Pyna swept, at first fearfully across the frigid powdery drifts, towards the distant and dusky marrow of the Meadow of Omoorn.

Lissome as a spirit of ruby-swathed alabaster, while the crystalline, and alien chorale rose to a weird pitch. 

Unendurable to the ears and conscience of any common quality.

To her, despite the undercurrents of anger and distress, something in their inhuman chords felt frightfully congenial.

As though her now eerie, and peculiar heart had at long last come home to its ineffable womb.

Grey things, of motley shapes both appalling, and splendid had emerged.

She could apprehend the ebb and flow of their perilous and alien curiosity.

Cautiously, from the muted silver and russet spill of moon-shadows between piling drifts, they trailed Pyna in her prudent progress, chattering, and singing spectrally. 

Here in this accursed meadow, the enduring residue of the Paper God’s dreaming had coerced, and coddled even the very fine pricking of starlight into something of sensuous ghastliness.

Insofar as she thought that she could feel the vitiated lightfall, like a thirsty presence pressing unwelcome; an impure tickling against her milky skin.

And the murk of dismal air crooned, intimating supernal, unwholesome unions.

Madness

Malingering

Madness

Pyna purred, as she drifted soundlessly, and still pressed deeper. 

To spite the quailing of that still vital, and very human quarter of her heart, which pined to depart this unnatural place.

She passed the ash, and knotty boughs of trees that could no longer be considered trees. 

Their wiry branches and leaves, piteous somethings lost wandering between the kingdoms of animal, mineral, plant and mushroom. 

Soon the snowdrifts gradually sloped inwards, leading her upon naked toes into a corded and curtained gloom, that even her uncanny eyes proved unable to unfold.

Strange like a misty, rarefied cloth it yielded and pressed; brushed against Pyna. As though she moved, through a lightless hall glutted by a ghostly tangle of black drapery.

Still, at a gently waning distance, the grey things followed at foot.

Something soon coalesced from out the scalloped, and roping obscurity ahead. 

She pressed forward, through a fog of misgivings.

Before long, Pyna emerged into an inky and frozen space of distempering tranquility. 

So sudden was the entombing silence, that it arrested her odd heart for a half-beat as she paused in mid-step, and settled into an inhuman stillness.

The grey things had also abruptly quieted.

Or perhaps it was that they simply couldn’t be apprehended beyond the indefinable barrier that she had crossed.

A shape nearby, that seemed too dense a thing for the rarefied lunacy that fenced the meadow, loomed from out the curtained and corded blackness.

Pyna drifted, delicately closer.

At first it seemed that a bending and knotty menhir, or great plinth, cut from a disquieting collection of curls and convexities, had arisen, crawling worm-like from the lacey snow-piles.

She paused, still as a stone-thing, to study the unwholesome-seeming monolith.

Its shape, resolving into something that she thought repellently familiar. 

Both sensuous, and odious in composition.

Its lewd, and tortured arches, intimating that first, abominable congress that had given terrible birth to her dusky, twilight world.

No…

It was here, as she drew gingerly near, moved pitilessly by the dawning of a very singular horror, that a diminutive murmur pricked at Pyna’s ear.

From everywhere and nowhere, which protruded and pressed, with a brazen tenderness.

Much like the morbid sprinkling of starshine that had tickled her sweetly from above, it felt an indefinable violation.

“Little Seducer…”  

The abhorrent susurration soughed. 

Pyna shrank beneath its intrusive peculiarity.

“You are so like the Burning One, who left us long ago. 

A succulent, vain instrument. ”

She was too frightened to find any meaning in this assertion.

Her mouth, unable to bend thought into breath.

“As hollow as a wood-wind, Little Seducer…

Your gift has been ill-used. You have not given us any children.”

If Pyna could have curled into the frost at her feet, and resolved into pondwater, she would have.

“Come, come. 

Take what you have pined for, my minikin, my fruit improper. 

Spread our sweetness again, across the horizons…”

With all too human uncertainty, Pyna approached, and pulled down a beaded, teardrop shaped something, from a rounded protrusion of the ghastly conglomerate. The thing that she had promised Father.

Like a treacly tree-gum. 

A cardinal resin.

The stain of afterbirth.

She thought that there, might have been an unwinking, gummy eye.

Perhaps a finger, a ring…

A once honey-hued curve of naked breast, pressed into the crook of something rivelled and plum-dark, simian…

You 

Are…

Pyna felt compressed. Breath, stolen.

“A lingering…”

Clutching her perfidious, and obscene prize. 

She turned with all her will, and ran across the crystalline snowdrifts, swift as a roiling and heedless tempest, from out the heart of the Omoorn.

With her preternatural strength made acute by immeasurable terror, Pyna plucked up the still helpless hunter, Eket as though he were knit of no more substance than a discarded shawl. 

Then fled madly, back out into the crackling winter-dark, of the weird woodland of Pirn.