“Here, I made a true-to-description drawing of Lyssav WITH the tism cap.”

  —A wildly upvoted post in the Creation Forums

  Dirofil hung head-down from the floating helix as it spun over its longitudinal axis, slowly climbing towards the heads-end in this world where the absence of darkness was as blinding as its absoluteness. His eyes remained closed, the rebounding waves of thought energy mapping his environment twice a second. The right hand, the eyed hand, the cursed hand, grabbed onto the back of another dog and helped pull his body upwards in this slow ascent. The breathing all around him rendered him into a ball of nerves. The small air currents felt invasive, abusive despite their subtlety. The bright clouds of Borzoi adopted the vices of a hell soon after you intruded them. It all turned in place, each piece in different directions, structures collided and joined and then broke apart into smaller pieces that gave the layer a nature like that of scree, with terrible sorting, composed of manifold sizes of the mother matter.

  The incessant hairfall insulted his divinity and hindered his psycholocation. Tiny threads invisible only by virtue of the saturated background against which they shone. That’s why he tried to remain belly up, shielded from the constant rain of keratin by the helix itself. He silently thanked the creators for giving him metallic lids instead of skin ones like the dogs had, for among their memories nested some of staring at a light source with the eyes closed, rendering the blackness a brownish red, and then transitioning to a matte orange. He had notion of afterimages, of paralyzed ghosts lodged on retinas far less efficient than his, and was grateful for not suffering from them.

  And this thinking about eyes tempted him. A peek, he could take a peek with the azure jewel that minded nor light nor gloom. He forwarded his fist, lowered it in front of his face. And he gazed. Both around him and into and from the beast that lost no time before rousing for the hunt once more. If the worst came to crash over him, this curse of his would become a weapon. A layer and some away it climbed, it crawled like the darkest of snakes, and came to eat him with its milleocular jaws. The same jaws, he hoped, that would seal Lyssav for long enough if he failed to cross the remainder of the sea in this last desperate push. He betted all of his hope on her ego, on his sister still being onboard the ship, lounging unpreoccupied whilst thinking he was incapable of reaching Shadiran, of crossing the Mauling layer.

  After taking a look in every direction, he closed his burden and weapon. Swallowed by the blinding light he was safe, and it made sense: the mutant dogs—or at least those that still enjoyed functional and light-sensitive eyes—would be bothered by such an unwelcoming environment too.

  Another reaching, another grasp on a furry back or leg, another pull that drew him closer to Shadiran. The path to her had always been this long, but it had never seemed so, given he had enjoyed leaping from sphere to sphere as he ascended through the clear atmosphere at the middle of existence. It used to seem a short, leisurely climb to him because everyone else that hiked one of the multiple paths was heading for the edge, but only for him were heaven’s gates open.

  And it had been logical but unexpected, thinking about it, that it was his and Shadiran’s love that prospered, and not Desmodus’ infatuation with Lyssav. The winged lovers would have had the advantage in mobility, in being able to satisfy their every whim to visit each other in mere minutes, but Lyssav never came around to the idea. The bat had never had a sliver of a chance with his sister: Lyssav lived for herself, beholden only to Leptos, her own will, and her self-imposed mission.

  Yet his romance with Shadiran felt devoid of reason. It was, without further justification. In the world before the world creatures had particular reasons to seek mates. Reproductive ones, chiefly. Thinkers didn’t make more Thinkers. They appeared one day, as the world had done, in medias res. Maybe once in the story of the world a new one, the Corship, had coalesced from the cooperation of many souls, from their struggles and, quite possibly, their deaths at the jaws of Cynothalassa. But that was no reason for romance.

  His love for Shadiran had been inherited, he had been born fostering it, and she had spawned burdened with love for him likewise. There was nothing original at the core of the motivation of this Original.

  But he had to carry on. Whether their love had arisen organically or been engineered didn’t make a difference about how real it felt. Maybe they didn’t deserve to be loved, or to love each other. It didn’t matter, because looking at the matter through the lenses of worthiness ought to be wrong from the get-go. Few things were deserved in this world of them. Nearly none worth discussing.

  He surged forward and upwards, all of his hands clasping onto loose skin and long snouts as he ascended. The heartworm charged, possessed by a determination as blind as the animal he had been named after.

  One could hear the dogs pant, lick their jowls, and even sneeze. An incoming helix collided with the one Dirofil was on, the structure of both breaking, forcing him to jump onto another one to continue with his ascent.

  Maybe the creators had endowed him with his mission, or maybe it had arisen out of the unforeseen interaction of intended parts of his being. It mattered not. He loved Shadiran, he loved their world-to-be, and that was all that mattered. A parasite shouldn’t kill its host, but another illness was consuming their home, euthanasia was the only cure, and only in his hand rested the lethal injection.

  Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

  The rampaging Thinker kept at it for almost an hour, and nearing the end of it, he found a surface upon which to cast a shadow, the blinding, omnipresent light left behind.

  Coming to the head-tip of the vertically-standing helix he was holding to, Dirofil finally opened his eyes to greet the beloved gloom hanging in the distance. A faint darkness glowed on his face, the shadow of his bones soaring up and breaking down in the little bubbles inside the mucilage that conformed his head.

