“The dynamic of the sea in its inner layers is heavily inspired by that of our beloved planet’s crust. Subduction and accretion both can erect low mountain ranges, and the cynology —or Cynolithology? The dogs that act as rocks, anyhow— varies accordingly. The strata are defined by breed, as in other parts of the sea, but they are impermanent: if there are mountains, there ought to be weathering and erosion. Without them, ranges would be quite boring.”
—Notes for Cosmopoiesis, page 17
Lyssav was kissing. With jaws designed to infuse fear and instill pain she softly smooched Babesi’s forehead, right over her only eye. For Dirofil, that climbed by grabbing onto his sister’s body and using a single hand to push puppies away, it seemed time had frozen solid. He couldn’t pull through, advance a single inch more. Lyssav was kissing, and not out of some sadistic inclination or to further a vile plan, no. Her teeth landed on Babesi’s scales with extreme caution, caressing a surface they should have scored. Babesi’s tail wish-washed as she, head down, enjoyed the rendezvous. Had he had a heart, it would have turned to mush, and for a moment that felt eternal, his resolve wavered. He would end this. A vision of the finale assaulting him. A tug of war, and Babesi as the stressed rope, torn in the competition between him and the elder sister. The shared object of affection, paid as a price to settle a conflict begotten by caprice. To carry on with his quest meant to damn the dear child.
Yet carry on he should. Tears were not his prerogative, and he was thankful for that. He needed to plan. To betray Lyssav in spite of the hatred it would earn him, the scorn of the living siblings. He couldn’t beat her in a fair fight. He was not even sure he would ever be able to bear the cross of having rendered her thoughtless, if he ever managed to, even if nobody else figured it to be his doing. He would know, and that alone turned the idea into a searing coil unraveling inside his mind, igniting flames of angst all over his psyche. His mission couldn’t be avoided; the course the river of his life followed couldn’t be changed. Betraying Shadiran would never be an option. His was the fate of a natural disaster, unable to choose where it went, and to decide the number of victims it took. Hurricane, meteor, tsunami or volcano, the only things that defined whether they caused a catastrophe were their location and power. And Dirofil was pretty sure of both: The Zenith of Concepts, and whatever power he would gather in his ascent through the sea.
And if he intended to overpower Lyssav, he would need to kill the meanest dogs of the sea and assimilate their weapons. Even if he managed to take her by surprise or assail her in a weakened state, she was not to be underestimated. That mouth that now kissed with unparalleled love had already ended several lives.
He reached higher and grabbed onto Lyssav’s shoulder, pulling himself higher against his sister, the top of his head touching the top of Babesi’s. The pink smoke had started drifting downwards, and was now enveloping their heads and the pups who made their best effort to hold their breath.
“What’s this thing?” Lyssav asked, trying to pinch a curl of the vapor between an index and a thumb, not necessarily of the same hand.
“Animist. I gasify the essence of my bubbliness and spread it through the air. Then the doggies breathe it in and they become Babesi-minded!”
“Creators, and I thought I was cruel,” Lyssav blurted out, planting another smooch on Babesi’s head.
“Hi Babs.” Dirofil finally spoke, because Babesi seemed to be too busy being coddled by Lyssav.
“Not now Diro... Diro!” Babesi finally realized, turning her eyeball inside her flesh and parting the scales on the top of her head to look at her brother. “I thought that was a body part of Lyssy, or a poochie! Your head, I mean.”
“Your capacity to dismiss reality when you focus on something is enviable, Babesi. You’d make a fine cosmopoietor.”
“Lyssy.” Babesi gave foot to the Elder sister to explain.
“Dirofil means you would make a good world-maker, Babi. I disagree, for you would leave the world half-baked to go and play with whatever swayed your delicate attention. But that would be a problem of the created, anyhow,” Lyssav said, regarding her sister with utmost affection.
Dirofil kept climbing, rubbing against Babesi as he emerged into the crater. The first thing he saw was the circle of depressed Bloodhounds staring at the space between their paws as they trembled. He raised his hand in front of his eyes as he considered that they carried wings. It was then that the pink mist cleared ever so slightly and he noticed the slumbering Pomeranian beyond them, and the lack of a puppy ceiling over his head. “Ah, it lines up. Babs!” He called and pulled his sister from the ground as if she were a carrot. Holding Babesi from her tail at arm’s length as she raised her head and stared at him, he continued. “I need an explanation about what you think you are doing hanging out this close to a Tribulator.”
“The big meanie that broke into our home?”
“The Pomeranian.”
Babesi wiggled a bit as Lyssav emerged from the ground. She looked at the Tribulator, and then her gaze bounced back to Dirofil. “As you are well aware, I live here. Well aware… I wonder if there are wells somewhere. And if they are sentient.”
Stolen novel; please report.
Dirofil smacked her sister against the puppies to avoid her train of thought from derailing further. The killing stare from Lyssav bore into a skull he didn’t have. “You do worse things to her.”
“She does! Worse and funnier!”
“But I don’t let her feel the pain from said things, moron! You are lucky I am here.” A wave crossed Lyssav’s teeth, from right to left, lifting upper ones and dipping lower ones, a pair at a time in a quick succession.
“You are forbidden from eating my pain, Lyssav,” Dirofil said. “Ever forbidden.”
Two of Lissav’s hands cupped her cheeks. The other three dangled almost lifelessly from her pectoral girdle. “Cute. You dispose of no means to enforce that prohibition.”
