Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

A prickling, and glacial wind, whimpered across the rolling winter-mounds, deep within the womb of Old Night.

Or perhaps it was simply the wheeze, and echo of laboured suspiration, from out the heavy body that pelted febrily across the nighted snow-piles, scattering hoarfrost. 

The twin moons: Fiin the Frostshorn and Ikrit the Cinnabar, spilled across the snowscape, wherefrom the broken clouds they spied. 

Painting the fearful, fleeing figure with an uncertain silver, and russet dapple.

He stumbled in a snow-crackle, but swiftly righted, as he cast his gaze briefly backwards, and across his own lunatic-meandering traces. 

Oh such

Filth

Bound by

Twine and

Thick with

Wine

He heard the bone-eater’s taunting, poison-sweet sing-song from somewhere, and nowhere. 

Lashing him on, towards the black and menacing treeline.

~~~

Three gelid, and brooding nights passed.

Since Pyna had departed the land of her lost maidenhood: The weird, woodlands of Pirn. 

And from out the hunter, Eket of Mirk’s uneasy company.

As she had come, so she went. 

Sojourning south, and towards the Great City, at a pleasant pace.

She was adamant upon the matter of travelling as it pleased her. 

To spite her frightful, and odious burden. 

A fragment of something that should never have been. 

Tightly bound and wrapped. 

Then secreted deep in a hidden pocket within the folds of her voluminous skirts.

Still, it endlessly sibilated. 

Sought to prick her with appalling ardour. Incalculable promises sweet, and perfidious… 

To which she shut her heart, and conscience firmly. Then tightened its binding ribbons and twine.

And so Pyna drifted without care, like a soundless, fog-born phantom beneath the spreading, stelliferous nightscapes.

Her naked, porcelain toes carrying her without the trace of a footfall, across the unlit drifts of ice-bound, winter panoramas.

She had replaced her fiery-crimson weaver’s robe once more, with her inky, and veiling traveller’s gown.

So that she would appear as no more than a brief shred of dancing shadow, against any horizon.

It was, as ever, her habit to avoid fellow wayfarers.

And to gently sup, when needed, upon beasts of the spare and wintery wood-groves through which she glode.

The hind, the hare, the wild boar. 

Their straining and struggles all, filled her with a voluptuous, earthy heat. 

Upon the first bell of the twelfth night of Pyna’s sojourn. A storm-bearing, and ferocious wind abruptly roiled from out the plains to her west.

Distempering the snows below, and building great piles of umber stormclouds, above. 

Which roared, and hurled gleaming and edged bolts. Shattering the nighted winter’s calm with violent brightness. 

Although not uncommon across these northern climes, in the midst of winter. 

This singular tempest arose with such reckless fury, as to have caught Pyna nearly unawares, while she sported playfully with the rising snow-plumes.

Its immediacy filled her with the dread of a girlhood memory. 

Of the autumn storm one year, that arose above the birchwood thickets of southern Pirn. 

Which hurled in its rage, a tree through the thatching of her family’s cottage. 

A calamity that nearly killed her sister.

Pyna fled from the brewing tumult above with apparitional haste.

Towards a skeletal, night-dark treeline of naked poplars. 

That creaked, and were bent into grotesque, and elongated shapes before the leaning storm.  

With ghostly velocity, and skirts billowing like a mad, inky cloud. She navigated the wracked, and crepitating boughs, moving further into the wood, where the storm again overtook her above a narrow dell. 

Terrified by the arbitrary lightning that burst whole boughs into flailing splinters, and set portions of the bare canopy alight. Pyna dug with her naked, milky fingers like a furious beast through the hard, frosty earth.

Deep, deep, until she found succor beneath softer soils, where she lay trembling. The storm above, a muted but still savage, and wailing presence.

A bell passed, perhaps two. Until the distant night had again quieted.

Pyna lay within a loamy womb of cool, and soothing soils. Pressed and cradled. 

Feeling placid and presently untroubled by thirst. She considered simply remaining there, within her chilly cocoon of earth, and matted winter-roots until the following night, when she could emerge again. Hopefully, beneath a still and stormless sky.

Feeling all the dank, blind creatures that burrowed through the lightless reaches, below the thin skin of the world. She felt nearly content. 

A peculiar creature among peculiar creatures. Keenly estranged from those fleshly, and warm dwellers beneath the ever-spiteful eye of the burning Day-star.

She was unperturbed, by strands of mold, blot of rot, or touch of grime.  

The Seducers. 

These most particular Children of the Paper God, neither feared nor abhorred any earthly infirmity. 

Nor dung, nor soil, nor dust.

Nor plague, nor blight, nor canker.

Nothing adhered to their pure, and porcellanous flesh.

Often only the tatterdemalion of their sewn raiment, tended to reflect the nature of their singular, and subterranean bedchambers…

And it was these qualities that so acutely divided them, from the precincts of the living. 

Unquiet thoughts such as this had begun to nibble at Pyna’s cold contentment. A snare of self-pity.

Thus she reached out, and apprehended the comforting, and warm thrum of unconnected hearts nearby, and above.

Of nocturnal woodland beasts, snuffling through the crackling snow.

And beyond, something other that pricked at her uncanny faculties.

So she reached out farther, and found distinctly human hearts, gathered together in a small space.

Quiet voices. Gentle laughter. 

Living heat.

Pyna reconsidered her plans for an early slumber.

