“I am once again dreaming myself in your cave while I sleep at Cirruin’s, Mardhaka. When will he die? And when he does, can you make flowers rain upon them once in a while? For the birds I killed with my negligence, at least. For the memory of the man your father tried to preserve in me, if anything. For I depicted you correctly in the book, if it strokes your ego.”
—An oneiric avatar of Terus, to the sleeping daughter of Cirruin.
To be perceived by hundreds of thousands of eyes, to be heard by hundreds of thousands of ears, and furthermore, to be smelled, however that may have felt for the receiver, by half that amount of noses. As powerful stolen wings carried him through the upper half of the Bernese layer, Dirofil couldn’t shake off the sensation of being stalked by the fabric of the world itself. The quivering, breathing columns, the catwalk where he had perched like a vulture on a dying tree, the tails that sprouted like thorns out of the branches and wagged freely as he came close. And the knowledge of an invisible threat waiting to devour his soul. That, and much more, comprised what he could call Cynothalassa.
His cape wrapped tightly around his thoughtcrystal, protecting it as much as the act discomforted him. His heart turned into an urchin, he scanned the darkness and wondered what he would do now. The mauling layer was barely a few Dirofils above him, impenetrable, impassive. If those dogs got a hold of him, it would be his end, no doubt.
If those dogs got a hold of him. If they were rendered unable to bit into his bones somehow, instead…
He plucked a Bernese mountain dog out of the pillar to his left, carefully placed the dog down over his peers, and proceeded to use it as a cushion. The Bernese panted happily, being a work dog. That the job was that of a chair, the pooch didn’t mind.
His makeshift trachea vibrated at the top of his head, where he had repositioned the exit hole of his yodeler lungs to avoid endangering the precious wings. He needed to master this stolen piece of anatomy and its powers. Armors of sound were slippery, their outer layer ever changing. If he could cloak himself in the same kind of protective layer the Yodelers naturally enjoyed, maybe, just maybe, he would be able to negotiate the game dogs above.
He let out a howl, and over him then stood a clone of sound, unstable, ready to blow up at a moment’s notice. This frail mirage remained in place when he slipped from under it, wondering how he could turn that ethereal construct into an armor. It wasn’t a raw material: his soul couldn’t whip sound into shape.
For a moment, only for a moment, he considered not taking complex organs ever again. To wield powers he didn’t understand was not only dangerous, but also actively detrimental even in circumstances where their outcome wasn’t capable of directly injuring him. Energy was too scant a resource to go around freely wasting it in adapting useless parts, in learning how to use them from scratch. But only a fool would deny that complexity often correlated with options, and that options fancied themselves a synonym of power.
The sea offered no easy answers to its sadistic questions, and about that Dirofil fostered no doubt. The beats of half a million hearts assailed his sensitive ear, and he replayed in his mind the silly idea that a heartworm ought not fear the hymn of their homeland.
A change in the air, a slip of his concentration, and he barely had time to hop backwards and avoid the collapse of his clone of sound, the ensuing dissonance generating a bubble of deafening tranquility, a relief from the breaths and beats of the unwelcoming environment.
When the shockwave of the explosion passed by and his ears returned to normal functioning, a distant buzzing remained. Getting closer and closer, forcing the eye of the Reaper open so its slaver could take a peek and penetrate the solid darkness. What he saw through his hand confused Dirofil. A shapeshifting blotch, its denser center hopping from structure to structure as it drew closer and closer, and a multitude of little specs flying around it erratically.
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The first thing the Fourth Imagined did was restructure his airway, shifting his slime and reorienting the lungs such that the hole emerged on his upper left elbow, a clear path, a thread of air, connecting the exit and the entrance to the lungs.
The buzzing intensified, and Dirofil had a choice to make: fight, or flee. Fleeing was, he believed, the wise choice: the enemy was unknown, the reward to be reaped by slaying it likewise. But he yearned to murder something worthy. He had witnessed Lyssavs puissance, and he needed to match a thousandth part of it if he wanted to have any chance at reaching Shadiran, at the very least.
