Within a half-breath, Pyna’s heart soared. Then, as swiftly plummeted.

She shook her head very slowly. A hopeless negation.

No

No

You are

Not

My

Nimblethorne

Pyna studied the appallingly familiar mien.

And speechlessly observed, that where Nimblethorne’s absurdly venerable features were lined with an albeit alien kindness. 

The similarly lank, and towering creature before her was of a cold and unpliable density. 

Which seemed to have been fashioned from an unaccountably vast cloth of cruelties. 

The Red Weaver reciprocated her motion.

“Lesshin…”

She was peppered by a voiceless mingle of labyrinthine sensations.

A spark of affection. 

Tightly wound into currents deeper, stranger, and more perilous. 

“Nimblethorne… To flee from all we birthed. He wove a new, name.”

Prickly scornfulness, like spicules of angry ice.

The Red Weaver’s eyes were of a ghastly-venerable Innulian colouration. 

Yellow-yolk bright irises - flecked with drifting cerulean - flared in the ailing autumnal radiance of the eldritch sea-craft.

Cracked, pools of inhuman glass, like Pyna’s own.

She peered briefly up at Umin, hovering close at hand. Who squinted, appearing transfixed by their hosts' apparitional presence. 

What is

Your

Name?

We are the

Same

Children

“Of the Paper God…”

“Yes, little blood-worm. 

We are dismal stains of a similar discolouration, upon the cloth of creation.”

The hulking and baroque craft abruptly lurched. 

Then began to drift, away from the shallows, and the corsair’s makeshift shoreline encampment.

Back out into the listless, oily darkness of the Great Lower Sea.

Propelled once more, by some silent command of its cardinal-hued master.

“Mountains have worn to hills, and those selfsame hills into dust, in the breadth, that I’ve forgotten the names of my fathers.”

“But not his… Not Lesshin…”

“I have not forgotten, my brother’s name.”

Umin willfully pulled his gaze away from the Red Weaver, and towards the slothfully receding, obsidian-silt strand.

To where the remaining pair of corsairs observed in bated silence. 

Their faces, unreadable, and their figures growing smaller.

“Guildsman!”

Their milky-wan host, flesh near opaline, then beamed frostily upon Umin with a dreadful, and angular smile.

“You find yourself snared in riptides. In fathoms unplumbable.” 

“Knotted in the dissembling of this creature, and her sire.”

“You cannot know her. You may yet take your leave…”

He spread his fingers towards the gloom of the slowly vanishing shore.

Umin gazed out across the aphotic vault of the Great Lower Sea. 

And suspired deeply of its perdurably burnt salinity. A look of gentle acceptance softened his features as he shut his eyes.

“As I have said…”

“And so you have, guildsman…”

The great ziggurat-like sea-craft had now moved well beyond the shoreline. The corsairs, lost, to unending dusk.

Slowly, as the oily-dark wash deepened, the bloat-bellied, windless craft gained startling speed.

Its weird, preternatural luminance, setting the blackness a’fire with the mutable discolouration of autumnal senescence. 

“How you burn, little blood-worm.

I remember, the sure need of youth. There were nights, I imbibed the whole quarters of cities…”

His tone was tender, to a measure odious. 

Pyna shuddered. 

The world had begun to turn crimson again.

Umin’s close presence, in particular, now terrified her. 

The succulent, syncopation of his heart. The weight of its song had proceeded to press, deliciously upon her conscience.  

“You need but ask. 

I will give over, such strength…

Years will pass, ere you need yield to your thirst again.”

She peered up at him with eyes, tempestuous. 

Tiny, inner-storms beating against glass. 

You are

False

You would

Not

The Red Weaver studied her now with eyes hooded. And an expression softly disarming.

“As you will.

Make do with your warm plaything for a while, if it pleaseth you.

He is not a fount-eternal...

You will need to make choices, little blood-worm.”

I have

Known

Violation

Pyna’s expression was inscrutable. The face of a milky-porcelaine doll.

Her words, a murmur, mournful, and perilous.

“So you clutched, nursed this deeper violation to a cankered breast. 

A sour salve against a kindless circumstance.

So young. 

Twenty three years. 

A forest-born girl-child. 

You knew nothing, thou issue of Elshad’s vanity.”

Notwithstanding the hardness of his words.

The Red Weaver’s frightful features seemed painted with a tempera of delicate pity. 

“Ah…

Lest I be a poor host, there is water, and biscuit in a box hard-by the bulkhead there, guildsman.

You need not starve.”

“Be at ease as you are able. The journey is not short, and yet, not so long.”

Umin frowned, unsettled.

“And to where do we go, my Lord Captain…”

Another gelid smile pulled the Red Weaver’s aspect into that of a horrifying effigy.

