Pyna ran, unseen, and swift as a storm-harried ghost.

Carrying the hunter, Eket out through the Omoorn's vile, vermiculated Arch and its attendant, ghastly grey things.

One league.

Then two. 

She fled, under a mantle of inhuman dread, through the frigid, frosty woodland’s early dawn darkness.

Until her marmoreal limbs ached, and the searing of that perennially cruel, and eldritch thirst in her belly could no longer be quieted.

Pyna nearly stumbled as Eket bestirred, shuddered, and struggled.

“Set me down, wood-witch…” He grated, through a nimbose plume of breath.

“Your wicked haste will be my death.” He gasped, as he pushed ungently away from her, and tumbled into a crackling snow-pile.

“My hands…

I can feel them.”

He lay breathing ponderously in the powdery drift. 

Clenching his fingers, and unknotting his limbs.

The twin moons now hovered low in the stelliferous sky.

Their spill of russet and silver luminance broken by innumerable naked branches, that rasped with hoarfrost. 

Stretching moonshadows, pawing at the snow like tangled, pitchy fingertips. 

Pyna had sunk to her knees.

Her cardinal weaver’s cloth spread shapelessly across the dawn-dark snow, like a rubious wound.

She drew in deep, the earthy scent of crushed ice and frozen wood. 

Hands splayed, she studied their unlined, porcelain bloodlessness. 

The monstrousness in her belly no longer simply brooded.

Now a cauldron, brim-full of unplumbable thirst, brought to a roiling. 

She could no more stopple its overbrimming, than she could halt the Day-Star’s fated march above the dawn horizon with her fingertips.

Helplessly, she peered up the snowdrift, a few paces to where Eket lay convalescing.

He appeared to her then, as no more than a fleshy blot of palpitating heat, threaded intricately through with an intolerably sweet and carnal redness. 

The ruby kernel, that supernal organ at its core, thrumming and dreadfully succulent.

No, no…

I will

Not

Pulling madly at her snow-peppered, milky mane, she stood and once more fled across the drifts, out into the cold woodland’s gelid cathedral.

Even in the bosom of winter, there is unnumbered life that hovels beneath the concealing snows of the nighted forest.

Before long, wracked by beastly thirst, and guided by her uncanny faculties, Pyna discovered a sleeping buck. Concealed, comfortably beneath the snowy cape which spread along the roots and skirts of a great, leaning pine-bough. 

Awoken abruptly from a bucolic dream of nibbling springtime shoots, his struggle was stillborn as Pyna clasped him. 

Bending like a rutting thing to the buck’s throat, she lost all that was human in her for a few heartbeats to its haemal heat, and the coppery-sweet fire that filled her.

It was not until the creature’s spirit had sorrowfully fled into the vast and unknowable Outside, did she disentangle herself from the carcass.

Then lay for a passing while, feeling sick, and rueful upon the snow, for having taken too much, too swiftly.

Breathing slowly, she once more studied her small, porcellaneous hands. 

Now touched by a warming, sensuous blush.

Even her otherwise milk-wan hair had reclaimed something of its venerable, and native wheatiness.

Rolling over, she lay her hand gently against the dead creature’s cooling thigh.

Cruel

Flesh

Well

Sweet

Now there

Is meat

For

Eket’s

Fire

Pyna murmured, piously. 

Then gingerly pressed her rubious bow-lips, to its lifeless nose.

Plucked it up, and slung it over her shoulders in the manner of a shepherdess. 

Feeling less monstrous. Like a phantom, she glode slowly over the snow-piles with her cooling burden. 

Her naked toes, as ever leaving no mark in passing. And onward towards a lambent little prick of fire in the forest, the way whence she had at first fled. 

Before long, Pyna emerged into the dell where she had left Eket.

The hunter had not been idle during her absence.

Eket had shaken off his stupor, and now kneeled in the dugout hollow of a frost-rimed snow-pile, as he toiled over a burgeoning flame.

“I did not think you would return.” 

He murmured plainly.

Regard fixed upon the task of nurturing his hearth. He soon moved to arrange his diminutive tea-kettle.

Following a few minutes of stretching silence, filled only by the fire's deepening crackle. 

When he did at last deign to peer up at her, his wolfish gaze was flat and feral.

Pyna simply stood, still as an ice-sculpted effigy. 

Seeming bewitched by the orange firelight which now baltered across the snowy dell.

A few heartbeats, and she returned Eket's unwarm gaze with a softly blithe bow-grin.

Forgive

Me

Eket

Dear

Flesh for

Thy

Fire

Her mocking belied by the tender reverence, with which she laid the buck's carcass upon the snow.

He peered at the milky-eyed remnant. Without a word then began his wary, and well-practiced knife-work. 

A skillful cut, before Eket abruptly paused.

“You have already bled the carcass…”

A thread of near indistinct unease.

Pyna’s porcelain face was an eerily apricot-kissed mask. 

Her only response, a measured blink, as she settled deftly, and silently by the fire, a few paces apart.

Eket frowned, creases cutting the skin sharply around his eyes, as he studied the carcass, then Pyna. 

Lips barely pursed and gaze sharply shrewd.

“Mmm...”

“You think it, worth the price, wood-witch.” He responded blandly, and resumed his careful butchery.

Pyna cocked her head, a curious magpie.

In

Truth I

Could

Not

Say

She reached beneath her cardinal weaver’s cloth, and into the secret pocket therein. 

Producing the enwrapped artifact.

A scantle of something that should never have been.

It felt unquietly, obscenely warm, even through a layered fold of concealing cloth. 

Bestirring distant sensations. Inhuman and immeasurably sensuous.

A frisson of hunger, terrible. Before she wrapped it ever more tightly, then stowed it swiftly away.

Eket had watched her wordlessly for a passing moment, then returned to his work.

Now she did the same, marvelling for some time in silence at his bloody, skillful craft.

The twin moons had fallen below the woodland’s horizon.

And to spite the deepened, winter's darkness, Pyna could feel the dreadful edge of merciless, kindless Dawn. 

As it crawled up and began to sear the papery edges of the world.

She stood, with the quiet grace of something unceremoniously fey.

Forgive me

For all

Eket

The wolfish hunter might have smiled, or grimaced, as he quartered meat and shucked bone.

You should

Not 

Return

There

To the 

Heart 

Of

All that is

Unfair

“I think, I will not.” He paused for a breath, and nodded.

She began to glide away then, across the dell and its still night-clad drifts.

“Wood-witch…” Eket called to her.

Pyna paused, still as statuary upon the sifting snow-crest. Then turned.

“You would do well, not ever, to return.”

She smiled her inscrutable little smile.

I think

I will

Not

Fare you

Well

Eket of

Mirk

Within the blinking of his eye, there was then, nothing there.

But for the crackling of Pirn's frost, broken by the percolating of his diminutive kettle. 

And a dawn wind rattling twiggy, and spare.