“He decreed the Sixth should be called Babesi. His naming scheme is unassailable: I can’t, for the love of all, make him drop it. I already told him that one cannot name a creation after a parasite. But isn’t my pet name for him that of a parasite? So he argues. I have made this bed.”
—Notes for Cosmopoiesis, page 7.
Highlighted by the shine of the puppies, together into that little pocket of safety among the tunnels where the dachshunds dug incessantly, Dirofil contemplated his little sister leaping around like an unfurling spring, her serpentine body curling one and another way to give the hand on her tail access to the puppies. “Judgement,” she said as she shoved one of the fallen puppies back into his place in the ceiling. She faced another and talked again. “Disembarrassed!” she chastised before grabbing the pup from its loose skin and returning him to his hole in the wall. “When!” Once again she hurried to return the pup to where it belonged in the room’s structure.
“Are those the names of the pups?” Dirofil finally asked, trying to think outside the box: That was the only way to understand Babesi sometimes.
“Yes, I name them when they react to one of the random words I mumble as I go about my tide.”
“You are wrong in the core, Bab.”
She nodded energetically, not looking at him because she was examining the belly of one of the floorpups. “Wrong in the Core: Another title for my growing collection.”
“But I thought you were… worse off. Gone,” Dirofil didn’t bother sitting up, nor staring directly at her.
“The sea almost renders me thoughtless, yes. Then I found the Dachshund tunnels and hid while figuring out where they wouldn’t dig next. They have a pattern to their tunnels, and that helps the warren keep its structural integrity. I have hideouts in places where they cannot dig without collapsing the whole thing.”
“And the Dachshunds, I take, keep other things away?” Dirofil’s expression went sour, the mirthful shine in his eyes dying off after realizing there had to be things more terrible out there; that he had barely scratched the surface of the sea of dogs.
“Indeed! I care for the Daschies and they care for me. The Sampreys parasite them, and I have the right size to crawl over their bodies and plug them off. A Samprey is a parasitic Samoyed. A Samoyed is originally a big fluffy dog of white fur and kind behavior and... Peritoneum!” her face’s tendrils stopped a little pup form emerging from the wall and into the open space.
Dirofil let out a little giggle. He almost felt like he was sitting in his throne, listening to Babesi’s branching speeches as he contained his urge to dismiss her like, according to her, Parvov often did in the days before her spire fell. “Why not call them normal dog names? Spot? Max? Rex?”
“I reserve those for the Dachsies!”
Of course. Of course that would be the case. Morbilliv would have found a way to beat them, to kill the things and make an armor out of their skin. Parvov’s plan wouldn’t be too far off. But Babesi was this bubbly, hyperactive thing. Like a metallic ferret she bounced off walls and looked at you with her big eye and, for a fleeting moment, you could believe that, just maybe, the world wasn’t this unfair heart grinder, and instead was a titanic joke you could enjoy if only you learned how to be on in it. “I am glad you still think, Babesi. Do you know of the others?”
“Others what?” She fiddled a bit with her tendrils and then seemed to crash against a realization. “Ah! The one you hurt is called Rita. She’s female. Very territorial girl, it took me a long time to earn her trust—”
Dirofil grunted. “Our siblings. Parvov, Morbilliv.”
“You are the first Thinker I see since I live here. Well, the first one with a working core. One of the side chambers of the cave system is full of Splinter scraps. Tail!” She dove in direction to Dirofil’s flicking appendage. “This is from Leptos.”
“Indeed, our brother granted me some parts of his to repair my body. I still have some minor issues with the articulations of the legs and don’t hear all too well from one of my ears, but I manage.”
“How’s the old Leplep?”
Dirofil rubbed his hands together. “Fine. Unable to move due to his core conjoining him with his throne, but still thinking.” But when Dirofil finished speaking, Babesi had gone back to minding a misbehaving puppy. The idea of cursing her flashed through his mind, but he immediately decided not to. If with each passing tide there was the chance of losing another sibling, his time with the young Babesi deserved to be cherished. “Do you wish to get out of here? I could descend out of the sea and take you to Leptos spire. He’d be glad to have your company.”
“But I am fine in here. I have a comfortable place to meditate, my core is weak but I can recover a bit of strength with each passing tide, and the Dachsies keep other ugly mutants away,” she said, closing onto Dirofil’s face, her eye examining the iris of labradorite that he had borrowed from Leptos. “Who took your eye?”
“Parvov. For reasons undisclosed. The tide before he came on his own to the sea and disappeared.”
