The simplest truth was that Pyna had grown bored.

That she had wearied of her own voiceless companionship. 

And of the unmoving gallery of lifeless sun-blots that she had for years, endlessly ruminated upon.

Frustrated, and yet at last somewhat reconciled to the spiny notion that Nimblethorne had, unfathomably faded into the vast landscapes of the world.

And when the young Aukrin had come begging on behalf of Father, something below the cold, reticent seas within her breast had warmed.

So she had plucked up a broom and brush, and banished cobweb, filth and dust.

Reveling in the long neglected richness of a common domesticity.

Then filled her high, redolent manor with freshly oiled lamps, and a legion of honey-sweet candlesticks. Their temperate and uncertain amber luminance ushering away all but the most taciturn of shadows.

Through her newly refulgent salons and halls, Pyna once again drifted. 

A ghastly-sensuous apparition fashioned from blood and snow, feeling well pleased with its own resurrection.

The following night, Pyna customarily arose with the twin moons, and once again set the halls and salons ablaze with brass lamps and candle-flame.

She bathed, and perfumed in the stelliferous solarium’s freshly-gleaming mirror-pool - marvelling, as she did unendingly, at the cold creaminess. The supple porcelain strangeness that she had so long ago become - before donning a laundered linen robe, sumptuously pleated and flowing, like a great gown of muted ink and coal. 

Followed by a wimple and veil, of a similarly nighted composition.

Accompanied at last by her horror-forged Innulian blade. 

Its terrible and clandestine presence sheathed comfortingly against her thigh.

As ever, her feet remained bare. 

Soon, Pyna had descended secret stairs, and flitted across hidden cloisters out into the mazily maundering, incongruous and ill-lit lanes and alleys of the nearer Opal Quarter.

Through which she moved with a preternatural haste. 

Unseen and unremarked upon by the region's more penurious inhabitants, like to the breezy passing of a fleshless spirit.

Until she alighted upon the wider, modestly trafficked nighttime lanes and dusky markets of the more prosperous, granite-cobbled Middle and Southern Opal Quarter.

Here Pyna slowed her pace to a graceful, very human stroll. Though one oftentimes punctuated by sudden and capricious pirouettes or a ghostly, drifting dance.

While she recited snatches of quiet poetry, and meaningless sing-song strings of rhyme.

She especially adored the works of the venerable playwright, Kreftin of Offlo, and his buffooneries.

Every line of every work that he had composed, Pyna had committed to memory. 

So that she might silently puppet the role of every player.

Laughing to herself, as she flowed and danced through the gloom, down adumbral and brass-lit laneways, at their drolleries.

Few of the nighttime passersby took any notice of her, as was common in the little hours. 

Those that did, most often pretended not to.

As the Opal Quarter had given rise over the long ages to its own very peculiar myths and bestiaries.

Some would be familiar with her in passing. Or the whisper thereof…

In which case they would have moved swiftly on, fearing her fickle attention.

Some fewer might in truth know who, and what she was…

These latter would presumably, prove to be Guildsmen. 

With whom Pyna had trafficked often enough, across the gulf of centuries. 

The Lower Houses, and their Great Guild offered few to no objections to any, as long as the price demanded was the price paid.

Over a bell had passed, before Pyna’s unhurried progress brought her to a region known as the Trammels.

A collection of three to four storey, eggy-pale plastered, and dark wooden-beamed, not altogether unclean tenements.

Which piled closely and sprawled well over a thousand paces from north to south, creating a narrow-alleyed tangle, not unlike the spread of a fisherman’s net.

Here she paused in stygian stillness, hidden below a beetling, bitumen-stained eave.

Nothing now stirred in this nighted space. The air, a little ruffled, and the nearby plazas unpeopled, but for a distant pair of insouciantly sleepy watchmen, leaning against their long-hooks.

A few thin tin-lanterns creaked mildly against tottering braces. 

Pyna peered up at the collection of narrow and broad tenement windows, and their panes of streaky glass. 

Most yawned black and sleepy, while some few shed a tepid, and precarious tallow-light. 

