea had rendered him too wary to these things, mayhap.
A thud, the sound of bent metal and a tremor that coursed through the bulk of Leptos’ Spire, then the fall of a behemoth next to the doorway, bathing him in a cloud of dust and Retriever dandruff.
After rubbing his eyes clean and slipping out by slithering behind the statues of the Imaginers of the World, Dirofil beheld the thing in awe. The twitching legs struggling to grasp the smooth stone. “The Corship splintered.” He uttered in disbelief. He wasn’t surprised by Lyssav’s demonstration of prowess, as he was unsure of her limits, and lifting several times her own body weight, even sending it hurling across spires, while nothing to scoff at, was a believable exploit for her.
Dirofil circled the fallen Splinter as it struggled against its own dinged body. The spikes tips had shattered, the legs wiggled deformed, bent. Lyssav’s cruelty in full display as she landed by him and folded her slimy wings.
“And, what do you think of this? Is this a reflection of the ship you speak of?”
“Yes, but that’s impossible. The Corship is not alive.” Then something clicked inside Dirofil’s mind. “Was not alive. Before jumping off of it to drive a threat away, I saw a most unusual… proliferation of soul energy in the walls. I thought it was the Reaper’s influence. I guess what happened is that the chaos somehow made all the worry and fear of the crew to coalesce into a thoughtcrystal.”
“This is good for Parvov’s crew. Now they can kill the ship and harvest the Splinters for spare parts. The size difference should not matter much,” Lyssav commented idly while checking the integrity of her claws. “When did I chip this one? Look.” She planted the twisted, crimson cone in front of Dirofil’s face. “Is it chipped to you?”
Dirofil decided against dignifying that question with an answer.
“So, you came here because you had to escape from that… Reaper, correct?” Lyssav broke the slab of silence that had settled between them.
“Yes. I still intend to erase this reality and make a better one, if that’s your question. Along Shadiran.”
“It would be in my best interest to strike you down where you stand.” Lyssav said, and Dirofil knew it wasn’t a threat, but merely a commentary on a matter of fact. There was no mistaking Lyssav’s threats.
Dirofil’s talons clinked against the felsic rock. “It would be, dear sister. But I am betting my own life here: you wouldn’t. You won’t until you judge me capable of crossing the sea, of threatening your plans.”
Lyssav interlaced two hands over her head and two under it, as if praying. “I want to save everyone from the end of the world, Dirofil. You included. Turn my might into an umbrella. Torture everyone, but drink their pain to stay at the top, like a working umbrella should. I know others dislike pain. I’ll eat it, take it away. Bliss, Dirofil, as lasting as myself.”
“Fitting of you to akin the apocalypse to rain,” Dirofil said as Lyssav approached the fallen Splinter of the Corship and grabbed one leg with her five hands. “What are you doing?”
“Sending this baby whence it came.”
The Second Envisioned’s many legs sunk their tips onto the plinth of Leptos’ home. Hear arms worked in unison to swing the leg overhead, and everything attached to said leg. Despite a difference of an order of magnitude in weight and size, she whipped the Corship Splinter around and around with frightening ease, gathering momentum. That’s when the leg gave in and left Lyssav looking at the amputated appendage, blinking as the Splinter’s body shoot in the wrong direction, not towards Parvov’s spire but right into the abyss.
With the remaining legs facing a barking and panting firmament the Splinter of the Corship plummeted in collision course with the dark core of the world, and the pervading shadow of the depth embraced it, swallowed it. After a few seconds, an eruption of orange gas welled from the insensible heart of creation, a mushroom of cruelty that battered the sea and embedded a single female corgi into its tail-wagging surface.
“Huh, even Loretta splintered,” Dirofil muttered, just loud enough for Lyssav to hear.
“What’s a Loretta?”
“A load-bearing Corgi that is found sticking out a wall in the lower deck of the Corship.”
Lyssav hissed. That wasn’t a good sign. “Answer me honestly, brat.”
Dirofil stashed his arms inside his cape. “That was pure honesty. Or do you think Parvov wouldn’t mesh a damned dog onto the structure of his ship? I was as baffled as you are when I found out.”
“It sounds like Parvov. But how is it load bearing?” Lyssav asked, tilting her head in a way that would have been cute if performed by any creature that didn’t resemble a living nightmare.
“Beats me.”
“Everything beats you, dear brother,” Lyssav said, and then turned over her own axis, heading back into Leptos’ spire. “We shall bid Leptos a farewell, Brother. Follow.”
“Why are you assuming I am returning to the sea so soon?”
“Because, Dirofil.” Lyssav blinked, once with each fire-kissed eye. Then grinned in a revolting way. “The sister you love the most could use a guide.”