Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

Driven by a tender Cant of Breathing. 

The narrow, and nimble sea-craft cut silently across the caliginous soupiness of the Great Lower Sea.

Umin reclined against the low prow, beneath the swaying amber-gleam of a copper sea-lamp. Which spilled a molten, muted illumination over the craft’s numbered occupants: Three of Sendrin’s corsairs, who crewed the small vessel. Himself, and Pyna. 

His gaze laid uneasy, pondering the ever placid-seeming Pyna, who sat ensconced in her amorphous soot-black sea-robes. As she trailed milky fingers delicately above the inky waters. 

Her facade, an unplumbable mask of porcelain. 

Eerie eyes unblinking, her hand would delicately dip. 

Then flit across the oily, mirror-black surface of the salty, and tepid wash. 

Cajoling lanky whorls; watery and languid curls. Fingers of polished ivory pressed into bitumen.

It is

Best

That 

We

Should have

Left

She murmured.

Then smiled, tenderly and taunting.

Sweet

How

You watch

And

Fret

Like a

Mothering

Hart

Umin’s brow wrinkled. 

Then he laughed, and peered out into the perpetual night-scape that entombed their scudding, diminutive sea-craft.

The hull rattled meekly, and the sea-lamp above him rocked in its amply-oiled cradle. 

Emitting a mild, tinny protest, and a shimmering spill of amber illumination. 

The air of the Great Lower Sea, which reeked perpetually of an astringent, black salinity had long ceased to trouble his nose.

The weight of the Below’s unending dusk had for some while now gnawed like a worrying tooth, against Umin's resolve.

He had begun to feel abandoned, by even his recollections of daylight, and its attendant colouration.

He shut his eyes for a breath, and strove to summon memories of Autumnal warmth. 

Mellow, evening sun-fall upon the quays of the Great City. 

Only for them to return, adulterated by a disquieting greyness. 

“Potril, do you not ever yearn for the sun?” 

He turned to aft, and addressed the nearest corsair.

A weaver of minor comportment, according to Sendrin, and their assigned navigator for this twenty-bell sojourn, towards the Archipelago of Echoes.

A rough-clad, dry-faced cutter poring over a panoply of charts. 

Arranged assiduously across a far too small sea-table. 

The other two, were Aked, their wiry steersman, and the brooding, broad-browed Flet. A watchman, with a swift hand and a heavy blade.

Potril sniffed, and arched an iron-grey brow.

“I have sailed the seas Above and here, Below. For many, many turns, Guildsman…

There is a peace in this place, this darkness…”

His gaze strayed momentarily to the quietly attentive Pyna. Her odd presence as ever, ineffably disquieting.

“And a madness...

I do miss the moons, from time to time.”

He smiled, a sinapistic smile, before attending his charts.

Umin turned back towards the prow, and found himself ensnared by Pyna’s wide, and weird cracked-glass eyes.

I too

Otherwhiles

Pine for 

Day-star

Painted

Skies

She soughed, such that Umin could feel his heart clutch against an uncertain weight.  

“Perhaps I forget, what that sun means...” 

His gaze drifted off, towards the immeasurable, and stony vault far, far above. 

Its invisible crust, an unseen but unendingly ponderous presence.

Pyna smiled then, perhaps chidingly, and gently reached out to brush his arm.

Sweet

I am

Content

As she tasted and sniffed at the air, quiet and feral. Her attention, caught by something, other.

Oh 

There

Are so

Many

Here

Umin shook his head slowly, perplexed.

Potril peered up from his papers, lips pursed.

“You feel them, mistress…

The Fleshless.”

Some

I see

Weaver

Umin squinted, peering out across the aphotic, and torpid waters.

“Shades? I see nothing.

Are these seas so very…

Bewitched.” 

Some

Unliving some

Unborn

We are ever

Closer to

The

Outside than

Thou 

Who are

Warm

She reached out with her hand once more. 

Dearly yet wryly, to brush Umin’s cheek with cold, milky fingers.

Their deepening bloodlessness bestirring in him a familiar unease, as she soon pulled away. 

Returning her attention to the unseen world that enwombed them.

Pyna had begun to thirst...

“And why here, are the shades so thick.” Umin murmured. 

Turning away, for the moment, from more unquiet considerations.

Potril responded, squinting. 

His nose a mere pinch above the spread of charts that assiduously papered his sea-table.

“They are but one of the echoes, of this archipelago, Guildsman.

Why? It is a riddle…

Though it is possible that they are bound to the great pit, that crawls along the archipelago’s utmost point.

Into which the Great Lower Sea spills into greater deeps, unknowable. 

Well… 

I would not wish to know them.”

A smile, again stretched the weaver’s lips.

Fifteen bells.

There was little more discourse, beyond passing words shared by Umin and the trio of corsairs, over biscuits and thin soup.

