Heartworm [WEIRD progression fantasy] (Volume 1 complete!)

"So… the sea of dogs is literal?"

—Question asked every three days, on average, on the New Creation Forums.

I beg you imagine yourself becoming blind. All the colors of the world where there one day, and then, not even darkness. No visual feedback, but not as black, not as static. It all simply gone, like your sight went to sleep but the other senses remained awake. And you cannot wake the sight up, no matter how hard you try, as you feel your legs shift, split with echoing squelches as they turn into muscular towers, as your body spins and your sense of smell grows more and more refined, taking over the whole sphere of your being. The creature had lived through that, and every single tide it suffered the penance of those not bright enough to identify the cause of their disgrace.

Now there was a prey, the faint scent of putrefaction drawing closer and then going away once and again. This visitor touched her whiskers, or the things that felt like whiskers had once felt on her snout. She couldn't scratch her nose anymore. Her nose, that lay split in segments all around her skin, all humidified by her tongue. Tongue that now came out the place where her legs met the trunk, split just like the nose, able to lick all of her bloated form tidy and neat.

The one that wasn't her charged with unwelcome élan, broke some of her whiskers. She barked. It erupted as a snort, and she barked more, whistles and sighs forcing their ways out the thousand olfactory tracheas that had formed from her once-nostrils.

Blind as few she swatted at the other, trying to rid herself of the touch that stressed her so much. But the thing bounced, it appeared at an angle, disappeared before she could react and reappeared at another, deaf to her sonorous threats.

She felt it speak. No, she didn't hear. She felt it in the whiskers: it made them vibrate, and with every sound the other made she could pinpoint its position. She wanted to hit it with the whisker, so it would stop cutting them off. She needed the whiskers. They were hers. Hers! But the damn thing would make that ugly sound it did before disappearing, an explosion of sorts.

Hurt. One of her paws hurt, and she could feel a wet liquid seeping from it. Teeth, the thing had to have teeth. Claws, the thing had to have claws. Maybe it could be something else that was cold, pointy, and ouch-y.

A fear rose from her depths. Columns of bone and black flesh writhing about, chains retracting into the flesh to lift her up; Dirofil stalking about, hidden behind a nearby stalactite, watching the light blue blood congeal on the talon inserted on his index. He had managed to wound the urchin, the spider, the whatever it was. Progress, as exciting as it was addicting, as addicting as it was loathed.

And if something was now obvious to him, it was that he was fighting a disabled creature. A blind mutant. But hesitation wouldn't buy him time against Lyssav, or a victory. Pity, mercy, much less so. He wished to have a tongue to lick his claw clean. To smear away the immoral taint.

No. He had to let go of his pulchritude, all forms of it. The moral, the physical.

Hanging from the thick-coated dogs, grasping only with his right hand and foot, he observed his prey. There was a real chance to use the puggum load in his tail to deliver a heavy blow to the mutant. Yet, he was reluctant to spend such a one hit wonder in any situation he would hesitate to call dire. The explosive clones couldn't cause nearly as much damage as he expected the tail to do, judging by his experience aboard the ship, from seeing Doratev mess around with small amounts of puggum.

But if he let analysis paralysis get the best from himself, this all-encompassing darkness was all that would ever remain. Supposing the sea devoured even Lyssav in due time, all light remaining in the world would be dog-sourced. From borzois, from retrievers, from whatever else shone in its depths. Light alive, light unwelcome.

A cold, bright world illuminated by souls and cores that expelled noxious miasma, that's what populated his memories most dear. And he wouldn't recover it by killing this creature, or their whole world. But such was the way of the cosmos, and acceptance the only path forward, no matter how many times he rehearsed the unpleasant thoughts in his core.

"Fight harder, please. Defend the reality that fosters you!" He jumped from behind the stalactite and skillfully glided towards one closer to his rival.

The mutated bitch remained in her state of shut-down confusion. There were many why's she didn't know how to ask, or that she was, in fact, supposed to ask

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

The heartworm rushed forward, for this would grant him the win. Lose a tail, gain two appendages that could serve as one. A worthy trade, if only he would dare make it.

It was too late for regrets, though. His wings were taking him straight into the beast, landing on her skin, over one of the numerous tongues that wiggled endlessly, imminent.

As she shifted her arms or legs to swat him off he ducked, clinging to the skin like a smeared booger, raised the tail, and then drove it down straight into her flesh. He dug into the nameless being, and with a deft turn left the tail go, immediately releasing his grasp, wings folded, letting himself drop, hitting several chains but never fearing getting tangled, for every bone he had spawned with could part ways with the others, except for his ribs around his core.