Of the many hearts secreted therein, most seemed to be at rest.

Convalescence, death-beds and the exertions of lovers filled the spaces between.

A great cacophonous pitter-patter that only she could feel. For a moment she opened herself fully to the succulence of their clammy, percussive symphony.

Then something, for half a heartbeat caught at the corners of her inhumanly sharp attention.

Something fleeting, and intimate…

Pyna smiled to herself. 

With a drop of delight, and a lick of old fear she moved quiet and unseen. Unhurried as a shred of fog, across the abutting plaza, and down a very particular alleyway, which wormed into the heart of the Trammels.

Following a few long turns along the alleys she paused, as still as the adjacent masonry.

For a fleetingly faint odour had tickled her nose. The sensual copper-sweetness of it, certain.

From scent alone Pyna qualified its nature. As neither the consequence of disease nor menses, nor love-play, nor other means. 

This was an effusion that had followed some manner of bitter violence.

She sniffed, and tasted the air like a coursing-hound. 

Following its faint track, she scaled the nearby wall with the grace of a coal-dark arachnid.

Up, to the sloping rooftop in a half-breath, then across to adjacent structures. 

A caliginous apparition leaping and flowing. 

The thin thread of cruel aroma drew her anon, as she expected, exactly to where she had intended to be, if not by a more lofty route.

Peering down from the perch of her rooftop precipice, Pyna noted the presence of a singular sentry, loitering watchfully about a stretch of the unremarkable, narrow alley.

Bedecked in the muted robes and concealing colours of the Lower Houses, he smelled very much like a Guildsman.

A very particular guildsman.

Amused, she doffed her wimple and veil, folding and stowing them away in a voluminous pocket. 

Her long mane flowing freely. 

In a few inhumanly supple motions, she had swung under the soffit and scuttled on all fours, like a beast unbeholden to gravity.

Silently backwards down the wall in the span of a breath. Until she hung, a single naked toe-length above the unwary figure.

Pyna then twisted sideways in a manner frightfully impossible for any common creature, until the length of her long hair gently brushed the cornice of the sentry’s cowl.

Young Aukrin had the presence of mind not to shout, as he adroitly scrambled away from the abrupt, silken entanglement. 

Laughing soundlessly, she dropped the remaining distance with the delicate ease of a tumbling feather.

Young

Aukrin

A sharp exhale from the Young Aukrin as he cast about the quiet alley for any further unexpected presence.

Before following with a deep genuflection. One that seemed over-practiced to Pyna.

“Your Ladyship…”

She could smell the well contained fear below all his wonderful surfaces. 

His heart a shuddering fist against his breast. The deep, rapid pulse which reminded her of his own very particular sweetness…

She reached out with marble-cold little fingers, to brush his arm. 

The gesture was affectionate, but only served to unnerve Aukrin all the more.

You seem

To me

To be a

Favorite of

Father’s

Young Aukrin cleared his throat.

“I was set to lead you, along the way.”

I know

The

Way I

Know it

Well

Without preamble, she pulled upon an unremarkable iron-ring set into the masonry nearby, unfolding a thick, heavy section of stonework.

Young Aukrin watched, his expression carefully flat, as with a single pull, she drew open a door that would otherwise require the effort of two, or even three stout men struggling in concert.

“Very well…” As he unbundled a diminutive frost-light.  

“After you, your Ladyship.”

Pyna smiled, her little rubious bow-smile, and preceded him into the lightlessness beyond.

The Cellar was a shallow, and sprawling catacomb that stretched the length and breadth, just beneath the scabrous and stony skin, of the Opal Quarter.

Its origin was as murky as the First Foundations from which it had been, by all accounts hewn. 

Known points of ingress, and egress were few, and those enviously guarded. Mostly in the name of Guild interests.

Rare stretches opened into the Below. 

And other portions, into terrible mausoleums and galleries, which the Guild had bricked away, fearful of the unspeakable particulars that hoveled therein.

Nimblethorne had, long ago introduced Pyna to this peculiar, wending way beneath. Of course, he would have been intimate with its manifold and furtive pathways.  

