NOVEL NEXT V2 Chapter 26: Hydrophobia
"Calipl and his brother simultaneously bit the flesh from the very same citrus fruit, the bygone war having costed them everything they held dear, except for each other. Fruit borne by a tree they had planted in days of innocence, before the death of their father, before their struggle for power. The war needed to end. The people needed a king, but they could use two."
—The Tale of Calipl and Dimerel, foundational myth of the city of Calmera, last paragraph.
The mamelons on the walls had stopped bleeding a lifetime ago. Dog hair had carpeted the entrance to the palace, and Shadiran had thought twice before stepping through the permanently-ajar gates. Nobody had set foot in that palace since Lyssav had devoured its owner, and it lay dormant, it lay dormant because whenever it had been awake, it was to wail and rage against the cruel fate cast upon it.
With a scarred and weak heart, she pushed onwards, having lost her siblings—who insisted on tracking her—by diving under the surface dogs, crawling and percolating through around their legs to become untraceable. The others probably thought her to be traveling away from the Zenith, not to Desmodus' Palace, second-closest to it. And the Palace wouldn't arouse suspicion, because it spoke to none. It woke up. It cried because the nightmare hadn't ended. It fell asleep once more. Every Original that lived at the Edge had heart it go through these cycles countless times. Her, of course, included.
Desmodus hadn't died here. This was not a tomb, but a cadaver. Yet, nothing said it couldn't become both. She needed peace, she needed time, and she needed to cry all that she would never a chance to again. To climb towards the throne room would have been fitting for a prideful, unbroken one. That was the least fitting set of words to describe her, so she wouldn't even see the next loop of the spiral staircase.
Heavy steps led her to a hole that fancied itself hidden in a corner. It was a drop of a few meters, a couple blood-soaked tiles wide. It led to the cave system that made up Desmodus' basement. A dry, dark system of tunnels and chambers carved directly into the foundations of his palace, not by his hand, but by the stiff transient roots of the palace itself.
As she penetrated the darkness Shadiran felt the broadcasted call of Vedala, and she could imagine her light constructs like sentinels patrolling the space between the palaces, looking for her.
While her sister begged for her return, she reached the little nook where her and Dirofil used to pour themselves and swirl around, a depression in the hematite their frolicking had deepened ever so slightly.
She slid into this stone bed, setting, melting as she grabbed her knees. They wouldn't know where to search for her until it was too late. But, in the off chance she was wrong, she needed to die someplace where Dirofil would look for her.
No, she couldn't be wrong. She didn't want to think about it. She was here because Dirofil had failed, because the sea had taken him from her.
She was there to die. But before that, she would grieve herself in solitude.
"Dirofil! Come here Dirofil. Report, then return!" Lyssav called out as she pounced from stalactite to stalactite, each of her landings shaking the structures down to the core, causing the malamutes and huskies under her claws overwhelming distress, their wails and cries mounting, echoing, spreading.
She didn't expect to find him lying upon a platform where the dogs' hair began to crystallize, the light from the Barrier of Memories still far from being overpowering, blinding. A tragic narcissist leisurely basking in the memory of a light, his eyes casting twined shadows over the fur of the underlying dogs, upper right hand with fingers half-curled, tracing doodles in the air, if he was listening to a personal, unheard symphony.
"I expected to find you toiling towards your goal," Lyssav said, perching on a stalactite several dozens of meters away from her brother. Folding her wings.
"The unnegotiable wall of soulstuff ahead of us may have something to do with it. May have." He gestured vaguely at the ceiling that loomed a couple hundred pooches above. The eye of the Reaper had snapped open, kept hidden from Lyssav's scrutiny by maintaining the back of his right hand resting upon the back of a dog. "Cynothalassa has won." He noticed Lyssav's azure eyes, and concern washed over him, but it didn't show outwardly. It couldn't, even if he couldn't help but wonder how. How had his sister attained eyes like the reaper's? Were they only an ornament? Were they functional? "And I can see you have taken something from said winner. The family… jowls. Can you see my soul?"
"Everyone's, dear brother, everyone's. And the pun isn't appreciated." Lyssav's body curled like a half moon, looking at her brother upside down, lower and upper marginal teeth rubbing against each other, whetting for a hunt they felt approaching.
"Of course a tyrant would despise humor." He hoisted his body slowly, spread stolen wings just to air them a bit as he stretched. The Reaper was close enough. He crossed his tree arms in front of his chest and took a step towards Lyssav. "Cynothalassa has won but, dear… I am a sore loser."
Lyssav stuck her tail in the canine speleothem and inched closer, her weight supported by her appendage and her gravity-bending might. "You are to return to the ship, brother, unless you want to entertain me and lose the wings you so diligently worked to attain. You got new toys, too! What do those do?"
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"They rain on your parade." Dirofil crouched ever so slightly ready to jump or dive if Lyssav attempted anything. "Come hither, Rabies. Drag this heartworm back to that many legged formaldehyde jar."
"All heartworms in formaldehyde jars we remember were dead," She was slightly taken aback. "Oh. Oh. I will let you fight to your last breath, until I rip the lungs off your spine. And then, you will obey like a good little brother."
Dirofil tightened his cape around his core. "We are going to play such an exquisite tag. Head start?"
"Apocalypse is upon us. The sooner you comply, the sooner you can reunite with Shadiran," Lyssav let the stalactite go and began gliding in an eight-shaped trajectory, losing no altitude despite the lack of beats from her wings, and the absence of any ascending air currents in the cold atmosphere.
