Umin found himself suspended once more, in the deep Between of Pyna’s dreaming.

Through her remembering regard, the fretted parquetry of Nimblethorne’s high manor gleamed with the reflected luminance of a hundred saporous-soft candle-flames.

As before, Pyna and her hoarily alien companion and patron: Nimblethorne. Lounged in the spectrally boneless manner of their unlikely kind upon a pair of low, and luxuriant settees.

They had taken ghastly-pale form abruptly, from out the chiaroscuro of a cluttered, but well appointed chamber. 

Presently Nimblethorne appeared to be either uninterested in, or unaware of the bodiless, and apparitional Umin. 

Instead, he seemed to lazily reflect upon the blazing, amber heart of a nearby corruscating candle-fire. 

Through which he ran his long, bloodless fingers without care or harm, as he smiled his amicable, and angular smile upon the similarly lounging figure of Pyna. 

Then plainly made forth with his narration.

“It cannot now be known the why or the how this, Ikiish. 

Came to be the captive of a petty band of forest-dwelling miscreants. 

Its exotic purpose is now long beyond plumbing. Even by the likes of us.”

“By the by, one may say that Sufa, was smitten…”

“When the Ikiish, now unwound from its bindings. Of greasy curtain, and rough, cruel iron cage…

Sang. 

Its ewe-shaped orbs, fulvous and laughing.

Its obscene, puckered and toothless, plum-putrid orifice exalted a polyphony. 

Terrible as a god’s shushing. 

Tender as dearest love-play. 

More mellifluous than the lips of any lover that had ever suckled her.”

“The Ikiish, its occulted crooning coaxed, and cajoled all that was bent and bright in Sufa’s heart. 

Then bent it thrice again, and set it alight with a white and blinding ustulation."

As though he here sought to express the throes of Sufa’s passion, Nimblethorne’s gaze flared with what appeared an appalling, unearthly fever.

The fleshless, hidden dream-shape of Umin, fixed by a sudden and animal horror, turned forcefully away from that frightful radiance in his ghastly cracked-glass, Innulian eyes. 

“As I have said:

The first Weavers, were innocent. 

However, the songs that filled Sufa, brim-full to breast. Those that swaddled, and wooed, and choked her heart, were something other than innocent.”

“Together, Sufa and the unspeakable Ikiish, would dance into the heart of the frosty woodlands of Pirn. Like horror-bound lovers.”

“But ere they danced, they fed.

For those few brigands who had not yielded their last breath to Sufa’s poison moss…

Those, their bones were shucked and their warm, inner softness was consumed. All to a terrible chorus of their own helpless bleating, like to that of kine gone to culling.”

“It was to be her first Great Iniquity. 

Her learning to savour the appalling succulence of her fellow creatures.

That would set her upon the way across that woeful abyss which would part her forevermore from all that she was. 

All that she had held dear.”

“So was Sufa, seduced by the Ikiish.”

“And so, as I have said. 

Into the heart of Pirn the weird lovers wandered. Their kindless lusts expressed in measures of verse and terrible song.”

“At last to a place, a meadow, of immeasurably strange stones, that were said to have tumbled from the twin moons, that dirged with the winter winds. Like a mourning song. Thus the name.

The meadow of Omoorn…”

“Here Sufa lay with that terrible seed. 

Still, she was not, nor ever meant to be, the womb…

But instead the first flame. The kindling and spark.

Raising mountains. 

Drying seas. 

Breaking distant forests.

I speak as though it came to pass in mere moments.

No. As Sufa and the Ikiish lay in their unholy tangle within that peculiar and timeless space in the heart of the Omoorn, a century of calamities transmuted the world. 

It was the Ikiish that was the fruit that split and ran like a black root. An inverted tree. 

A canker that curled beneath the hills and at the last, burst open the womb of the world. 

And gave birth to the great deep that we now name, the Below…

And into this new and lightless world beneath, where the Walls Between were thinnest, came skulking, perhaps out of curiosity, out of hunger, out of need? 

The question is unanswerable.

That unknowable being that was the Paper God. Whether this was the Ikiish’s purpose or otherwise, we cannot now say.”

“The Paper God, whose dreaming filled at first the lightless below, then up, like a cup overrun, into the Omoorn. 

Pirn, and further beyond, out into the broad and broken world.”

“But for all its mastery of shape and form, it could claim and bend only beast and bird, bone and dead flesh. Stone, wood and water. At first…”

“The Paper God found Sufa, now alone again, and bereft in the heart of the woodland of Pirn, and witnessed in her the same spark which the Ikiish had.”

“And so she became the First Concubine to the Paper God. 

Through her tutelage many of the innocent First Weavers learned to sing, in obscenity…”

“And so were the Seducers born. Whom the Day-star despised but Old Night did fete. 

We, who are exalted, as the Paper God’s highest children.”

The dream-shape of Nimblethorne laughed then a little, ruefully.

Nearby, the hidden dream-shape of Umin felt stretched, and tenuous. 

A leafy tissue blown feebly across the lunatic depths, and insinuations of Nimblethorne’s narration. 

“We, who can steal the incarnadine and carnal heat from the heart of the living and give it back, in the shape of the Paper God’s dreaming. 

So do we bring others, with the promise of a perpetually thirsty forever, into its terrible fold.”

“For an age we were bound to its fathomless intrigues. Its striving as it sought to mold, what was to it, an alien world, unto its own strange designs.

Though many of those self-same weavers that first learned to sing its Adumbral Cants, through the mouth of Sufa, its most celebrated instrument, opposed it, and its odd and unlikely offspring...”

“Until that time when it simply departed this world. Who can say why? 

Perhaps it grew indifferent to its playthings…

And at last, when Sufa was struck down by the descendents of those whom she had first taught how to sing. 

Above the inky wash of the Great Lower Sea.

And so, my dear Pyna…”

The urbanely grinning Nimblethorne began to fade into a soporific luminescence as Umin floated towards wakefulness, and Pyna’s remembering dreamscape grew ghostly and thin. 

“We, ghastly and lingering few…”

”We are orphans…”