Umin found himself suspended. 

Pendant and bodiless, somewhere Between. Then rushing through pale, rarefied cloudscapes.

The brumous descent soon unfolded above a sprawling map, far below.

No, it was a city. The Great City…

The imperishable bastion of the Upper Houses.

Umin recognized the nighted Opal Quarter, as he fell heedlessly towards its hurly-burly and hodge-podge of tangled architectures. 

Unnumbered points of lantern and candle-fire at a distance, which reminded him of the Gate of Candles.

There was no fear as he swept across, and through the manifold structures and spires. 

Alighting at last within a high, secret place of ample curtain-cascades and mellow, fragrant link-fire; honeyed candle-spill and pungent herb gardens, blended with an inexpressible alchemical oddness.

Fleshless and formless in this place, Umin realized that the sensations he was foundering in were Pyna’s inhumanly luminous recollections. Crystal, set against the muck of his own memories.

He floated through some manner of gallery, overbrimming with hanging glass plates of every conceivable shape. Each framing a curious, and nearly singular blot of radiating darkness.

Pyna’s memories provided no illumination as to what this vast picture-wall represented. 

Perhaps she concealed it from him.

Perhaps it simply wasn’t important. 

Instead, he was ushered along in this spectral dreamstate, into an adjacent chamber ablaze with the amber-hued glow of a hundred, rolled honeycomb candlesticks.

Two figures soon emerged, sinuous from the effulgent candle-glow.

Umin roundly recognized Pyna, swaddled in her heart-blood incarnadine weaver’s accoutrement. 

Reclining in a manner bonelessly restful, upon the black sumptuousness of a low, velvety couch. 

Her long mane draped, a milky, silken stream, leonine and flowing loose.

Though her mien and carriage were familiar to him, in their porcelain changelessness. There was an air of youthfulness that hung upon this rendition that had emerged from her recollections. 

The flavour of a fledgling, still fresh to the Synods of Old Night.

The other figure, which reclined opposite her upon a similarly low and luxuriant settee, was terrifying, in his unsettlingly alien demeanor.

Lank and willowy tall, his precisely too angular features albino to the extent of translucency. 

Sharp, affable features. 

Which might have seemed urbane when otherwise painted upon the face of any common man, were here radiant and ghastly.

Umin could feel the dry, suffocating weight of his antiquity. 

To peer too closely between the smiling wrinkles and folds. Into those landscapes of Forever, which unfurled within the wells of his oddly flecked eyes, was to yield to lunacy.

Umin sought to pull away from those weird, plumbless orbs. Fearful of their regard.

But he had no control of himself in this place. Swept along by the tide of Pyna’s venerable recollections.

“Perhaps, simple breath and words are best. ”

The figure’s voice was genteel, and measured.

That of a consummate actor, intimately projecting from a stage.

Umin apprehended the maelstrom of Pyna’s emotions. Or perhaps, she allowed him this glimpse of her inner nakedness. 

Neither quite brother nor lover, this odd companion.

Their intimacy was born of some red, and fathomless inhumanity. 

A tenebrous carnality that wove them together.

But above those underpinnings, Pyna felt a deep and very human affection towards this uncanny personage.

“It begins, as it does so oft, with a misbegotten song. 

A prayer, a whisper. 

A curl of paper…”