To do the wise thing, to lose nothing but the chance to gain a smidge of power, or to risk wasting energy on a useless quarrel? He had no time, for the potential rival was drawing closer. Drawing closer with considerable delay.
He closed the eye of the Reaper and dimmed the light of his soul. In the shadows, terrors lurked. But that didn’t mean he needed to be the only one afraid.
In the shadows terrors lurked, and the Shihibe knew herself mortal. Deafened by the buzzing and whispers of her brood, she depended on them to guide her path and get her home safely. For a dog always thought they could return home, no matter how far it could lie, or how many raging bullies blocked the way. She had been dragged along one of the massive mutants, and now wandered in the lower layers, seeking a wound in the Mauling layer where she could climb back to her strata and reunite with the other Shiba Inu.
A flicker of light caressed her sensitive retina, and she whipped her head around, the short ears twitching uselessly, the burrows in her skin throbbing as the sensation of being under threat escalated. Her curly hackles rose to life, and the symbionts, her parthenogenetic children, emerged from the holes populating her sides like a fish’s lateral line. They buzzed with their flimsy wings, two pairs of distributed over their backs, and stretched their long heads out of their holes. At the end of each wing wiggled a tiny appendage, the rough-skinned remnant of a leg that aided them in coming in and out of hiding inside their mother’s thickened, nourishing epidermis.
With a low rumble in her throat she tried to calm her offspring, her colony. In her defense they would jump, and for her welfare they would die. But too eager they were, the little ones. Eager to fight, eager to perish.
Her head wish-washed from side to side, paranoia taking hold of her, for an eerie feeling permeated the air. The dogs around reeked of distress, and the aroma of a soul hung in the air like a baleful spectre. Something was amiss and she didn’t like it. At all.
She thought she felt something touch her tail. In a hop she turned on her heels, ready to bite whatever was trying to assault her. But there was nothing there. The rarefied air remained stagnant. Naught threatened the Shihibe. Nothingness, to put it differently, antagonized and teased her, causing the bitch to raise her labia to reveal a yellowed and robust dentition.
From his vantage point, hiding behind a faraway beam and looking around it with peeking finger-and-eye, Dirofil pitied her, and wondered how come an opaque dog could act as so perfect a mirror of his state of mind. The bitch barked and growled and the creatures that came out her hide buzzed furiously, attacking the void around her with vicious slashes of their four claws—one at the end of each atrophied leg.
He cast a clone of sound in front of the mass of Berneses, and then slowly crawled away while the confused dog stared at the parcel of empty air, ears shooting up and down as she sought a sound that could compliment her deficient sight. The last thing Dirofil needed was an army of noisy drones flying around him, obstructing his vision and contaminating his psycholocation-derived feedback.
While the heartworm furtively abandoned the scene, before his wings spread to let him take air once more, the clone exploded, the sudden noise startling the Shihibe and causing her to turn on her heels, skittering away with her tail tucked between her legs and her swarm sent into a loud disarray.
He didn’t watch her escape, and he didn’t want to. To give the dog a scare was but a useless act of kindness, if one is even allowed to judge kindness in those terms. It could be argued, Dirofil thought, that useful kindness was no kindness at all. But it was his presence, or so he hoped, that had distressed then creature, and the explosion would give a tangible danger for the dog to run away from. One of them had to be paranoid, one of them camped in the belly of the beast. One, without any need for both. To those he could use, he would bring death: as swift as possible, and with as little pain as he could while retaining a dash of safety. And to those he couldn’t use and could avoid, he would try and bring nothing. No despair, no antagonism.
He slithered into the featureless dark, his coruscant heart a pantomime of a morning star, the links of the chain constricting it roughly, and the Chihuahua teeth jutting outwards like the rays of some cruel desert sun. Breathing ground underfoot, he spread stolen wings and took air. The mutant he had just encountered may live long and avoid his kind, for they weren’t his enemy, but only another victim of the emergent tyranny he called Cynothalassa.