“‘Hey, Doratev, I had a marvelous idea. I want to butt a Corgi into this wall and tell everyone it is load-bearing. Think that’s doable?’

‘It can be arranged, my gigantic moron. But I am naming her.’

‘How insensible.’”

—Parvov and Doratev, in a conversation recreated in the secret recording lovingly named Legend of Loretta: Beginnings.

Heights. Vedala, submerged into a slumber of the sane. The baubles silent, unbetraying. The violet clouds witnessing. The burning core, casting its tyrannical cold over the palaces. The faceless visage, the husk, contemplating the expanse of Cynothalassa, pupils absent, but spots brimming with activity. Ground, gold and blue tiles at the palace’s base. A little whirlpool had gestated to her left, started by a lab hopping over his equals to chase his own tail.

Shadiran reformed her head and used a single hand to straighten a kinked femur. A single fall wouldn’t break Dirofil’s widow. To her own disgrace, she feared death, and the emotion from the jump proved underwhelming, insufficient to edge her to detonate her core. She examined her dress, confirmed all the beads were in place. So it seemed.

The doors of the palace, gates of many mixed-and-matched metals of different hues with a front depicting the thorny Imaginers in a tasteful bas-relief, stood ajar and pitied her. She could cross them again. Climb the squared staircase. Sneak past Vedala and return to the balcony, only to take the short way down a second time.

She would not grace Vedala’s stairs with her defeat turned into a sorry march.

Thus Shadiran faced the sea. The tide was high, just a few heights of her body below the edge of the palace’s yard. A little hop away.

A little hop, and not away anymore. Her evenly spaced toes found the dog she landed over fluffy. A Curly-coated Retriever that barked twice at The Besotted. In the past, she would have petted the creature. Hugged it and lifted it out the sea, maybe. This tide she lacked energy to do anything but ignore it. Other dogs licked at her feet, up her ankles, with intentions perhaps benevolent, perhaps maleficent. She couldn’t know; she wondered if she was meant to care as she strode from pup to pup.

Her palace was far away from Vedala’s, but the sea was mostly at calm, and as such, walkable. She needed to kill time. She wanted to murder it, stab it, sure, but until that became possible, meditating to forget Dirofil’s absence for a wee while would suffice.

A wave threatened to break against her, and Shadiran simply leapt over it, traversing several times her body length in a single jump. Even aching from the fall she was able of honoring the athletic feats of her days of youth. No other pair, or couple, of Thinkers had gamboled more on the way between both homelands. Dirofil climbed faster than her, but she jumped higher than him. Both of them danced though the sphereway, coalescing into a single body with two minds at times, and then pulling apart, regenerating the duality. Once she had left an eye spot on his right hand, showed him the world as she saw it, and he had lent her his eye to return the gesture. He had said that he looked hideous in her eyes, and she had retorted that she could say the same about herself in his. They had both laughed before having a playful spar on the platform of Mardhaka’s palace. Neither had won, victory was not what they sparred for. It was their loving ritual, another way of showcasing their souls to each other. A deflected set of claws met with an intense gaze, a wound of the mucilage soon to heal celebrated with delight, guffaws. Once Desmodus had furtively observed them go about their act of lovebirds, and he had spread his wings wide and taken flight to kick them both in the head while the lovers entangled claws and strived to shift their anatomy such that they could topple the other, transiently decapitating her and sending Dirofil’s left eye rolling across the rosy marble of Desmodus’ palace’s yard. Those had been happy tides before the tides.

Times past, times gone. Times swallowed by the sea under her feet. Out of rage she kicked a snout that dared pop out of the mass of Retrievers, prompting a whimper from the surprised dog.

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Immersed in her fit of rage, in her reverie of memories, she didn’t notice him approaching, digging through the dogs as he liked to do. The elongate body rose in front of her, the crooked notochord guiding the mass of transparent, deep-blue-tinged flesh. He stood on five appendages that couldn’t be called anything but roots, long and pointed. His face consisted of a glabella here, an schizochroal-like eye immediately to the left, and a metallic Aristotle’s Lantern on the opposite side of the so-called head, lower with respect to the sagittal plane, keeping the asymmetry so characteristic of this brother. And inside that echinodermal mouthpiece, when the five teeth parted, a vertebrate-like eye could be seen, using the urchin’s jaws as improvised lids.

