In the end, Pyna very nearly scoffed.

And would have drifted back to her high and refulgent manor, had Elshad not pleaded the peculiar nature of his need…

Listening to his entreaty, she felt caught in the unquiet commingle of old, rankling memory. And a heedless anticipation that is felt by every unfettered vagabond.

Pyna agreed to the journey, but with no mean measure of trepidation.

Elshad would have provided her with a retinue to bear her North. Resplendent, and fit enough for any scion of the Upper Houses.

He appeared to care little about the extent to which rumours would foment along the trail of any such train.

Pyna, however, had other notions.

Do not

Mock

I will

Walk the

Way on

My

Own

She bid her Father farewell and returned - brim-full of sleepy bestirrings - to her refuge, as the twin moons, Fiin the Frostshorn and Ikrit the Cinnabar, sat at the burning edge of dawn.

It could be said that Pyna was a parsimonious traveller.

Perennially barefoot, and with little other than her Innulian blade, crimson Weaver’s attire, and a wimple and veil tucked into a voluminous pocket beneath her coal-dark, pleated robes.

With her high manor locked and barred, she set out early the following dusk.

Descending into the Cellars, by way of clandestine closets.

She had no intention of moving with any greatly inhuman haste, if no such particular need should arise.

Within a bell, she had secretly traversed the length of the Opal Quarter. Emerging just beyond its confining walls and out, into the mercantile Mid-Wells, near the black basalt Bridge of Hinds. 

Its lanes, broad, well-swept and bright with high-lanterns of assiduously polished brass and iron.

Crossing the lightly trafficked nighttime span like a fleshless spirit, she paused on the other side beneath the long, sharp night-shadow of the Spire of Clioh. 

Which sat astride the border between the hurly-burly of the ancient Opal Quarter, and the more healthily endowed Mid-Wells.

Here Pyna dined briefly upon a ruddy-faced young wagoneer in the sweet straw-piles of his wain. 

Feeling flush, and bright again with a human heat, she left him beneath the disheveled straw. 

Confounded, and slumbering.  

Onwards, she pointedly avoided other passersby, and the scrutiny of occasional paired watchmen, before exiting through the broad and sleepy Fourth Gate, and at last out onto the beaten limestone flags of the Pale March. 

Two mountain ranges of venerable stone bound the Great City, and its webbed, unruly sprawl upon two flanks, bent like colossal, broken crescents which stretched from north to south.

To the distant west rose the toothy, marching Mounts of Senem. 

Scraggly crags with sharp, heavily verdant slopes.

And to the nearer east, the Spines of Tiul, of a not dissimilarly horny and cavicorn composition. 

Their nighted limestone and granite folds, gleaming rust and silver beneath the twin moons. 

Between these two ranges, also from north to south, threaded the Pale March.

The Great Road. A sallow, stone artery that skirted the Great City. Extending innumerable veins that bore travellers from across all horizons. 

From a concealing shadow beneath the Fourth Gate, Pyna gazed northwards towards the distant pass that opened between the nimbose stone ranges, and their craggly spires. 

She studied the road as it wended between spotty inns and roadhouses.

Northwards, through a distant patchwork of senescent orchards, unkempt hamlets and bare, rolling wheatfields that spread to the roots of the sharply sloping mountainscapes.

Over one-hundered and twenty leagues beyond the Pass of Omun - at least fifteen days of arduous travel on horseback - where the Pale March at last faded into a stony wagon-rut, there burgeoned the woodlands of Pirn, and their spreading birchwood skirts.

Pyna peered upwards at the patchy cloud-wrack which scudded across the supernal, early winter stars above. 

There would already be a dusting of snow, she mused, blanketing her old, and nearly unremembered home… 

She spent several nights drifting. 

A secret, sable apparition. Across frost-burned orchards, atrous woodlots, and cold, stubbled fields.

Far abreast of the Pale March and its sparse, nighttime travellers. 

As the threatening edge of dawn cascaded across the mountain slopes, and the twin moons sank, Pyna sought out in particular, mouldering sepulchres and cemeteries. 

Where she would lay uncaring and comfortable, amongst the gelid bones and rags of someone's fenowed ancestors, while the spiteful sun rolled across the sky.

Otherwise, beneath the floorboards of abandoned cots, or derelict cellars and farmhouses.

At very worst, she would dig like a brute with little alabaster fingers through the hard, winter earth to lay in repose deep under sleepy, black soil. 

Filth found no purchase against her porcellanous skin. Upon waking at dusk, she shook off the frosty dust like a hound.

Pyna found this peaceful, solitudinous manner of sojourn to be pleasing. 

The endless press and crackle of frost against her naked toes soothing.

And so she persisted in this manner for many nights across many leagues, through the mountain Pass of Omun, and north across the rolling hills, past scattered hamlets, and the black winter woods beyond.

When her thirst inescapably menaced, she was content to take deer, or any forest-bound beasts.

Still, it was at a crossroads, hard by the indistinct hamlet of Drywell. 

Nearly fifty leagues north of the Great City where Pyna came upon the wrack of an old man. 

Crumpled, his knotty spine slouched against a low plinth of snow-dusted, dark granite.

Limbs and body aflame with disease, he had come alone to witness the unfolding of his final dawn.

Pyna’s heart was sore. 

So she sat with him awhile and listened to his whispered stories. Then helped to usher him into the Outside with a gentle touch and warm, mellow dreams.

The folk of Drywell found him that morning, with his bloodless lips bent into a sweetly boyish smile.

