“The miners found a supposed Splinter among the pugs. I have no doubts this is Dirofil himself. It has the unmistakable markings of an original. Yet I will gift the captain the chance to feel smart. He adores that.”

—Doratev, in a voice record he hoped Parvov would never listen to.

Parvov entered the laboratory grumbling something inaudible for everyone but the Doctor and his Splinters. “There’s no need to call me for the assimilation of a new Splinter into the crew, Doctor. I’ll introduce myself to them in due time.”

“This Splinter of Dirofil has an unusual core, sir,” the Doctor said as he observed his latest catch laid over the examination table. “He has parts of Splinters of Leptos, too. Probably scavenged a carcass to survive. It also has… something unusual in the arm. A contamination of sorts. We fished him from the current as the miners gathered pugs for the refiners.”

Parvov approached with a slouch, as he often did when the crew bothered him. “Let me see him, then.”

Once Parvov had the battered and unconscious body in front of him, he forced himself to straighten his back and backhanded the Doctor so casually, sending him reeling to the floor. “What was that for, sir?” The Doctor asked dumbfounded as he gathered himself.

“Chainmail cape. Loss of…” Parvov tapped his eye. “…This. A broken tail so antique it could only be of Leptos himself. A core of unusual size for a Splinter, yet as weak as one for the moment. What does it tell you?”

The Doctor went to Parvov’s side and examined the captain’s countenance, how his four eyes looked at the one laying in front of him. How he looked way more… relaxed than the tides prior. “The search for Dirofil has ended, sir?”

“Yes, Doctor. I’ll inform everyone personally. Tend to him until his core stabilizes. Make sure no one disrupts his meditation.” Parvov stared at the ceiling and stretched his arms before taking them behind his head, under the horn. “It seems it is a small sea, after all.”

“It’s a big ship,” The Doctor countered. “Lots of energy needed to move the legs. Mind if I run some non-invasive tests on the Original?”

“Do unto my brother nothing that you wouldn’t do to me if I were in his place, Doctor.”

Parvov left the laboratory and the Doctor dragged a stool up to the examination table, upon which he sat as he carefully lifted Dirofil’s right arm to give it a closer look. The black mineral —Which made the doctor think of amphiboles, pyroxenes or even Dobermannite— throbbed inside his flesh, and over the back of the hand rested a bulge, or a pustule of said material. The Doctor debated between getting a sample, which was an invasive procedure for which he probably had no permission, or waiting for Dirofil to wake up and ask him if he could do so.

For the time being, he would try to get a better idea of what the anomaly was. A parasite, perhaps?

He poked the swollen slime around the mound on the back of Dirofil’s hand, and the sapphire stare that got revealed gave him such surprise that The Doctor stepped backwards, tripped on his cape and crashed onto the floor with an absolute lack of grace.

Dirofil opened the eyes on his head. Where was he? What were all those ghastly images, all those… energy constructs drifting above them. He propped himself on his hands to sit up, and that’s when he noticed that the shift of the ghostly imagines didn’t match that of his field of view. As for his location: the sterile environment, the lack of dogs, the brass color of the walls, and the numerous pieces of analytical equipment littered about the place could only mean that he had been found by someone… a very organized and resourceful someone.

He decided that unveiling the mystery of his whereabouts would, as a collateral, offer some sort of explanation about the moving creatures of light or smoke, that seemed to be composed of a core like them, and then innumerable veins of milky white defining sometimes legs, sometimes arms, and oftentimes things he couldn’t make out. He turned his head to look at the incorporating Doctor.

“You saved me, Splinter of Mine? I… remember a current. Pugs everywhere. Oblivion with eyes of blue tracking me as the dogs carried me elsewhere.”

The Doctor joined his hands in front of his own face, a recognizable gesture of concern. “Oblivion with eyes of blue. You met a Reaper. It’s the most dangerous creature we have catalogued so far.”

“Catalogued? We? Who are you and where I am?” Dirofil tried to push his leg off the table, but found it too heavy to do so, and let his body fall back. He felt his core, how tired and weak it was. “I need answers, and then a rest,” he said, gaze fixed on the beams and the spirits that moved about.

