“It takes, in my humble opinion, a special breed of bastard to create a world inhabited by sentient robots and grant them the curse of pain. I shuddered while reading the description of the Second of the core, named after the virus that causes rabies. She lives in constant pain, and they say she doesn’t suffer. Both facts I consider abhorrent.

Since my teenage years awakened in me the illness, fibromyalgia. For those fortunate enough to have never heard of it, it means my body has taken aching for a sport, and became a master at it. I have points the size of a coin across my body where even the gentlest touch can feel like a treacherous stab. I depend on prescription drugs to function, not as an exemplary member of society, but as a human being. I know what living in constant pain is. I know the fatigue and hopelessness it brings.

Yet Lyssav won’t feel this despair, no. She embodies a masochist’s wet dream. Such cruel mockery of everything pain is supposed to be, to mean. I despise the very concept.”

—Musings of a Detractor, page 3

Behind were left the sisters, deep in the safety of a tunnel in the case of Babesi, and next to Babesi without any regard for terrain whatsoever in the case of Lyssav.

Dirofil, aching all over, hobbled through the aftermath. Towards the mangled, oozing cadaver of the Tribulator. The ocular globes had blown up, the tongue dangled from a perpetually opened mouth. The neck crooked backwards, like in so many dinosaur fossils, avian or not. And yet it was in a far better shape than most of the greyhounds, that fared as best as they could in their new role as lumps of charred flesh. Wings reduced to coal, what a waste.

Yet riding the windless air the soft weeps of some canine reached him, far too despicable to be the ones of the puppies that comprised most of the layer. Somewhere under the Pomeranian remains, he thought, a greyhound could have found itself trapped. One with functional wings.

It crossed his core, the idea that, maybe, wings weren’t what he needed the most. He dismissed such worry without emitting a single sound. He wanted the wings, since the first tide he had entered the sea he had wished to get some wings, and had lacked the gall to ask Doratev to try to engineer some like Lyssav’s but without the plaguing pains. He deserved the wings, after everything he had endured.

Yet the part of him that despised the dog-sourced additions also spoke, and how loud. He would be unable to welcome the flapping aliens, to experience any measure of freedom as he soared. His capacity to assimilate the working cogs of his antagonist, of Cynothalassa, could serve his purpose, but that didn’t render it any less of a burden. Furthering his power meant furthering his punishment. No enlightening would be found either along or at the end of his path.

And still the need obliged him. He skirted the dead Pomeranian, stealing a glance to his side now and then, trying to come up with words for the clusters of gushing wounds, for the massive damage done. For this and this alone, maybe, Lyssav could be a good unit of measurement.

Finally, with its posterior crushed under The Fallen Pomeranian’s right elbow, he found the wailing hound. Pinned between the bony appendage and the soft puppies, she was bleeding and crying and breathing with difficulty. Dirofil’s talons drummed over the ground, causing the underlying puppy to scratch the air as the sharp claws tickled them.

Sorry was the sight that greeted him. The creature grasped once more for air, trying to get a footing to crawl from under her prison. Blood from one of the Pomeranian’s wounds had drained over her face, smearing it in a dark and bubble-ridden red, rendering her blind. She flapped her wings chaotically, short bursts that soon tired her out.

Her ribs expanded and contracted more than they should have, her tongue rolled out her mouth and negotiated her horrid fangs as she panted hopelessly.

Dirofil could have crushed her head with ease, put a definite end to her misery.

Instead he crouched and with a gentle movement wiped the blood from the eyes of the mutant dog. They locked stares after she opened her lids; she found unexpected solace in having the metallic phalanxes caressing her cheekbone.

Dirofil produced a pleased hum. He raised his form, looming over the now calmer creature. “In the end, Babesi is right. You are just doggies. With or without wings.”

Suddenly and with a psychopath’s coldness he stomped on the head of the bitch, talons digging in the grey fur as the whole head trembled and she tried to squirm free. Slowly he began closing his claws in, stabbing past the skin. He wasn’t looking as he did this, his stare was set on the distant firmament and its collies. He ignored the flaps, the desperate hisses and kept on applying pressure. The vice of his foot kept pressing and the bones kept cracking, the blood slipping out the wounds.

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Lying on the golden shine of the puppies she perished, her life and brains draining not over soil where they would nourish some beautiful flowers or homogeneous and green grass. A waste of a death that, in some other world, would have been more poetic, perhaps. For it was undeniable that Cynothalassa allowed no beauty in death, no bleached skull lost amidst a tall-grassed prairie, supporting the colorful span of a proudly standing, sun-kissing butterfly. No fossils to be found in some exquisite Lagerstätte by young and wide-eyed friends or wrinkled knowledge-loving experts. No use for your carcass but to rot and melt or be crushed by the jaws of your equals.

Finally, Dirofil deigned a look to his prey, the muscles still twitching, the skull crushed but not beyond recognition. The wings lay dead over their owner, ripe to be stolen. Hands that had never felt the pulse of a heart inside them reached for the joints of the limbs, the duplicated shoulders. And using a foot to pin the neck and shoulder blades in place, he straightened his back, pulling.