Each soul aboard laced in their own uneasy ruminations, as the craft sped readily and silently across the unctuous murkiness.

Umin watched Pyna whisper to the blackness. 

She would pause, listening. 

Her head cocked, like a curious magpie. 

Then murmur once more to the unseen. Replies so soft, as to be well beyond Umin’s faculties. 

Soon, the shades pressed with such density that he also began to apprehend a pricking and breezy brushing against. 

As though a feathery wind with a will all its own sought to embrace him. Half-whispers, and admonitions in his ear, like a rising madness. 

Potril, perpetually at his charts, sat with teeth grit.

He would often wince, and swat at the empty air, as though vexed by some manner of brazen insect.

Umin reached out, and gently caught Pyna’s hand, cold as yielding marble.

“What do they say?” He mouthed quietly.

She peered at him and blinked, a slow reptilian blink. 

Her bow-lips bending gently.

They speak

Of 

Need

 

Like

We

With skin

That ever

Cries on

Touch me

Know me

 

Is it not so?

I think it

So

For all

Above or

Below

He perused her ghastly-pale, oddly unlined fingers, pressed coldly against his own. 

Fleshy, long-fingered and rough as a millwright’s. The indelicate, yet practiced hands of a crafty cutpurse. 

Wooden of mien, Umin had no reply to give.

Twenty bells.

Potril shuddered, and massaged his weary eyelids.

“Something is amiss…

There are too many of them here. Never have I felt an air so weighty.”

He turned, his expression sour, towards Pyna.

“Mistress…

Do you understand any of this?”

Pyna sniffed at the air, like to a coursing hound.

It is

As though

They part

And dart

And

Flee

Why that might be, Pyna left unspoken, as she turned her gaze to regard the basalt-dull crags, and cracked mounds that had resolved, abruptly from out the deeper duskiness upon their port side.

A word from Potril, and the steersman, Aked, adjusted their smooth little sea-craft’s course to run alongside, then towards the nighted and, gently piling shoreline.

Their approach at first brought with it a needling hiss, which briskly grew into a cresting roar that reverberated drearily, and incessantly into the unfathomed inkiness above.

Soon their craft found rasping purchase in the shallows.

The two corsairs, Aked and Flet, disembarked from the prow into the knee-deep, sable and oily wash. 

Then pulled the sea-craft, a further modest distance, up onto the black and pebbled coastline.

The corsairs soon set to the business of securing a makeshift encampment.

Leaving them to their accustomed toil, Pyna and Umin wandered a ways across the mounds of cracked ash, and glassy-edged obsidian columns, and to the very lip of the nearer abyss. 

So that they might peer into the yawning, sonorous depths wherein the Great Lower Sea spilled its oily darkness, unending. 

Until the air was replete with a misty, stinging salinity, and the vast booming echoes for which this region was named, made of the very stone a perpetually thrumming drum-skin.

The moaning reaches below them swallowed all illumination, and returned no inkling of their unaccounted depths.

Umin’s frost-light quailed before this hungry lightlessness.

He marveled that this place had not yet drunk up the entirety of the Great Lower Sea. 

Leaving only a parched, caliginous obsidian playa.

He sighed softly and considered Pyna, who stood unmoving abreast of him. Her body hanging loosely, like a rag-moppet as she peered unreadably into the depths.

“What are we to do now?

The reavers will return to Sendrin before long.

The way is lost…” 

She gathered herself up and cocked her head. Studying him with her wide, cracked-glass gaze.

“We, I… 

Will have no sufficient stores to march far. Or await one hundred bells, for some other craft to pass this way.

And you, now thirst…”

Umin trailed off. 

He looked away, into the cascading, atrous seafoam churn, far below.

I will

Not 

Ask

Pyna’s voice rose scarcely above a hush.

“You need not. I will give what I am able…

Which will not be enough.”

Her dreadfully paling lips bent into a tenderly wry bow.

Come

To the

Shore

We will think

On this

Trouble some

While 

More

Together they wandered away from the black, yeasty abyss.

Its odious resonance receded into a humdrum moan, then melted into the listless wash of the Great Lower Sea.

Upon cresting a mound of cracked ash, a cry of alarm rose from the shoreline encampment ahead.

Pyna halted with inhuman abruptness so unlooked for, that Umin very nearly tumbled down the strand before her.

No

A flash of copper, against a mercurial and windless sail. 

Which dragged an abominable vessel out of the unending gloom of the Great Lower Sea’s false horizon. 

Baroque and bloated. 

Eldritch fires of ailing yellows, and Autumnal reds, danced across its roping and raveled shrouds. 

And there was not a single soul to be seen anywhere, across its stacking, ziggurat-like deck-mounts, as it listed, and began its obdurate approach.