“To the Watch-ward, guildsman…

Your well-desiréd destination. 

Where we will afterall, hunt for your wayward compatriot…”

Umin’s frown sharpened.

“Ure…?”

“Yes! I do wonder at the depth of your Lord Meshmin’s apprehension of how truly vast your fellow’s offenses, may come to be…”

The Red Weaver turned his hooded gaze once more upon Pyna, who yet sat in her rag-doll manner.

Head bowed, snow-milky mane a concealing cascade. 

Her porcelain hands outstretched, and fingers splayed against the startling contrast of the ship’s mellow-dark blackwood planking. As the ripened faerie-fire of the craft painted her limbs with a sickly illumination.

“I will leave you to your, intimacies..."

Within the space between a heartbeat, the Red Weaver was simply, soundlessly no longer there.

Umin shook his head. His weariness once more a physical presence, like the discomfiting weight of his still sodden clothes.

He crouched, and delicately touched Pyna’s dauntingly cold fingers. 

Ever Like marble made supple.

“Well, by all accounts, it seems we’ve a way to be where we need to be.”

Pyna raised her head.

The emptiness of her manner melted away. Answering Umin’s blithely teasing quirk of the lip with a momentary one of her own, before becoming something more faintly rueful.

He sees

So

Deeply I

Am

Ashamed

“No, you need not be…

Lingering upon what is no longer.”

“Attend, to the now.”

Pyna reached up, her all too bloodless lips bending into a little bow, and cupped his cheek and chin. 

Then 

Shut your

Eyes 

For

Me

~~

Umin awoke from a shallow dreamscape, limbs and skin feeling cottony.

A rough, knobby sack stinking of mildew for a pillow, and a canvas scrap for a blanket.

The redolence of The Great Lower Sea’s perdurable black salinity immediately bloomed in his nose.

You

Should

Eat

Sweet

Pyna uttered without turning from her place near the rail.

Wheaty mane lashing in the eerily soundless wind of the vessel. As it was propelled at distempering speed across the yeasty, and atramentous wash. By whatever unknowable weave-craft its cardinal-hued master employed.  

She moved then, ghostly graceful as Umin sat up slowly. 

Her skin flushed with a weirdly apricot-pale human heat. 

Mouth, once more rubious and smiling. As though savouring thoughts of dear and secret things.

She drifted to the bulkhead and brought forth a very simple sea-chest.

From wherein she produced a pair of modest flasks. 

Brim-full of a mineral-water, cool as though recently drawn fresh, from a mountain spire. And a polished blackwood box of pleasantly piquant sea-biscuits.

With the relish of deprivation, Umin set to filling his belly.

You need

Not

Be so

Beastly

Pyna mocked, affectionately.

Umin huffed, between a mouthful.

“You thirst, I hunger…

Have you no memory of sweet seed-cakes? Warm pies…”

I

Remember sweet

Meats and

Meats

Sweet

 

The fresh 

Flesh of the 

Hind 

Its

Sweet

Dappled

Skin

Pyna went on, in a silky sing-song.

Umin swallowed. His brow knit, and laughed.

“How you mock…”

Oh?

I think

I do

Her head cocked, a curious little magpie.

~~

Five, perhaps six bells passed. As the uncanny and appalling sea-craft, to spite its monstrous dimensions, sped with phantasmal celerity, through the unremitting dusk of the Below.

With all the discoloured illumination, of a garish bloat-bellied gourd. Rolling across the oily breast of the inky, and unfathomable Great Lower Sea.

The odd pair stood abreast the rail, and peered out at the churning, coal-dark waters. 

Disquietingly silent, despite the violent haste of their passage.  

Pyna touched Umin’s hand, which rested upon the fretted rail.

There

Do

You

See?

A

Sea 

Grown

Strange

Umin squinted, and gazed into the dusky gloom beyond her porcelain, pointing finger.

Something there, indefinably ponderous, roiled beyond the curtained darkness.

The vessel abruptly listed, and the decks groaned like a long unfed abomination.

His presence was unlooked for, and discomfiting. 

Between the space of an eye-blink, standing beside Umin. The Red Weaver leaned out from the rails, in an incongruently human fashion.

Through Pyna’s presence, Umin had grown somewhat accustomed to this penchant for simply appearing in the manner of something more spirit than flesh. 

A faculty that all these peculiar Children of the Paper God appeared to keep in common.

The Red Weaver had once more replaced his grinning and ghastly, particularized copper mask. 

Which made his abrupt presence all the more terrible, and otherworldly. 

“You would not have found this without me.” His voice. A susurrus, like to a cracked steam-pipe.

“These are particular pathways…”

“Look you! Guildsman…”

“What the living have not looked upon, for a moldy aeon.” 

“We have come, to the hidden Heart of the World…”