Pyna felt it, in the measure of less than a heartbeat, before it arrived.

A scalloped surge of corrupting weaver’s fire.

There was no occasion for thought, or fear. 

Within the remaining half a heartbeat, she had wrapped her small arms around the young man, Iearon.

And with all her faculties for appallingly eldritch haste. Hurled them in their embrace, deep into the engirding gloom of the forest, while the onslaught of pyroclastic rage licked, and lashed. Gorging the woods in their wake.

The abrupt, and apparitional burst of unforeseen speed had been too much for the boy. 

Who lay now, gasping for breath, and twisting in a patch of disordered snow, and frosty leaf-litter. Although he appeared to be otherwise unseared.

Pyna was fleetingly overcome by the terror of her indelible recollection of tumbling - well nigh over two centuries past - helplessly through a gulf of caliginous night.  

Sheathed in unnatural fire. 

Of inexpressible agony.

She shuddered as she gathered herself.

Stamping and batting, at the nearest lingering licks of sickly flame that had scorched the edges of her skirts.

Her otherwise pristine and naked alabaster toes, now brushed with a fine, and oily-hued ash. 

A polluted, metaphysical stink. 

Caustic and ineffable, lingered within her nose. 

These were the Adumbral Cants, sung to their most dreadful pitch. 

Pyna crouched and leaned gently into the still trembling boy, nose to nose.

Give

Me your

Trust

Keep here

Stay

You

Must

Reaching out, as she touched his tangled and greasy locks, she found his conscience to be a curiously disordered space.

Fear and flight, and something alien befouling.

Wherein she apprehended the fabric of other, more subtle weaving still.

Something she could not understand nor unwind from her present place.

Pyna was angry.

That an act of precipitousness should have unmade the peculiar, and abstruse sweetness that had come to her so unlooked for.

Iearon…

How could such a thing be? What did it mean?

She set all such questions aside for the present.

Then slipped her horror-forged Innulian blade from its secret sheath against her thigh. And moved, like a thirsting spectre, back towards the wagon train.

The distance was not far for her fleet, naked feet.

She flowed swiftly, and soundlessly between the tattering, ugly ochre shadows cast by vestigial sprouts of corrosive flame. That supped still, upon the tormented swathe of charred woodland. 

The ineffable, and creosote reek upon the air waxed ever more acrid, as she drew nearer to her destination. 

Pyna had enduringly loved the poplar boughs, and sweet birch of her birthplace. 

She found their stretching limbs to be lissom, and feminine. Stately in their yellow, and russet autumn garnish. 

To see them in this place so unkindly contorted, and stripped by peculiar fire, only served to swaddle her anger in a stinging sadness.

Forty paces and five heartbeats, she came upon the first body. 

Disfigured and faceless, it seemed little more than a hunched and smouldering ash-pile. Still crackling with unnatural heat.

Man, woman or child. She was unable to discern from the miserable remains.

When she delicately reached to brush an ashy protrusion, the form breathlessly collapsed beneath her fingers. 

Leaving no more than a grim stain upon her porcelain digits. 

Even all the bones beneath, would seem to have suddenly rotted away.

Pyna’s rue and rancour compounded…

She moved briskly onwards, another twenty paces and two heartbeats, through an obscene gallery of similarly cremated contours. 

Sifting piles of ash, and feculent bone. 

Thrown against tortured boughs, that still hissed and groaned in the early gloom.  

Until she emerged into the space where she had at first secretly observed the Elro. 

Concealed by the girth of a blistered oak, Pyna peeked out upon a sinister landscape of black, and ailing yellow ruination. 

The moist earth wheezed, and stank of burnt things.

Two of the former four colossal carriages had simply ceased to be. 

Of one, there remained a crumpled, and smouldering skeleton. 

As though a giant had tread upon a burning, naked wicker-wain. 

The last appeared to have mostly outlived the force of the conflagration, but had been pushed, and rolled beyond the camp some distance into the forest. 

Where it lay upon its side, woefully cracked. Like a great wounded, woodland beast.

Pyna reached out, and felt the frightened pulse of five living hearts, therein. 

One sicklier than the others. Nonetheless there was still breath, and life. 

She moved, a noiseless wraith, from out her place of concealment alongside the oak, and then across the nearer wrack, and unwholesome smouldering of disordered, and mustard-hued cinder-piles.

The unseen threads were cumbersome, and sticky here. 

Weaver’s work. 

Sung and hung heavily from the bare canopy in order to befuddle and blind. 

Pyna pricked her finger-tip, and drew a strange incarnadine little bead. Then sang her own sibilant cant, which unwound the tangle in the skein, and opened the ruined meadow again, to all her unearthly faculties.

Immediately, she was aware of the approaching company.

Which had skulked, and spread itself out across a nearby swathe of the caliginous wood.

