Pyna blinked abruptly, and birdlike, startled.
As with a shout, Umin tore himself away from her touch.
Her cracked-glass gaze, wide and ablaze.
Oh…
That was
Unforeseen.
Umin rolled away.
Retching sourly into the stark, obsidian-dark sand-piles.
“How…
Could he see?”
He mouthed between gasps.
The occulted fathoms of Nimblethorne’s infandous gaze, a sunbright stain across his memory.
He wondered briefly how Pyna could have endured such depths…
Pyna offered no answer.
While her wide aqueous-odd eyes peered thoughtfully into some secret middle-distance.
A milky little finger pressed to her softly pursed lips.
Curious
I
Will think
On
This
She stood then, a coal-petaled flower unfolding.
And peered out along the saline-sluggish wash and wending black shore, sniffing at the listless air.
I smell
Them
There
A short
Repair
Now
Umin pulled himself up and out of the obsidian-sand, spitting black, glassy grit.
“Smell what? Who?
All I smell is salt and burnt stone. It's like a brick-works.”
Pyna’s replying smile was sweetly wry.
From
Near or
Far
I would
Think
You should
Know a
Reaver’s
Stink.
“Brigands?
Corsairs of the Great Lower Sea?
If we had something to bargain…”
Umin frowned with a mingle of thin hope and heavy consternation.
Pyna turned and continued her apparitional drift down the aphotic shoreline.
Her naked, ghastly-pale toes, leaving no trace against the gritty jumble of jet particulate.
Well
We will
See
For nearly a bell longer they followed the inky and featureless strand.
Before Pyna led them at a gentle angle inland, towards a lonely pile of looming dune-shadows that arose some distance ahead. As though they had burgeoned like something fungal, from out the otherwise iron-pan flat ebony plains.
Still, upon their left hand, the distant fire-mounts marched, and smouldered against the ever unbreachable dusk of the engirding Below.
Brooding, belching black and bloody. Sulfurous yellows staining their wide, molten paws.
Outwards, for at least a league.
Another half-bell passed, before they came to the foot of the nearer, impending sand-pile, its slope gentle at first. then sharply sudden, ascending into the black above. Stygian salt and silt streamers disquietingly soundless, poured in ribbony runnels down its grainy flank.
Umin’s frost-light wavered, a bright coldness across the thickening, glassy particulate. As the pair slowly ascended the nearer dune-face.
His boots sank to the cuff and sometimes to the knee, leaving him struggling to keep pace with the ethereal Pyna. Though she paused often, to hang like a ghostly doll in the darkness.
Stopping again to sit and sip from his canteen, Pyna drifted close to his ear, whispering.
Can you?
Hear
Above us
Then below
A
Shallow
Clamour.
Indeed, there was something of a distant hurley-burly.
Umin could discern sounds cavernous and leaden. Seemingly made heavy by the perpetual gloom.
Come
To the
Crest there
We
Will rest
And
See
She stood, and quiet as a streaming fog, flitted up the remaining slope like a shred of impatient shadow.
Umin replaced his canteen and sighed, turning to stand, stumble and crawl up the narrowing length of the dune-face at last to where Pyna lay, just below the crest. Observing him with an incomprehensible expression.
She had pulled her cowl up in order to conceal her wan locks. So that only her smooth and alabaster face alone floated like a terrifying, and bodiless corpse-candle against the scrim of unending night.
As he crawled up beside her, she reached out to lay her yet distempering warm fingers, gently over his palmed frost-light.
The perpetual murk in reply, immediately rolled down to enfold them in its concealing creases.
Hushhh…
Look
You.
Umin crawled a few handsbreadth higher in the dark, until his head broke above the looming, black sand-crest.
Below, perhaps by two-hundred paces, there opened a sheltered cove, which pressed against the sharply descending dune-skirt.
Wherein bloomed pockets of familiar frost-light, and the shifting, oily smoke of a single tepid fire.
A lonesome point of orange warmth woven amongst blots of cold, abbreviated radiance.
Figures moved to and fro across an apparent encampment.
Ample and common sea-robes, concealing features and softening the sound of all motion.
Voices hushed and temperate.
Even the pulling of oiled ropes, and the lapping of the Great Lower Sea’s briny black wash beyond, seemed muted and watchful.
A number of the figures were gingerly hauling compact sea-chests, and wax-cloth swaddled, shapeless wares from out the narrow belly of a beetle-shellacked longboat. Black and glistering as the waters upon which it languorously lolled.
Umin’s gaze lifted to where a mid-size Droon rode at anchor beyond the scalloped confines of the small inlet. Sea-lanterns shuttered and illumination low.
All told, he counted perhaps a score of shore-bound bustling reavers.
Not accounting for any secreted sentries, who may have lurked along the lightless periphery of the encampment…
Umin turned and slid back down the short distance to where Pyna watched him with her ever vexingly odd eyes.
Sending rivulets of glistering onyx particulate running past into the inscrutable dusk below.
“A score at least. Perhaps more, hidden…
Too many.
I do wonder why they are here.
There would seem to be nothing in this place, beyond grit and burnt stone."
Pyna studied him sidelong with the mien of a curious magpie.
“The Corsairs have never bowed to the Gate of Candles.
They are not like the Guilds. Unbound…
We are nearly naked. What have we to offer?
I believe-”
I
Myself or
Rather
Something of
Father…
Umin quietly cleared his throat and knit his brow.
His head-shake, a wordless question.
Internally, he roiled. Once more feeling unmoored.
Pyna paused as if to listen.
Peering up into the great lightless vault above.
The odd sparks of yet unknown provenance, still dancing into and out of the everlasting blackness, far, far overhead.
She sniffed at the salty, baked-stone stillness of the air.
I think
There
Is one
Among them
I know.
An
Unquiet
Soul…
Pyna smiled, sweet as a baneful honey-drip.
And reached out playfully with a wan finger to tap at the tip, of Umin’s nose.
My
Sweetling
Fellow
Let us be
Bold and
Make
Our
Hellos.
