“ ‘Unkindness, why should I grant it an expiry date?’

  ‘It may be an accident that our reality is finite, and not the will of the All-Carver. It is my belief that the sentients of the next one deserve certainty.’

  ‘We had certainty, back in Felsia. We knew Mother awaited us in her heaven and Father roamed the world making deals, granting us knowledge in exchange for the flesh of his children. We were certain that if our progenitors died, soon would our city. Look where certainty left us’

  ‘Felsia outlasted them. How long did you keep the city standing on your own, Ald? How long have their exquisitely preserves souls watched over the cursed savior that destroyed the ravenous goddess?’

  ‘They are watching over me as we work in this volcano. Your point? That somehow, certainty delivers a somewhat-happy ending?’

  ‘Certainty delivers honest closure. Do you think they would believe in some eternal reality when everything else they see begins and ends? Grant them endtimes, or they will concoct those themselves.’”

  —A little chat between the Creators of the Creators.

  Angio had never been one to befriend stairs. His five root-like legs weren’t optimized for traversing the insides of Vedala’s palace. An uneven wobble upwards, clearing steps he saw seventy-three times each, not caring to ascend just one at a time. He was halfway there when, descending the same winding well, appeared Mardhaka’s frozen face. Angio analyzed the position of her hands, the withd of her pupils, the slack of her bones. Then he took a glimpse out of the tinted glass windows of their sister’s home. “You look tired, Mardhaka.”

  “Aren’t we all, Angio? To search or to wait, both are extremely draining options.”

  “I am not tired and neither is Shadiran.”

  Briefly did Mardhaka’s headdress’ feathers perk up, just to then fall back into position in a show of sharp, reflective silver. “You do not speak conjectures. You know of Shadiran’s tiredness, or rather the lack of it.” she descended three steps and leaned forward, her mask inching closer and closer to the Aristotle’s lantern that concealed the non-composite eye. “What have you found out that makes you use the stairs like the rest of us, instead of climbing up the palace walls like you are used to.”

  Angyion split vertebrae went up and down his notochord, fast enough to create a sucking, liquid sound when mixing the Thinker’s flesh. “Shadiran shattered her mind a few tides ago. After my latest meditation I decided it was high time to check for myself what had caused the new cadence of Desmodus’ Palace’s cries, and found her thoughtless bones spread around the hidden caverns underneath.”

  Had Mardhaka been a statue, her reaction to Angio’s words would have been appropriate. “Desmodus’ Palace—”

  “Yes, carved into the base.” Angio interrupted her with his flat tone. “And Shadiran is no more.”

  “You speak of disgrace with such coldness. Didn’t you love Shadiran?”

  Angio’s camera eye took stock of his sister. Slender, tall, incapable of the simplest facial expression, all descriptions that fitted Mardhaka. “I loved as much as I could, falling short of your shared standards of kinship. The question I want a response to, regarding this matter, is the following: what importance does it hold if the bygones were loved or not? Love is powerless. Love actions no motor, shift no gears, pulls no bones. Love—”

  “Love and the pain it brings killed our sister!”

  “And it did so without applying force or generating work. Fascinating on its own merit. Still, alien to me. Shadiran’s departure is still a negative experience for me, if clarification about the matter is needed.” The din of his leg sliding up a step mixed with the nearly-unintelligible sound of his voice. “We ought to inform Vedala. Words, I believe, will do better than thoughts to avoid startling her. Can you relay the news to the other two? The twins aren’t as level headed as the eldest.”

  “It shall be done. Ocisbur and Ningil won’t be delighted to know we are five now.”

  Angio opened and closed the lanter a few times before speaking, clearly thinking through his next words. “Five is a primer number. Part of the original state has been restored. We are closer to the initial state of the world than we have been in long, long time. Soon, if we assume Lyssav eats no more, only Vedala and Leptos will think, and the sea will take them and push them against the cores of the world, bringing us the end the creators intended, and not the one Shadiran and Dirofil wished for.” There was no emotion to be found in his blather, only facts and speculation. “Inconvenient. Boring, even.”

  A sudden movement of a leg, Mardhaka’s, and the metallic sound of her foot meeting the uneven plating of Angio’s chest. Then, a spinning world greeted Angio’s compound vision, and the din of his chaotic descent downstairs invaded the microphones of everyone present. “You tell the Twins, moron! I’ll inform Vedala” The sister shouted, her demand carrying down the stairwell and reaching the trilobite-eyed sibling.

  Angio reached the ground floor, and once his rolling fall was broken he stood with the grace of a mangy, beaten-up senior dog. “She’s one for unnecessary violence. Ocisbur and Ningil could also live closer…” He grumbled as he exited, past the lavish gates of Vedala’s palace, and hopped onto the shinning retrievers. The uneven surface stopped bothering him as soon as he sunk his stilts among the canines, and thus he started down the long way to the Twinned Palaces. They hung small in the distance, ragged like abandoned war banners, metal roots encroaching their ancient walls.

  “I could just not. Yes, it’s an option. Vedala is likely to broadcast the news eventually.” He mused, and turned towards his abode, the steps lighter and full of purpose.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Angio, I don’t know where you are as of now, yet I’d wager you are at least thinking on postponing your task indefinitely. Do not. Inform the twins posthaste. Fail your sisters not, angio. He grunted when the mental message reached him. At the Edge, there had never been enough of a reason to tune out of the telepathic channels.

  It’s as if you knew me since the day I spawned, Mardhaka. He thought, and kept strutting down his merry way to his abode.