Bestirring, she pulled, and dug, and worried herself like a blind, opaline worm through the frosty loam.

Back out the way she had descended.

Soon she emerged, especially begrimed, from the leafy and root-tangled muck.

Like a perfectly odd, and pale flower bursting from a pot of soil. 

She pulled clods from her hair, and wiped her eyes. Shook herself clean. Patted her cloth into something passable.

Which had become ever more difficult with every day not spent within a ruin, or root-cellar. Instead of beneath a tangle of roots.

And so, she found herself briefly longing, for the mirror-pool at the heart of her high manor in the Opal Quarter. 

Before long, she was drifting once again, like a shred of night-fog beneath the naked canopy of the atramentous wood. 

The stelliferous sky had opened once more. 

And the twin moons gleamed, silver and russet against the poplar-boughs, and crested snow-piles. 

Pyna moved as a soundless phantom, towards the distant flare of cookfire, obscured by the tangles, and lightless folds of the nighttime forest.

The space wherein the hearts that she had apprehended from below, were congregated.

She reached out again. 

And touched shallow, fleeting notions not her own. Unfolding the nature of these folk

Elro. 

Merchant-nomad families which wandered interminably. The expanses between the Great City, and the scattered hamlets that abutted the southernmost reaches of Pirn, to the north.

The redolence of woodsmoke, entwined with the reek of unwashed skins, soon tickled the sharpness of her inhuman nose.

From the inharmonious chorus of palpitations alone, she counted the presence of twenty souls. 

Broadly gathered near to a hearth, at the heart of a protective curtain of four, colossal carriages. 

Others were scattered.

Sentries, in the dark or grooms attending to horses. 

Most, slumbered at this early hour.

A few were sickly, their pulses uncertain.

Others were lovers. 

Their quiet exertions reflected in each febrile vibration of their delectably soft, incarnadine kernels.

Pyna paused, still as statuary, upon the periphery of the encampment. Within the secreting veil of the forest’s winter gloom. 

Sniffing softly and listening, for the particular thread that had found its way to her, even beneath the concealing black soils.

There, nearby the hearth.

A high, whisper-thin tune emerged once more, coiling as sinuously as sweet woodsmoke.

The primeval piping, of a shin-bone flute. 

Pyna found herself bewitched by the cavorting, and allycholly chords.

But no less than by the soft aspect of the sweet-faced young man, from which the supernal wind-song had arisen. 

Who ceased his piping, and sat, and laughed within the small circle of companions that had not as yet, succumbed to sleep.

From her secret place of stillness and shadow, like a looming and soundless wraith wrought of dark and snow. 

Pyna studied his apple-ruddy glow.

Something in his mien, and manner touched her with a tender disquiet, even as it drew her in.

She thought to reach out, and brush against his thoughts. In order to steal his name. 

And yet, some uncertainty she couldn’t plumb, made her reluctant to do so. 

Instead, she remained enrapt. And enwrapped, in her concealing coal-dark folds. 

Thinking to await an occasion.

Which came before long, as the young man stood, and smiled at something that was said.

Before moving off, into the gloom of the nearer treeline.

Oh…

Pyna soughed, spying her opportunity.

Moving again, with inhuman alacrity, and silence through the winter-bare, dusk enshrouded trees. 

Within two heartbeats, she stopped a few paces abreast, and slightly behind him. In the stygian space immediately beyond the periphery of his sight. 

Wherefrom she wordlessly watched him.

Propped up, like to a ghostly rag-doll.

While he performed the very human, and animal task of emptying his bloated bladder into a leaf-ridden snowpile.

After a moment, Pyna conspicuously sniffed.

He stank of straw and sourness. 

And a mingle of rich, and motley reeks native to the body of every unwashed young man.

Bundled in the roughly dyed cloth of an unrefined homespun.

His hair, a raucousness of greasy auburn curls. Limbs thin, and a handsbreadth taller than her.

When he finished, and sighed, he turned to address the darkness. Mistaking her presence for that of someone else.

“Phen, I begged you not to sneak and skulk li-”

Hello…

Sweet, and spare.

Any further words, caught like hooks in his throat. 

Eyes made window-panes suddenly thrown wide, to admit terrible things.

Fascinating, and repulsive.

“W-Who?”

My mother named me Pyna...

“What are…You…” His words trailed off, as though they were dust upon his tongue.

Her little bow-mouth, bent into a sweet, succulent smile.

No harm

To

Thee

Something, Pyna thought she should recall, tugged distantly at her conscience.

The shape of his eyes…

The young man swallowed and wet his lips, squinting at her.

“You are so, pale…”

“A… Bone-eater…” 

He stumbled back. A terrified step or two.

No I

Am not

So

She reached out then. 

With a simple and warm kindliness, in order to ease his heart.

And tell

Me true

Sweet

What does

Your 

Mother

Call

You?

He blinked, frowned a small frown and shook his head.

“My name is, Iearon…”

The abrupt and empty stillness of Pyna’s expression appeared to frighten him once again, as he stepped back quickly. Face once more uneasy.

A frisson of brittle coldness had threaded itself through her heart, much like the selfsame piping that had at first snared her ear.

Pyna’s voice was a timorous whisper.

Iearon…

I know

You are

A 

Poet

Is this 

Not

So?

He smiled again then. Seeming both perplexed, and pleased.

“I am. I-”

But his answer was abbreviated. 

When the world brusquely burst, into a blistering tempest of yellow-grey fire.