She simply insisted upon a nocturnal sojourn.

Eket balked. 

At the notion of blundering like a brute, through the coal-dark of the cold, and pathless woodlands.

Even bearing a brand or lantern, the way would prove uncertain and perilous.

Travelling thus would also serve to make him a very visible mark to Pirn’s manifold and often strange predators.

Into the company of which he unsettlingly felt that he may have already fallen…

Pyna was unmoved by his misgivings.

She provided him a shadow chasing frost-light, and assured him that she would clear the path of unpleasantness, should any arise.

At first, Eket had little faith that this ghastly-odd, doll-shaped girl-child - alabaster as the frost that gnawed the papery birchwood - should possess any such faculties.  

Still, against all imagining, she had broken the monster with a mere touch…

The Pirnian Wolf, which had brought calamity upon his hamlet for generations.

And then tended to his overripe wounds.

Although unyieldingly mistrustful, it was for these reasons that he felt inclined to honor his debt. 

There was also his wanderlust. 

Something profoundly ineluctable in Eket’s nature demanded ever expanding horizons.

He needed to see and know. 

And it was said that the Omoorn lay at the unfathomable heart of Pirn. Unseeable, and unknowable.

As dawn rounded the branch-tangled sky with a feeble brightness, Pyna informed him perfunctorily that she would return, come dusk. She then vanished, wordlessly into the paling wood.

Eket would spend the morning erecting a hidden camp where he would sleep, brood and proceed to hunt.

He returned under twilight bearing a snow-hare and pheasant. Which he cleaned, prepared and then settled by his small fire to supper; tiny tea-kettle percolating pleasantly.

As the gloaming purpled, then blackened, the supernal cloudscapes above muted the illumination of the twin moons. 

So that the swelling dark beetled ponderous, and pernicious against the meager guard of Eket’s small bloom of wavering fire.

For a few heartbeats, he shut his eyes, and turned his well honed hunter’s senses to the nearer nocturnal landscape. 

Smelling, listening, apprehending the propinquity of sundry nighttime woodland creatures going about their concerns. 

When he opened his eyes again, she was simply there…

A porcelain phantom swaddled in heart-crimson cloth, sitting across the fire from him. 

Her uncanny cracked-glass gaze smiling. Rubious little doll’s lips bent into a softly mocking bow, and drifting mane like a river of silken snow.

As though she had taken shape from the night’s fog, arising from the dark and cold.

He had neither heard, nor smelled, nor felt her approach.

A chill bristled across Eket’s skin that did not proceed from the winter’s inclemency.

Hello…

Her voice was sweet, and spare.

A desultory snow had resumed its soundless, and torpid fall.

Flakes unmelting peppered her cadaverous skin and hair, until she brushed or like a hound, shook them away.

Have you

Rested?

Well?

A spot 

Of

Tea?

A little

Burnt flesh 

And

Bone

Eket, bundled in heavy furs and rough, layered cloth, studied the shimmering thinness of her cardinal robe. 

How it draped, shapelessly. And the nakedness of her feet, indolently stretched out upon the snow.

“The cold…

It doesn’t, trouble you.” He murmured, like rasping gravel.

Oh?

No

I feel it

And

Not

Distant but

Near

Just

So

Pyna cocked her head and shrugged.

“Hnn…” Eket frowned.

“What do you believe you will find, wood-witch…

In the Omoorn…”

Witch…

Pyna smiled, playfully.

Not as

You

Know.

She stood, silent and smooth as a fog-wight.

Old

Night is

Fresh yet

So

Shall 

We

Go?

Eket pursed his thin, frost-bitten lips, and proceeded to break camp.

 

~~

 

At least three, or four bells into their journey a soft, but biting wind arose.

Moaning and crackling through the spindly and leafless dells and across the hills and hummocks, it soon distempered the thickening snowfall into downy whorls and silently weaving cascades.

Pyna appeared endlessly enamored of the way flakes flurried, wove and frolicked.

She whirled and sported in the midst of the snowfall like a spinning marionette, as Eket trudged in makeshift snowshoes across the drifts a short distance ahead. 

The cold effulgence of his frost-light - bound to his belt so that his hands were kept free - flowed starkly over the bleached snowdrifts, and crawled across the barren, leafless boughs of trees.

As the avaricious murk, beyond its sharp circumference skulked and groaned.

I have

So

Missed the

Woodland

Snow

Do you

Know?

It does

Not fall

So 

Ample

To the

South

Pyna had ceased her capering, and come to drift, spectrally, alongside Eket.

He turned his gaze sidelong as he trudged, and studied her with an unreadably flat expression.

“You were born, here…” Eket stated, recalling her soliloquy.

I was

Long ago

And then

Taken

From out

Hearth and

Home

Pyna then stopped with such smooth abruptness that Eket, for a passing breath, thought that she might have transmuted, into a perfect effigy of ice and snow.

