“The time is coming for this world, and whoever created it is not paying attention anymore. We won’t let the shadows of entropy eat the new world, devour it like they are to consume ours. The most destructive force of this ideal world are to be… pups.”
—Notes for Cosmopoiesis, Page 2.
Extend the arm, grab onto the hole or ledge, retract the arm. It was so monotonous to climb, and what a long way upwards awaited him. The opening above the throne, the one that let retriever light grace Leptos’ sitting form, had been left behind, and now he stuck to the outer wall of the tower, fearing the fall and the damage it could cause. No wind howled, yet he knew of mountains and their howling gusts of doom. Mountains didn’t exist, so why did their ghost haunt him?
It was a silent ascent, the only sounds he could hear those of his inner workings and of his tail intruding in a crack to provide him some sense of safety.
Looking behind he could see, through an atmosphere that was nearly clear of miasma at such heights, a crimson spire adorned with banners like rotting ribbons of flesh. Lyssav’s home, closer to the ocean than Leptos was, yet unable to reach it still. He would have to jump from floating sphere to floating sphere, like he had done long ago to visit his love on the lands above. He would be safe from the fall once he managed to hold onto a retriever and penetrate into the sea. And he would also wish, probably, to need to worry about a fall and not whatever awaited him beyond the fluffy dogs.
Fear fueled his extremities as he skittered up the tower. There was a certainty that things would get worse, only worse from there onwards. And the sooner they got worse, the sooner the anxiety gave place to the harsh reality, the better for his frightened mind. One cannot worry about the looming jaws of death when the teeth are already crushing one’s skeleton.
A second wind possessed him, and Dirofil started to ascend by means of big leaps. If he fell, it would get worse, and if he succeeded, it would get worse! Hope was facing an eviction notice, to be homeless in the foreseeable future. Only at the other end of the sea it would inhabit, only in Shadiran it was meant to be found incarnate. The world was hopeless. And it was good for it to be, because it set realistic expectations.
He reached the tip of the spire, the tapering point at the end, and as he clung to it he stared in the distance. Perpendicular to the line described by this spire and Lyssav’s, Parvov’s, an unholy mound of onyx and emerald that he liked to image as circled by ghosts, stood taciturn, miserable. A shiver went up his tail, and then his back. In its last moments, his spire screamed into his mind, and he refused to listen. Those dear places had been built to fall.
Yet Parvov’s spire had an oddness to it. Behind its patina of blue Dirofil could hear the faint chirps of boiling rage. Parvov’s spire fostered the bitter scent of a betrayed one. Poor thing, Parvov had abandoned it before it was its time to fall. “Wish I could topple you down, Parvov’s,” he let out a weak whisper.
Throwing his head back, he could see it, still far above: The Retriever layer. The beginning of the Sea of Dogs. “Shadiran, I am coming!” He kept his hands and legs in place as he pulled his body down, preparing to spring fort towards the nearest sphere as it drifted lazily in the atmosphere. To miss was not an option: long ago, before the sea closed, he had done this for hours to meet Shadiran as she descended, in turn, from her home. Rusty he was not. The spheres hadn’t changed. His legs still remembered, and so did the arms that had been his for a long time. The tail… well, it would soon learn the ropes.
Hands on the wall. Claws clinging to white stone. And then, stone no more, only air to traverse and a sphere of orange to grab onto. A sphere that got met by his right hand, and then by his left as he clambered upon it.
Spotting a nearby cylinder, smaller than the sphere but just as slow, he readied another leap. Like a monkey enjoying himself in the jungle he used his tail to hold onto the rod and hang from it. From there he hung, staring at the void below, finding it disturbingly alluring. Too early it was for him to have these thoughts, to contemplate surrendering before even beginning his journey. Ease would not seduce him, however: if he upheld the holiness of his promise when faced with that which could have helped to render so many thoughtless, with the paradoxical drive to just stop, he would come up on top. On top of his pessimistic impulses, and eventually, of the sea above.
Excitement. Fear excited him, there was no other explanation. After a life of idly sitting upon his throne, of thinking as in the distance new spires were erected —spires like his or his sibling’s, but inhabited by unoriginal designs, by Splinters based upon the six of them— and of missing the happenings of the world, he was afraid, and had a reason to face that fear.
This line of thinking soon made him realize how deeply he missed Babesi. His younger sister, the Sixth Conceptualized, had always been adamant on wasting thinking time to visit her brothers and her sister. She visited him not to take, but to talk. She brought news onto his monotonous life.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
But the monotony was over, and apparently so was Babesi. “Are you truly nowhere, sister?”
Soon enough he surprised himself with the idea that, perhaps, it was worth it to go back down, safely, and go meet Lyssav. That reaching the sea would be easier there, and that she, too, deserved to enjoy a last gesture from the only brother that could still visit her.