Babesi lowered her head and coiled in a corner of the puppy-pocket, as far away from her brother as she could. “That was my fault. I never discouraged him from pursuing his dream. Parvi told me he wanted to save everyone from the sea. That the only way to do so would be to know what said sea concealed beyond the retriever layer. I told him it sounded like a noble endeavor. And now Parvi’s…”
“… Gone.” Dirofil sentenced, and he leaned forward to crawl towards his armless sister. “But it’s not your fault, Babesi: Parvov believed that, like he had been dreamt third by the creators of the world, he could manifest his own dreams, bend reality to his will if his core was strong enough. I have no idea what he planned, but it’s clear to see he failed.” He reached for Babesi’s head and used two of his fingers to caress the area under Babesi’s left voicebox. “We cannot save our siblings from themselves. You cannot save me from my promise, nor can I save you from…” Dirofil looked for the words for a long instant, but failed to find them. “From being you,” he had to satisfy himself with that simple statement. “Now let us rest, Babesi: I want to restore the thought energy I lost by fending off Rita. Afterwards, I want to go scavenging among those scraps you mentioned, if you wouldn’t mind.”
“As you wish, Dirodiro! I will make the rounds while you meditate!” Babesi perked up and shot past him, wiggling her way past the thinnest of the walls of puppies with such speed that Dirofil barely managed to come up with the right question.
“Rounds of what, Babesi?” She didn’t answer and he repeated the question only once before letting himself fall on his back and lay on the soft dogs. He closed his eyes and embraced the calm of that place, the knowledge that he was with Babesi, that he had recovered a smidge of what he had thought lost. Maybe Parvov and Morbilliv were out there, somewhere. But he wouldn’t let optimism beget hope, not because of this fortuitous encounter. Contenting himself with Babesi’s wellbeing was the best he could do, refraining to invoke the ghosts of his other siblings.
----------------------------------------
The Tunellers’ order resulted curious for Dirofil. Those monstrous dogs had brought all the remains of the splinters they hunted to a single room, gathered them in a heap, and left it unattended, or, at least, ready for Babesi to exploit, if she needed to.
“There aren’t many Splinters of me being rendered thoughtless by the Dachsies: they don’t actively attack them. So please don’t take parts from the few remains of them, as I may need those in the future. Solely!” She rushed to catch a brown dog that had fallen from the ceiling of the scrap chamber.
Said chamber, as judged by Dirofil, was roughly shaped like an oblate spheroid. The distant ceiling stood as a parody of the creator’s sky, with black and brown puppies speckled here and there as if they were stars seen in a film negative. And at his feet, a lake of remains, of gold and silver and green and iridescent parts, with no core light to be seen. So much thoughtlessness presented as a distressing sight to him, but it was also a heap of resources he couldn’t ignore. He could readily recognize the worn-down arms and legs that jutted out the mass of scrap here and there.
As his eye and Leptos’ scanned the pile of deceased, he began wondering what he wanted to get. Not what he could get, as he fostered a pretty good memory of the parts that conformed the bodies of the original six. And besides an ear from a splinter of his and a few spare pieces for his articulations, he was unsure. For long it had been a dream of his to test out Lyssav’s wings. And he beheld a pair of them, shaped after a bat’s, with the characteristic elongate metacarpals and phalanges on most fingers, a few meters away from his position, poking out from the pile not unlike other appendages did.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“Ah! I forgot!” Babesi urged and swiftly snaked to her brother’s side. “Sometimes Chiranhas hide in the pile. The Dachsies don’t stir nor mind the pile a lot so they don’t bother eating the Chis here like they do elsewhere in the tunnels. It’s a dangerous place.”
“You consider mutant Chihuahuas dangerous?” Dirofil asked in an almost-mocking tone.
“A sausage dog almost ends you,” Babesi replied with a satisfied tone.
“The idea is amusing until you see them. I get your point. How big are these mutant—”
But expecting Babesi to wait for her interlocutor to finish such a sentence was a pipe dream. “Chihuahua sized. Vicious. They hunt in packs. Their teeth are modified to be sharper and can bite through the alloy of my bones and scales. They are made of the same thing… wait, snake scales are of epidermal origin, they are not made of bone… Brother, I am shaped after a fish!”, Babesi concluded, closely inspecting the scales of her tail-hand.
Dirofil imagined the metaphorical hamster with hyperthyroidism that lived inside her core overdosing on psychostimulants. “At least you gave me a definite answer.”
The Fourth Imagined glanced at the wings once more. Lyssav would straight up obliterate him if she saw him using a body part of one of her Splinters. Not because she cared about them, but rather out of considering it an affront against her gargantuan ego. Only The First Pictured would be spared of her ire, for only Leptos she respected enough. And he had clearly transcended the need for a functional body, such that the situation would never arise.