His voicebox, like its product, twisted, the sound emitted barely intelligible to those unused to it. As it was only natural, though, his younger sister found no barriers to understand him. “I saw you jump, Shadiran. Many times.”

“That eye of yours sees everything many times, Angio.”

Angio The Misbegotten whistled out a laugh. He had always loved Shadiran’s harmonic voice, so different from him, from the carefully disparate design that defined what Angio was supposed to be. His sole vertebra slid up and down the notochord, split in twain, left and right half of the spondyle moving independently. “Seventy-three, indeed. And it sees that you seem pained by your little acrobatics show, sis.”

“It’s a long fall from Vedala’s balcony. Step aside, I am primed for a rest.”

“Considering suicide, are you? To lose a sister to the sea would be tragic but understandable. Yet, to lose a sister to loneliness… I wouldn’t know how to make it make sense.”

“You have never loved anyone. Not even yourself. I won’t ask you to understand my anguish, brother.”

The Aristotle’s lantern closed, letting Angio inspect Shadiran with the trilobite-like eye alone. “I cannot love. That’s a matter of fact. A fall cannot kill you. That’s another. I foster as much appreciation for myself and my siblings as I am capable of, which isn’t half of what you’d like, but it already feels overwhelming for my core. I am slightly emotionally invested in your wellbeing, Shadiran.”

Shadiran abandoned her slouch, something the meandering creature in front of her couldn’t do. All of her eyespots relocated to the front of her body, beholding her brother in her watercolor reality. One day the world would stop being painted like that. One day, all that would remain of reality would be the sharp edges of the other’s eyes, the ones like Dirofil’s, or whatever mosaic Angio’s constantly created. Only for her and her Splinters the world looked like a painting did to the creators.

“Come. Walk with me to my palace, brother. We have nothing to talk about, but your company is welcome.”

“I don’t understand you, Shadiran. The lot of you. I wish to.” He said, mobilizing his stilts, managing a precarious balance by digging their ends between dogs. In other words, stepping aside.

“Our realities are different, brother. Our somas grant us unique feedback, and it builds the world outwards from the heart of our beings. I must look hideous from your point of view, from your… vertebrate-like eye.” She said as they began walking side by side, with her carefully stepping on butts and backs, and him sinking his sharp legs into the snug spaces between Retrievers, his a wobbling march.

“I have no appreciation for beauty nor aversion for its lack thereof, Shadiran. But I know the theory. Content yourself with your symmetry and smooth surface. I don’t envy them, but, from what I have gathered, I am considered the ugly one among us. Even the Imaginers called me Misbegotten. Wrong,” he said, and Shadiran could identify the absolute lack of bother in his tone.

It was true. Angio had been created distinctly from the others at the Edge. For some reason, he had been named after a parasite, too. A nematode, like her beloved: Angiostrongylus vasorum. Many times she had cracked in laughter after calling out “Heartworm” only for both of them to turn at once. But the time to play was over, the time to climb stairing spirals of spheres that impaled creation and connected the core to the edge, gone by. Now there was the sea underfoot, deep and fluffy. Sneering.

“Don’t feel bad. I cannot boast about having a face someone could ever love,” joked Shadiran, a glimpse of her old self resurfacing.

“You have no face,” Angio pointed out, humorlessly.

“It was supposed to be a funny comment, Angio. To raise the spirits.”

“My spirit needs no raising. I am not the depressed one,” He stated as tactlessly as it was expected of him. It’s not that Shadiran didn’t mind, but rather that she knew asking for anything else from his elder brother was a fool’s errand.

“Nevermind.”

And so, immersed in the sort of theoretical silence that exists when one abstracts reality from the whimpering and barking and howling and snorting and sneezing of the sea, they kept on traveling towards her spire. Stepping on myriads of wiggling creatures that panted and smiled and scratched against her rough toes, she wondered if that would be the last time she would walk beside Angio.

He would miss her. Vedala would miss her. The others would miss her even more. Possibly half as much as she missed Dirofil in those moments.

The world was ending, anyway. Chances were that soon not even Lyssav’s odious jaws would remain souled. Her siblings would not miss her, Shadiran The Besotted, for long.