“You are safe. This is the Corship, the only subcanine ship in existence. As far as we know, that is. It was created to provide Thinkers a place to live inside the sea, now that most spires have fallen.” The Doctor reached for a pair of tweezers on a nearby metal table, and pointed at Dirofil’s right hand. “Now, would you allow me to extract a sample from the contamination in your hand? It looks like an eye.”

Dirofil swung his right hand to look at its backside, and his Thinker eyes stared into the Reaper one. There was a ghost in front of him now, adopting the same position with his hand. He turned his head to look at the doctor, and touched his forehead with his palm. Effectively, the energetic image he was now seeing fitted perfectly with the image of the Splinter standing there, holding the tweezers with both hands. “No. It’s an eye. I think it allows me to see flows of thought energy. There are people walking above us, right? Other Splinters?”

“Splinters, all but one. The other may be Captain Parvov.”

The Doctor had never seen an injured and exhausted peer incorporate and head for the door as fast as Dirofil did.

Would it be his problem if the wounded Original wandered about the ship? His core was rather stable, despite Parvov’s brotherly concerns. It wouldn’t shatter in a non-stressful situation. He could catch Dirofil and probably bring him back in, but it wouldn’t be worth the hassle. Parvov would later make a big deal out of it and tell him that the next time something like this happened he would claw his head off his shoulders. Poppycock: Parvov respected him and his role in the ship way too much to do any lasting harm to him. So the Doctor sat next to his deck, and pulled a box from under it, and from the box, a cage. And inside the cage, a big teethed, muscular pug with three horns on its head.

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Pug that cowered and retracted his head inside his shell when the Doctor produced a needle from one of his drawers. “Let’s see if your blood has already changed color.”

Dirofil found himself crawling though cylindrical corridors fitted with convoluted pipes and lines of dot-like lights. He used only his left arms and his legs for support: the right one was still pressed against his forehead, on eye duty. Stealth was not something he concerned himself with: he was among Splinters, which had no reason to be outright hostile to him, and, judging by the one in the laboratory, had no interest in pursuing him. A guest needed not to hide from his hosts—a situation that he found quite ironic.

He turned in the intersection of two corridors and happened upon a spiral staircase made of perching balls. They were supported by poles, unlike the natural, floating ones, but he wouldn’t complain about that. He ascended it with haste and emerged into a room bustling with activity. Splinters of every sibling of his sat in front of platforms where pugs where shackled, and they groomed the ugly dogs, gathering their fur on flat combs, just to then introduce the gathered hairs into their bodies and run them through their cores, before expelling them back as a liquid in buckets of the same orange-ish tone as many of the structural elements around him.

He sat idly and watched, flicking what remained of his tail as he tried to make sense of the situation. But this confusion didn’t last, not as the titanic Splinters of Morbilliv hauled carts loaded with more pugs into the room, the green metal plates of their exoskeletons glistening on their legs, waists and arms, their three short tails not even reaching their knee-height.

He incorporated and tried to put up his most authoritative facade. He also closed the Reaper’s eye, to avoid getting distracted with the superimposed images.

“Someone, take me to Parvov!” he demanded and some Splinters turned their heads briefly before returning to their jobs.

He noticed a few splinters of Parvov musing something across the room, in a voice deeper than he had ever heard. “Look at him, got hauled in among a lot of hideous brachycephalic balls of fuel and already believes he can boss us around. He had to be an Original.”

“Idiot! Just because he and Splinters of others cannot hear us doesn’t mean Parvov can’t!” the other answered, never stopping his pug-grooming.

“Parvov is announcing that we found him across the ship. He won’t suddenly return back here.”

“He will if that buffoon keeps on shouting his name.”

Dirofil decided to approach them, not to reveal that, indeed, he had the capacity to pick up the frequency in which they spoke, but because they deserved to be annoyed. “Excuse me, Splinters of Parvov, but would you two be darlings and tell me where to find the thinker you are shaped after?”

“Son of a Reaper. Why me?” The one closer to Dirofil cursed as his coworker cackled, all in this infrasound their voiceboxes where fitted to produce. He continued in a normal voice, so everyone could hear. “You go through that exit there and proceed straight until you reach the cabins. If he isn’t in his, at the end of the hall, go to the middle deck, check the bridge, and if he isn’t there either, I would guess you’d need to go with the legsteerers on the lower deck. And put up a good word for me, will you?”

