Mourning the boy Iearon, and both greatly unsettled and perplexed, by the encounter with her kindred.

Pyna abandoned any further notion of a leisurely southward sojourn.

The knowing in particular, that other synods of Seducers so broadly, even carelessly, strode beneath the luminous twin moons, had left her feeling almost, deliciously unmoored.

In all her long years of prying into the innumerable corners, crinkles, and crannies of the Great City, and its capacious, rambling quarters. Never had she crossed the path of any other than Father, or Nimbelthorne.

Never had she apprehended any other.

Neither had she felt any need to examine what was now so suddenly an immense, and echoing absence.

Like the whisper of a pebble, abruptly dropped into a parched and unplumbable well.

During her long tutelage, Nimbelthorne had very rarely spoken of their kind, other than of Father. Or of the lesser progeny of the Paper God’s dreaming. 

The histories he recounted were ever broad, and sweeping. 

The particulars thereof, always very Human or Innulian in scope. Mentions of the Seducers were as punctuations, footnotes, and spidery sketches.

Though much had faded across the aeons between.

Certainly, since the long stretching ages from the ruin of Sufa to the present, few of the highest Children had been Born. If such a ghastly initiation, could be considered a manner of nascence.  

Through assumption, Pyna had long believed that there remained few, if not altogether none at all, other than the lingering three, of them.

Perhaps, she mused, there were recondite boundaries, and rules…

Why if so, had she not then been made intimate to their imposition?

For the following nights, Pyna moved apace, across the frost-bitten northern plains, and sere forest-scapes.

Leagues of silver and russet dappled distance dissolved beneath her naked, porcelain toes. As she drifted through the deepest hours unseen, with the haste of a sable wind.

Until a profound weariness claimed her.

She would then sup upon nearly anything fleshly, and warm, which crossed her path.

Beast, bird or more rarely, brigand. 

Sometimes gingerly, often ravenously.

Never cruelly.

Before settling customarily into a tomb of cold, hoary soil near the scorching fringe of dawn-rise. 

Seldom did she make any effort to take up more comfortable lodgings, in cellar or sepulchre.

All the while, the fragment of something that should never have been, tucked safely into one of her ample, and secret pockets, whispered voicelessly a treatise of succulent obscenities.

The unending prick, and poke of its beguiling horror worming ably past her defenses in her grief and fatigue. To fill her subsequent dreaming, with winsome apparitions of lush and toothsome dismay. 

Which only grew louder, and more brazen the closer she drew, to the Great City.

Robbing her of any respite, and peaceful rest.

Pyna awoke once more at dusk, burdened by a shroud of unshakable weariness.

Vastly worse were the wicked, and peculiar storms which arose abruptly, and unnaturally. To bedevil her along the track of her journey. 

All of a similar shape and violence, to that of the one which had driven her towards the Elro, and the boy: Iearon…

Forcing her to seek swift refuge, most often beneath a crust of frozen soil. 

Slowing, exhausting, and thwarting her progress.

Ruefully, she understood the weird wellspring of these storms to be the self-same repugnance that she harboured within her pocket. 

Still, it promised, pleaded, and cajoled that she need only yield…

To become the cherished birth-mother to a fresh brood. 

To people Old Night to brim-fullness once more, with all the Paper God’s unbounded variation.

It would teach her how to feast.

The World, her larder.

No

No

There

To ruin

We

Go

Pyna would murmur, against the vast odiousness of its cunning, and sweetly crafted covenants.

Wielding an ancient memory of her servitude within the old pleasure concourse of the Opal Quarter. 

Its repugnance, a cudgel against the ineffable succulence that invaded her dreams.

And so she waged inwardly. 

With a weapon of unforgotten, and ugly horror, opposing a multitude of splendid abominations.

Only to wake, into an ever deepening weariness. With which to flee again with the haste of a windswept night-fog south, towards the Great City, and home. 

Vile and spiteful storms upon her heels, and a madness, suckling at her ear.

The nightmares of sleep and waking before long bled, one into the other, purloining from her any firm sense of time.

And then at last, only through happenstance, and an exercise of utter will, did she recognize a particular stretch of the Pale March. 

Pyna raised her head, and focused beyond the inner cacophony.

There, from out the blending rust, and silver of the twin moons. Heaped against a palette of shredded, caliginous cloudscapes loomed at last, the Pass of Omun.

Which opened between rising foothills. 

