For my eye, no need, still.

Light for you though love.

It is darker, deeper here than the

Middle-below above.

From a concealing pocket, somewhere under-gown she pulls something frost-blue and opaque, passing its waxiness to Umin. 

The stone-thing is cool and unassuming against his fingers. Quite suddenly it begins to shed an icy, shadow-melting illumination that rolls outwards around the pair into a cold, steady aureole.

Chasing away the obscurity from the doorway, which now yawns deep and rounding like the gape-gullet of the toothless dead.

Down the sloping, stairless tunnel the pair descend.

It is a place of hard, packed earth, much indeed like a root cellar.

They move lower for some minutes, until the way opens and broadens. 

The air by and by thickening against Umin’s lips with a yielding, putrid moisture.

He turns to spit onto the gritty slope, his movement momentarily arrested by the oddness of Pyna’s aspect. Which is smooth and stark in their icy, embracing halo. 

Beautiful and terrible like an alabaster doll, with lips slightly parted in perennial soft-seeming smiles. 

Her eyes, reflecting like pools of shattered, shallow-sunken gemstones.

The impression is that of a flower sadly protracted and perpetuated; preserved in the bloom.

“Pyna, how-” He starts uneasily.

Oh, much longer than you my heart.

See now, we’ve come to the end.

And the start.

Umin blinks away his curiosity. 

Turning instead to regard the low-ceilinged grotto ahead, its floor pooling water from trickle and drip.

Scattered about are black-beamed cages painted over with rust and nitre.