She would oftentimes employ its rank corridors, when she desired to traverse the Opal Quarter with singular discretion. Or upon occasions when she wished to descend into the Below…  

After passing another pair of similarly accoutred sentries, just beyond the portal. 

Pyna and the Young Aukrin descended a suffocatingly narrow, neweled spiral stair, which led them sharply into the depths of the Cellar.

About thirty paces down, the stair suddenly ended and opened into a wide chamber. 

Rough sandstone walls lit by the spill of warm link-light. 

Here the copper-sweet trail of scent that Pyna had followed, found its wellspring. 

Here it was cloying, and odious. 

A handful of figures milled about the room.

Including one of immeasurable familiarity, who lingered near a roaring brazier at the heart of the chamber.

Wherein something fleshy and horrible hung from numerous long hooks. 

Its features, obscured at a distance by the effusive brightness shed from the adjacent coals.   

“I could smell you from four hundred paces, dear Daughter…

Very peppery...”

The figure moved with a distempering fluidity to within a few paces of Pyna.

Facing her, by a head taller.

This

Perfume

Pleases

Me

“It becomes you!”

Young Aukrin bowed then, and gracefully withdrew.

Moving quickly back up the winding stair. Pyna watched him melt into the darkness with a soft amusement. 

And a touch of something akin to melancholy.

She turned then in order to study the amicably smiling Elshad.

Unaltered by the passage of so many years.

His eyes, of a depthless smokey obsidian, still grinned perpetually.

His garb, still modest and practical. Bitumen-black and slate gray. 

But for the sheen of that uncommon, silvery pin that was ever at his breast. Which winked, and appeared to twist in the chamber-light.

Hair, raucous and unkempt. Night-dark and roughly shoulder-cropped.

Presence both earthy, and inhumanly spectral.

Terrifying.

Why the

Young

Aukrin

“Was he not a pleasure?

Kind to the eye?”

He

Was

He

Is

“Ahh! And if I had come instead? 

All upon my lonesome?”

Then

You 

Would have

Left upon

Your

Lonesome

Elshad laughed again, warm and urbane.

“You see! I needed something a little sweeter.

Something, to unlace the frost, from my Daughter’s heart…”

The fleshy, suspended thing at the crux of the chamber then mewled, and shifted in its abominable suffering.

Pyna smelled the many layers of its fear. Its blood, sour.

She reached out… 

Her conscience, gingerly brushed against the angry, pulsing ocean of anguish and distress that had drowned its psyche. 

Leaving only the flotsam of a beastly madness.

Very little remained of the man that it was.

A martinet

“The Burning Houses. Always picking and prodding…“ Elshad spoke with a feigned sadness.

A hateful, and familiar coldness then began to creep across Pyna’s inner landscapes.

Her eyes, as flat and unfathomable as that of a woven doll-thing, fixed upon Elshad.

I will

Not brook

This

Cruelty

Father…

Something harrowing and stormy danced across the atrous depths of Elshad’s gaze, but it was swift in passing.

He bowed his head and laughed, a little ruefully.

“My Pyna…

I had forgotten, the great vastidity of your Heart. 

Very well! Yerin! Petrik!”

Two Guildsmen made their way swiftly across the chamber.

“Take the martinet. Have his wounds bound, tended and bathed. Then leave him upon the quays. Breathing, mind you...”

“Of course, Lord Elshad.” The pair then moved off.

Lord

Elshad

Pyna’s nose wrinkled.

Her eyes mocked.

Elshad smiled with a touch of self-deprecation. Followed by a boyish shrug that was jarring, set against his otherwise ghostly mien.

“Well…

We wear the masks that we must.

I am building something, Daughter…

In which you will have a great part.”

Pyna cocked her head. A nonplussed magpie.

“You will need to journey home…”

Home

Here?

Where

How do you

Mean.

Pyna did not think he meant her high manor, refulgent and redolent in the heart of the Opal Quarter.

“To the birchwoods of your birthplace.

Home, to the weird woodlands of Pirn…”