Where the two bounding ranges of the Spines of Tiul and the toothy, marching Mounts of Senem broke, one against the other, to climb steep and craggily into churning murkiness.

Beyond, at least a further two nights of fleet travel to where the pass unfolded, and opened to the spread of rolling, and fertile lowlands that abutted the Great City.

The repugnancy in her pocket seemed to quiet its vile prattling.

Oh

I am

Nearly

Home

How had she lost so much time?

The early dawn-dark skies were discomfitingly stormless - although the atrous cloudscape above, tattered and boiled - as she dug with her little alabaster fingers, then settled drowsily, into a gelid patch of pebbly earth beneath the roots of the foothills.

Pyna’s subsequent sleep was muted, and mostly dreamless, such that she awoke at dusk feeling nearly well rested. 

A sensation she had not known for longer than a fortnight. 

Provided that her account of days was presently proper.

Greeted upon waking by an unexpected, and uneasy silence from the obscenity held within her pocket.

As she brushed frozen soil from the tattering folds of her ever more shabby gown. 

She studied the near cloudless night which draped, star-speckled upon the ragged mountain-spires sharply now, above.

The twin moons were yet young, and hung low against the horizon. 

Their lightfall, obscured by the toothy and curtained peaks. 

Eager to be home, and rid of her odious burden, Pyna was soon moving, swift and silent as a nimble dusk-swallow. 

Up through the cracked mouth of the pass, and into the deeper night-dark of its narrow defiles.

Four bells passed, as she followed the Pale March along a wending course through lightless, tapering gorges. 

Neither sudden storm, nor the voiceless soliloquy of her burden arose to obstruct or trouble her progress.

A peculiar and perfunctory absence, which simply served to deepen her disquiet. 

As a grizzly wind scraped across the sandstone ribs of the mountain fastness which embraced her.

Five bells. The way widened, and descended gently towards a vale of wide, worn sandstone. 

Decorated with happenstance boulders, plinths and carved, leaning waymarkers.

Pyna had first passed through this place in her sojourn northwards. 

Well now over two full revolutions of the moons ago. 

It often served caravans and travellers as an encampment; a waystation. 

Upon this wintery night however, it appeared to be unpeopled. But for the radiance of a single tremulous blaze, that hurled stretching, and serrated shadows against the southernmost cliffs. 

Nearby to where the Pale March once more narrowed, and ascended into a fissure along its southbound course.

Pyna hesitated. 

And stood, unseen and unmoving as the stony bones of the mountains that engirded, then reached out.

Extending her uncanny faculties towards the unseemly quiet fire-light.

Nor motion, nor pulse of blood or breath did she apprehend. 

Which aroused a tickle of ephemeral dread. 

For her eldritch eyes had picked out a bent and bundled figure that sat, unmoving abreast the minikin fire.

Her frightful Innulian blade within an eyeblink at hand, she proceeded as a trackless spectre from nighted plinth to waymarker, and between the scattered, standing-stones and boulders that dotted the narrow plain.

Pyna soon paused behind a concealing crag of rotten sandstone, ten paces apart from the attendant personage and their little flame. 

Which appeared to sprout soundlessly from the confines of a plain-seeming clay vessel.

Behind which the figure - enwrapped in the bold, radiant russet, and yellow of a weaver’s robe - was huddled. 

A moment of singularly inhuman stillness, before the bundle bestirred.

“Girl-child… Sister…” It creaked into a soft, sudden gust of gelid wind. 

The crooked figure peered up, its heavy mantle slipping back to unfold a smooth-faced, featureless mask of polished blackwood.

Pyna drifted closer, and into the aureole of uncertain amber radiance.

“You may conceal yourself from me. 

What you carry, may not…”

“Well, not any longer…

Not as it did…”

Pyna’s only open rejoinder was a prolonged stillness. 

Cold and smouldering. 

Her mien, as unplumbable as that of a painted marionette.

Though she made no effort to veil her soundless rancour from the mask.

“You thirst. It has been some while.”

I am

Well

Enough

“Sit, speak with me. We will clear the way.

Unlace our misunderstandings…”

Pyna shook her head softly. 

A negation.

I will

Not

Sit

With

Thee

The mask simply twisted its mantled head a little. 

Licks of reflected fire curling, and gamboling across its lustrous surface.  

Pyna, acutely wary, reached out with all her unearthly senses. 

Seeking for the mask’s missing companion…

Where

Is the

Other?

Your

Daughter

Lover?

“I have sent her away…

She will have other errands to attend.”

