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

"'You could have gone thoughtless!'

'But it worked, darling. I corrected part of the flaw of my core. I am halfway done now, and you could be too. I am almost sure it can be fully done.'

'I am not risking my life by trying, nor my sanity by witnessing your suicide. Desist now, Doratev.'

'I cannot. I must live to know it was done or die and render the matter moot.'

'Desist or I am leaving, dear. Please. For us.'

'You cannot return to your spire with the sea between us.'

'I'll rest in the platform of some other spire. A throne isn't much different from the ground. So make your choice, Doratev.'

'Choice there's none. Take care, Seloma.'"

—Conversation that took place when the sea was young.

Hours had passed him by and he hadn't noticed. Safely ensconced among puppies, Dirofil had dragged down the body of the mutant, and began to assimilate it sparing any major modifications. It was a job too taxing to clean the bones and reshape them in his current state, and he could end up with an unwieldy abomination. Had it been the only option he had, he would have done exactly that. But a dog's body was already functional, albeit quite unbecoming of a creature of Dirofil's status. And yet the world was in its death throes, and being squeamish and prideful would make him no favors. A functional body, even an unworthy one, would do.

Ramified tendrils of his psychosarc crept all around the dead Chihuahua, and into every orifice, no matter which one we speak about. The mouth, nostrils, ears, uretra, anus,lacrimal ducks, an d the open wound, every single entry route into the dead dog's body was a viable way to make his flesh enter it, invade every tissue and change them fromt eh inside out, using the lymph and circulatory systems to great effect. His core couldn't enter by mthe mouth of the small creature, however, and as such he stopped to consider a way to insert himself in. His deliberation didn't last long: flesh could be cut, he had a tooth, and he needed the limbs, but the guts could be… disregarded.

He used the teeth to make a rather unclean cut posterior to the dog's sternum, down the middle line, letting the guts spill into a bag of Slime: he didn't need them, but they were Chihuahua tissues, and chihuahuite could prove useful to someone so deprived of resources. Once the wound had been properly opened and the abdominal cavity emptied enough, Dirofil stashed his soul inside the dog's cadaver.

As soon as he considered himself safely stuffed inside the ribcage and managed to acclimate and take control of the eyeballs, Dirofil tried to puppet the legs and dig out of the puppy hole he had brought the body into. It proved a challenge, because he lacked all of his bones, and thus any reference on how to pull the levers that made a body move. The dog had humeri and femurs, but the proportions were all wrong, and the digitigrady was the cherry on top of the shit cake that was the Chihuahua's body.

The ungainly cadaver struggled against the mass of puppies, and extended and contracted its legs at seemingly random as Dirofil tested and tried . Muscles were disposable, so tearing them was no issue for him. The bones, however, presented an issue he hadn't foreseen: they were rigid, unable to bend as much as he was used to. And what a nuisance that was. The flexibility of metal allowed to cushion blows, to facilitate landings. Now he would need to produce an extra layer of psychosarc to ameliorate hits and falls.

Eventually he found a way out the puppy ground. With the eyes already taken over, he beheld the sea above, and found the color palette and the visual acuity highly discouraging. The world was now composed of hues of yellow and blue, and anything further than ten or twelve Morbilliv heights away was a blurry mess. He sat down and stared upwards through stolen eyes and failed to whine with an unresponsive throat. The task before him was daunting, nearly impossible. And yet it was that very adverb that spurred him to go on. In his mind, he could still reach Shadiran, he could put the world down and give birth to a place of untainted benevolence.

This body offered a lot of teeth, and while the levers of the jaws were kind of a foreign concept to Dirofil, he was positive making it work would be like managing an extra hand at worst. A hand with a hole leading to a now incomplete digestive system in the back. Well, if that ever became a problem, he would deal with it somehow. Use a patch of skin in the throat or a plug of denser slime.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

His deliberation was interrupted by a flash of light that changed the hues of the visual horizon above, from the dark colors of the Bernese layer to a persisting orange glow.

A wave of heat soon reached the dead skin. Fire. What in the sea could ignite a pyre bright enough to illuminate the sea?

Parvov crossed his mind. But Parvov was dead.

Most of Parvov was dead.

He hurried to puppeteer the unwieldy body he was wearing up the highest Collie he could reach, and expedited his assimilation of the lungs and throat at the same time. He had no time to learn how to bark, any sound would do.

And so he proffered an unholy hybrid of a howl and shriek, a broken sound that reached far and wide. It would attract predators. But it would, if things went as he hoped, also attract The Flame.

