Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

Pyna leaned out from a lofty and perilous perch. 

Balancing against a toe-length narrow crevice. A mere mossy crack, that snaked and switched across the ashlar of rough and creamy architecture.

High upon one of the tottering spicules of the spiny Spire of Clioh, which abutted against the northern boundary of the Opal Quarter, and that of the mercantile Mid-Wells.

The paired moons, Fiin the Frostshorn and Ikrit the Cinnabar had settled low now, bleeding rust and silver across the toothy, marching Mounts of Senem.

That antique and insouciant range of crags that bounded the Great City to the distant west.

The heavy verdency of their sharply sloping flanks, black and ambiguous in the deep of midsummer’s dark.

The night-soil stink of the sprawling structures far below, rose on the warm, mild breeze to tickle Pyna’s nose. 

All of its alluring pungency unfurling, along with the endless tolling of countless hearts. 

A lulling, rhythmic sea, that she had to shut herself against, lest she sink and be carried away across its syrupy swells.

With eldritch grace, she moved along the sheer surface of the spire, bare alabaster toes, bird-like, to the cracked masonry curled fast, quiet as a shred of night-fog.

Soon, Pyna rounded the western face of the spire to a worn and mottled recess, set below a weather-bitten and blackened overhang.

Here was a short and narrow aperture, long sealed against entry and use. Its leaded glass, grey and opaque from countless years of abandonment.

She slips into the slim safety of the recess and crouches like a waiting beast, peering out at the peppery lights of the Opal Quarter spread far below.

Silent as the rising miasmas, she gazes upwards in order to study the wooly tangle of a nearby nest, and its resting occupant. 

A glister-eyed, bold little magpie. 

Smiling and playfully mocking, she returns its sidelong regard and rapid-eyed bird-blink. A perfect imitation thereof.

Pyna then reaches out, gently brushing against its inhuman and feathery conscience. 

Her thoughts are briefly intimate to the unfathomable language of birdsong, and the concerns of airy things in high places. Seed-psalms, wind-forms and feral, feathered little gods.

She also plumbs its apprehension. 

Something less akin to fear than revulsion, towards the unnatural creature keeping present company.

Which gives rise to a frisson of sadness, swiftly passing.

Oh, dear

For thee

Something bright, and

Shiny.

Pulling a polished silver ket from her sash, she sends the tiny coin twisting end over end, to land upon the lip of the magpie’s disheveled nest. 

The bird stands unmoving and unconcerned, its eye fixed on her. 

A wet convexity, brightly reflecting the rusty and silver moon-glows.

Pyna stands then, and with a coquettish expression and expectant sigh, soundlessly drops from her tip-toed perch and out, into the black and waiting sky. 

Nimblethorne had taught her how to flutter, like a leaf twisting through a wind. 

Pyna however, longed simply to fall.

She had come to be enamored of the brief madness of a stone careening carelessly through a blind abyss.

To spite her unspeakable once-upon-a-time immolation, when she had tumbled with the helpless agony of a burning star, fallen from the cradle of supernal Night.

For a half-breath she simply plunges.

Her incarnadine robes and wheaty mane flailing ferociously against the rasping air, like a suddenly unanchored spirit, torn to ribbons in the grasp of a tempest. 

She tucks her limbs then, and rolls for another half-breath through the atrous firmament.

At last alighting feather-soft and bird-like on bare toes, upon another narrow, blackened overhang, set against the creamy surface of the spire.

Below her, bending out of sight around the tower to both her left hand and right, is a wide platform. 

A walled gallery, open to the winking starfields of the astral vault above.

She crouches again and pauses to exhale a near shuddering sigh. 

Her marmoreal and uncanny heart thrumming and thrilling from the fall. 

A breathtaking and sensual impression. 

Not unlike that of when in the course of her cresting hunger, a serous copper-sweetness at last stains her lips, and fills her rapaciousness with a saporous heat… 

At first there is only the softly engirding, eternal susurrus of night.  

Soon however, the reverberation of approaching footfalls, hard and leathery, proceed from beyond the convexity of the spire to her right.

Weaving an Adumbral Cant, Pyna shrinks back into the sorcerously thickening murk about her concealing nook.

Another breath passes, before a pair of sentries emerge from the lee of the tower. 

Bearing long, razor-scalloped flame-plume lances ablaze with a white crackling fire, dispelling all common adumbration to their fore and wake. Illuminating with terrible clarity, the creamy cornice-work and creased, wrinkled masonry of the gallery. 

Their heavy, concealing robes slitted and bronze-plated. Rust and porphyry hued.

Smooth, faceless masks ribboned with the same colouration, concealing watchful faces. 

Martinets of House Joon. 

Broadly a minor House, however as seneschals to the Spire of Clioh, they occupy a place of peculiar import within the arabesque echelons of the Upper Houses.

Pyna warily observes as the pair march past, the darkness and obscurity of the rounding tower wall to her left, soon swallowing them up.

Moving with preternatural swiftness, she leaps and flows from her nook, and in the opposite direction of the now unseen sentries. 

Then along and abreast the wall, until she arrives at a darkly-painted postern, deeply set into the rough and creamy ashlar.

Another tenderly whispered Adumbral Cant, and the door’s guarding lock is promptly unmade.

Inside she slips, a porcelain, crimson-painted shade, into a cramped vestibule.

The air within hangs thickly with the charred aroma of lamp-ash and link-oil.

A few wavering lanterns meekly illuminate the oblique hallway that opens before her. 

Here at this lofty height in the Spire of Clioh, all is narrow and inclining.

Walls pitched and aslant. Doorways confining and low.

Pyna moves like a spectre through these aphotic servants corridors. Her eyes piercing the reticent gloom.

