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

In the absence of Parvov Dirofil didn't expect things to suddenly burst into flames. Needless to say, givens he nursed an eye stolen from the monstrosity that had bit more than it could chew, he should have had. The pain crashed over him with the might of a Shih-tzu-nami[1], causing him to drop and hit the lower end of a stalactite, weaver finger first, detaching the lower dog and throwing the poor canine into the abyss below. Out of control, he smashed against a thick formation of dogs, such that some of his slime got shaped like the spaces between their backs.

But he didn't care, because the cursed eye burned, and it did so with carnelian fire. He willed to push himself apart from the dogs, but he couldn't: a single word swam in his vision, wriggled like dying worms, copies of it hundreds, swarming all around, shining like pulsing walls of flesh. A single word, eleven letters. A threat so personalized it couldn't be applied to anyone else: Melarsomine. Two hundred and four times, all over his periphery, painted in the air, in the dogs, inside his own flesh: Melarsomine.

A constellation of tiny red suns depicted a molecule of the arsenic–bearing compound, slung all over the dome of his head. His first instinct was to claw the damn things out, but he caught himself before doing so. His enemy was not in his head: It rested in his right hand.

A hand that, like the pain it carried, he had no obligation to keep. Cutting it at the wrist would leave the optical nerve still dangling from his radius, so he had to do away with everything below the elbow joint. So he commanded his aching flesh with every remainder of his will, to slid off the helical cogs, to free the twin bones and let them depart from his humerus. And when the articulation was fully dissembled he used both his lefts to yank his forearm out the sockets. Relief, if only for a second, welcome and cherished.

He dropped his severed limb as slime dripped from it, dead, colorless and liquefied. The dogs it fell over licked their fur clean of the taint, swallowing Dirofil's burning flesh, the pain of automata unfelt by them. Warm hues, sick hues, illuminated the white and grey fur in front of him, and a fraction of second later the shockwave slammed onto him from behind, pushing him against the wall of whining, hyperventilating dogs once more. HE scrambled with all his remaining appendages to unglue himself from his current position, but as soon as he turned long lances of light impaled him into the wall of dogs, , the constructs rooting inside the pillar, and trying to do the same inside his fighting flesh. His core was surrounded by three lances, his right scapula pierced by another, the wings unable to avoid being nailed against the stalactite.

A gathering of red lightning thundering with rage crossed the distance between them, Lyssav's core suspended amidst a mass of bubbling slime and a few, half melted bones. Light recreated the remainder of her skeleton, including her eyes, and it flickered with rage. One of her hands had turned into a miniature, crimson replica of the reaper that she had just blown up. Her presence was oppressive, and Dirofil knew himself unable to escape.

Yet, he had to try.

And try was all that he could do. Movement was nearly impossible, as the pain rendered his flesh more viscous, and his bones and articulations rigid.

He grunted in defeat, staring at the shifting form of his sister with the alst scrapes of pride he had left. "So this is where my dream comes to die. I won't ask you to spare me. But…"

Lyssav's severed tongue shot from her mouth like a bullet, piercing dirofil's neck, obliterating his voicebox and tearing a wound onto the yodeler lungs.

He had been silenced, but in the domain of Lyssav's aura, he trusted his presence could still be felt by her sister.

Bring Shadiran solace under your rule. Preserve her.

"No last wish should be granted for the one who wet me. Water!" She lashed out, two of her fingers stabbing Dirofil's eyes against the wall of dogs that, to Dirofil, felt like a cliffside. "You used water. You broke a rule so old, so sacred, it could only be while unwritten, unspoken. Thou shall not drench rabies."

She pulled her hands out, letting Dirofil's shattered eyes float in the inside of his head. "You ruined our little… competition. Played foul in this little market of ideas that defines our existence."

The only regret I have is that my plan failed, sister. Do what you must, but console Shadiran after eating me. Be a good if cruel empress, Lyssav.

Lyssav dispelled her spikes of light, letting Dirofil's body fall into a mound of slime and bones that he struggled to control, to push past the encroaching pain.

He tried to crawl past her, to slide down the dogs and let gravity take him a little bit closer to safety, despite knowing she could easily catch up. Hope whispered that of the siblings awoken at the bottom of creation the fourth was the monstrous one, the heartless. That there was mercy to be found in the depths of the rust-colored demon floating in front of him, if only reserved for brothers and sisters.

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Lyssav reached with the red reaper, it's mouth grabbing Dirofil's core along its brazen ribs and his protective cape, picking it and the bag of slime his body had turned to up.

Dirofil felt the teeth of the appendage approaching his shining core, and assumed the end was nigh.

Console Shadiran.

"Maybe I will, brother. Maybe I will." Lyssav began lifting him, holding Dirofil in place as she slowly regenerated her metallic teeth and tongue. Soon, she would eat.