Although her eerie eyes blazed with such a fixed intensity at the swallowing darkness at foot, that Eket reached thoughtlessly for the hand-axe at his belt.

Wait

She whispered, face an inscrutable porcelain mask. 

As her perniciously pointed Innulian blade appeared - plucked from out a secret crimson pocket - and slipped into her hand.

Eket slowly drew the hand-axe from its rest, and followed Pyna’s gaze beyond the aureole of cold radiance and curtain of gamboling snowfall. 

While only the impenetrable scrim of night greeted his gaze. 

He apprehended a frosty scratching above the plaintive wind.

But it was the slow suspiration, like to a punctured bellows, and a subsequent reek resembling charnel paper, that made his hackles bristle.

“Bone Eater…” Eket rumbled.

Shhh

Whatever it was, it had refused to breach the circle of frost-light. 

Before moving off at last, melting into the muffling snowdrifts.

They will

Watch

Now

How far

Is the

Meadow?

Eket looked at Pyna, his axe still tightly gripped.

“Three, perhaps four… Nights. 

The Omoorn is, elusive… ” 

You have

Walked its

Inner

Dark

Eket frowned.

“Madness. No…

Not beyond the Arch. Never, beyond the Arch.”

He shuddered inwardly. 

At a remembered glimpse. A passing memory of its presence from afar, which he soon pushed down and away.

Pyna cocked her head. 

A curious, pale magpie, and studied him. Her gentle bow-smile, slow and fathomless. 

Well

We will

See

Thus did they move deeper into the weird and discomposing heart of Pirn.

Slowly, across the breadth of three nights, the birch, aspen and pine gave way to odd and leafless, deciduous giants that loomed kindless.

Thick with frozen coal, and corpse-hued, pendulous mosses. They might have been venerable oaks and ancient elms, wrought wrong by the depthless dreams that haunted the forest’s penetralia.

During the day, when Pyna would again vanish into the woods, Eket hunted what he could and slept fitfully, fearful of the restless and increasingly odd flora and fauna.

The ceaseless unease had begun to gnaw at Eket’s better judgement.

There were moments during the tepid light of day, that he thought to simply gather his wares and turn back the way they had come. Debt be damned.

But the shade of the dead Wolf lingered still, haunting.

The hunt that had so consumed him for years, and the ancient stories of the beast’s cradle, at the heart of the wood…

He needed to understand.

At dusk, when Pyna unerringly returned, they would break his makeshift camp and continue across the cold and seeping drifts, and through downy flurries. 

As some abominable, unseen presence from out the gloom followed at foot.

Which prowled always just beyond the limit of Eket’s frost-light. 

He had sojourned to the edge of the Omoorn, only twice before. When his unceasing hunt for the great Pirnian Wolf had led him into its precincts. 

At that time he had suffered no such distempering visitations.

He suspected that this time, his very curious companion had attracted the regard of something terrible and peculiar.

Two bells deep into their fourth night, there came the intimation of an indefinable sourness upon the gelid, snow-touched night-breeze. Something that Eket had rarely smelled before. 

He wanted the language necessary to give meaning to the odium that it gave rise to. A pollution that trespassed not only upon the skin but into his very fundament.

The pair paused, as the wind once again bemoaned, through the ponderous murk.

Ahead, partially illumined by the feather-edge of frost-light, there grew a vermiculated shape that twisted and arched agonizingly upwards, into atrous obscurity.

From beyond there was a tinkling, as from the presence of purling forest pools, and a purring unintelligible, like canticles sung softly from the soily wombs, of grave-barrows.

Eket tasted bile. 

He felt as though he would retch into the virgin snow.

His fingers curled about his hand-axe.

Pyna stood still, as an effigy of frost and porcelain, her head cocked, listening. 

Eerie-bright eyes, glistering and wide.

Exalted…

Something alien and abhorrent from out the nearby night-dark murmured.

There is the toll, exalted…

Eket felt ill. 

He tried to comprehend the obscene susurrus behind his eyes.

His fingers trembled, slick with a chill sweat.

The heat at their heart, exalted…

Pyna turned to Eket, and with inhuman swiftness curled her indomitable little alabaster fingers with disquieting gentleness, around the circumference of his wrist.

A shadow of fleeting sadness discoloured her cracked-glass gaze.

Forgive me

Dear

Eket 

Comprehension came, swiftly.

With all the grim strength of his hunter’s sinew he viciously strained to dislodge himself. 

Still, it was as though he had been caught within the coil of some unbreakable, metal manacle.

Betrayal.

“Witch!”

Eket snarled and lashed out in Pyna’s direction with his axe.

Shhh…

Through a frighteningly sensuous warmth, his mind suddenly mucky, and eyes blurred.

Eket fell, smothered beneath the inevitable density of what felt like a downy avalanche, down into soundless night.