Pyna twisted and kicked. Tore and pulled. As the tenebrous mass of clotted, lurid obscenities bore her deeper into the lightless reaches of the Great Lower Sea’s gloomy, and brinish womb.

Her wheaty locks blooming beneath the murky waters, like that of a pale, sarsenet anemone.

Thick

Thick like

Plague rats and

Porridge vats…

Was her tempest of furious thoughts, as her eerie and refulgent eyes pierced the oily water’s oddly striated layers of salty obscurity.

She had slipped her Innulian blade safely back into its hidden sheathe beneath her robes. 

As the stygian, sluggish salinity of the sea proved only to be an impediment to her bladecraft.

I have no

Breath… 

The Red Weaver, would 

Have known

This

Why?

Something vile and tumescent, amidst the hodge-podge of vileness and tumescence, circled around Pyna’s upper-arm and torso in an iron-vice grip.

Like a beast, she tore it away with her teeth alone, spitting bitter filth. 

Then crushed, with her other hand to a further foul ruin what might have once been a mortal face, long lost to putrescence and shapelessness.  

So many.

A mountain of

Heaviness…

Still she sank and struggled and ripped and ravaged.

Still, they bore her deeper into the fathomless black of the Northern Rankles.

As she twisted and grappled, she peered down, down…

There, nearly obscured by the darkness swirling below, winked tongues of fire and lazy, molten steaming flows.

The deep skirts, and secret roots of the reaching fire-mounts.

Would they

Burn me?

In the

Deep?

Pyna laughed soundlessly, through the brine. 

The notion of being borne down to the immeasurable bottom, and made a mucky ash by this overbearing mass of slimy mortification, pricked her with a rueful delight.

I will join them then

In shapeless

Softness…

As she ruminated upon this unpleasantness, something more distinct quite suddenly snatched at her ankle.

Strings of razor-edged keenness sinking, and cutting into her marmoreal skin. Wrenching her carelessly and with little kindness from out of the animate, boney mire that crushed and enfolded her.

Pyna cried out voicelessly as a lacerating fire tore through her leg.

A flicker of something carnivorous, and grimly osseous in shape coiled, and wormed from out the edge of her gaze.

A monstrousness that glowed with the sickly illumination of ghostlight.

It shook her mercilessly, as a cruel child would a toy fashioned of rags and patches.

And something else.

Something unlikely, which clung to its rivelled and nearly fleshless and shredded flank. 

That thrust and stabbed madly, and blindly - to spite the languorous, syrupy wash - with a flashing long-knife. Leaving a febrile trail of bubbling breath in its wake.

Pyna blinked in startlement.

Umin…