That idea was discarded with a trembling of the whole body and a twitch of the fingers. Had it been about Parvov—had Parvov been there and not lost—he would have come down. He would have travelled to his spire and bid him farewell. And Parvov would surely make some ridiculous demand, and maybe they would wrestle a little. But in the end, Parvov had never wished ill on his brothers. The same couldn’t be said of Lyssav. Not without Babesi present to mediate the encounter. She yearned for the Time to Move. She believed she would be powerful enough to harness the sea and rule over her lesser brothers and sister one day. Odd was her tolerance for Babesi’s antics, but it was probably due to the fact that none of the siblings considered Babesi as a serious contender for… anything, really. Parvov believed he could find a way to survive the end of the world; Morbilliv that there wasn’t anything inside the sea—or outside of it—that he couldn’t best in battle. Dirofil wanted to remake the world with the aid of his lover. All of them represented different obstacles to Lyssav’s dream. Babesi wanted to enjoy her siblings and the Splinters as long as her mind endured.
But the Time to Move had come for him, and he would waste no fraction of a tide visiting his sister only to see her deep in trance, and find out he lacked the bravery to wake her up. Whatever lived in the sea was bound to be far less likely to assault him without a good reason.
So he regarded the sea once more, with mechanical eyes open wide. An eye of his; an eye of Leptos. He balanced back and forth, the tip of his tail safely curled around the cylinder, and with a little effort, managed to reach a nearby sphere that drifted in a slanted orbit, upwards when approaching the side of Parvov’s spire, and downwards when it approached Lyssav’s.
Another successful jump filled him with something akin to fleeting mirth. Just a few more until he reached the descending sea. The tides were swelling, coming down towards him, like the massive diaphragm of the world had expanded once more to allow it to take a breath. And the diaphragm was dull yellow and dirty white, with the black and brown dots of wet noses and the transitory flashes of pink that revealed the dog’s tongues. Now and then a black or brown Labrador, or even a flat or curly-coated Retriever popped on the surface briefly, only to be submerged back into the sea by the movement of the yellow dogs soon after.
He had forgot. Forgot that the sea of dogs was as beautiful as it was ominous, even now that its youth had faded, that there were no more puppies on the outer layers. He knew it promised thoughtlessness, but how joyful it seemed. It was not the straight allure of the void below: the void promised damnation, and did so honestly. The ocean of dogs lied. It promised boundless love, softness unrivaled. Not siblings that would never return, countless Splinters going down with their respective spires and getting forever lost.
Another thought assaulted him: maybe no Splinter of his lived anymore. Maybe all that was left of the Thinkers of the Core were a few besides the three of them: Leptos, Lyssav, and him. The oldest spires stood, and all the others, the hundreds of others, had fallen. If Morbilliv was dead, so had to be all of his Splinters. The same went for Babesi. And for the copies of himself. No splinterspire was closer to the lowest point in the world than the one they imperfectly reflected.
“I will never see their forms again. And you are to blame, wondrous thing.” He stood upon the sphere, pointing at the sea with an accusing finger. “I will create a world where you cannot take them from me! Not Shadiran, not Morbilliv, not Parvov, not Babesi! I will be a foul nematode in the heart of you, vile creation, and still it the moment I reunite with my beloved!”
With this bold declaration he jumped once, and clawed the target sphere in a flowing movement, hopping once more without stopping and reaching a second sphere, higher, closer to the sea.
The final jump happened, and there was no sphere to grab onto. Just tails and snouts.
His hand found a fluffy Golden’s backside, and he grasped onto the dog’s tail like it was a rope. Swiftly, and as his new friend whined from getting his tail pulled, he reached for one of the animal’s legs and swung his tail to a side, letting a friendly Labrador lick it a bit as he thought of a way to use it to pull himself into the sea. It was a split-second doubt, as he quickly found a way to make the hand that was holding onto a kicking leg —the left hand, the strong hand— to reach higher, grabbing onto the animal’s side, pulling from the poor thing’s loose skin as he butted his head among the snugly packed dogs.
The shine they emitted was awfully strong, when you were this close. So many Goldens and Labradors, all giving off light. But he persevered, and soon enough his whole upper body was tightly inserted between the canines.
He kept grabbing onto whatever dog body part he had in front of him, paining the dogs but not harming them, and soon enough, his feet were past the surface.
And once safely ensconced between retrievers, Dirofil realized there was a… very concerning issue he hadn’t thought of: Even if this part of the sea wasn’t dark, dogs weren’t transparent. He was blinded to danger.
He began emitting pulses from his core, to check his surroundings with aid of his psycholocation. For now, the only things he detected were a bunch of retrievers spinning, moving, crawling and climbing onto each other. “So this is how you render us thoughtless,” he said to the sea, and kept climbing, worming his way in, a task that became easier once he was past the few first layers of dogs, away from the surface and its tension.
Now all that was left was to climb. But laugher soon escaped his voicebox as he ascended, pushing and struggling against playful retrievers. So paradoxical it was, to hold as much respect as he still did for the object of his hatred. Respect that, maybe, deserved enunciation. “Ave, mare; moriturus te salutat!”