"'Sheila, you need to stop living in your own fantasy world. Life will run you over if you don't!'

'Life? The five years we all have left, father?'

'Girl, grow up at once. How many times have investigators failed to predict the end of the world? Besides, even if it ends, would you like to have spent your whole life writing things nobody reads and playing pretend with people you have never met?'

'That's precisely the idea.'"

—Conversation between the Creatress and her Progenitor, five years before the world ended.

The faux-spire stood small and claustrophobic, with soft transitions between surfaces that affronted the sensibilities of the Original. It was a sorry attempt at recreating the best of his dear Spire, and Dirofil wouldn't take it in silence. Neither would he pose any sort of intelligible complain out loud, as his capabilities for oral communication were currently… not. Still, he needed no words to make his unease known: bodily language, even when the body wasn't a Thinker one, was more than enough.

"Think what you will about my home. I hold no pride for the hole I carved for myself in the world."

And why would you? Our spires are not something we hew or mold. They are our immobile twins.

Caenor dragged himself with heavy, sticky steps until he sat down on the weathered outcrop of chihuahuite he used as his miserable throne

"If that's how you see it, your betrayal of Lyssav comes off as no surprise. You left your twin for dead. What is left there for your other siblings. Say, would you render Babesi thoughtless?"

Reaching Shadiran is my priority, above all things. All. Things. I do not know if I can grow more desperate, so conclude your business with me and let me go hunting for the parts I need to meet my darling, Splinter. My patience runs thin.

"I want to do a merely observational study of your core. It will take but a few hours. Conversely I don't want my world to end, Dirofil. I hope you arrive late, yet I am not crazy ro stupid enough to hinder your quest. I beg you consider you may already be running late, however. What if all your effort is for naught, if you find out the sea has claimed your darling?"

Dirofil didn't answer immediately. It was, and denying it would be immature. The major of his fears, stated by someone who had once looked so similar to him. But he had to reply somehow: silence would be taken as a signal of denial. So he raised the chi's head to stare at his interlocutor's eyes with his dead dog ones.

I have not lived through any significant amount of time in the absolute absence of Shadiran. To be Dirofil is to love Shadiran. Whatever remains after she's gone is not me, and I cannot speak for his acts.

"An interesting strategy to avoid a potential and painful truth. No matter what pain may come, one is damned to be oneself. Don't think for a second this sea hasn't taught me to withstand the horrors it throws at me tide after tide. This comfortable refuge, I built it while being a Splinter that had no idea how it had scrapped by death so many times. You cannot fathom the privilege you have, being you." He spat the last word with unwarranted disdain.

Curious thing, envy. Splinters envy Original's puissance and long lives, and we sometimes envy the lighter loads you carry on your tiny shoulders.

Dirofil stretched the dog's legs and arched tis back, but not in the way a living dog would. It was an unnatural, robotic movement, a rigid grin stuck in the dog's jowls.

"You bear no burdens except those you have chosen. And if I am wrong, pray tell me about this supreme arbiter of your destinies. Of the one above you whose will the thirteen Originals enact."

Dirofil answered with mental silence. Aggressive silence. A silence that required effort on his part to uphold.

"A tantrum becoming of a noble." Caenor said, sitting up from his mound and stepping to the side. "Lay here and expose your core: I shall inspect it closely."

Having no time to lose, Dirofil obliged, exposing the dog's belly, right legs in the air as he slowly pushed his heart out of the cadaver without severing its connection to the body. Here, satisfy your voyeur impulses.

At first, Caenor didn't move. He stood in place, beholding. He opened the eyes of the dead Reapers to see the dimensions of Dirofil's soul that escaped a Thinker's sight. An arm slowly rising, spined tentacles hesitant to approach. "So this is what Doratev coveted to the point of risking his very existence," he said, engulfed by Dirofil's light, the Chihuahua brains firing to nourish Caenor's core with enough thoughtenergy to keep him from cowering in the presence of the Fourth's harsh shine.

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The Splinter put both of his hands over the cold crystal, and Dirofil's thoughts rattled against Caenor's little mind, an ocean threatening to flood a lake. Like Babesi awed in presence of Lyssav, he shuddered before Dirofil's mighty mind. "A world that wants to make a world, to unmake a world." He commented before stepping back with quivering legs, using hiss tentacles for support. "Pray shine a bit less, Fourth Imagined. I want to observe the facets of your thoughtcrystal."

Not adulating enough. Dirofil communicated, the feeling of control and power rendering him drunk after the humbling he had received at the hands of his sister. For in the Corship he was near an almost equal, and in the open sea he was prey to the powers that be, but in the fake spire he felt like the royal he had always been.

"You won't get undue flatter out of me. Consistently behave like an ass, and I will throw you out and let the sea have yours. You may surpass me in power, Dirofil, but this is my home, and I have the duty to make sure unruly guests get expelled from it." Caenor warned, caressing the thoughtcrystal, rendering his pupils little points to try and filter the highest amount of light possible.

