Elsewhere and otherwhiles…
Eket
Eket
Awake
Eket dreamed an odd dream.
In a flat and snowy place.
The pale wood-witch bent, a porcellaneous rag-doll of ribbons and black lace, looming and lisping above a bedraggled little boy.
Who clutched something that seemed a diminutive russet box, pungent with herbs, and quince.
My little
Mouse
Sweet
Would you
Come
Home?
To my
High house
Sweet
Perhaps
My little
Mouse
When you’ve
Grown…
The scene melted into unending whiteness, however the pale wood-witch’s voice persisted.
Eket
Awake
A pressing whisper sweet, and spare.
He couldn’t see.
He felt both leaden, and downy. Limbs of brittle iron swathed in cotton.
Eket
Open your
Eyes
Slowly
Gelid little fingers soothingly brushed his rough and benumbed face.
“False witch…
Why am I alive.” He croaked.
Shhh…
There are
Many ways
To pay
The
Omoorn's
Toll
Why
Should
I give
Them
All?
Her peculiar words made no sense to him. Her sing-song cadence, vexing.
Eket struggled to blink his hoary eyes.
The baffling, and glassy grave-song from before his tumble into senselessness, still pressed at him from behind his eyes.
However it seemed muted here. Distant and soft.
The fragile tinkling of a terrible loam-bound choir.
He strove to clench unfeeling fingers.
Where was his axe?
Some manner of cardinal ghostlight had at last begun to seep through. As the interminable whiteness resolved into perplexing, and fantastic shapes against the convoluted forest’s night-dark scrim.
Placating little fingers pressed against him gently from above.
Their strength, incalculable against his present helplessness.
Be still
Do not
Stray from
The
Circle I
Have
Made
“What have you done…” He soughed, still struggling against the weight of some indomitable softness.
Something darkly indiscernible, and ragged-breathing, like to that of a punctured bellows sinuously approached, then scurryingly receded into the gloom.
The terrible, crystalline chorale rose again briefly behind Eket’s eyes.
There accompanied the alien, and sour sensation of something that had been thwarted.
He grimaced.
They are
Displeased
With
Me
“Why…”
Eket still needed to understand, to spite his present predicament.
I have
Slain their
Wolf
“The Pirnian beast…” Eket wheezed.
So
Stolen the
Warmth
Of
Sacrifice
He
Brought
Eket laughed.
The sound between a cough and a hiss.
“So, wood-witch...
You are treacherous at all corners.”
Only the muted wind which rattled through the hoarfrost engirded branches, replied to his accusation.
~~~
Fleetingly, Eket’s cruel admonition had touched Pyna like a descending sunray.
Scorching, where it fell upon her.
The heat of it so startled her, that she could summon no rejoinder to fill the cold, uneasy winter’s stillness that followed at foot.
Exalted…
We languish…
A spidery susurrus.
As one of the grey things, from out the heart of the Omoorn, again addressed her in a tongue improper to the ears of anything sane.
Its cadaverous shape, obscured by a heaping snow-drift.
Their presence horrified her, despite their shared, inhuman kinship.
Cousins of an unspeakable sort.
Children of the Paper God, one and all.
Pyna had pricked her palm, and painted a dribbled ward of dark incarnadine across the snow, with a syrupy string of her own uncanny life’s blood, then sealed it with a whispered cant.
From Eket, a few sanguine drops, the price enough, for passage into the meadow through the vermiculated, and vile Arch.
Her own, to lay a hasty guard, denying her ineffable kin what they had thought to be theirs: Pyna’s unlikely companion, the hunter, Eket.
This and for her voiceless admission to the murder of the great Pirnian Wolf, had left them, in their ethereal manner distempered, and angry with her.
Their eerie, crystalline loam-song swelled like an opaline tumescence.
She could feel the wellspring of their dreadful terror. That they should be left to waste away.
The wolf, their instrument of sacrifice, having been deprived.
She did not think that they could, or would harm her.
She was, after all, one of the Seducers.
Exalted amongst the Paper God’s unnumbered brood.
Eket, however, was another matter utterly.
He was presently safe and subdued, she believed.
Still incapable, nonetheless Pyna had warned him not to cross the circle which she had painted.
With a repining sigh. Warily, like a sneaking spectre, she drifted across the cardinal thread, and towards the meadow’s nighted and unseen penetralia, from whence their ghastly, and frangible song spread.
Her naked, little porcelain toes, as ever, left no tread.
Nor impression upon the pristine snows.