  The horizontal columns illuminated from below erected towers of shadow over themselves, casting tuned out lines on the column that succeeded them in the vertical. Numerous breeds composed the cylindrical formations, and as Dirofil’s gaze wandered, he found, at the end of a column, a canopy of small dogs: Pekingese, Shih-Tzu, Yorkshire terriers. Immediately to the left of said structure a radicular formation of pulik clung to a piece of otterhound-based, tightly-packed ground. And even further leftward, another trunk.

  “A forest like a spaceship fleet. How quaint,” he commented, trying to imitate Lyssav’s voice, ultimately failing to get the inflection right. “I guess I have to climb you too, thing of beauty.”

  He kicked off the light ground and glided towards the upper surface of the nearest dog tree.

  He landed upon a Komondor, white and dready.

  For a moment, all was well. Only then he realized: he landed upon a Komondor.

  As fast as it was possible he opened the cursed eye and swept its surroundings with the Eye of the Reaper. Murkhounds, at every angle, holding their breaths, cautiously padding closer, lining the trunks with their long bodies and drooling dreadlocks. Stalking silent, thinking themselves unseen.

  He tightened the grasp of his cape around his core. A yodel marked the rebirth of his sound armor. A spread of the wings decreed that he wasn’t the one being hunted this tide.

  His role was that of a hunter.

  A rush forward, a turn midair to unleash sharp talons, and a landing on invisible, yet soft flesh. The scream, and the sound of blood gorging out for an instant, and then the dog collapsing off the tree, into the mass of borzoi below.

  A jerk of the tail before the nearest Murkhound could react, a victim with the neck pierced, and another cadaver reaching for the light, falling in it.

  Dirofil’s right hand remained glued to his forehead, physically so, for the flesh of the hand melded with it. The Reaper was far away. He had time to murder the pack of would-be pursuers.

  When the others dogs stirred into action Dirofil lost no time, and each of her left hands reached for a foot. Middle fingers transposed with the toes, turning two talons into veritable daggers to be wielded as he saw fit.

  A brave idiot lunged aiming for the shoulder of the heartworm. There had not been an instant in the world where that idea could be considered good, but right in that moment, it was absolutely terrible.

  Another Murkhound tried to sneak a bite on the sides of Dirofil’s rib, dropping from the dogtree above, the mouths of its dreads trying to curl around One of Dirofil’s arms to restrict it.

  The first attacker’s throat was met with the talons of Dirofil’s right foot, and into the chest of the second were the claws held in the hands drove in.

  That’s how the battle ended. The rows of would be predators realizing they had been labelled prey, scurrying away, mixing with the shadows or with the light that had taken two of them, and would be moments away from taking two more.

  That was, if Dirofil hadn’t been the one to murder those dogs. But he dragged the bodies closer, slung the heavy things over his shoulders as he crawled towards the roots of the three. There, the trunk was slightly wider. There, he could work. A last glimpse to make sure every last living Murkhound had left, and he sat by cadaver he couldn’t see. Under him a bulldog wriggled, uncomfortable. Poor deformed thing, he thought.

  Poor deformed thing, the bulldog thought.

  The talons now dangling from his middle fingers would serve their purpose as knives soon enough, as Dirofil considered what to do with the invisible materials. He couldn’t shroud himself in invisible skin, as that would restrict his movements and the capacity to freely flow and adapt.

  Furthermore, the creatures were able to avoid psycholocation, which meant the tissues either absorbed or allowed thoughtenergy to flow around it nigh-undisturbed. The first presented a trouble for normal functioning of, at the bare minimum, his psycholocation and blast attacks, and if he isolated a bone with it he could straight up lose control of it. The alternative dealt with the first problem if he were to use only some strips of it, but raised a new worry: would he be able to assimilate a material his soul had trouble affecting?

  There was a way of finding out, but he was tired. It wasn’t the fight that had fatigued him, but the whole ordeal since he had found the structure of fused skulls. He had spared the bare minimum of time to meditate, to nourish his core. Once he was out the sea, in Shadiran’s arms, then he could rest a little if there were no signs of Lyssav’s approach. Those had been his thoughts, and how na?ve they seemed now. He could fight, the hatred he fostered for these invisible sources of paranoia would fuel the slices with his brazen scythes, the gutting kicks and bone-shattering whips of the tail. To move, to dance and spar was second nature. Assimilating dog parts required a wholly different level of effort, of conscious action and visualization.

  Maybe invisibility wasn’t worth it. Dogs had a keen sense of smell, and he didn’t know if Thinkers exuded any kind of scent whatsoever. Perhaps they reeked. Perhaps they smelled like a field of the most precious flowers.

  Pushed by weariness, he decided to make deliberation the problem of his future self, and returned his talons to his feet and his finger phalanxes to his hands. Dog by dog he carved a hole in the wide trunk, removing everything that wasn’t a Komondor. One of the Papillon took exception to it and began barking, only to be disdainfully cast down, into the sprawl of lights. Once in his hole, Dirofil used all of his limbs and even his tail to rearrange the canines, blanketing himself in their soft, oppressive embrace.

  With some luck, the bodies of the Murkhounds would still be there, and alone, whenever he woke up. With a bit more of luck, if his little nap got interrupted, it would be by some horror of the sea, and not by a crimson smile.