I dug down once. Down beneath the dogs. Beneath the hair and the ears and the barking. It was hard, and took a lot of planning - I had to destroy one of the dogtrees with my hands, rip out the twisted, yards-long communal spines that served them as branches and lash them together with tendons and skin. But soon I had tools - pitchforks, spears, shovels. I picked a spot where the dogfloor seemed shallower and set to work.
The blood started spurting when my spear first broke the surface, and didn't stop for hours and hours and hours. I was drenched in gore and viscera, covered in flecks of bone and meat and brain. But I learned to ignore the sickening squelching sounds, ward off the smell, and just kept going deeper and deeper, spearing and levering out dogs of stranger and stranger size and build, dogs with two heads, dogs with human hands, and dogs with writhing tentacles where their back legs should be
Eventually I came to the end of the dogs. Or perhaps the beginning of whatever lies beyond dogs. An expanse of multicolored, patchwork fur that extended as far as I could dig in any direction. I could pierce it with great difficulty but it barely bled, and try as I might I could only barely peel the skin away, revealing a layer of striated grayish muscle beneath. It started to tremble as I watched it, shaking the very dogmatter around me, and I realized that the dogscape was beginning to regenerate itself, close in over me, seal me in - so I fled, climbing back up into the light.
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