Pyna and Umin moved swiftly to rejoin the corsairs upon the sable strand.

Who stood therein the midst of their impromptu encampment, and gazed out upon the lethargic and atrous wash, as the abominable vessel of the Red Weaver listed, bobbed and loomed inescapably ever closer.

Its windless, preternatural sails cut from a singular, and undulating sheet of uncanny mercury.

Flee 

From

This

Place

Make

Haste

Pyna’s recondite expression, doll-delicate and frosty, reverberated with a tactile enmity.

Umin however, understood the dread that threaded the foundation of her animus.

The naked fear that had left her albeit briefly, impotent in the midst of their sometime struggle against the copper-masked master of the baroque, and odious sea-craft.

Potril grimaced at the approaching vessel.

“There is no sailing past that beast, mistress…

Not as anything other than splinters.”

A chilling susurrus had arisen, and rolled across the wash that preceded the monstrous bow.

Akin to a tortured chorus of unnumbered clattering claws and crackling teeth.

Umin, and the corsairs struggled to stopple their ears against the weight of its stabbing and mad disharmony.

There soon followed, pouring from the gunwales of the lurching, and bloated sea-craft, an uncanny tide of boiling and tangled sheets of roping, and scalloped smoke. 

Which heaved across the inky surface of the Great Lower Sea, like to a wheezing miasma. 

Pyna audibly whined.

Which ran a splinter of ragged dismay through her companions.

Swiftly, and with visibly trembling finger-tips, she drew her horror-forged Innulian blade from its secret place, and ran an ugly gash the length of her alabaster-milky arm.

Yielding a welling, and terrible contrast of syrupy-dark scarlet against snow.

Do not

Stray

Far

Pyna then sang the strings of a not dissimilarly discordant cackle, as to that of the queer and roaring fog. 

Which plucked up her bloody life-stuff and wove it, into a sanguine and gossamer veil, against which the ghastly and roiling vapor battered, and raged. 

A curling shred of the vile smoke-stuff by ill fortune, found its momentary way past Pyna’s watch, as she struggled to seal her sorcerous veil.  

The little corpse-tongue of mist then lashed like a living worm-thing against the nearest corsair: Aked.

Who gurgled as though he drowned, and fell back. 

The wound against his breast papery, and foul like the loose skin of a thing poorly embalmed.  

Pyna closed the circle of her cant with haste, scattering any further misty intrusions, as the fearful company attended to the wounded corsair.

While she strove against the sheeting tide of eerie and corrupting vapors, a lamentably familiar voice arose above the tumult.

A voice pregnant with vast, and inhuman pretensions.

“My miasma will leave you, unstained, little blood-worm. You know this.”

“But oh, what it will make of your beloved guildsman…

When your strength, at last fails.”

“Your mourning will know no surcease…”

“Yield, and they may pass, in peace… Yield!”

It had been far too long since she had last supped…

Now as she bent, and laboured, the monstrous thirst in her belly waxed. 

An onerous, but intimate horror that seemed, and felt a will all apart from her own. 

Knotting her veins, transmuting the world into an appalling redness.

Her head bowed, against the Red Weaver’s foul and hopeless storm.

Glistering tears streaked her strange, porcellaneous skin.

Stop

I

Will stop

Stop

Pyna pleaded. 

Reaching out, voicelessly.

Brusquely, the brumous nightmare shredded, and collapsed.

The tuneless, grating chorus of clattering claws and crackling teeth swiftly followed the terrible fog, into oblivion.

Resolving into the lazy lapping of the sluggish, inky sea.

Pyna’s cant shattered. 

A spray of curiously thick, copper-sweet carmine, misted the salt-brakish air as she pitched forwards. 

Trembling, into the jet-black silt of the strand.

Where she laid, spent. 

A boneless, and ghastly-pale puppet, discarded.

Limbs crooked into unlikely angles.

Breath shallow and swift.

Pyna’s gaze fixed upon the perdurable black of the vast vault above.

The unending pulse of her inhuman, alabaster heart, the only sound that filled the cosmos.

Until mild fingers, rough and alive, and achingly warm, pressed against her cheek and brow.

There was Umin’s aspect, pinched by a fearful solicitousness. Floating against the scrim of unbroken black above.

Pyna thought that she might weep again, for his tenderness. 

She reached up in reciprocity, with her coldly senseless fingers. 

Brushing his now coarsely bearded chin. A greyness therein, gleaming with some import that she thought she should grasp.

My

Sweet

Leaf-eater

“Aked has died.

You must take what you need, swiftly.” He whispered with a febrile urgency.

Pyna shook her head slowly, and smiled softly, sadly. 

