“While the flesh of earthly organisms, regardless of their variegated forms most curious, is a reflection of their ancestral past — of the selective pressures their lineage has endured and the contingencies it has negotiated to arrive to our days — the flesh of the Thinkers is a reflection of their soul. This slime, called psychosarc, is produced and supported by their thoughtcrystals. It procures them a connection between mind and body, not that different from our nerves and muscles, except far more… plastic: Muscles and nerves are selected, psychosarc is designed. Notwithstanding, this should not be understood as the psychosarc being perfect: It shares many of the shortcomings of the animal flesh, as we consider that one of the most important components of humanity is physiological.”

—Tidbits of Our Creation, page 7

Lyssav kicked off the ground, emerging from the river of green lightning, her wings full of holes, but somehow still supporting her weight midair. Her hands reached for her chest, ripping off her rotten skin and forcing her metallic ribs open to reveal her pulsing core. Her soul bled vermillion light, and the vile vapors pretended to ride winds that weren’t there as they climbed up the humid atmosphere, soaring in direction to the Bernese layer.

The wings didn’t beat, and the Pomeranian didn’t exhale the storm anymore. Its cloudy eyes quivered as it stared at the martyress looming over him. The ears pulled back, the nose licked again and again and again. The fingers on the split paws curled, the hackles lowered, curly tail tucked between the hindquarters.

He couldn’t see the blood red clouds gathering in the middle of the collie layer, but the eyes of Lyssav showed it to him anyway. The triad of cleft suns had nested deep inside the Pomeranian’s brain. The pupils inclined, each with a different angle, and numbers that the dog could understand appeared along their edges, phantasmagorical figures of the purest fire environing the globes. Without tics, without tacs, they spun slowly, marking the hour of the poor dog’s demise.

The clouds swirled up high, rumbled menacingly. Inside them the rouge light clustered, crystallized, and the tiny crystals, suspended in the air, exuded the light back as a liquid-like entity. And over Lyssav, and over the Tribulator, it rained ruby. Drop by drop fell on the fur, and seeped through the pores of the creature’s battered skin. He howled with growling pain while the pupils of the cleft suns drew ever closer to an alignment which reminisced of a trilete mark.

The Pomeranian foamed at the mouth, attacked the air in front of him with fruitless bites. Trembled as his whole body got wreathed in sensations alien to him. The monster was inside, inside! His fangs penetrated friendly skin and muscle, his molars crushed a radius they were never meant to lie onto. He whined pathetically as he destroyed his own limb, tearing muscle from the bone, scattering dark blood all over the Labrador puppies, who lapped it up and considered it quite the gourmet delicacy.

Lyssav grinned, her head dropping to the side, limp. Her arms extended like the petals of a flower, and her wings pointed downwards, disregarding gravity. Her prey slammed his head against the ground like a knight delivering a spiked flail to the skull of some unfortunate enemy.

Light seared his near-blind eyes, and everything shone in the cruelest of mockeries. The Tribulator wailed desperately, but no lightning obeyed him this time. He had lost control over his element, his green scars swollen and bleeding, unable to call forth the storm’s fury.

His elbows gave in, his mangled foreleg the first to crumble before he smashed his snout on the ground. The neck had no strength left to raise his head anymore. The fingers and toes twitched as the foamy drool drained over the pups. The heart refused to stop beating erratically, but each pump resulted harder and harder to conclude for said organ.

“Lyssy!” Babesi called out, popping out of her mound like jumping worms out of a can. “What have you done to the doggie?”

Lyssav’s wings returned to their gleeful chastising of the air, and her head whipped to the side to regard her sister. A wave coursed through her teeth, a gesture unique to her and her Splinters, that almost nobody else had cared to learn to decipher. “Honor my name, Babesi. Honor my name.”