From her cursory dance across their shallow-most thoughts, they seemed to her to be no more than a knotty collection of common ruffians, and brigands. 

But for three…

Who, like puzzle-boxes, prevented her perfunctory intrusions into their penetralia.

Who, soon coursed over the scorched hillcrest like graceful, quiet shreds of silken, autumnal fire.

Bundled in bold russet and yellow weaver’s robes. 

Not dissimilar to her own, which was presently folded and pressed into one of her secret pockets.

Seducers…

Siblings

Pyna, startled and wary, stopped and stood in her ever unnerving rag-doll fashion, and watched as they cautiously; soundlessly approached, smooth and graceful as ribbons of smoke, then divided. 

So that two stood facing, abreast of her. 

A man to the left, and a woman to the right. Eyes oddly, familiarly glassy and a’glister, and skin, ghastly-wan. 

Though they smelled fresh, and plumping. 

And full of too much heat.

And the last, a head taller than the other pair - and Pyna - to fore. 

Man or woman, she could not immediately apprehend.

As it concealed its very particular nature from her, by way of comparable means to her own. 

And it seemed sufficiently strong in that quarter, as to prevent any compulsion.

Their conscience shut soundly, against her reaching. 

And features secreted beneath a smooth-faced, featureless mask of polished blackwood, beneath a heavy mantle.

For a few breaths, the figures simply stood, still as effigies, studying one another. 

The forest hoarfrost rasping, and ash sifting the only sounds.

“You are the brewer of storms…?” The mask creaked. 

Pyna cocked her head, a curious magpie.

Its hollow voice still left her perplexed as to its sex.

Perhaps, neither man nor woman, she mused. 

I have

Made no

Storms

But Pyna understood immediately then, the terrible import of their presence.

As the nightmare she kept bound, and corded within her secret innermost pocket twitched a little, like a restive insect. Its unctuous murmur, just a little louder in her ear.

The mask seemed to find her manner of speaking odd, the way it bent to study her. 

It continued.

“We thought it the Elro. 

At first.. 

But they have none of such talent.

Now, we see…

Sister…”

With long-fingered hands, near skeletal. Porcelain-pale as Pyna’s own. 

The mask performed an affected gesture. 

Pyna shook her head, and gazed sourly at the wrack and ruin that encircled them.

No

I see

You are

Not as

I

But 

Lesser

To

Me

 

You are

Cruel

Homicides and

Thieves

“Enough…” The man smoothly interjected.

“Enough chatter with this twiggy puppet.”

He had plucked a long, black-iron blade from its bindings at his waist.

“Wait, we must-” The mask objected, but not swiftly enough. 

Blandly, Pyna watched as he moved. A gust of sudden wind with murderous intent, against her. 

Like a ribbon of oil and milk, she streamed. 

With uncanny and near boneless alacrity, beneath the black blade of the man’s inhumanly swift cut.

He had thought her deceptively doll-delicate shape to be something readily broken.

That very common misestimation, twinned with the blood and tutelage of Nimblethorne. 

In this place made Pyna an implacable adversary.

You are

So

Young

Like a willow-switch she came back up, then parted the man’s breast-bone from below with her dreadful Innulian blade.

In the same heartbeat, she had plucked from the wound his weird, and marmoreal kernel from its osseous rest. 

Like pulling a seed through sodden tissue.

The figure flailed for a moment. 

A dropped mammet, before crumpling silently into a puff of yellow-grey ash.

Wherein it twisted obscenely. As an alabaster-wan worm-thing.

That soon resolved, with the discomposing sound of crackling parchment set alight, into a foul, and milky dust.

She felt the departure of his mournful apparition. 

Drift out, and fade away into the unknowable depths of the Outside.

Still, the horrible engine of his unhomed heart, thrummed between her bloodied fingers for two breaths. The shape, and putrid texture of some vulgar plum-fruit.

With a flick of the tongue, she tasted only unfamiliarity in the liquor of its cooling, cardinal life-stuff. Before letting it slip from her small, alabaster fingers into the ash at her feet.

Whom 

Was

Thy

Womb?

The woman, who had been to the right of Pyna, simply melted unceremoniously into the murk of the forest. 

Her bloodless mien, a misshapen grimace of terror.

The mask recoiled, and cursed in a mingle of regret, and a jumble of indefinable fears. 

An Adumbral Cant was swiftly sung.

Followed by a curtain of rippling yellow-grey vile fire that keened, like to a dying and distressed animal. 

Which the masked weaver cast, and spread open. A blazing net with which to snare Pyna.

Who proved to be swifter by a hairsbreadth.

In the space of an eyeblink, she had danced along, and around its coruscating and searing surface-flow, to grasp the mask by their neck.

Then hurled them like a rag-thing, with unspeakable speed against the prodigious trunk of a leaning oak.  

Pyna felt, and heard bones shatter, and organs burst.

In crumpled agony, the mask shouted something that she didn’t immediately comprehend.