Like a spark in a dark room full of gas the puggum ignited. At first it was but a weak orange light, and then it expanded into a burning hell that put fire to a flesh that wasn't even used to light. Mad the creature trashed, overcome by pain, letting her chains melt and her heavy body begin to fall, the shock wave and the hole on her side making it impossible to keep control over her muscles, jerks resulting from damaged nerves adding to her confusion, the pain all-encompassing, heat and cold and a stalking calm driving her insane in her silence.

Dirofil reacted with haste. He stabilized by extended his wings and turning midair, ready to rise up to meet the falling monster as she died and bled constellations of blue.

He avoided fleshy debris with ease and met one of the appendages with his arm wide extended, the sharp talon easily detaching it from the main body at the base. He kicked the appendage towards a nearby platform, an outgrow of malamutes, and proceeded to repeat the process twice more as the creature fell, breaking its own tangle of chains as it grained more and more speed. Finally, he let the agonizing mutant get lost in the darkness of the horizontal forest down below, where psycholocation worked and the ones it couldn't pick up lurked.

Now, he needed to investigate the parts he had just procured. They couldn't be proper arms, as they moved more like tentacles. But he had struck bone with his claws like blades, and he needed to know what he would assimilate. And as he opened the base of the limb up with his talon, illuminating it with the light of his soul, he beheld a curious arrangement, repeated segments composed of three distinct bones, resembling some sort of composite, primitive spine. As he got the sinew and flesh out of the way, he kept discovering more and more segments, these things tapering ever so slightly as they approached the distal end.

"Hyperphalangy," he muttered, grasping realization and feeling a sense of accomplishment as it dawned on him. "These were hands. These were feet." His gaze drifted until it landed upon the distinct end of the thing, on the protruding part of the gland that eh assumed produced the cold chains. "were these nails? Sweat glands? Mammary glands?"

He pondered for a while, taking in the tranquility of a completed hunt. "What do you think, Other? Of this unorthodox whaling of mine?" The presence didn't respond, just as he expected.

He cut off the damaged, lower end of the appendage, and held it in front of himself like he had once done with the lungs. It wouldn't serve as a hand. This would be a new tail. A tail lost, another gained.

A worthy trade.

Like his sibling's tail had once done he felt the alien appendage intruding his form, burning through the slime as it dug towards the core, attracted by it. It penetrated his soul, and by the very essence of Dirofil the remains of the dog changed, skin becoming a rubbery substance, the bones acquiring a silver hue, the flesh stretching, muscle fibers mineralizing and intermingling with psychosarc, nerves hollowing to give place to channels through which the substance of the thinker could freely flow, adding to the net of arteries and veins it could naturally use.

At last it connected to his spine, at the plane of caudal autotomy, completing the squirming appendage, sending a shiver up his body that made his vision blurry and the slime of his head wobble. At first the new sensations overwhelmed his thoughtcrystal, leaving him standing over the malamutes, catatonic, his body barely retaining enough stability to remain on all five instead of melting into a puddle sprinkled with pieces of his skeleton.

But it lasted only a second, only until he could organize all the new sensory feedback. The gland at the end of the tail, a sapphire structure with somewhat rounded shapes around a hole, filled his mind with odd sensations. The rest of the appendage didn't move quite like his tail, and it took a while for him to realize that if it was a hand, or, rather, several fused fingers, he needed to regard it as such. Fingers that… bent in all dictions. Horrific.

As he played with his new toy, trying to figure out how to weave a chain of the frozen substance, he thought about glands. All the variegated ones he could harvest from the bodies of his enemies. Maybe he could add some gastric lining to his skin and cover himself in acid and protein-degrading enzymes: a high enough concentration would turn him nigh-unpalatable. Or steal the anal glands of some of his less-mutated prey and use their pheromones to disguise himself as just another dog.

Weird. Something older than his self told him that was a weird thought. Inheritance from the creators and their biases.

After a while of trying he managed to produce a drop of the quickly-solidifying substance and let it fall over a panting husky. He looked at it close up, picking it from the dog's fur with his lower left hand and holding it in front of his core so it would illuminate it. Frozen to the touch, he regarded the droplet as a shard of beauty.

That was enough. He could produce the matter of the chains, and his time would be better served if he had three weavers to practice, instead of one. He only had to scoop up the other two, that were lying in some platforms above… and add them to himself.