A rumble swiped through the whole chamber, upsetting the puppies and putting Dirofil on guard.
“Worry not, that’s probably Blotch. He has a tendency to dig around these parts.” Babesi’s sentence was punctuated by a second-long quake of the ceiling. “And that’s a tunnel collapsing. I am positive now: Blotch.”
Babesi’s calmed demeanor prohibited Dirofil from manifesting his nervousness. “I see, I’ll begin seeking the parts I need, then. Keep your eye out for trouble, Bab.”
“I am an expert Chiranha spotter!” she said as she used her tendrils—of her face, of her girdles, of her tail— to ascend along the wall and oversee the whole pile from such a vantage point.
Dirofil’s claws found easy purchase upon the plates, cogs and rods that once made up his equals. He advanced with a regal air, with firm steps and a straight back under the chainmail cape that concealed most of his form. It was the only proper way to walk over a cemetery, to pay respect to the thoughtless. “I see them while meditating sometimes. Gravestones under a blue sky riddled with blooms of whiteness. I see vines creeping up them while flowers whose names I don’t know why I know wither over beds of dirt. The makers knew of death, Splinters. Theirs is the fault of our demise.”
Dirofil rejected the idea to use his core’s energy to raise the metal skeletons back up, to make them march out of the pile so he could comfortably take what he needed. The privilege of spare energy wasn’t one he enjoyed. So he limited himself to picking up a replica of Parvov’s skull, with the twisted horns pointing in opposite directions, giving him that battered crescent moon appearance when looked from either side. Their inner ears were similar enough, so maybe he could pluck the little artifact off the thoughtless husk and assimilate it. With his right arm, whose fingers were thinner than those of his composite left, Dirofil reached beneath the right horn and fiddled a bit between the sharp plates of the skull, until he felt the peculiar dotted texture on his fingertip. “Eye for an ear, and not even yours. But this is what I get for acquiescing to your petition, Brother.” A little infusion of core energy and turn of the wrist later he was pulling his hand out, the little hearing implement stuck to his finger, encased by his own slimy flesh. Now he had to test it. “Babesi, tell me about other layers of the sea. Are there open spaces like these tunnels? I take it’s not retrievers and their puppies all the way up.”
“I don’t know, but I am sure the Dachsies do!” She shrieked like she was wont to do, and Dirofil paid close attention at how the ear in his finger picked up the sound.
Yes, it would do: he pulled with his core, and under his skin, the little object travelled up his arm, into his chest, through his neck and across most of its head, lodging itself next to his deficient ear, which would be expelled from his body as soon as the assimilation process for the new ear was complete.
“The Dachshunds can talk?” He asked, pleasantly surprised by Babesi’s statement, now that he could properly react to it.
“No, but they surely know about the sea!” She stated, impervious to the intent behind her brother’s question.
He shook his head and began pacing over the pile once more. His cape’s lower end caressed the bumps and shapes of the fallen, like a mourning hand holding the deceased’s in a funeral. There was no warmth in the pile, there was no warmth in the cape: there was only warmth in the puppies and in Dirofil’s and Babesi’s cores. “You have a penchant for collecting and dispensing useless information, sister.”
“I call them facts. Conclusions, sometimes. Wrong, rarely.”
There was no wind in the sea of dogs, nor in the core. No gentle gusts to rip frail petals off decaying flowers. He walked upon a graveyard devoid of beauty, and he lamented it deeply. An ugly dump of husks of replicas, that it was; did not a single one of those Splinters deserve a beautiful place for their remains?
His gaze drifted to a nearby pair of Dirofil-legs barely standing out from the rubbish. He wondered if that could be him. If it was fate or rather mere luck that determined if one was born as the original or as their countless Splinters. In the farcical world of the creators, only a few would ever see a cadaver that resembled them.
But that world was either gone, or had never been there in the first place. The creators had promised them nothing of value: not truth, not coherence, not salvation. Not a place to go when their cores went devoid of light and shattered into a fine dust.
He reached for the legs to pull them from their spot and soon heard the little sniggering of something drawing near.
“Chiranhas!” Babesi shouted uselessly as Dirofil raised his bitten arm, where a single dog with sharp cyrtoconic teeth bigger than its eyes and an armor of brown and silver scales thrashed and tried to rip off a part of the Thinker’s flesh.
“What a nuisance.” The Fourth Imagined used his left arm to take the thing from the head, and he held it at arm length as the predatory Chihuahua kicked and tried to gnaw though the Thinker’s palm. “You may be able to bite through metal, but bone is way frailer than enamel. Let’s see what your skull is made of.”