I'll cooperate out of a need for haste on your part. But afterwards you will aid me in my hunts until I need your help no more.

"Let's cut to the chase. I'll pay you handsomely for a few select parts I fail to dare and procure. Care to run some errands in exchange for an eye?" Caenor offered, showcasing his Reaper-ridden limb letting it lay with twitching fingers in front of Dirofil's dog's face.

The Chihuahua's nose scrunched up as Dirofil tried to imitate one of his sister's smiles, and failed disgustingly at doing so. The teeth were showing, but skin quivered in a grotesque fashion. Caenor didn't mind: In the world of Thinkers the only disturbing smile had red teeth, not yellow ones.

"I can give you a non-haunted eye. Thanks to Lyssav, I have two, and I get the feeling I will have more soon enough."

So there are things in this sea your fear. You, that harvested eyes from Reapers.

"Once again: the flea fears not the dog or the cat, thousands of times their size, but the humble ladybug that devours them and their young. You are a cat: even the biggest dogs will hunt you, and you can do some serious damage with your claws. Me? The titans don't notice until I am done and gone. I could cover myself in the skin of Ghost Komondorok…"

Murkhounds. The crew deemed them Murkhounds.

"Terminology is just a subjective convenience. I'll send you a mental image of our quarry to avoid that issue, and so you can plan in advance if you want to keep any part of them for assimilation."

Dirofil groaned with a stolen throat, and it sounded pathetic. Yet neither of the nematodes would comment on it: What use were proxies like tone and gestures when you could directly appreciate the semantic load of a mental message?

You won't aid me in hunts, I take.

"I'll prioritize personal safety and keep a sensible distance from conflict. You go in, kill, and I carry the cadaver back to base. Then I harvest the parts of interest, and everything else is yours to use as you see fit."

Dirofil couldn't protest, not before knowing which parts interested Caenor. He liked reminding the Splinter of the power differential between them, scare it just enough to avoid being backstabbed, but he had already stressed their relationship enough. To shut up and be as agreeable as the situation called for was the smart play.

Stands to reason, Splinter of a Splinter.

Caenor stepped away from Dirofil, down the smooth staircase that led to the opening of the fake spire. "Fit your soul back into the dog's body. I want to get some lenses to better appreciate your crystal, and shaping them out of chihuahuite would be …suboptimal."

What do you hope to find in the surface of my heart? Dirofil asked warily.

"A shard of empathy. Or, to put it in more concrete terms, similarities and teleology. In the heart of originals lay the true intentions of the creators of our world. You, in particular, seem to have been born with a mission. But why create a doomed world in the first place?" He pace around restlessly, hands fidgeting, rubbing along the dorsal of each other.

Because our makers, those… shades of monkeys I saw up there, were evil, mayhap. I have given it a thought in the past but their reasons are ultimately inscrutable.

"I am afraid I cannot subscribe to such simple and satisfactory explanations, Dirofil. What were we for them? Beings? Things? Stories to be told?" He covered his hands with his tentacles, a veritable robe of them sticking to his body, transparent flesh on whitened vertebrae.

If you want insight into the minds of cosmopoietors, you may study me until we part. The makers of this world spoke so long ago that barely an intelligible echo of them remains, at least outside the thoughtcrystal at the center of the sea. But I will make a new world, and I don't mind telling you about the plans Shadiran and I hatched for it.

"Without meaning offense, I have no interest in the affairs of a world I will never see. Kind of ironic: In one case I have the world, and in other I have access to the reasoning behind it. Neither works for me without the other. Yet, I may be able to read those echoes in any original thoughtcrystal, if they codified them. Be it Cynothalassa's, or be it yours."

Dirofil followed out of the spire, into the platform that hung among floating collies, coming out just in time to see the beginning of an episode of mass shedding, the surrounding atmosphere becoming a show of bright and dark lines slowly drifting down, a harmless hairfall that would soon cover the spire and the platform with a thin carpet of collie–sourced keratin.

I don't believe your motives are coherent enough to place blind trust on you, Caenor. First you marvel at my core and say it is what Doratev sought to achieve, then you blather about hidden messages from our creators.

"Your extreme monotropism is not a universal feature, Dirofil. Creation marvels and interests me in a million and one different ways. Do you distrust your sister and her incoherent antics?" He said, staring not at Dirofil but at the little heap of hair at his feet.

Babesi manages to be coherently incoherent. She's a pattern of constant chaos. Can we go hunting at once?

Caenor turned a single mechanical eye to look at Dirofil's snout. "Posthaste. Just give me a moment to check the position of my sightmates, and I can decide for a route that will avoid them."

Dirofil nodded and sat, licking his paw just to figure out how to use the taste buds. So far, he had had no breakthrough regarding receiving or processing the stimuli in a way useful to his end.

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