And thus for over a single turning of the twin moons did Pyna journey north. A solivagant phantom.

Until the broader deciduous tree-scapes of the south yielded to wiry evergreens and lean poplars, and the sky was often filled with downy snowfall. 

Before long the Pale March did indeed become little more than a mucky, snow-choked wagon-rut.

Within the depths of her thirty-fourth night of travel. Pyna paused briefly upon the rising crest of a gleaming snowdrift, and studied the thickening birchwood that opened before her.

The snows had briefly ceased to tumble, and the cloudscapes above had opened to a panoply of cold, distant stars.

Something indefinable in the odour of the birch and their prettily-pale paper-skins. How their leafless boughs rose up from the shapes of familiar dells, told her that she had come home…

An unquiet knot in her belly reflected that apprehension. 

She wondered if all that she had once known still persisted upon the verge of this venerable, and weird woodland.

Pyna shut her eyes and stood, still as statuary, for a long while, simply remembering. 

Listening to the creaking, nighttime winter woods and its hidden, nocturnal inhabitants. 

Thinking of sunbright autumn fallows of long ago.

Over the passage of centuries the land had changed. However she found carved, hoary way-markers here and there that set her upon familiar pathways.

Fields and orchards had long vanished, reclaimed by the forest. Still, there lingered certain shapes when imposed upon her memories that lead her towards a destination which she dreaded, and pined for.

There, a frozen forest marsh. 

Mucky hummocks are all that remain of where a mill may once have stood.

Worn foundations protruded from the yellow winter-grass at the fringe of a sometime mill-pond. 

Pyna thought that those she had known must have departed, or fled long, long ago. 

So few marks of habitation had endured.

A bell passed as she roamed the nearer dells like an unhomed apparition.

Until her naked footfalls, following a fine thread of memory, brought her at last, across a very particular hill. 

Then down into a shallow vale of leaning poplars, blanketed in downy drifts of virgin snow. 

Nothing of her family’s cottage remained. 

Even its humble, stony roots appear to have been swallowed by the forest. 

Pyna stood there for some while, and studied the empty vale, sunken into a reverie. 

Hesitant, her heart a rattling puzzle of irreconcilable shapes.

Though anon, she moved, inhumanly swift as a ghost, towards a knot of thick aspens, beyond where the cottage had once stood.

Here, she plunged her hands into the snow and began to dig. 

Before long a small and grey, oblong and upright granite marker emerged from beneath the drifts.

Father…

Then, unexpectedly, a similar stone abreast. As begrimed with lichen and moss as the first.

Leaning, and broken, like a careworn tooth.

She gingerly pulled back the frosty moss, and scaled lichen to reveal another roughly chiseled name. 

Mother…

Pyna wrapped her arms about her knees, and laid upon the forgotten graves of her father, and mother as the snow once again began its earthward tumble.

There she wept silently, for her lost self, and a world that had long gone to dust, until the unfolding of dawn.

The following dusk, after she had emerged from a thick tangle of roots and icy soil beneath the aspens. 

Pyna set about cleaning the graves. 

Pulling away the snow and muck and dead grass. The moss and lichen.

Wearied somewhat of the unending cold, and her travel-tainted coal-dark robes, she donned her crimson Weaver’s garnish, and set about the task of building a blazing fire upon the bones of her family’s cottage.

Where she sat and warmed herself - and brooded upon Elshad’s desire - as night deepened, and the twin moons, now high in a cloudless sky, spilled their rust and silver across the snows of the twiggy, leafless and caliginous woods.

If she desired, she could reach out, and apprehend all the nearer denizens of the nocturnal forest.

The little, alien hearts of beast and bird. Slumbering or snuffling in the snow for prey. 

And as she did so, one particular pulse, rapid and heavy, like the beating of a stone against hardwood. Pricked at her attention, as it approached at a lumbering pace, from beyond the birch-topped hillock above the vale.

This was preceded by the ever-familiar sensuality of a copper-sweet odour, that set Pyna’s marmoreal flesh to tingling. 

She stood before the fire, and loosed her Innulian blade from its secret sheathe, before an imposing shadow burst ponderously through the crackling birches and plunged. Then rolled heedlessly down the slope, before coming to a panting tangle in the snow, ten paces ahead.

Pyna blinked curiously, as the bloodied Pirnian Wolf attempted to pluck itself up onto quaking limbs.

Its monstrous jaw snapping at her, before it shuddered, and yielded to wounds and exhaustion. 

Falling back into the snow where it lay, breathing swiftly and shallowly.

Once

I was

Afraid

Night or

Day

Of thee and

Thine

She addressed the fallen wolf, nearly twice her girth, as she drifted with the airy suppleness of a phantom, to within biting distance.

Though it didn’t stir, she reached out, once again. Soothing its burning, pain-wracked conscience, as she kneeled to run her porcelain fingers through its grey, matted, and filthy mane.

Before another figure soon emerged from above, and slid down the snowy incline, with a great deal more grace than the wolf had.

Pyna smiled sweetly at the panting stranger, her fingers still nestled in the wolf’s voluminous fur.

Heavily swathed in animal skins, and ample winter-cloth, he stumbled knee-deep through the drifts, boots crunching. 

Gasping plumes of wan mist.

Oh

Hello…

How 

Like you 

The

Snow?

Fifteen paces away, he stopped to stare dumbly at Pyna. 

Eyes mad with incredulity, weariness, and cold.

She went on, in her mocking sing-song.

I was

Born

Here an

Age

Ago…