“The First Weavers were…

Innocent…”

“They sang for simple things. 

When men and women first bent towards the sky. Standing! Like wheat stalks! No longer snuffling for worms, downcast and beastly in carriage.”

“This was, an aeon ere the First Foundations of the Great City were set down…

And to the South, before those far places were, Unremembered.”

Umin - a substanceless witness enmeshed in Pyna’s recollections - could feel how the apparitional figure’s gaze lay unreadably upon her for a thoughtful breath.

The figure then laughed with the softness of drifting thistledown.

“It is easy to forget, how very, very young you are, Pyna…” 

“They wrought their first, petty city-states abreast of sand to South, and snow to North. 

There was intercourse with the Innulians, who they are both like and unlike, in shape and temperament. 

Long before that people descended into the Below.”

“And so, men and women waxed and waned for an age, or two. Blood, love, birth, death, war… 

These ever timeless refrains. 

Unshapen, and beautiful!

But this is common, and unimportant. 

Only a theatre; the scrim upon which the Paper God painted itself.”

“In time, between the ziggurats of the Unremembered South, and the meagre, bucolic hamlets of the North, there wandered wide, a young weaver of incomparable faculty. Of great craft. At first, she did not see her capacity.

Her only desire, to refine her minstrelsy. Her poetry. Her dance and her laughter. At first…”

“At first…”

“Sufa, of Nurooln. 

Daughter to honey-skinned papyrus-cutters, who clove to the marshes of the nearer, Unremembered South.”

“We know her fate now. 

How she became the First Concubine. The greater, amongst the innumerable lesser, to the Paper God.

It is her path, thereto that is mysterious, and instructive all the same.

Which shows to us, the shape of our own cradle…”

The figure, who Umin now understood to be Nimblethorne. 

His eerie eyes mockingly a’crinkle as he cupped his slim cream-pale hands, to mimic the placid back and forth of a bassinet. 

Umin felt Pyna’s disquieted smile, like an uncertain sunburst across brewing cloudscapes.

“It was once-upon-a-time then, that the young Sufa’s minstrelsy carried her some leagues beyond the fresh-faced city-states of the Nearer North.” 

“By conveyance of caravan, beast of burden or as a lonely barefoot vagabond. Ever she sought for that restless something, which bred her unsettling wanderlust.” 

“Soon, she found herself, lonesome along the scalloped skirts of a whispering birchwood. A forest that would in time know the deep weight of the Paper God’s weirdness. It would come to be known by the name of Pirn…”

“The woodland of Pirn…”

“It had no name in the age of Sufa’s youth. It was simply a cold and dark frontier against the ice of the Deeper North. A land of solitary woodcutters, hunters, charcoal makers.

The redoubt to petty thieves and bands of starving brigands.”

“It was the peculiar company of this last manner of folk into which Sufa swiftly fell.

As a minstrel is welcomed into every society! A keeper of manifold custom!

A voice with a warming song, to sweeten a meagre fire against the hungry night…

And Sufa was otherwise cunning. 

And through the art of her harping. Her song and sporting, she drew naturally from the deep wellspring of her hidden faculties... - She was not yet a weaver - To seduce and placate any who might wish upon her malice.”

“This, singular band of petty miscreants. She would observe from a hidden place their often wretched exertions. Their larcenous efforts ending mostly in bloody routs.

They seemed an odd band of oafs and idiots. 

It was no wonder to her why they starved…”

“And yet, she lingered!

Keeping company for nearly a full turning of the moons. Sharing in their thin fare and forage. 

Singing sweet and stitching her tales.

As it wasn’t these poor souls that kept her, but what they kept in their midst…”

“Two would bear it, always, from camp to camp. A black-iron cage, wrapped in ragged, foul cloth. 

Half a grown man’s height and two handsbreadth in width.

Their stringy, toothless headsman, would spend long hours whispering to something within. Never was the cloth parted or removed.”

“Its inexplicable purpose and presence, bewitched Sufa. 

It was an empty space to her senses. 

From it, she felt, and apprehended nothing. 

It was frightening…”

“Another day drew down, and as dusk once more crawled across the windy woodscape.

Sufa walked alone, the skirts of stretching birch-shadows, scratching with her knife where the tangled root-barrows, like pale worms roped. Where dusk was thickest.

But had not yet bloomed into night…

She had sometime learned of a peculiar moss that burgeoned, in this middle-space. Lived, and perished in the twilight-span of thickening darkness. 

A minikin, bone-wan fruit, no larger than a mote of dust.”

“With some sweet fortune and timeliness, she harvested a quarter-thimble of its frost-thin tracery.

Sufficient to spice a simple root-porridge…

It was not long before the troupe of idiot brigands lay dumb, and wide-eyed before their meagre fires. 

Peering into the phantasms born from their own hearts. 

Spilling seed, baying like beasts or gnawing upon stones…”

“Sufa had left her portion of porridge to grow cold, having chewed only upon a wrinkled onion.

Alone now, amongst blind madmen, her heart clenching with terror, and something more seductive, approached the rag-bound black-iron cage…”

“Its bindings were old, greasy and reeked of something rotten and sweet. Like a fig left to bloat.”

“With unsteady fingers, she parted the foul cerement, ribbon by ribbon, fold by addled fold. 

She could hear something therein bestir. A breath…”

“Beside her the headsman mewled, crawled and snuffled naked against the hard earth, chewing on birch-roots like a sow.”

“A final shred of cloth tumbled away. 

At first Sufa could see only a blot of obsidian softness, bent to the center of the cage. Then it unfolded, like an arachnid.

She stepped away in silence,  fingers pressed to lips.”

“Therein, a long-faced, char-fleshed simian-seeming creature, stretched slowly upright. 

With golden eyes, like an ewe, that gazed into spaces that should not be seen…”

“It smiled at her, its mouth an ‘O’ of furrowed toothlessness.

Then spoke, wordlessly, as though from behind her eyes.

‘Weaver. I will teach thee how to sing…

In kind, for only a little thing…’ Its words, touching and tingling.

‘I am no weaver. And I know how to sing. What are you?’”

“Sufa palpitated, with horror and relish.”

“‘Ikiish…’ Replied the creature. Again tonguelessly, from within the very canals of her ears.”

“‘I am a minstrel. What can you teach me? Thou withered thing. Prove to me…‘ She mocked as she trembled.”

“And so, this Ikiish sang for her. And so, for the first time in her young life, did Sufa truly swoon…”

Pyna wrinkled her nose.

Why

Is song

Or

Poetry

Ever at

Root of

Calamity.

Nimblethorne laughed, earthy and urbane. 

A sudden night-breeze had set the chamber’s candle-fire to baltering drunkenly. The shadows ragged and grotesque in their ambling.

“There is truth in this. For, metaphor underpins, the All…”

Umin watched, a ghostly observer, as Nimblethorne then appeared to pause, and gather his thoughts.

His ancient and eerie eyes then turned, a’gleam with a terrible and bottomless amusement. 

His aspect, a nightmare of bloodless-pale angles.

To pierce the emptiness that was the dreaming Umin, as though he perceived him. 

“And who might you be?”

Umin screamed.