Dirofil found his suck-upping and double-faced attitude disgusting, but decided to not let his expression show it. If someone thinks you cannot hear what they see, they will often reveal useful bits of information to you. And that applied both to the Splinters and to Parvov himself. “Sure, friend. But I need a name.”

“Kirval.”

“Well, thank you, Kirval.” And so Dirofil headed for the door —an arch defined by the union of two curved beams of orange— as the pair talked shit about him.

He dropped onto his left hands as soon as he was out of sight, opening the eye of the Reaper once more. That thing could see souls through walls, and no soul on board would be stronger than Parvov’s. Aiming at the floor he could see the soul of the Doctor, and something he hadn’t noticed before: the faint outline of a roughly canine thing with horns and a shell. He turned his gazes in the direction of the room he had just left. No outlines for the pugs.

He focused on looking in the directions to the areas where the moron had told him his brother could be giving the news of his arrival. He needed to see Parvov. To have him face to face and shut up the little voice inside his mind that said that Parvov was devoid of all thoughts, and that there surely was a Splinter impersonating him. Soon he found the unmistakable flare of his Brother’s soul. From it erupted a shine unlike all others. Whiter, stronger, slightly oppressive. This soul shone with unrivaled brightness, and it burnt out all doubt that his had to be one of his siblings, and not merely a liar trying to snatch up his place.

The way to the bridge was mostly clear, save for some Splinter that dashed from one room into another, as if there was no time to move in any other way. A discordance of psycholocation waves hit him now and then, several souls meeting the world face on. And he could see them, blasts of soul energy invisible to a thinker’s eye, but not to a reaper’s. He was learning about his people, and he was learning about his enemy. If his soul and its pulses could be seen through walls, and maybe even through dogs, there would be no place to hide from the monsters of the sea. Nor for his siblings to hide from him.

When he took the last turn and beheld the entrance to the bridge, with the four steps that led to it, his round entrance, and the imposing figure of Parvov looking out the massive porthole, he closed the Reaper’s eye and stood.

As he shuffled his feet to the first step, and before he reached the second, Parvov turned, and Dirofil met his own glancing gaze in his brother’s face.

“You should be recovering, little brother,” the captain said before turning and lumbering his way down the bridge. “Let me take you to my cabin.”

The multitude of claws in the hands of Parvov made Dirofil empathize with the Chihuahua whose head he had crushed as the captain approached.

“I needed to see you, Parvov. To know it was you,” Dirofil said, letting himself collapse on his knees. “You still think.”

“Barely. How did you elude the Doctor?” Parvov leaned forward to look at his brother in the eyes. “And poor Leptos. I’ll have to pay him a visit to restitute the parts you took.”

“You think, Parvov. I love you,” Dirofil admitted before bowing and planting his head over the corgite slabs. “Thanks for surviving this sea.”

Parvov blinked and scratched his skull. “Are you feeling alright, Dirofil? I don’t remember you ever showing this sort of… disposition towards me.”

The Fourth Imagined met The Third Dreamt’s worried stare. “I love Leptos, I love you, I love Morbilliv, I love Babesi, and I pity Lyssav.”

“Allow me to carry you to my chambers, brat. You are not right in the core, clearly.”

“Morbilliv. Where’s Morbilliv?”

Parvov answered near instantly, without a shadow of doubt in his voice, but in a conspiring tone, and next to Dirofil’s left ear. “Nowhere. I found him shortly after finishing building the corship. He was on board for a time so brief and so distant that few of the crew remember him as more than a side note. Our brother blew up his core to save me when we had to face a monster of black tentacles and blue eyes. Don’t tell the Splinters that don’t know. To you I owe truth. To them I owe hope. Hope of saving us all. Sometimes those two are incompatible.”

“I understand,” Dirofil said, letting his head fall forward, onto His Brother’s shoulder, as he lost himself in deep meditation.

“There, I´ll take you to my chambers.” Parvov lifted his brother from the floor and barked no order. The crew knew what to do when refueling the ship. Heavy was each one of his steps as he made the way to his room, with an unconscious Dirofil slung over his shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Dirofil. The only danger here is your own stubbornness.”

The eye of the Reaper flicked open and closed again. The captain didn’t notice.