And pulling.

And pulling.

The humeri popped off the sockets, the skin began to tear. Dirofil’s grasp didn’t waver, and he just kept pulling as tendons and muscle got rendered. Soon after the left wing remained connected only by a thin thread of sinewy flesh, and that motivated him to jerk the right one free too. He held him in front of him like a couple of dead hares, admiring that which would soon taint his form.

He stabbed his back with the mutilated wings, each on its respective side. This was a sort of pain he could stand, more superficial, far less pervading than the one that inhabited the Ly-model wings.

His mucilage began climbing, coiling upwards the stylopods and the corresponding patagia like snakes around a bough. Soon they formed a sheath and it began invading the area that belonged to elongated digits, a membrane of slime covering the velvety skin. Dirofil realized he didn’t know how to deal with bone yet, that the closest he had gotten had been dentine and enamel when welding the teeth to his cape.

He dropped on all five as the wings sunk more and more on the flesh of his back. The organic tissue had started to morph into the weird parody of metal his core turned the parts he absorbed into. The nature of bone, muscle and cartilage changed centimeter by centimeter, second after second, from the exterior to the core.

His soul and his mind demanded obedience from the newcomer, and the foreign substance was promptly forced to obey. Submerged completely on his flesh, the wings didn’t take long to erupt reformed, breaking out their slick cocoons and showing silver-like shine as they emerged back into the air. Dirofil’s scapulae reworked their structure, gaining a pair of accessory glenoid cavities for the dog humeri to fit into.

Just once they beat under his command. Once, and then they were folded like the precious resource he considered them to be.

It was done. Not with a battle, not with a relentless search driven by his motivation, but as a side effect of her sister’s display of power. The heartworm had gained his wings, and their frame, like cylindrical mirrors, reflected off the light the Retrievers gifted the sea.

He sauntered off the crime scene, the new additions to his body violating Shadiran’s beloved sanctuary. He didn’t want to whisk his eyes back and look at the wings. The foreign presence on his back hung heavy in spite of the knowledge that it would allow him to take air.

As he relocated the breathing hole to the top of his head to keep the wings safe from the explosions, Dirofil wondered how much more of an alien thing he would become before reaching Shadiran. If she would love his form despite the countless crimes committed against his purity.

And he rued what he was about to do.

The wings popped out his flesh once again, and he beat them clumsily, without the synchronicity needed to be deemed worthy of defying gravity. He raced on all five, as fast as he could, given the loose and gravelly nature of a ground made out of puppies, and as he did, he fluttered like a hideous, drunk butterfly. His leaps became acts of clumsy parachuting at first, and of gliding not long after. It was like watching a particularly stubborn chicken flap around, trying to bend reality to his whim and finally take off.

“I think I got a hang of the downstroke but the upstroke is… problematic.”

The squelch so characteristic of a falling Lyssav was heard behind him, and Dirofil didn’t need to turn to feel her eyes on his back. “Not in my opinion. But you could still use them for inclined running, as you already got the basic movement figured out,” she offered with a distressing lack of mockery in her tone.

“I already excel at climbing, sister. Your help is as appreciated as it is unwelcome.”

Lyssav joined two of her hands in a parody of a concerned gesture. “And here I am trying to be a good sister to you, little ungrateful brat,” she sang in a playful and teasing tone.

Dirofil approached her with a bipedal walk, and stared up at her three-eyed and hundred-teethed face. “The tide will come when I’ll need to betray you. Don’t make me feel worse than it is necessary about it.”

“Very unorthodox on your part, to warn the very object of treason, your sworn enemy.” She made no sudden movements, gave no signal to act. She knew Dirofil wouldn’t attack her there and then.

Dirofil knew she wouldn’t attack him, either.

“I am warning my beloved sister, not my enemy.” Dirofil said, one eye going stray to inspect the cape that now ran down from his neck and got bottlenecked between the base of the wings in an awkward and uncomfortable display. “I’ll need to solve that later…” he muttered.

“You break the heart I never had. But I cannot complain when that’s your profession, heartworm. So go ahead, plan your betrayal. If it succeeds, you will deserve your happy ending.”

Lyssav’s lack of worry was concerning, but Dirofil decided to not show it. Instead, his expression softened and both eyes stared once more into her sister’s three.

“How kind on your part to accept a future defeat.” He joked, and then adjusted his pupils as his tone shifted to a more serious one. “I changed my mind, Lyss: Teach me to use the wings. Then we can go seek the Corship with one of us carrying Babs.”

Lyssav smiled, a horrid display of the motility of her mouthpieces. “A pain I am willing to bear.”

She dragged her form past him, away from the Pomeranian. “Follow, Heartworm. Today, you have gained your wings. Tomorrow…”

And the Fourth Imagined needed nothing more to complete his sister’s sentence. “You’ll seize the chance to clip them.”

Three pupils thinned from sheer emotion. “Precisely.”

END OF HEARTWORM: VOLUME 1