Elsewhere and otherwhiles…
“Bone-eater…”
The tatterdemalion figure stumbled forward through the rustling snow-piles, reeking of necrosis and pine-sap.
Then leveled an arrow at Pyna.
His quaking short-bow drawn taut with frost-tainted fingers.
No
I am
Not
Thy heart
Is full of
Cold
She nosed the air, tasting it like something unabashedly carnivorous.
Little porcelain fingers caressing the gently expiring Pirnian Wolf’s matted mane.
And
Thy limb
Rot
You are
Feverish
His wet and tormented gaze wandered from Pyna’s unsettlingly still expression, to the wolf then back again.
“It’s dying…” A crackling whisper, full of a prickly frost.
It is…
Though
Do you
Know?
I may forfend
This
If it
Pleases me to
Do
So
Pyna cocked her head slowly, observing the landscape of the hunter’s weather-bitten face.
The storm of emotions that pulled, and puckered the skin rounding his watery eye-sockets.
“You would deny-” He crackled.
Deny thee
What…
Malice?
Meat?
Blood?
Lust?
Anger turned his aspect into a craggy, and wolfish mask.
“Justice…”
Pyna studied him silently for the space between two heartbeats, then reached out…
Brushing against his conscience, a soundless thief.
Purloining a pattern of shallow-rooted memories.
Remembered portraits perverted by horror. Curdled by loss.
The wolf’s razor-jaw, a common refrain, touched them all.
She let her gaze fall away from the man’s baffled and angry eyes, to alight upon the creature that lay beneath the press of her fingers. Its breath, shallow and rasping.
Slowly, and with an expression akin to piety, Pyna brought her hands up soothingly to its rattling throat.
Shhh…
Time
It seems
To
Dream
She whispered into its mangy and stinking fur.
Her heart ached. For this terrible creature that had roamed these weird woodlands of Pirn for a thousand, upon a thousand years.
Both of them, in their own manner, Children of the Paper God.
By means of her peculiar faculties, she slowed its heart to a mere tremulousness.
Then pressed her finger through the tissue of its throat, as though it were no more than a waxen paper-screen.
A silent wellspring of blackberry-hued heat followed.
That painted her alabaster hand, and the engirding snow-pile. And perfumed the air with a fulsome, copper-sweet redolence.
Farewell
Old
Monster
Pyna murmured to its departing spirit, as it carried her melancholy away into the unknowable fathoms of the Outside.
Her eyes rose to meet the hunter’s glassy stare.
His arrow still leveled menacingly, although his entire arm presently trembled with the effort to contain its tension.
She held up her hand and tasted the now gelid and lifeless heart’s blood. Deprived of its native heat, she thought it savorless and putrid.
Splaying her slim and minikin fingers, so that he might remark upon the stain.
Here is
Your
Justice
Pyna blinked when he then abruptly collapsed.
Falling with a puff, into the adjacent snow-bank.
Leaving the wolf’s husk to the indifferent ministrations of gently drifting snowfall.
It demanded little effort of Pyna to carry the cold, and senseless hunter back to her modestly blazing hearth.
Here with a gentle sip, and a few incarnadine drips, she drew the illness from his bones, and bound and tended his wounds.
Whispering songs all the while from her lost girlhood. Of an age long fled from the bending, snowbound birchwood.
It was well three bells before dawn.
Pyna sat upon the snow, still as statuary, and watched. Across the crackling fire, as the hunter stirred, his breath brumous against the morning darkness.
She had found a small kettle secreted amongst the disheveled wares of his travel-sack.
So she had gathered up snow-bound milk-bloom. A bluish, sweet-petaled flower that flourished along Pirn’s border-woods, even in the bosom of a most gelid winter.
From this and a handful of snowmelt, she had decocted a liquorice-tangy tea, which percolated and piped pleasantly above the fire.
The hunter rolled slowly, with a grimace and a grunt from his back to his side.
Shaggy, wolfish face towards the blaze.
His umber eyes then opened, fixing calmly upon Pyna as her rubious mouth bent into a little bow-smile.
Sweet as
Old
Memory
Would you
Like some
Tea?
“Who are you…
Bone-eater…” He rasped.
My mother named me Pyna…
Bone
Eater
I
Am
Not.
With the discomfiting silence and smoothness of a phantom, Pyna moved to pour him a fragrant cup.
Into a stony, smooth palm-sized vessel, that she had also unearthed from amongst his raucous belongings.
This she lay a handsbreadth from him upon the snow, before retreating to her rest, opposite the blaze.
Lazy curlicues of fragrant steam twisted into the dark, redolent with the milk-bloom’s soothing sweetness.
The hunter propped himself up gingerly and sat, with a twist of the lip.
He studied the cup wordlessly for a breath before reaching for it. Cradling its heat and sniffing like a suspicious animal.
“So…
You’ve learned how to brew tea.”
Since
Long
Before the
Birth of
Thee.
Pyna mocked.
He sniffed again, then sipped with reluctance, followed by a puff of breath.
A touch of his hardness seemed to momentarily melt away.
Watching Pyna all the while, he reached down with one hand to explore the bound and tended wound upon his leg.
“What a fool am I…” He grated.
Pyna shook her head very slowly. With a wan doll’s discommoding grin.
You are
Practical
“So, you feel that I am indebted, to you…
Mayhap, I should simply slit your gullet, and leave.”
You would
Not
I know
I have
Touched your
Heart…
Eket of
Mirk
“Stolen my reason, you mean.
Wood-witch.” His lip twisted.
All the
Same
“And how, should I repay this. Debt…”
Do you
Know?
Deep within
The
Wood-wold.
The meadow, of
Omoorn…
“That, is a place of fleshy nightmare.
Of grey, things…” He scratched.
Pyna’s uncanny cracked-glass gaze pierced him, from beyond the wavering flame.
Take me
There…