“And I would not risk a deeper loss…” The mask paused. Radiating regret and grief.

Hasty

Had

He

Stayed 

His

Blade

“He was young…

Too proud. It was a grave price.”

Pyna, with a watchful stillness as of the stones that stood abreast, offered no reply.

“It is past and done.” 

The mask creaked, and gestured ruefully with a desiccate, marble-wan hand. Fingers twiggy as a bird’s talon.

Another pause as they appeared to ponder.

“The longer I mulled, in my pursuit. 

Watching the storms arise, though you shut yourself…

I was able to follow. And wait, here…” The mask performed an expansive gesture.

“Ever more it vexed…

How, you should have been granted to leave the Omoorn, bearing what you did. What you do. How?”

“Now, I begin to see. It terrifies…”

Pyna had listened warily to the creature’s soliloquy. 

Her unease waxing with every subsequent word. She knew what the mask would demand of her. 

But neither why, nor how.

She interrupted the creature's musings. 

Her sing-song utterance, sweetly temperate but unyielding. 

No

I have

Promised

 

It is

Not for

Me to

Give

To

Thee

“It is too vast for your knowing.” The mask creaked, wearily. But with eminent reasonableness.

“You are no shepherd…”

Its meaning confounded her.

You

Cannot

Claim

It

“No, not alone…” 

Again, its words, ponderous with lament.

Something struck Pyna from her flank.

A voraciousness, that had melted abruptly from out the softly wailing winter’s wind and gloom. 

Which had somehow bewildered her senses.

“You are so young…”

She heard the mask murmur, as the indistinct shape of a papery-fleshed, knotty abomination, hurled her like a thing of mere shreds and patches. 

Out into the dark and hard, against the outcropping of a weather-bitten plinth.

No

Bone

Eater

The breath was swiftly pressed from Pyna’s lungs, as her Innulian blade slipped, and skittered from her grasp, and away, into the lightless tomb of night.

The bone-eater moved with an eldritch haste akin to her own.

Its wide, keenly edged and osseous fingers buried themselves bitterly into her marmoreal flesh. 

Ripping through cloth, and her uncanny, alabaster skin.

Then tossed her, once more with inhuman ferociousness, into the nighted sandstone cliff-face, so that she fell, cracked and tangled like an unstringed marionette.

Against the blazing anguish that corded and pinched her every fibre in agony, she held her silence. 

Eyes shut and burning with blood and salt.

Slowly, Pyna spread her hands into the blackness and reached out.

An Innulian blade of the ilk that she bore was not a common, base instrument.

It was a part of her. Another eerie organ.

As bound to the secret ebb and flow. The surges of her innermost incarnadine seas, as was her own strange, marmoreal heart.

Soon, she felt again the queer and comforting coldness of it beneath her reaching fingers.

Not far, the bone-eater snuffled and rustled like a bundle of crepitating leaves, from beyond a tall boulder. 

It seemed suddenly hesitant.

She sat up and leaned, in her rag-doll fashion. 

Already her blood had begun to stitch and knit and bind.

The bone-eater moved again, inhumanly swift as a black, winter squall. 

Pyna rolled, and bent with equal if not greater haste. 

She watched its eyes, like puckering plums, swollen and putrid. Follow the flow of her motion as she twisted and cut. 

Her Innulian blade separated the vulgarity’s jumbled and fused, parchment-like leg from where its groin might have been. 

Its speed carried it, hurtling beyond into a sandstone spire. 

Where it lay, crackling and rustling obscenely.

“Why, must we always choose the path of savagery…” The mask creaked musingly, as it glode, a wraith from out the gloom.

“Now, Sister…” 

But its speaking was abruptly abbreviated, by a billowing brumousness. 

A pall of rolling and silent ink so fathomless as to leave even Pyna blind.  

Weavecraft…

“No!” She heard the mask plead. 

Before a disharmony akin to the grinding of a glass pane.

Pyna raised her Innulian blade against the silence that briefly followed.

And a figure that shifted at her periphery, as the unnatural caliginousness melted away. 

“Oh, my most beloved Daughter.” The figure’s adumbrated voice was smiling, and urbane.

“You are truly, dauntless…”

Pyna gazed up from where she sat bonelessly against a black, and sere stone. 

He was no more than a beetling shadow of perplexing angles. 

But before his words. Or any other faculty, it was his peculiar perfume that brought unfaltering recognition.

Father…

She then allowed herself to slip gratefully into senselessness.