Twice more he cried, and thrice the fire flashed over him. He imagined the Flame gliding above like a bird of prey riding an ascending air current.

The acute noise hurt the sensible ears he had just acquired, but Dirofil didn't care much about them. If he could manage to communicate his needs to the flame somehow, he could strike a deal with it, aid them in whatever they needed and in exchange be taken to some Splinter graveyard. There he could gather whatever parts struck his fancy, the necessary to become a menace to most small-and-middle-sized dogs, without having to acclimate himself to sensations as aliens a those the body of a canine offered. The mutated Dragon Terrier could reduce his new body to a crisp, but if it took him to the right place, it wouldn't matter in the end.

So he cried the most horrible song, half intent and half accident, and soon enough he saw the shine of the plasma wings draw closer and closer. He psycholocated with all his might, and the returning waves of energy confirmed that it was The Flame that had come to see what the ruckus was about. When he was sure to have been spotted by the child, Dirofil ceased his painful call, crossed the legs of his dog body, and extended tendrils of slime holding droplets of the dog's blood in them, these little red dots spelling "Fourth".

The Flame landed far enough to not hurt him, but their heat Dirofil could feel regardless. He raised the tendrils of slime higher, joining them in a fan of bloody letters, the train of a gruesome peacock.

He half-barked, half whistled, for the Flame stayed on all fours, staring at him without moving a single muscle. "Those seem to be letters."

Dirofil lied over the collie and kept flaunting his message.

"Those are letters. And they mean nothing to me. I am fire, Thinker: my role regarding books is devouring them, reducing them to ashes, no matter how valuable the doodles they contain, not caring about any aspect of the written word besides the chemical makeup of the ink I burn."

Dirofil's tendrils retreated back inside the Chihuahua's body, and he tried to sue the dog's throat to articulate a few words, but all that came out were incoherent garbles. Vocal folds were not an easy instrument to learn and play.

"You are trying to communicate. You want something from The Flame. You are not attacking nor running. You stopped crying when I came close. I assume you know what I am. Have we met before?"

Dirofil commanded the head to nod, but still kept his distance. Approaching without knowing if the flame would cooperate could destroy the body he had worked so hard to secure.

"Show me your core. You have my word that I won't do anything to it."

"Such a worthless thing to have." Dirofil wanted to reply, but seeing he couldn't, he simply acquiesced, with due caution, and revealed the eviscerated underbelly of his vessel, where his core poked out, shining its pure light over the collies.

The Flame stared in a silence only broken by the crackling sounds of its fires. Then it pointed with a nightmarish claw, long and sharp. "You are Dirofil, you thing. So far have you fallen from grace."

Once again, the Fourth Imagined limited himself to a polite nod.

The Flame showed the sooth-laden teeth of his vessel in a jackalesque grin "Make it easy for me, then: I need to escort an Original back to a friend that can see everything the sea ahs to offer, at least to me. He's like you, harvesting parts of the children of the sea for his own gain. He's an inquiring mind: his desires are not inclined towards harming you, he just wishes to study your core. Thus, I offer you a deal: Come of your own volition, and I will spare that sorry form you snatched from a child of the sea."

Dirofil relocated his core inside the dog's ribcage. Against the flame he had no chance of winning, but if a Splinter reveled against him, he could be able to wrestle them off their body solely by exerting the supremacy of his core. And if they meant no harm, he could find a valuable ally in them.

So the Fourth bowed, not because the flame deserved reverence, but because anything else I could interpret as a no. A gesture of submission increased Dirofil's chances to arrive to a less-disadvantageous position, and to defeat time meant to stack the odds in his favor, as small as they could be.

He couldn't speak aloud, and the words he could write his interlocutor wouldn't understand. But to an understanding they came, and the heat of The Flame waned. "I'll carry your core whilst burning as cold as I am able to. Keep the dog's body hanging from your flesh if you wish to bring it along, low enough under me for it to take minimal damage."

A last time Dirofil nodded, extruding his core from the body it puppeteering, his very soul launching forward, it's connection to the dead Chihuahua merely a few threads of slime.

"Good, Fourth. I'll rid the sea of a Reaper, if my power allows. And until another takes its place, its territory would be relatively safer for you to use as a hunting ground, wherever that is."

And as he got lifted by the mutated Lienoga Dragon Terrier, Dirofil thought that this child of Parvov was quite well spoken for an analphabet.