He awoke convulsively, with the cresting roar of reverberating surf filling his ears.
The weight of the Great Lower Sea’s torpid, black waters crushing his breast from within.
Umin rolled over once again, and vomited a sickly, ropy stream of coal-dark, salty filth. His fingers clutching for purchase in the fine, ebony sand of the nameless shore. Gasping, coughing, spitting.
Sweet, foolish
Boy
I may breathe
Yet I
Have no
Breath.
Pyna sat cross-legged, an arm’s length away upon a low, and flat chalky slab of stone. Her legs concealed by the folds of her now somewhat tattered, ink-dark sea-robes.
Umin’s frost-light rested upon her knee. Its diminutive, snow-wan oval shedding an aureole of cold illumination across the leaden, lapping shoreline and its gleaming, onyx sand-piles.
You do not
Swim so
Well.
Sweetly mocking. Her cadaverous lips arched into a minikin, smiling bow.
She bent close, and brushed his cheek with a cold, gentle finger.
“No, not without breath I don’t.”
No longer coughing and gasping, he lay upon his back, and drew in a slow, supple suspiration.
His gaze moved across the cimmerian vault overhead. Distant sparks of unknown provenance, flicked across the face of the immeasurable grotto high, high above.
Umin closed his eyes.
“What is this place? These shores…
How long? How far?”
He sat up then and blinked. Peering beyond Pyna at the featureless black plain of onyx-ebony sand that stretched out behind her.
Beyond, to the angry glowing feet of several marching fire-mounts. Ponderous, molten stone-blood winking and churning, and sparking. Their rippled flows, visible even at considerable remove.
Who can say?
The beast
Pulled us
Far, across
The waves
Unto this
Place…
Umin studied Pyna.
He frowned. Something in her exceptional sallowness troubled him.
Her lips had lost all their odd, cardinal suppleness. She seemed ever less fleshly and more marmoreal, more spectral.
Her mask of perennial placidity, thin and skewed.
Something feral poking, from beneath.
Something perilous, and poorly leashed.
“I fear for Lord Emberbole. His crew…
The red weaver. That was not Eikoon…”
Pyna stood up soundlessly, like a loose-limbed doll unfolding itself.
So many
Mysteries.
Umin licked his lips.
“Your wounds?” He waved a hand, gently at the sea-robes that swaddled and concealed her limbs.
She studied him sidelong for a moment, like a measuring magpie, before shortly lifting her hem.
Umin grimaced at the ragged, fleshless tear that stretched from Pyna’s ankle to below her knee.
There was her bright bone peeking, and uncanny skin ripped but exsanguinate, like something wrought of pale stone.
He peered up at her, unsettling ideas taking shape along the periphery.
“You thirst…”
Only her cracked-glass eerie eyes, within the hollows of her porcelain mask flicked and found him, flinty and carnivorous.
Yes
No…
It matters, so little
Though.
“You must…”
No
I must
Not.
“Ere it claims you.
And then it will claim me.
There will be no choosing then.”
Pyna turned away from him towards the sluggish and sable waterline. Still as statuary.
He watched her study the enwombing darkness.
She lifted her hands to touch her face and hair, murmuring delicate words Umin couldn’t hear.
Within the space between a breath, she was then simply there.
Kneeling in the onyx-black sands before him.
Umin blinked, startled.
Scrambling back thoughtlessly, a few handsbreadth.
Pyna’s face was a mask of indecipherable porcelain, yet her eyes were effulgent and frightening.
Do you see?
Shut your
Eyes for
Me.
Umin breathed an uncertain sigh, closing his eyes.
He could feel her fingers walk gingerly the length of his arm.
His heart, an unsteady drum from out the depths of his ears.
She plucked up the cloth of his battered sea-robe’s sleeve reverently.
Her corpse-gelid fingers gliding, searching, pressing against the skin of his bare forearm, as his blood thrummed behind the darkness of his eyelids.
Soon, there was an abrupt, needle-point pain followed by what sounded akin to a receding tide, from behind the veil of his eyes.
A sweet and horrible copper flame threaded outwards, and filled every artery and vein.
Dream, dream…
Pyna’s feathery voice reverberated, from everywhere and nowhere, as he tumbled down.
Umin dreamed…
He lay suspended between two achromatic seas that flowed, one above and one below. There was no sky, no land.
Such peace, such heart’s ease.
He lay in this middle-space for a measure unmeasured, as the seas rolled and soothed…
There was something though, that needled at his conscience. Something that bobbed and bobbled like an unhomed wine-cork within the periphery of his eye.
As this something approached, carried by the waves of the lower sea, his dreaming gorge rose and he struggled to pull away.
There, between wavelets, rode the addled, feculent head of his old companion Ure. Which grinned from behind lipless black teeth, and gouged pits where once were eyes.
Disgust and fear pummeled him, as the apparition’s mouth worked to form a whisper, but only yielded up a string of foul seafoam.
Ppp… Ppp… Ppa… Ggo…
Umin cried out.
He blinked.
The syrupy rolling of the Great Lower Sea’s dense wash once more filled his ears.
He felt a cottony weariness, that weighed both heavy and light.
Perhaps
I took
A touch
Too much.
A hint of wry humour in the honey of Pyna’s voice.
His head rested upon the lap of her crossed legs. Her sea-robes smelling salt-brackish.
And yet, she herself smelled of nothing.
Her fingers, now oddly warm and supple, tangled gently with the unwashed curls matted to his brow.
She peered down at him with a languorous half-bow smile. Her lips once more rubious.
Skin, now touched by a pale pink heat that gleamed warmly from within.
My esurient
Leaf-eater…
You truly
Do
Taste of
Sweet-grass.
We will rest
Awhile then
We will walk.
I think…
I have felt, a thing
Along the
Shore.
