NOVEL NEXT V2 Chapter 24: Walking Graveyard
"'What did you do, sister? What between the two cores did you do?'
'I simplified the management of your kingdom, your majesty.'"
—The Second Envisioned and his little sister.
The atmosphere inside the Corship sat rarefied. Never before had so many members of the crew perished at once, and if that wasn't enough, the ones who perished were Splinters of Lyssav, and their slayer walked the halls of the living ship and slumbered in a chamber reserved just for her. Yet, as it was only to be expected, nobody spoke against the Second. If it was mostly out of respect, out of fear, or out of some peculiar outlook on life that decreed that they were lesser than her and thus unfit to speak, no Thinker knew. As it was natural some feared, as it could only be some respected an Original too much to speak ill of them, and others simply had their unique reasons, each weirder than the one preceding it.
Lyssav hung from the ceiling of the lab, observing his sister, the Splinter of Shadiran, and Doratev toil around, whilst the meditating core of Morbilliv rested on the examination table: Parvov's body had been put aside, indignity populating it's every joint as it lay like mere scrap metal. They all cared for it, and that afforded it its own corner on the lab, but that was all that being the remains of Parvov could buy. Their nature as painful reminders meant they were to be kept out of sight, either as a pile of rubbish to be side-eyed and then ignored or enshrined in some room the mourners would visit maybe once per tide, if at all. Having his cadaver hanging around and taking the spotlight resulted distracting, macabre, and life had to go on. His spectre would already haunt them until the maw of oblivion swallowed the last thinking soul or the jaws of Lyssav tore the throat of oblivion open, and if there was something they wanted, was to forget he was gone for a while. Seeing Morbilliv in his new body would help this transition, to give overbearing grief the contained, restricted space it deserved. Poor Parvov, he had died. Poor dead ones, they are useless to the living. Poor living ones, needing to spend resources as precious as time and energy to honor the dead.
"Babesi, expedite the process," Lyssav barked down, one of her numerous legs impatiently tapping onto the metallic surface overfoot.
"It's Dora that is working slow!" she said as the light of her core made quick work of giving shape to a dark green chest plate.
Doratev refrained from answering, and kept connecting the fingers of a hand with ritual slowness.
"She's talking to you," Lyssav spat, her tone threatening enough, demanding an answer.
"You know of grief. Let me have mine."
"I can take my brother's body to my room if it bothers you so much." Lyssav offered with a far tamer voice.
"It's not only my former captain I am grieving. I am a Splinter of the Fourth, and today I grieve prime numbers. Three, for Parvov, and for Filbaros, dead to a murkhound that intruded the ship. Five for Jadimar, dead while mining, not long ago. And two… for the many. I know the name of every Splinter inside our friend—"
I am the friend. Communicated the Corship, as cheery as it was expected of him.
"Yes, thank you, Corship." Doratev made a pause to re-rail his train of thought. "I spend my free time learning about their gripes and concerns, conversing through the mental links. For every core that thinks on board I can pinpoint a couple preferences, and a fan of fears. The ones of the living, I'll allow you to learn them yourselves. The ones of those gone, the time to learn them is long over."
"Yet I know the ones of the Splinters that are now part of me. And none of them had getting challenged by you for a hobby. Do not bother their final resting place," Lyssav extended slowly from the ceiling and down over the table, hanging from the legs in her rear end, a macabre chandelier of twisted metalwork looming over the working trio.
"With even undue respect, Incarnation of Rabies: my sentiments towards you are no business of yours." Doratev's stare crossed Lyssav's, fearless. Fearless and tired. "I consider myself immortal in the ways that matter to me. It doesn't mean I seek death or that I recklessly prance across its face. It does mean that I will tell you to your horrible face whenever your actions displease me, miss," he proceeded to pull one of the new hand's fingers up, testing the joints. "All seems correct here…"
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Lyssav swayed from side to side, gaining momentum to let go the ceiling and land in the far end of the lab, extending and retracting her wings in a gesture of clear annoyance, a proud cormorant cleansing itself after crawling out a tar pit. "Just hurry with my brother. I need to know someone capable is looking after my youngest brother and sister while I dive deeper into this sea. Turn Morbilliv into a weapon that can scare off those that can hurt even me."
"What do you expect to find out there, besides aberrations?" Seloma asked, fiddling with a slightly misshapen cog of the left knee, attempting to reforge it with her soul.
"The final challenge. If the Reaper is the most powerful kind of monster this sea holds, I am already queen. But once long ago Leptos spoke of lanky creatures dwelling at the center of it all. The center of this sea, the center of our universe, that which we crossed so many times before the dogs multiplied. I shall reclaim it."