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The lights of the Captain’s room flickered on and off, the shards of the mirror scattered inside the lattice, reflecting a thousand fragments of Parvov. The hand used to destroy the reminder of his brother was still curled into a fist. He held it still in front of his eyes, contemplating the gone brother’s paw as he sat on a throne that didn’t belong to him.

Forward?

The question of the Corship snapped him out of his abstraction, if only for a brief instant. The nails of Parvov, brazen under the retriever-like light, stared him in the eye , but that was no excuse to slack.

No, down. We are traveling Leptoswards. Find a way down and we will soon greet Dirofil, if everything has gone according to plan.

Understood, brother.

The ship whirred a happy purr. Morbilliv returned to his contemplation his brother’s body. Soon he would abandon it, like he had decided to abandon his reflection. Excited, afraid, and doubtful were all things he was in those moments. Doratev had already started planning up his new body, and soon his soul would have a new, so awaited home. The Reaper had condemned him to wear Parvov’s form along his loss. The latter, he couldn’t shed. The former, however…

Puppy!

The whole ship shook energetically, forcing Morbilliv to claw the armrests of the throne to stay in place. He began fidgeting with his forehorn after things stabilized. The ship presented a cloyingly innocent attitude towards mutants. And while Morbilliv fostered no ill feelings for any creature that had yet not proven a menace, exercising caution had to be regarded as best practice.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Describe the… puppy.

Obedient as it wasn’t, the Corship sent a fragmented mental image of a snarling, horned, thick skulled creature climbing towards them.

The fingers triggered to life, spreading as tendrils of light grew from the tips, emerging from the space betwixt twinned claws.

That’s a pugilist. I will have some… physical words with it, if you don’t mind.

Dragging the threads of his soul he went down the sphere staicarse, transiting the corridors of the ship with a purpose that was plain to see. There would be no need to announce a Pugilist protocol if he handled the threat. Furthermore, any sort of protocol had been rendered useless or redundant by the Corship’s newfound sentience. It knew how to run away from obvious threats, it had learned to hide from the big predators. It was the smaller ones that they had to fear, as it had always been.

And it took a Morbilliv to call a pugilist “small”.

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The agitation of the Bernese dogs was nigh-palpable as Morbilliv sauntered out the ship’s backdoor. The cold air from the interior mixed with the muggy breath of the sea, and the solitary lights of the Seventh penetrated a darkness all-encompassing. A quick peek down made Morbilliv meet his adversary-to-be with tendril-extending eyes. From the rims of his orbits more and more threads of soul wriggled out, silky stands of light lowing from each eye that belonged to the dead brother. But not from Leptos. Leptos’ was closed. Leptos’ was closed and retracted into the skull, as it was too precious to risk it.

There was glory to be found in symmetrical conflict. Glory like that which wreathed the aberrant pug’s head, the wide, crooked horns sticking to the head like two halves of a crown. It climbed like a gorilla, slow but powerful, with wide forelegs ending in claws sharp enough to rend, yet prehensile enough to curl into fists. It enjoyed no nose, and probably no sense of smell. The head consisted of a wide mouth compressed into a permanent frown against a short skull, brachycephaly taken to the extreme.

Morbilliv had found out the hard way that there was no trachea to crush, that the things drew no breath once they completed their metamorphosis. His fingers twitched by his side as he beheld a creature indistinguishable from the one that had almost rendered him thoughtless so many tides ago. Back then, he had fought alone until the searing flames of his brother descended like a rebuking angel. He had committed mistakes, assumed his enemy was like most other aberrant dogs he had faced in the past.

But he had learned. Maybe not how this particular one would fight, and yet the knowledge about the anatomy and weaknesses of his enemy resulted invaluable. He had but a few seconds until the charging creature, now heading straight for his core, crashed over him.

And yet it was plenty of time. Arms spread and fingers likewise, he let his body drop from the ramp of the cargo bay. The light of his spirit got weaved into the thinnest threads, and betting on their unrivaled resistance he used them to grab onto the tails of a nearest column, dangling now a bit further from the pugilist, that crawled down a Bernese pillar and approached the nearest walkway. It supported its weight with its roughed-up knuckles, keeping the claws protected and sharp as it raced like a possessed ape.