The crack in the thoughtcrystal birthed a flash of light, and sent her thoughts into a disorganized spiral. Memories painted the walls, her eyespots creating holes of shadow in the film projected by her unraveling existence. She could feel it, this was the last try.

Each crack projected more light, illuminated the cave with her ideas, fixations and desires. She extended her arms forward, rising slightly from her hole, seeking to embrace a shadow of her beloved. Seeing it embrace her back, she did her best to stand once more, and once she was on her feet, she joined hands with the ghost of his lover, numbing the knowledge that it was not real as they began dancing, feet touching feet, toes interlocking.

"I missed you so, Dirofil," she said, the cave seemingly gone, Vedala's palace slowly coming to life around them as their dance took them upstairs, to the palace's roof, to the base of the Zenith.

Lyssav's teeth sunk into the tendons at the base of a wing, the bite diagonal, the alloy of metal and bone cracking and creaking under the pressure. Dirofil wasn't unsure if he should ask her to hurry up and finish it: She was tearing the wings from his back, bite by bite, an act devised to humiliate him, and nothing more. She had given him the wings, and now she was taking them away.

If you are determined to kill or devour me, do it posthaste. Such could be your act of mercy towards this traitor.

Lyssav swallowed the bones and skin into her slime, both organic and inorganic matter beginning to burn, to melt as it travelled down her maw. "You are giving me a free pass to torture you. Original Thinkers of the Core, just six left. And while I'd love to devour a little piece of shit who weaponized my hydrophobia, my mission and our family bonds are two reasons to spare your life. And they are good enough. You are going to die…" She said as her hands carefully removed the cape, that had tried to curl around Dirofil's core to defend it. "But not by my teeth, and not by my hand. You are blind, you are defenseless. Your wings have been clipped. I could already leave you for thoughtless if you weren't so resourceful. And you managed to cross the mauling layer somehow. Tell me how and won't leave your core in the middle of it."

I sung an armor up.

This caused Lyssav to stop on her tracks. "That's absurd. Very well, explanation accepted."

Then she grinned with her freshly regenerated smile. And she sent the image of said smile directly into Dirofil's mind. "Say goodbye to your whole body."

With clawing vile and precise she extirpated Dirofil's core from his body, holding it in the mouth of the Reaper as with two hands she attached Dirofil's cape to her pectoral ring. "I'll take care of it… right, no ears anymore. Boring."

Cradling Dirofil's core against her chest Lyssav gave a last glance to his remains, and then let herself fall. She dove down and around the structures of the sea at a vertiginous speed, such that Dirofil could barely manage to get anything coherent from his psycholocation. There was Lyssav, and behind her the world was uncharted, while anything below them approached way too fast, describing long forms, and then passed them by just to blur out into the confusing background.

Her energy enveloped him, interfering just enough to make him desist. Without any sense of men or of automata except for touch. Dirofil waited blind and deaf, prisoner of his own mind and its delusions that grew stronger in the absence of organoleptic feedback.

Down they went, and he felt the impact of every piece of fur on their way. But it would soon end. As long as Lyssav kept her word, it would soon end. One way, or the other.

It would soon end. As she climbed the walls of the roughly-hewn cave she perceived as the perfectly arranged Zenith, as her dying core projected the image of her beloved by her side —any side, in a dream-like fashion, with skips between perceived moments, with no continuity of a step into another, with none moving like a pebble rolling down a hillside— she knew that her death was at hand. She believed they would give birth to this new world, that their quest had been fulfilled: such was the delirium a cracking thoughtcrystal could become immersed in. She reached up and ahead, to what she though was the Zenith, and her heart collapsed right there, a few hundred pieces of dying light, dispersing into a flesh that began to peel from the bones.

The images in the walls disappeared, darkness returned to the basement of Desmodus Spire. Shadiran's skeleton stood in the midst of the darkness, the spire wailing as it always did, and it wailed for her too, even if the others would ignore its ever-present cries.

Not a thought coursed the dead original's carcass, the eyespots decaying, foaming out the remnants of the slime matrix. And she died extending an arm to reach something unseen, honoring her name, as though even in death the world marveled her, any future observer unaware of the fact that she was reaching for an illusion, a lie instead of a fleck of dust, of something ethereal and by then long gone.

It would soon end. They had stopped. Dirofil pyscholocated once more, seeing the packed collies all around, and the squirming Retriever puppies below. He felt soft skin as Lyssav placed his naked core on the belly of an upside down pup. And then, when he stopped wasting his precious and limited, remaining energy, she spoke straight into his mind.

Here we are. Farewell, Dirofil. May the sea take your life. But, I know you are stubborn beyond compare. Stubborn enough to beat the odds, perhaps. So, I'll take your body back to the Corship. Find your way back, and it's yours to keep. Show this sea of dogs that you deserve to be my brother. Earn the title you so proudly flaunted until this tide,

HEARTWORM.

[1] It shows immense authorial restraint that this pun took until the midpoint of volume two to show up.