Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

Pyna peered out, her eerie eyes piercing the caliginous murk of the Great Lower Sea.

She watched the overripe skull which she had hurled a ship’s length away and beyond, bob like an addled cork upon the inky wavelets. 

Within the span of a heartbeat, it was engulfed, and sank into black obscurity.

The now headless, hapless seaman’s corpse at her feet had collapsed into a shapeless filth.

Ebullient, and befouling her bare toes.

Blood Worm…

A century's weight of tired fear coiled round Pyna’s strange, and marmoreal heart.

The Red Weaver’s words. 

Which had proceeded like a miasma from out the dead man’s lipless orifice, had left her disquieted.

Apprehending their perilous auspice, she sighed and hiked her robe’s hem. 

Then waded into the thick, tepid brine of the onyx waters, in order to wash the syrupy death from her milky-alabaster feet and fingers.

Perhaps, her ghastly-woven Adumbral Cant had been ill-considered, Pyna pondered with a blush of shame. 

Like a bright beacon held aloft in the Deep. It would draw hungry things. 

A short distance up the obsidian-silt strand, Umin stood, still transfixed by the heap of yeasty rot. 

With an air of soft melancholy, Pyna studied the haunted expression that limned the sleepless bruises rounding his eyes. 

As she gingerly laved her porcelain fingers in the black, tepidly sluggish wash.

Perhaps he should not have witnessed her numinous Adumbral Cant.

It was often too easy for her to forget how the long years of Old Night had inured her…

A few heartbeats passed before Umin turned away, quietly and without preamble. 

She watched him stumble wearily, back to their borrowed, and modest hovel upon the obsidian-sand shore.

You wish

For

Impossible

Things

A sussruss from somewhere deeply sunken at the heart of her, tickled her ear from within.

She smiled sweetly at the unctuous, inky wavelets that licked at her finger-tips.

Well

We will

See

Her measured ablutions were soon broken by a crackling bellow from ashore.

Red-beard had returned, plodding through the atrous sand and pluming dust, with a small retinue of his fellow reavers following at foot. Reeking of drink, charred tobaccos and tar.

“Abomination!” His grainy intonation rattled across the waters.

Pyna stood straight, shaking the oily seawater from her fingers, and studied their approach. Her head cocked, a curious magpie.

They bore a raucous, but well kept collection of brandished arms. 

Blades raised and crossbows leveled, as Red-beard waded alone, out the short distance to where she stood, ankle-deep in the black brine.

The others of his tatterdemalion troupe, hard-bitten miscreants and murderers all, hung back with varied miens, bent by apprehension, blotted by fear.  

“Work your kindless craft, and I’ll have you staked and burned upon the sands, no matter your quality.

You’ll poison us all, with your Deadspeech… ” He rasped from between worn teeth.

Pyna peered up at his looming, threatening barrel-stave girth, her face an empty porcelain surface. Gaze unreadably flat.

She curtsied deeply, and bonelessly then. Like a collapsing doll.

Her robe, a gloomy aquatic bloom spread across the equally inky waters.

Forgive me

Then

Fendin

It was a thing

Ill-considered

She soothed, wordlessly from behind his eyes.

Startled by the intrusive and uncanny intimacy, Red-beard pursed his meaty lips, brow bent and beetling-thick. He also found himself briefly unable to breathe or move.

By measure mollified, and furious still. 

Ignoring him, she unceremoniously once more hiked up her sodden skirts. 

Pyna then drifted, a silent and frighteningly graceful apparition of alabaster and coal. 

Out of the wavelets, and through the small muttering mob of corsairs, which parted swiftly.

Then up the strand in Umin’s wake, her naked toes leaving no print upon the sifting, black grit.

For some while she wandered, swiftly and unseen, amongst the pavilions and hearths of the corsair’s encampment. Observing them at their work and carousal.

The knowing that her rashness might bring the bane of the Red Weaver to their refuge, painted her melancholy with a vexing bitterness. 

When Pyna returned to her tarpaulined hovel, she found Umin once again deep in exhausted sleep.

She sat herself down beside, and watched his slumber for a few breaths. Like a child, wrapped in his worn sea-robe, tangled and redolent with brine. 

Then, with some reluctance, caressed his thin-bearded chin with her cold, little fingers.

Umin’s eyes fluttered open immediately. 

Peering up at her hovering, apparitional form with a leaden gaze.

I am 

Sorry

Sweet

“Pyna, don’t trifle with the dead…

Promise me.”

His eyes for a moment, flinty.

“It imperils us. These men are bloody, all…”

As you

Wish’t

She smiled sweetly down at him. 

Her bloodless, and gelid fingers lingered against his cheek.

The tale

Of Sufa

Is

Unfinished

You should

See 

Its

End

Then you

Will know

What might

Be.

“What of Nimblethorne?” 

Umin frowned. 

The recollection, still terrifying.

Of Pyna’s angular boned, and fathomlessly antique patron peering through her dreams, and across the unlikely centuries, then deep into his disembodied presence. 

As though Umin had been no more than a spicule of ice, resolving against a towering sunbeam. 

Pyna blinked slowly in her ever imperturbable fashion.

We

Must

See

Perhaps

You should

Know

Him more

Deeply

“What do you mean?” Umin’s brow creased. 

He could feel his rarefied self sinking, as Pyna reached out.

Shhh…

Let us

Begin

Again…