Dirofil didn’t speak out the single word he wanted to: Yet.
He gestured at the giant Pomeranian and waited just enough for the gaze of his sisters to follow his left hands. “That thing breathes thunder and seemingly hosts these winged atrocities among its fur. Have you domesticated any of them, Babs?”
“No. They tried to kill me a while ago. Why do you ask?”
Yet. The first step to eliminate that malignant word was to match Lyssav in mobility. He kicked off with a disregard for both his joints and the puppies underfoot, using even the tail to keep advancing in a sprint despite the loose nature of the ground underneath. Hand to snout, foot to tail, slam the tail to the left to make up for a little slip. He was not the scared Thinker that had hurt Rita’s shoulder eye, not anymore. His feet and hands had gotten used to the unusual nature of the terrain about him.
Overhead zapped crimson, beating powerful wings and slapping the back of Dirofil’s head with her stinger as she passed him by. It didn’t hurt, but it did stop Dirofil in his tracks: Lyssav recklessly charged against the Tribulator.
No. His thinking process was upside down. The Tribulator was helplessly sitting in Lyssav’s path.
He turned on his heels and nailed the calm Babesi with his stare. He was so close to the wings, but the thunder could hit and hurt her. Wings or Babesi was no real choice. Babesi getting hurt would mean Lyssav was to blame, and Lyssav wouldn’t accept that. No, she would deflect, place the blame on him and punish him for a crime he hadn’t committed. Because his role had been assigned in silence by a simple smack of her tail.
He dashed back for Babesi, paying no heed to what could unfurl behind him. “We need to get to the tunnels. Now!” He cried out, tackling her, picking her up and holding her close to his chest with the lower left hand as he skittered his way towards the nearest tunnel entrance.
Lyssav landed in front of the clattering teeth of the Pomeranian, his static-charged breath unable to move her heavy frame as she lumbered closer, her lower half slithering more than crawling, and two of her arms working as makeshift legs as she dragged herself closer to the slowly incorporating dog. “I feel your blindness and the anguish it brings forth. I feel the thunder burning down your chest, tide after tide. The might you wield and the confusion you feel sit side by side as equals inside your heart,” she discoursed as the tangle of electricity gathering on the jaws of the Tribulator grew denser and denser. Lyssav persisted in her approach, fully exposed, the light of her core overpowering that of the puppies, tinging them red. “Let loose, come on. Shock me worthy of your fear.”
The thunder unraveled, the Tribulator’s jaws almost unhinged as he channeled all of his fury upon the pesky dark blot in front of him. With arms open like a lovely daisy Lyssav took the waves of electricity head on, her flesh spiking and bubbling and sizzling as the green beam engulfed her completely. And it hurt, it hurt with such grandeur as she basked in the attack. Every bone and plate in her body, every tumor of high-density slime ached and burned and seethed. She clawed her cheeks in delight. A hand intruded between her three eyes and bloomed like a flower, shoving them apart. But they stayed fixed on the outline of the teeth beyond the blinding light, ignoring the waves of electricity that coursed outwards from the impact point and climbed up from the crater’s bottom, towards everywhere. Towards Dirofil.
Lightning sprouted around him, bounced to his sides and threatened to obliterate both him and Babesi. Deep within he knew Lyssav hadn’t fallen, and that she wouldn’t be even close to falling. Every sibling had an understanding of their place in the hierarchy, in the gap between them and the others. Once one removed the unique talents of each one, that’s it. He believed he could bridge the gap to Lyssav one day, but it would take all of the might of the sea, expertly wielded by his hand. Anything less wouldn’t do. A mere Tribulator wouldn’t do.
But the fact remained that neither him nor Babesi were Lyssav, so before the jumping beam battered him, he pitched Babesi towards the tunnel, as if flinging a card, making her collide with a loose column of puppies, being buried by them.
If she complained, Dirofil couldn’t know. The offshoot from the attack entered by his tail, and immediately made its way through his whole body. With his core compromised by the shock, any attempt to control the psychosarc became a grueling task, and he gave up on managing his ears first, becoming deaf. Even without hearing, he felt the vibrations of his voicebox as it released a discordant shriek, heterogeneous chirrups interrupted by solid, high pitched slabs of sound. He lost control of one eye when a bubble of vaporized psychosarc exploded, expelling it like a volcano a bomb. His bones dislocated more and more with every passing second, and as soon as it had started, it ended, his form slumping over the puppies, about a tenth of his flesh vaporized. With great difficulty he tried to get back on a crawling position, taking stock of his body parts mentally as he attempted to overcome the all-encompassing pain. A few more hits and he would be done.
So he began digging. Removing puppies one by one, he flowed into a trench of his own making, sending waves of thought energy to the lost eye so it would try and roll closer to its rightful place.
Sooner rather than later his whole form got covered by Labradors and Goldens, and he received a message via mind link. It was from Lyssav.
Fitting for a worm, to hide by digging. I could have eaten that pain if you had allowed me.
Just deal with the Pomeranian at once, showoff.
You, dear brother, are no fun.
The huge, flaming eyes floated in the center of the field of view of the Tribulator, their nitidity leagues above everything else.
And while there wasn’t much the dog knew, having lived inside the sea since he had spawned, one thing was as clear as the image seared inside his ocular globes: he was mortal, and soon he wouldn’t be anymore.