Babesi dropped the set of ribs she was arranging together and began bouncing like a spring "Lyssy! Lyssy! Bring Dirofil back if you find him, please!" She asked, bubbly as always, more of a reminder than a concerned position.
Lyssav turned to address her dearest one. "Every last one of his old bones will drag across these halls for many more tides if I have to save my obsessed brother's sorry tail-end from some mutated poochie, Babesi. But I doubt I will find him on the way up. I can cross the mauling layer unharmed. So can our freshly armored little brother."
I like the armor. Armor is good. Armor preserves me. Added the Corship.
"Serviceable as always, huge little one." Lyssav smiled in the only way she could: macabrely. "Dirofil, granted that he still thinks, must be struggling in the Bernese or Collie layers. Maybe even in company of the Retrievers or back out the sea. I seriously doubt he could cross that thing without a proper armor, or an excellent core." Two of her hands gestured at her own heart, as if her words needed further emphasis.
"Or ride inside an ascendant pug current," Seloma offered, raising a single finger, her attention still directed mostly at the task at hand, barely eleven eyespots regarding Lyssav. "They are pretty useful to travel between layers safely, even if the ship cannot fit into them."
The wounds of the cloven suns shrunk, grew thinner as Lyssav's teeth chittered horribly. "And I am here wasting the world's time!"
Lyssav's psychosarc boiled, blisters of red light appearing on the surface of her chest area "Babesi, you are in charge of defending the ship until Morbilliv is operative." She said, rushing for the door.
"Hunting high and low for Dirofil inside an opaque amalgamation of canines may not be the best use of the world's time. I assume our future empress has a plan to track him down," Doratev said, his tone steady, homogenous.
"I devoured a Reaper, Doctor." The blisters on Lyssav's chest popped, a colony of eyes of blue revealing themselves, each nestled in their very own oozing wound. One of said wounds and orbits opened in a palm, the third arm from the top, if numbered clockwise while facing her. The second hand in this arrangement gave birth to a crimson flame that it sustained and held aloft. The fourth hand sprouted bloody threads, one from each twisted finger. The fifth hand gathered luminous red mist in rings around each fingertip. But the first hand, at twelve o'clock and over her horrible head, remained empty, curled in the fashion of a dinosaur's arm, scars in the metal rectifying, healing in a show of dancing light. "And whatever my siblings can do, I can too. Less efficiently, perhaps, but efficiency and subtlety are not my game. I can emulate the powers they and their Splinters have an innate disposition towards."
"That's my distraction cloud," Babesi finally said.
"I adapted it to cause overwhelming pain." Lyssav boasted, holding her sister's cyclopean stare.
"Rad." Was the elaborate answer Babesi managed to give to the fact presented before her. "So, go do what you need to do, Lyssy! Convince Diro that our bepuppied world is worth saving!"
Lyssav froze, the enchantments on her hands becoming undone before she let them fall. "Not with those words, Babs. You cannot call the world 'bepuppied'."
"Bedogged."
Lyssav pivoted without another word, and began accelerating away, dragging her bloated form across the floors of the laboratory, the halls and up the sphere spirals that led to the nearest sluice. Her gallop melted the rungs as she climbed, her noxious aura reaching the Corship and making him shake as he saw the dogs spin around. An extra pairs of wings violently budded from her back in a shower of red matter, energy. Joined with her ring of scapulae, they were an exact replica of the wings a bat had once sported, down to the lone long thumb.
And coming out the back of the Corship, into the cold white light of the Borzois, she spread her four wings, vaunting them in front of a sea with many eyes but zero vision. They flapped just as hers, yet out of sync, as the smears of rot lifted her airborne.
Back in the lab, Babesi quickly returned to working on Morbilliv's body, and lost no time before giving the crew their first orders as the substitute captain:
Hey everybody, I am in charge for a wee while, so, priorities: don't die, or provide a fourteen-tide notice before doing so. Thankyouverymuch, that would be all.
"Captaining is exhausting," she told Seloma before going back to fiddling with one of the articulations of Morbilliv's new body.
"Not nearly as much as being a Splinter, no," Seloma retorted, her attention focused wholly on Babesi. "But I'd say, out of all the Originals I have met so far, I'd prefer you or Dirofil as captains."
Babesi didn't hear: she was too engrossed in the world of newfangled anatomy to pay attention to the world. Seloma didn't care, because truth wasn't spoken to be heard: it was spoken because of its inherent value.