Umin awoke from Pyna’s luminescent dreamscape with a downy sigh.

Her cold, little porcelain fingers - supple as a newborn’s, yet unyielding as marble - still gingerly caressed his cheek and jawline. 

Her long mane, a cascade of wheaty-snow silk brushed against his nose.

Umin’s eyes opened to Pyna’s tender bent-bow smile and woeful, cracked-glass gaze.

Sweet as jam. Terrible as tombs.

The primeval weight of Nimblethorne’s narration was as an unquiet shroud, that brushed uneasily against Umin’s recollections, while he wearily shifted, in order to stretch cramped limbs.

He felt spent, and seared. 

As though he had trodden carelessly into a belching fire-mount.

And all that had remained was a bowl of crackling cinders.

Beyond the bedraggled, and thin canopy of their shared pavilion, the muted domesticity of the corsair encampment had abruptly intruded. 

Its pungency, and constrained tumult, returning them to the present’s intractable densities.

Do

You

See?

She said simply. 

As though it were as little as a child's fancy.

Umin was silent for a stretching moment. His expression flat, and lips pressed into near thinness.

“No…”

He shook his head slowly. Brow lined by deep furrows.

“Not yet, Pyna…

It is all, so old and terrible...” His eyes, then watery and haunted.

Pyna’s smile was feather-soft.

Well

There is

Yet

Time

We will

Speak with

Sendrin, one

Last

Then

We must

Leave this

Place.

“And how do we do that?

And to where, do we go?” Umin, gaze stormy and brow still sullen.

Pyna was placid, as she perused the bruised, blue lines that had hollowed his eyes.

The bone-weariness which had filled him, and begun to define his presence.

Too numerous the terrors, in too brief a span could unmake even the stoutest of the living.

She softly traced the matted waves that framed his way-weary face.

Sleep

Awhile

Sweet

I will walk

A’ways awhile and

Wonder

In the space between a heartbeat, she was gone from their patchy pavilion.

Umin lay back upon the mealy pile of pillows and gratefully shut his eyes. 

As always, puzzling whether Pyna's pensive tenderness was true, or but a cunning manifestation of native monstrousness. 

A hook. A snare.

Something predatory at heart.

He was exhausted. 

A few more hours lulled by the not too distant, and syrupy wave-song of the Great Lower Sea, would do him no harm.

He thought, as he sunk again into a dreamless sleep.

~~~

Pyna brooded. 

Bundled in her voluminous coal-dark wrack of a robe, she sat upon the rounded crest of a high, bitumen-black sand-pile. 

A short distance beyond the corsair encampment, but within sight of the canopy beneath which Umin lay slumbering. 

The soft pulse of his distant heart ever upon the periphery of her awareness.

Otherwise she watched, with a moody amusement, as the figure below her drifted lazily closer. 

Much like herself, leaving no iota of impression upon the sifting silt in his passage.

She could smell the cant, its abstruse and peppery composition, which had provided him this passing talent.

Falwyrm…

She whispered, in a manner that allowed only him to hear, across the closing distance between.

Falwyrm paused, and peered up the atrous dune-face.

A few more moments passed as he soundlessly navigated the remaining distance. To at last, a pace or two below Pyna's place of rest.

“Exalted…” He punctuated, with a much too courtly bow for the angled slope upon which he had come to stand.

Pyna smiled with all the warmth of grave-soil.

Pinching crackling obsidian dust between her small, marmoreal fingers.

Her posture, unmoving as that of an alabaster plinth.

Do not

Call me

That

Of an

Age

Long gone

To dust

To bat

And

Rat

The wiry Falwyrm in his muted sea-robe of grey-gold straightened, and bobbed a cowled brow. 

Long face rutted by salt and suffering. Eyes almond-dark and slit.

“Apologies, Lady Pyna.” Sibilant and sandy.

I was

Born long

And

Far

After

Sufa's

Fall

Falwyrm smiled then. Perhaps uneasily.

Teeth black, and sharp as the inky grit beneath his bootheels.

The affected blackness of his teeth mirrored the pits of his eyes to create an odd pastiche. 

As though the skin of his face was a papery falsehood, stretched over a well of ink.

He cleared his throat. 

“She, who taught the Seducers how to Sing…

Ah? May I…”

A plucked, inky brow and sweep of the hand indicating a patch of sand near to her.

Pyna returned his gesture like a milky marionette, mildly mocking.

Please

You

Then

Be at

Ease

“Very kind.” He smiled again, and set himself to sit a conspicuous arm’s length abreast of her. 

Then stretched his wiry legs out upon the silt. 

Pyna could apprehend.

Smell and taste the potent Weavecraft which so thoroughly mingled with the life’s blood that streamed, and purled beneath his sinewy skin. 

Inasmuch as it infused the very air which brushed against his flesh, pulling away in unseen ribbons and uncanny curls.

So did Pyna see, and suppose through her very odd eyes.

Falwyrm, was a weaver of considerable faculty.

Nonetheless, she felt disinclined to dance with this creature.

Whose pinguid appetites she could well taste.

Tempestuous eddies, and undertows that snaked, loosely leashed, and poorly concealed beneath the crust of his conscience.

For a strained few heartbeats they sat in silence, peering out into the perdurable gloom.

What is

It here 

That

You are

Wishing

For

Weaver

Falwyrm laughed again. The sound, like a cascade of silty grit. And dug in his bootheels, precipitating a sluggish sand-fall.

“I had heard that you were very evasive in your speech…

By the by, are you not also a weaver, Lady Pyna?”  

“Of the Adumbral Cants at that.”

Pyna was silent as he made forth. Placid as polished, milky marble.

“Even for a Child of the Paper God, some might call it obscenity…

Drawing the dead from the Outside, In. 

Against all their wishing…”

He stopped to study Pyna’s imperturbable mien sidelong and asquint. Black teeth bared like a starless void.

“Ah, well. I am not here to admonish…”

He laughed again then, with the sound of a shaken hourglass.

“But to convey that the Captain has decided to provide you, and the Guildsman, with passage North to the Archipelago of Echoes.” 

“From there, you might flag one of Meshmin’s barques, if you are fortunate.”

“It is a twenty-bell journey hence. 

Best you ready yourself.”

Falwyrm stood then, and brushed the silt from his sea-robe. 

“Your Ladyship.”

And bowed, before drifting down the sighing dune-face towards the encampment.

Pyna watched him recede, and melt back into the constrained hurly-burly of the corsair’s settlement. 

Before casting her gaze along the distant false horizon of the lightless, and sluggishly tumultuous tar of the Great Lower Sea.

Her thoughts were unquiet, even as a brief flash of copper snared her attention. 

Somewhere out, out upon the waters, along the utmost reach of her uncanny eyes.

Rekindling a spark of smouldering, and pernicious fear within the cold cavities of her marmoreal heart.