Even as the company of common brigands hastily converged from out of the gloom.

Two ruffians perished abruptly, to Pyna’s cavorting Innulian blade, in their ardour to do violence.

Their necks, purging a warm, dark heat into the inkiness of Old Night. 

Their bodies tumbled into ash-heaps.

For Which

For What?

 

A kiss

Or a

Cut

 

A kiss

Is

Sweeter

Though

A Cut

Will

Do

 

I think?

I do

Four more needlessly perished in a similar fashion, before the remainder scattered into the woods.

In the midst of the brief hurlyburly the woman, and the mask had vanished, like to a dawning mist.

Soon, Pyna stood alone in the midst of cold grey, and yellow ashy devastation. 

Studying the now tranquil night with all her eldritch attention.

The remaining company of outlaws had retreated. The febrile pulse of their heartbeats faded, as they fled.

Not far away, she could feel the surviving Elro. 

As they woefully gathered around the remains of their last, ruined wagon.

She sighed with a downy sadness, and left them to their work.

The twin moons were low against the horizon, when she returned to the young man, Iearon.

Who lay sleeping, curled warmly in his rough homespun, against a heap of disheveled snow. 

She crouched and leaned in close to him, nose to nose and gently shook him to wakefulness. 

Brushing his oily curls.

How?

You

Cannot

Be

Pyna, enrapt in her musings, failed to apprehend the heavy shadow that soon crept across her periphery.

Something unkindly cut the air, a finger-width from her brow.

The sudden feathered bolt from out the forest-dark, nonetheless found a mark. 

As crimson abruptly bloomed above the young man’s heart. 

Startled, she pulled away and mutely watched for a few breaths, as his rough homespun grew thick with the scarlet of swiftly seeping, cardinal life-stuff. 

As he, caught in a half-slumber, suddenly struggled to draw breath, and trembled appallingly.

Iearon…

No

No

Pyna swiftly tore at his cloth with her fingers, in order to unfold the naked flesh from which the hateful shaft now protruded.

No

No

I can

Mend

Something acrid touched her nose.

She could smell the viperousness.

Iearon’s eyes opened. 

The jellied brightness therein, had already grown milky.

His duskily stained lips parted in what might have been a passing smile, as he peered blindly into some space which Pyna couldn’t apprehend.

His hand rose, and brushed against her cold lip. 

Voice less than a whisper.

“I, see…”

No

Do not

Go

But she felt his rarefied self flee.

Inevitably, into the ineffable Outside…

Pyna quietly wept in despond.

Murmuring strings of nonsense.

While she tenderly pressed her cold, porcelain-wan fingers against his breast and face, over and over.

As though she might summon something back to the empty place, that had been the boy Iearon.

Within the folds of his ruined tunic, she discovered his shin-bone flute. Which she cradled.

Then slipped gingerly into one of her hidden pockets. 

Before long, the surviving Elro warily, and silently gathered.

She ignored their angry, accusing, sorrowful, confused and astonished eyes for a few breaths.

Before at last peering up at them all. 

Her peculiar, inhuman eyes, brim-full of a very human helplessness.

I am

Sorry

She then fled, a sallow spectre, into the encumbering dark of the forest.

But Pyna did not depart from the wood. 

Instead she pursued the murderer by means of her uncanny faculties, scent and spoor, as though she were a hunting-hound.

The gelid spark of grief, and hatred in her breast, pressing her onwards.

Until he arrived. A lone, broad-shouldered scoundrel of the same band that had set upon her, within the forest’s thinning eaves.

Where she made her presence known.

Bent like a spectral shred of night-fog between the bough-shadows.

Neither here, nor there.

Thus she hounded him, for two bells, out across the glistering drifts of the nearer plains, and to the edge of another naked copse of wintry poplars.

At last weary, and sick of her sport. 

And as the burning edge of dawn, began to sear the lip of night.

From out the attenuating darkness, she cast a palm-width frozen stone upon him with such violence, as to shatter his thigh bone.

The brigand wept, and stumbled into the crackling drifts beneath the grasping fingers of bare poplar twigs. 

His breath, a diffuse and febrile fog.

Where he crawled achingly towards the obscure, and enwombing trunks of naked trees. 

Pyna leisurely drifted, ever more near. 

Her bare, marble-pale toes against the hoary snow grinding, deliberately; terrifyingly.  

To tread, with heedlessness, at last upon his heel. 

The bones therein a cacophony like to dry, crepitating leaves.

The man screamed.

As Pyna crooked him upon his back, and crooned.

You will

See the

Deeps of

Such

Unspeakable

Dreams

And so he fell into the splendid, and eerie brightness of her terrible and wide, cracked-glass eyes.

For a short while, his bewildering howls fractured the early dawn darkness of the forest.

Shook the rooks from their roosts.

And discomposed, the beasts in their brooding, beneath the snows.