The beast plucked a Bernese out of the fabric of the sea and lurched it with savage strength, but Morbilliv swatted the projectile away with a graceful movement, using a dense tangle of threads as a whip while the ones of the other hand and his legs kept him rooted to the wall.

He raised Parvov’s forehorn, regarding the beast across the pit, as if saying “Come.”

Three more parried dogs it took for the mute menace to let out a silent snarl and charge with its toothless mouth agape.

Morbilliv wondered if one of the hearts he heard thumping behind his back belonged to an invisible menace. Yet the weaver oughtn’t to waver. He was the Fifth Conceived, no matter whose body he wore. Regardless of whatever hands he controlled, he would crush the skull of any dog that dared sneak up to him.

The creature lunged, claws of the left arm ready to slam Morbilliv’s face against the column of dogs. Using the tendrils like a multitude of legs the automaton climbed out the way, and kicked off the wall with absolute disregard for the poor structural dogs. He extended the threads of a hand, reaching for a faraway catwalk, and grabbed firmly onto a tail.

Ultimately, fighting in the Bernese layer was easy: you didn’t need to kill your enemy if you had a good enough chasm under your feet. To throw them down into the Collie layer, that now suffered from an unusual reddish hue, often sufficed.

Because there was glory to be found in long, excruciating battle against an equal, but right then Morbilliv had no use for glory.

Light threads shot from his face and fingers while others all over his body rooted him to the underside of the catwalk. They aimed for the wide neck of the creature, that glared daggers with one of his eyes at a time: not even aberration could deliver this pug from strabismus.

Morbilliv had expected the thing to jump after him, but the pugilist instead grabbed the tangle curling around its neck and began tugging from it, the muscles of its arm bulging obscenely as, at the other end of the ropes, Parvov’s hand trembled.

Morbilliv was well secured, glued to the structure made of Bernese mountain dogs. His joints wouldn’t give in, not before he let the technique fade. He simply wasn’t a fan of playing tug of war with a pug. Whatever else lurked out there could assault him, make use of the unique chance to assail his core. The sea was dark, the sea was relentless, and it made good on its promises, so while he felt it treacherous, he couldn’t call it so.

He ignited the threads, hoping the pug would let go, but the mutant seemed impervious to pain. Parvov could straight out carbonize them, rendering the searing pain useless. Morbilliv didn’t enjoy the same level of control over fire. His technique was clumsy, inefficient. The eldest siblings told that the day of Parvov’s awakening his whole spire had exploded in flames so white, so pure and threatening. That it had lighted up the dark core with an intensity that rivaled that of the burning one at the edge. Lyssav had even used the word “cute” to describe the event.

Back and forth, back and forth, muscles of flesh facing bones of metal and trembling as equals, seeing who would get worn out first. But this was merely an act to distract it: the thing about roots is that they grow, and nets major strength lies in their interconnectedness. So while it was a rather long winded way between his point of vantage and the pug’s, traversing it, maneuvering blind through the mass of Berneses, was only a matter of time.

And after a solid pair of minutes of strife, the threads erupted from behind the Pugilist, pushing it off the wall, encroaching his fingers to unmake his grasp onto the column. Soon enough Morbilliv dispelled his power, letting the heavyweight creature flail against thin air as it plummeted to the bottom of the sea.

Sometimes battles went this way. And it was the best for all parties involved: the pugilist lived another day, the ship and its crew were safe, and he had spent as little energy as he could. A win in his book, that, in his opinion, could use a few more of those.

Now all that remained was to return to the ship and search for Dirofil…

Puppy!

Or maybe not.

Morbilliv grunted as he clambered up a strut of Berneses. It would be a long, long tide for Battle Incarnate.