Then wry and as ever, mildly mocking.

Now

There is

No

Time

A lone figure, before long appeared amidships at the bottommost rail, below the stacking, ziggurat-like decks. Illumined by the craft’s dancing, eldritch and autumnal-hued fires, in a most apparitional manner.

Its grotesquely particularized mask of gleaming copper was unmistakable.

As before, its stately accoutrement was a seamless cassock, and smock of cardinal. 

Shades within shades of bloody cardinal, unto the high, affected peak of its tapering cowl, which rippled like spilled wine.

Its voice carried, oddly echoing across the waters.

“The corsairs may depart. 

Or remain, as it pleases them.”

“I will not leave!” Umin raised his voice towards the figure.

His answer was a chortle, akin to a cracked steam-pipe venting.

“I did not think you would, guildsman…”

An angry Potril stumbled through the sifting sable grit of the strand, to stand beside Umin, who yet kneeled before Pyna. 

“Assassin! Odium!” The corsair bellowed across the sluggish waters.

Above the rails, the cardinal figure spread its hands in the manner of a false apology.

“You could not fathom the depths of it, weaver…”

Umin peered up at Potril, his gaze weary with too many griefs. 

“I am sorry for Aked…

You must take this tale back to Sendrin. 

I will not leave…”

Potril studied Umin, his expression unreadable. 

Then turned, and made his way back towards their makeshift shoreline encampment, without preamble.

“Otombalm of the Black Egg, keep you, guildsman.” 

Umin heard him murmur.

“The hours are fleet, guildsman!

And we’ve much to discuss. Bring her.” 

The Red Weaver turned and vanished from the rails.

Umin’s hand yet rested against Pyna’s frighteningly cold brow.

She had shut her eyes, and it seemed to him that she breathed now with greater ease.

Like a great, milky-skinned doll. Gelid as marble made supple. Its limbs and mane, loose and disheveled.

He gingerly plucked her up, and was startled by the bird-boned lightness of her body.

That something so fragile-seeming, should harbour such weird, and unspeakable strengths…

With Pyna cradled, he then warily waded out, into the tepid oily-dark waters of the Great Lower Sea.

That rose above his abdomen, before he came at last to the hull of the dreadful sea-craft. 

Where a rope-ladder had been tumbled from above.

Umin paused for a moment, in order to ponder how best to climb with his odd burden, when Pyna spoke. 

Her eyes still shut.

I

Will

Climb

Gently, he set her down in the waters, where they rose, nearly to her neck.

“Are you able?” With a soft uncertainty.

In reply she smiled, then simply clambered up the hull with the ease, and dauntingly silent grace of an arachnid.

Barely brushing the ladder. 

Umin frowned and adroitly followed, hand over hand.

He soon crested the first, and lowest rail of the odious ship, then leapt down to what appeared to be the assiduously polished Blackwood planking of its hull.

Immediately a musky-sweet, and yet indefinable pungence assailed his nose. Indeed all his senses, with the sensual recollections of long buried and unknowably distant things.

Here he found Pyna, once again sitting in her rag-doll fashion. 

Her eyes shut, breath even.

Ghastly-seeming, and bathed in the jigging and sickly yellow-russet, autumnal ghost-light, which enwombed the queerly silent craft.

Umin knew, with a sharp certainty, that she mutely strained against a kindless and carnivorous thirst.

Though her little porcelain fingers lay folded against the cloth of her nighted sea-robe. As though in contemplation, or supplication. He apprehended their tremor.

Then, the Red Weaver was simply, soundlessly, there…

A head taller than Umin and twice that of Pyna, the figure moved with all the unwavering purpose of an irrefutable monarch.

“I think perhaps, that I have been hasty in my measures.”

“I think, there are some things we may yet share with one another…”

Pyna opened her eyes and peered up at the looming, cardinal creature, her head cocked. Expression flat as a doll-thing.

“Such thirst. 

Such, need…

You are already aflame…”

A scornful little fire fluttered against its open palm. 

Across the cardinal stuff of its begloved fingers. 

You could

Not

Know such

Things

A thread of hesitation stitched Pyna’s words.

“Oh, little blood-worm…”

“Don’t sport with me like your warm playthings…”

“You must, know…”

“I am so, so, very tired.”

With a twist and sigh, the Red Weaver assiduously doffed its ghastly, widely grinning polished and particularized mask of redly-gleaming copper. 

Then raised its naked head, beneath a mane as porcellanous-pale as Pyna’s own.

Pyna’s weird, cracked-glass eyes glistered suddenly. Wet and terrible, as a bottled tempest. 

Her murmur, little more than a string of feeble breath. 

Nimblethorne…