Dirofil wreathed his upper arms and chest in his wings, just to feel a tad safer. "Not as a failure. I made a promise I must struggle to keep, Lyssav. That, I know you can understand. Help me euthanize the world?"
"You speak as if I didn't have a promise to myself to upkeep. A heavy crown to bear. I don't want to force a sibling to kneel, Dirofil. I am willing to create oranges so we can share one under the same tree." Lyssav landed on a platform across him. Dangerously close, if you were to ask the heartworm.
"Sorry is the state of affairs: I don't wish to rule along you, Lyssav. Parvov is gone, so is Desmodus. Your mission to preserve us, merely a stillborn runt. But I, I only need Shadiran and myself to right all wrongs."
A sudden kick of the Heartworm sent him off the platform of dogs, and he dropped a few meters before opening his wings and pumping them furiously, accelerating away from his sister. Lyssav waited a few seconds and then pounced in his pursuit, the more experiencer flier swiftly reducing the gap as both of them evaded the hanging cones of dogs, some of the tips licking them as they grazed them by—most of these huskies, in case anyone wondered.
"You have gotten pretty adept at using your stolen wings." She said, emphasizing the beating of the luminous pair that imitated Desmodus's.
Dirofil grasped his buckler tightly, ready to get rayed with Lyssav's paralyzing gaze any moment then. A gurgling howl sounded in the distance, and inside his mind popped the image of a predator watching both him and his sister from away, a white-gray soul followed by a crimson one that got closer and closer.
"Enough," Lyssav decreed. Infected light burst out her three mechanical eyes. Dirofil turned on his axis, contorted to get his lower left to the right position and intercept the noxious ray. She had aimed for his back, but struck his buckler. The light scattered, a fine dew of dobermannite spreading in the air, only to be immediately left behind by the fliers.
"What?" Lyssav uttered, a Dirofil just laughed. "There's nothing there!"
"You see nothing there, sister! There are things that escape even the Reaper's notice." He dove under a lateral outgrowth and then pumped his wings mightily, ending straight under his cloud of chains.
The hour had come. The time of truth, of betrayal, arriving in such a mundane way, in a mere chase frilled with a couple fun rays.
He let out a breath under the chains. A chittering breath, a song of no bird ready to blow up as it slowly drifted towards the chains. The next set of notes dressed him in a slippery armor of sound, and close by, less than half a kilometer away, he could see it coming, the succession of heads, necks emerging like tongues from the stuck-open jaws, severed heads panting severed heads into existence. And from each mandibular hinge sprouted a tassel of pitch-black worms, a single blue eye on their heads, the chitinous jaws trying to grasp nothing, trapped inside the ocular globes, their sharp edges of emerald hues showing in flashes behind the corneas. And such festival of deformity was crawling closer, curling around one stalactite and another with its ophidian flexibility.
Lyssav drew too close, but too late. Before her claws could grasp Dirofil's arm, the explosion sounded, shaking the arrangement. Unchaining the rain.
A hundred unassuming droplets welcomed the Second Envisioned with a gentle caress, prompting a complaint from Lyssav. "What in this cursed dog mound is drooling n—" But as soon as her psychosarc recognized the alien substance, her eyes went wide.trembling in place, wings frozen and body kept midair merely by her power, she began to sink slowly as Dirofil landed onto a nearby pillar of dogs and watcher her suffer.
"I am sorry, Lyssav. You are too much of a monster for me to risk a fair fight." He pulled the flask with water out of his chest with a pop, and in almost slow motion she saw him retract his arm and cast the vile container straight into her mouth, impacting the tongue and the faux-coronoid teeth, shattering and drenching Lyssav's trembling mouth.
Her flesh began to boil, her upper eye didn't hesitate to blow up from the stress, leaving behind a red ghost of itself. Her fingers struggled to even curl as she tried to regain a smidge of control to groom the pure and tarnishing liquid out of her body. She replayed the prior seconds in her mind, trying to figure out what had happened, and her image of the Imagined got tinged by the hues of betrayal. To be defeated in a fair battle, she would have liked that. She would hold no ill will towards such action.
"M…mel… Mel…" she stuttered, aware of the monster that was coming, slowly sinking into its way while her brother glided past her. No. While the traitor safely glided past her.
"Mel…" She turned her eyes with difficulty to stare at him as he flew away. "Mela…!"
"I hope the Reaper preserves you weak but alive, Lyss. But if you should part, part your brother loves you," he said before diving down and away, masterfully avoiding the husky-and-malamute structures.
He refused to look back as Lyssav remained stuck in her three-letter loop. Whatever she wanted to say, it couldn't matter more than the precious time it would take for the to say it.
The dark maw of the Reaper came straight for her as Dirofil, blue eye closed, put distance between the monsters and him. The creature, unlike the siblings, showed no feelings nor restraint, swallowing the twitching Thinker without fanfare as she spiraled deeper and deeper into the despair of her all-encompassing phobia. Gullets that opened into other gullets transported Lyssav into the dark depths of the creatures, obscure appendages trying to tear her body apart.
And through that torture, she endured. And hated. Hated as the outer layer of her slime dissolved, hated as she methodically spat out the water in her mouth, even as she lost some of her teeth to the digestive arms of the creature.
Hate as her stressed-out core erupted in a deluge of red light.
It hurt. It hurt more than it had even hurt for her. It burned all over, all across, and she drank all of this pain, the lines that conformed the field of red light around her expanding, spreading through the interior of the creature.
And the creature was a Reaper. And Reapers never let thieves get away unscathed.