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

"'I have seen the center of this dog layer that grows between us and the Thinkers of the Edge, little sister.'

'Did you find anything useful, Leptos?'

'They were pale, lanky. Mangy monkeys conjuring jungles without branches. Synapsids who dared pose with the grace of deities.'

'Who? New thinkers?'

'No, my beloved. In time you may find. In time.'"

—Leptos and Lyssav, a few tides after the sea closed over their heads.

Psycholocation had abandoned him, his core wholly incapable of seeing beyond the limits of his slime. But as he ascended, as he used his two new appendages under the right hand to create little lumps of cold matter, he intended to learn how to use them to feel. He stopped at each ledge he found, and on them he lingered, producing droplets of zeroweave, as he had come to call the frozen substance. The stubby tentacles at the end of the glands were rather clumsy to manage, and he refused to fully extend tendrils of slime into them, fearing he could damage the delicate biological structure.

He tried for a few minutes on end, always producing shapes most curious, like little worms coiled around invisible twigs, but not managing to create a proper chain link. And after he succeeded at making one there was the matter of concatenating them. Twisting the material in such a way that the meeting ends of one link fit before the bent end of the other wasn't a simple task, despite the numerous moving parts the glands possessed. But the material solidified fast, and it wasn't fit to make threads: he knew, he had already tried to, and failed miserably. It was too hard, too frail a substance, such that it turned into needles instead of something he could properly weave.

Now, needles and a use went hand in hand. But it wasn't the use he envisioned: his claws were already pretty adept at stabbing targets and gutting them. Needles were redundant in close quarters, and shooting them as soon as they were made was beyond his current capabilities.

The want for chains was only natural for him. He had spawned wearing his cape, cold metallic links hugging his back, neck and shoulders. His first thought may have been of a featureless face freckled in eyespots, but soon enough he had subconsciously taken a hand to his collarbone to adjust the fit of his cloak. Hours had come and gone as he displayed his skills at acrobatics, always wreathed in his comfortable sack of metal. In Shadiran's arms and flesh he and they had worn it, too. Since the day he had awoken to life, he had never wanted for chains for long.

But he couldn't make them, not out of zeroweave. Not yet. A grunt in the dark was his answer to an unspoken question: "What did I harvest these things for?"

Chance. Odds. He harvested them to raise the marginal odds of outdoing Lyssav, were she to become an obstacle. He preferred wasting a bit of time improving the array of possible outcomes now than to find himself in a metaphorical cul-de-sac. Time he didn't dispose of.

But it merited another try as he slowly climbed the seemingly endless stalactite, a lizard-like wiggle characterizing his movement. He didn't mind dropping some zeroweave for the sea to safeguard it in its illuminated depths.

And so he climbed, and so he worked towards both goals at once, his psyche having no issue managing the three alien limbs at the same time it commanded arms and legs.

And in the distance, light for the eyes, and darkness for the soul. Behind a black mist shone a thoughtcrystal so bright it dwarfed every other light source of the sea, its luminosity barely contained by the dark miasma that hung around it. He felt the dogs turning tenser, their hairs harder and frailer as he approached the anomaly. Even if blinded by light and smoke, he could see it, in front of his mechanical eyes, a gradual transformation of the mound of dogs into an amalgam of deformed crystal statues. Heads meshed with tails and the limbs shared more bodies than they should.

"You spare not even yourself," He said, eyes trembling inside his own flesh, unsure where to look in the deluge of colors that revealed itself with tortuous lazyness.

As he drew closer and closer to the source of light, with a blind soul and eyes that saw nothing real anymore, and the colors that welled from within the amorphous but almost-uniform crystalline mass the dogs had become began to condense in images. Morbilliv green, Parvov amber, Lyssav red, Babesi purple and shadiran blue, all colors drawing together, coalescing into a movie that unfolded around him. A film of blades of grass, of irregular bark and the trees that wore it, of long leaves and sedulous bees, of grey winding paths among the lush spring, and them walking across this thoroughly-vegetated landscape. Them, dressed in thick coats, their images slightly blurred by distance and mist, their boots crushing the frost formed upon grass far too lively for wintertime. And the aroma of it all, of the sweat of the couple and the wet dirt and the blooming flowers of spring and summer. They assaulted him, even if he had never smelled before. A sensation he would soon forget, and that he wished to.

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The pair of figures slowly kicked forward, ignoring the concrete path, stepping on the foliage without a care in the world.

"Those are no snakes," Dirofil spoke to himself, extending a curious hand to try to reach the blurry figures in the distance. And when he did, their hands became better defined, covered in black fabrics, but with a clear anatomy that resembled his. Five fingers, including an opposable thumb. Three phalanxes per, except for said thumb, featuring just two. Primate hands.