Listening, always listening. To the muffled pulse of many scattered hearts. Some here, some there. Above, below…

Some still, some drifting too and fro.

At this early hour many - barring the nightwatch - of those who dwell in the spire are a’bed. 

And unwanted visitations, especially from the high places above, are unexpected.

She quickly locates a stairwell and drifts downwards another two floors. The architecture, broadening about her as she charily descends.

At each juncture, she avoids pairs of wandering sentries.

She is wary to forfend any violence, which would only serve to undo her purpose…

Another descent down a narrow, worming newel, brings Pyna into the family apartments.

A wide wing of the upper spire, where those of blood-kin to House Joon keep and congregate.

Even upon this deep hour, the corridors are kept bright. 

Numerous tall, aromatic beeswax tapers shed their illumination against the sumptuous scrollwork, and hangings of articulated patterns that blanket the walls.

A surplus of reds, coppers and a penchant for porphyry patterns, which complement the House’s heraldry.  

Pyna pauses to listen again, sniffing at the still air, tasting, reaching out…

There, along the corridor, the second door. 

A little thing, alone. 

So tiny, so swiftly drumming.

In the measure between a blink, she is standing before the portal. The door is oaken and heavy. Intricately carved with ivy curlicues and fretted with whirling birds bearing nameless fruits.

Gently, she presses upon the door, finding it to be unbarred and unlocked. 

Why should it be? 

None are expecting

None or, 

Me…

Pyna edges mutely through the partially open door, discreetly pressing it shut behind her.

The chamber within is all soft angles and roundness. 

Plastered with bright motifs of blossoms and bucolic hills, bringing to mind notions of ample fruitfulness. 

Richly soil-dark now, but for a single frost-light, emitting a placid pale radiance, set upon a low, rare blackwood table. 

Nearby is a wide, silken bed and a sistering bassinet, all opulent in configuration. 

Pyna stops, still as a stone-thing.

With inhuman faculty, she imbibes every peculiarity of the voluptuous chamber. 

Her gaze at last alighting upon the bassinet, she moves with apparitional alacrity, in the wink of an eye-lash, to stand over its tiny, slumbering occupant. 

She can feel the infant child’s near hummingbird-swift pitter-patter heart.

Oooh, sooo

Sssweet.

Pyna’s eyes wide and wondering, rubious lips slightly parted. 

Daintily she reaches in and brushes the child’s peach-warm cheek, who stirs and murmurs but does not awaken.

The redolence of its newborn flesh is perilously intoxicating.

So you

Are the Jewel 

In the Cradle…

Reaching in, and under the bundle of blankets and swaddling clothes, Pyna delicately plucks the wrapped little creature out, and easily up into the crook of her cradling arms.

Do you see?

My mother named me Pyna… 

Do you like lullabies? She taught me one, or two…

Something like wispy regret reaches out and grasps at her, but only fleetingly does it find any purchase.

Do you know?

Never aught

Of my own.

And so, as Pyna coos and fusses quietly over the still slumbering little one, so enrapt in the infant, and her own ruminations is she, that the noiselessly opening door briefly escapes her regard.

There is the awareness of a sudden, fearful intake of breath from behind, before Pyna is able to fully take measure of, or rue her carelessness. 

Swiftly but gently she sets the child back to rest in its bassinet, and then turns with unnerving smoothness.

A plump young woman in a servant’s gown, the hues of House Joon. 

A head taller than Pyna, with apple-red, round cheeks and wide, lovely dark eyes. Her face at first a mask of mixed anger, perplexity and fear, then something else more unspeakable, gazing on Pyna’s odd countenance.

Pyna can feel the woman’s horror rise then, as a tactile, palpable wave, cresting and washing over her.

An intake of breath upon the sharp and tragical border of a scream.

Within the space of a heartbeat, Pyna stands quite suddenly there, a feral thing, within a handsbreadth of the young woman.

Her small, cold hands, unyielding as marble and yet supple as a newborn’s belly-skin. 

One presses swiftly against the woman’s mouth, as the other curls about her throat, stopping the rising alarum, with a soft, graceful savagery. Her face, a beastly mask.

A bare-toed kick, and the door shuts lightly with a click.

I see? I do…

You are the suckling-nurse

So fatty and fresh and

Pretty

Despite Pyna’s waifish, doll-delicate seeming frame. Her uncanny strength is a monstrousness too great for the young woman. The wet-nurse's eyes now dark pools of helpless indignation and hopeless dread.

Pyna’s tempest of ferocity soon weakens, her features softening into a pensive smile. 

Eyes like cracked-glass, brim-full of an indefinable and tangled longing. 

Whist…

Shhh

Just a little, dear

I will not take it all

Do not fear

And so she did, as Nimblethorne taught her, decades ago.

Reaching out, then slowing the heart with every stolen rivulet, unto a deep and helpless sleep. 

Within a few breathless moments, the wet-nurse is sprawled senseless upon the sumptuous bed. 

Limbs akimbo like a drunken scarecrow, Pyna breathing against her breast.

She disentangles herself quickly with a soundless sigh.

Oooh, sooo

Sssweet.

She then returns her attention to the bassinet.

Now

I have been

Foolish.

From out a hidden, and guarded pocket of her robe, she produces a diminutive, empty ampoule of oily glass.

With a gentle prick of her fingernail, she draws an incarnadine drop, or two from the infant child’s lip. Catching them up, into the frangible, glistering receptacle.

The infant stirs fitfully, but doesn’t wake.

Then with a quick, matronly kiss upon the little one’s brow, Pyna is gone from the now glumly silent chamber.

A specter dissolved into the dark.