  Under the lump of floating chihuahuite Caenor called home Dirofil worked tirelessly. He tore tendons, rearranged bones, and set aside organs for careful consideration. The Eye of the dead Reaper Caenor had paid him for his efforts rested above his core, the dark optical nerve curled around the globe in a well-shaped spiral. He had gathered a bunch of collies and, using a couple splinters of bones and his psychosarc, tied them by the hairs of their belies to create a somewhat coherent platform to work on. The dogs stared at him from below, one of them raising his head to regard the monster that sat on his ribs.

  He didn’t work with one part at a time: like a cursed starfish he managed all sorts of bodily parts and fluids, pumping thought energy as he processed them into something useful. A serendipity, a mistake in energy allocation, had clued him into the fact that the blood of the Braccos could be turned into a hard but easily malleable metal. It hardened like the alloy of Morbilliv’s body when properly irrigated by thoughtenergy, and softened like gallium on a summer night otherwise. And, it had to be granted: its color, undecided between the aged beauty of ivory and the seductive shine of silver, resulted in a welcome surprise. Utility over aesthetics, that was the principle Dirofil swore by whenever he sought out new parts. Yet he wasn’t going to complain if once or twice both virtues managed to coexist in some exquisite harmony.

  What did he seek from this prey? He pondered whilst he worked, in case an idea sparked and he needed to deviate from his rather general plans. Dreams of flight were distant still, and the main concern of his was facilitating the acquisition of new parts.

  Because new parts meant climbing, and climbing meant meeting Shadiran. If only he could find a Splinter cemetery like the one that used to exist in Babesi’s hideout…

  Then, the recurrent thought he desperately tried to push away resurfaced. There was a readily available way to procure several dog parts. He could do it, trade security and potential knowledge for a meteoric rise in power. But safety knew how to be a tempting mistress. A thoughtless Dirofil couldn’t ever reach Shadiran. And a safe Dirofil could be running too late to reach her.

  He hated it. the constant weighing of options, turning from thinker to a pair of scales, every forking preposition of the sea a choice between two seemingly lesser evils. And to make it worse, the rule of Lyssav would eliminate all of those heinous choices. The Time to Suffer would, ironically, be also a time of peace of mind, with only bodies aching to feed their guardian. His own fate, his victory, would allot him only a few instants of peace as along Shadiran he reached for the Zenith of Concepts. The birth of the new world would obliterate them first, the last thought in existence belonging to whoever occupied the other end of the cosmos: Leptos, most likely.

  Leptos, to whom he needed to fail to reach Shadiran.

  He had no voicebox to spell it out, but he thought as if he could: I am so sorry, Leptos. Mine’s a mercy killer’s kindness at best.

  With his latest victim exsanguinated and the prize metallized, he pumped the substance into molds made out of his own slime, and sealed its shape by showering the new bones with a healthy dose of his life energy. Two arms, a set so miserably incomplete, thought of as ones that would sprout from his back and could be fine-tuned for tasks requiring precision and exactitude. In these tasks he found some solace. When working on them he felt like a fraction of the creator he needed to become to fulfill his destiny.

  He subsumed the brain and the light organs on the eye bags first, and then the rest of the head. Bothering to cut off and relocate the rest of the body wasn’t among his priorities, so the postcranial body was left dangling as a cape as he put metal, slime and bone to work and sew the bloodless prey to the burnt neck. He had no lenses to focus the scorching light, so he planned to use it to blind his prey whenever he hunted in the abyssal darkness of the layers above.

  He rose on wobbly terrain, each collie he stepped over sinking slightly in the air. He waited for a dog to pass by like he was expecting a buss, and rode it up to another, and then leaped into the ledge of Caenor’s floating abode. He wondered how the Splinter Squared had managed to build a flying spire. His theories where that he had either embedded a static sphere into the structure, or rather build everything using one as the foundation, or he had entombed several collies into the opaque glass. Dirofil preferred the second: Spheres were a scant resource , easily destroyed by the sea and its tongues. If hovering abodes could be created by harnessing the natural buoyancy of certain dogs, maybe there was a way of devising a transport, sort of a boat to drift through the collie layer during his hunts.

  Imprisoning dogs in his body to float… now that was an absurd idea: he didn’t know how to control the height a collie floated at. Like the spheres they had their own paths, and they were nobody’s business.

  He stepped into the hoel that acted as a door, and thought for the splinter to pick up: Give me another target.

  Wont you meditate? Don’t you need respite from the madness of existence?

  I have discovered how to use the stolen brains to generate a meager amount of thoughtenergy. Enough to drip-feed my core. To march on.

  You use the energy for way more than moving your slime around. You have been restless since you arrived, and I doubt that your little sibling wrestling with Lyssav came to pass without taking a heavy toll on your soul. Pride and stubbornness will be your fall if you persist.

  I am running late. I cannot describe the foreboding sensation to you, yet another one who lives in a world without blurry deadlines of any substance whatsoever.

  You are still running, fool. Consider yourself—

  I know my limits. Dirofil slammed the wall with the remaining bone mace, cracking the surface and making the whole structure shudder slightly. Lend me some energy if you believe my soul to be so close to shattering.

  Rest. There are more parts I am interested in, and your life is an asset I am willing to risk. Weakened, you are of no use to me.

  Dirofil didn’t’ answer. He had no voicebox. But he did have a couple mouths. A quick cut, a precise nip and some more sewing to connect the Bracco’s esophagus to what remained of the Early bird’s.

  He leaned forward and began crawling using whatever appendages would be available for the next step. The legs, the broken arms, the new hands.

  What do you need, that you are coming into my room? a safe place to rest?

  Dirofil didn’t stop, and distress made itself evident on Caenor’s next message. I am of use to you whilst I think, far more than I would be thoughtless.

  But the thought fell on a closed off mind. Caenor knew that the only way out would be through. To fight for his life—or, at the very least, his body— against an Original.

  “A foreseeable but poorly planned against outcome.” He lamented, and then stood from his parody of a throne. “May I greet another tide.”