These apparently bulky monkeys, covered in fuzzy coats made from oil and furs, with their meter and something of height, they couldn't be the makers. They laughed and spoke a language so similar to that of the Thinkers, and their voices featured uncanny inflexions and tones, biological and visceral, like the words had been howled or spoken by some intelligent bird—a raven, a parrot. A cruel parody of the manifestation of their intellect.

"They are no snakes! They have no more eyes than I!" He blurted out, indignation taking hold of him, his ungual phalanges digging into the once-dogs without being able to penetrate the dense thoughtcrystal.

The figures had their faces covered by coiled fabrics. Scarfs, Dirofil realized. The eyes of one of them hid behind dark glasses. The smaller of the figures held a cone, but the ice cream had long been gone.

Listening closer Dirofil realized they were speaking garbled words now and then, that between the familiar sounds they mixed others, speaking two and a thousand words at once, something that should have rendered their speech unintelligible, but he could understand those just fine. Interference there was none other than that of his own ideas, drowning into the mind of the sea.

This was a superposition of films, not a single one. the fingers moved with and without their black coverings, bouquets of rosy flesh and black fabrics dancing whenever the shortest of the two gestured. A certain something in her movements resulted familiar to him. The creature carried the unmistakable flair of his lover, each single mannerism of Shadiran he had known to cherish.

"Are you mocking me? Please, be mocking me."

But the sea gave no straight answers. It only showed what had not been, yet could be remembered. The world before the world, focused on the creators. On the one that had designed Shadiran as an avatar of her longing, and the one who had designed Dirofil as his self-insert. Because more hurtful than realizing this mysterious figure he failed to fully fathom was the ideator of Shadiran, was realizing he was sort of seeing the one he had been shaped after.

Understanding slowly drafted over him as they spoke, as he saw the memories fly by as his grasp on the crystals got weaker. The feelings of the creators were also impregnated in that unique layer, and his desires and fears imbibed the Heartworm like formaldehyde. Their world, too was ending. And they couldn't save it. The only thing they could do, after winning some sort of… selection whose finer details he failed to fully understand, to interiorize, was to create a new one. The world of the thinkers.

The World Before the World was confusing, overwhelming in its shades and shapes, in its sounds and sunlit landscapes. Machinery roared and groaned all around, transport for creatures born of the tarnished chalice of biology. Bodies that didn't rust or wear drown from friction, but decayed all the same. In the entrails of a clock he saw cogs, regular and perfectly assembled, and felt a pang of kinship for them.

This world and all he cared about was mere machinery for the creators. A perpetuator, if it made sense to call it that. Carefully curated, a reality with the sole purpose to show their creative flair, to boast that this unholy pair was the only one whose ideas would persist. And they had bequeathed him a bastardized form of this wish, a splinter of their desires. But he and Shadiran weren't like them. They would not create an aberrant reality full of suffering, both sentient and non-sentient. What was the point of creating beings with minimal needs if you were going to schedule an apocalypse for them? The World by Shadirofil would be endless, or cyclical if endless was an impossibility.

He finally noticed he wasn't holding into anything anymore, the dream of shine and smoke slowly drawing back, dispelled. With a violent jerk he turned mid-fall, the fingertips of the bat-like wings slicing the air as he beat them harshly to stabilize, his new tail and weaving arms dangling under him, heavier than his natural appendages.

He loomed among the stalactites a few seconds, beating stolen wings just to remain in place, and then glided to a nearby platform of dogs. Wings folded, eye of the reaper open, he scanned the barrier of crystal above. The magical eye could see it just fine, and it extended in every direction, a solid, if a bit irregular, ceiling to his progression through the sea. He was already choosing a direction to wander away, because he knew himself incapable of penetrating such a powerful thoughtcrystal in any meaningful capacity. He hoped he would find a natural passage, a tunnel or a current of pugs that crossed the whole thing. And even if he did, he feared, because he would be blind, lost among reveries of a truth long lost, unable to see, hear, or psycholocate. He would constantly depend on the cursed eye, draw in unwanted attention, and still be open to ambushes in case the Reaper drew close enough to force him to close the eye.

Well, he could still practice his racklewright[1] skills as he searched for an exit from this layer and into the next one. There was no doubt he was halfway there. And if the sea was symmetrical, "just past halfway" and all "the way there" were almost one and the same.

[1] Neologism meaning "chain maker". Follows the structure of real words like playwright, wainwright, woodwright, and a long etc. of terms with the suffix "wright" meaning "builder", "worker" or "maker". English has no cute word for chain-maker that I know of so I had to make one up. Blame the language.