The vile creature frothed at the mouth as what initially was merely a restrictive grasp turned into an unforgiving vice. “I don’t need to exert my core to deal with pests of your size,” he said as the mutant dog whimpered and kicked uselessly, the little bones of his skull cracking and giving in as the dark blood escaped from his orbits, nose and mouth. Then, a splat as the cranium finally collapsed, like a broken egg full of brains and gore.
Dirofil let the lifeless body in the pile and focused on catching the three new attackers that were climbing his cape and nibbling his leg. The tail skewered the one biting his calf without the littlest of issues, and with the cape of chains he enclosed the other two as in a bag and then used his core to take control of each link of metal, tightening the fabric around the aberrant creatures, compressing them from every angle until their bones started to snap and their flesh to mix in a ball of squeezed-out Chiranhas.
Babesi watched the whole scene unfurl in silence, and then found the words she was looking for. “You are murdering them. Offhandedly.”
“They are polluting the resting place of the murdered.” Dirofil shook his cape to rid it of the sticky Chihuahua remains, and then hitched his tail like a whip to dislodge the impaled one. “I promised this sea I will be its heartworm. Why would I hesitate when killing sick dogs?”
“They are still doggies,” Babesi lowered her voiceboxes, as if frowning with her inner structure, forming an inverted V shape with her lone eye.
“They wanted to end me,” his eyes wandered into his bloodied hand. He had never killed anything before. No. There had never been something to kill before. No even trees to topple down, or bugs to squash. Only siblings and their Splinters, which no Thinker would dream of rendering thoughtless… or almost no thinker. And yet the blood didn’t feel alien between his fingers. It didn’t feel wrong. “I am sorry for having you witness that, dear sister.”
He finally decided to sit upon the pile and inspect the legs he had found. Fiddling first with the knees to check on the hinges and cogs in them. With some luck, a few would have gotten stuck on the fixed elements instead of falling out after losing the gelatin support they had in life.
“You killed them, brother. You, Dirofil, Fourth Imagined, killed them. I’d expect that of the others —except Leptos— but never of you.”
“Leptos likes to address me as the Kind One. My siblings, the Splinters and the Thinkers of the Edge deserve my kindness. This sea doesn’t.” With his bloodied left he gestured at the heap of carcasses, at how expansive it was, drops of dense blood dripping here and there, baptizing the metal cemetery. “Look at what it did. Behold the cruelty we must repay in kind if we wish to overcome the end of the world, Babesi.”
“But Diro,” she said with bottomless hurt in her voice. “The Dachsies like their food alive. Dead Chis are up to me to clean.”
It was like a fat lamppost had been shoved in between the spokes of his anger, sending his thought process out of rails. “Is that how you get rid of the Sampreys? You feed them alive to the very animals they parasite?”
“Yes. I batter them against a nearby wall or the ground and then, once they are stunned, I give them to the Dachsies to eat. They slurp the Sampreys up without hesitation. They love their taste,” Babesi explained, in a far calmer tone.
“Wrong in the core.” Dirofil finished absorbing the articulation pieces he needed for the legs, and let his gaze come to rest upon the wings. Cautiously, using his hands as well as legs to support his weight as he crawled towards the object of desire, he wondered how it would feel, folding them under his cape, or spreading them to take flight in any space as open as the one they currently resided in. He pictured his slime flowing in and coalescing into strong patagia supported by the abandoned metallic bones. Lyssav, he had seen her flying from the top of her spire to Leptos’s, to Parvov’s, in the times when the hand of Shadiran could readily touch his. He kneeled in front of the wings and joined his hands in that snowglobe-holding gesture so characteristic of him. In silence he pondered the inexistent little world between his hands, thinking about the fact that the wings could become more a burden than a boon. But the scarlet skeleton called for him, reflecting a beam of puppy-light from a polished metacarpal. A tentative touch made a river of cold course through his arm. There was nothing special about these wings, but that wouldn’t make them look less like the ones inserted on the shoulders of his cruel sister.
And yet the sea wouldn’t afford him mercy for nurturing these irrational feelings, for fostering an absurd phobia of Lyssav’s potential judgement.
With both hands he grabbed the wings middle section —the zeugopodia— and infused his soul into the carcass as he straightened his back, pulling.
And pulling.
And pulling.
Until the obstinate articulations gave in, letting the appendages dangle free, making Dirofil fall backwards onto the pile of rubbish. Now, all that he had to do was to assimilate the wings.