There is a fleeting tooth-rasp of particulate as the panel slips at last, shut.
A sift of tumbling dust. A precarious creak as weight settles against the straining frame of the ladder.
Umin hangs from a mouldy rung.
Like a blind spider against the inky, undeniable lacuna of night.
He is well acquainted with high and perilous places as a qualifier of his craft, however this suspension like a pale pendant fruit over a sightless abyss is disconcerting.
Breath held, from a concealing pocket-fold he gently plucks Pyna’s opaque light-stone. As he steadily and warily opens his palm, it brightens like a lazy halcyon dawn. Soon he is engulfed in its reassuring aureole of frost-light.
Squinting, his eyes slit against the reflective and wan sepia dust that clings to the wain’s width of vertical chute. Frozen billows like a sallow, sickly cloudscape cut in stone.
The air is smothering. Motes of filth fill the chute in an unending, languid dust-fall.
Umin swiftly swaddles mouth and nose in the kerchief of his loose robes. Easing breath and the unkindly scratching in his throat.
He gazes downward and begins a careful descent, the nothing beyond his frost-light slowly unfolding to reveal more drifting, dusty nothing.
This continues for an agonizing number of breaths and powdery blinks. Flecks adhering to his eyelashes like unmelting snowfall.
The ladder groans with a dry moulder, but is otherwise stable. Perhaps, Senic has made some nominal effort to maintain it.
Pyna is nowhere to be remarked, and again there is the sharp dirk of doubt twisting in his belly.
What manner of aspiration to self-immolation is this that whips him on, hanging from the skirts of an eerie wraith racing across the underbelly of the world.
Poxy Ure and his aspirations. His intrigues…
Poor Thimblebrom!
And me, how I miss the dawn…
His indulgence in self-pity is fleeting as the frost-light’s icy illumination falls at last upon a narrow strip of floor, a few mere meters now below. Abreast some manner of erratic-edged opening.
Umin moves now with all the years of his accumulated alacrity. Slipping down gracefully and landing quietly on a surface downy with the same thick, drifting grit as that choking the chute above.
He edges through the rupture. A barrel-wide, man-height laceration through the waxy soapstone wall. The issue of some long ago act of stone-breaking brutish violence.
Scanning the chamber beyond, its mellow cylindrical shape made sharp and shadowless in the outflow of frost-light. The walls formed of a cobalt tinted soapstone void of any protrusions.
It has the appearance of a hub.
The floor sloping mildly towards a filth-smothered concavity at its heart, and four wide and atrous arches agape to each cardinal compass-point.
Umin reaches deliberately to loose the long-knife from out the sheathe against his thigh.
Its fine-edged balance and ruthless presence reassuring against his palm.
The chamber is soundless. The preponderance of particulate deadening. There is no mark of anyone having passed through this space for an unmeasured span.
He moves discreetly along the round of the room taking pains not to bestir the powdery detritus. But dust rests uneasily and despite arduousness, small spillways across the drifts form, which then sift into the well at the center. All without a whisper.
The nearest arch broods black and bends over his approach like a great open gullet, petrified at the apex of engulfing.
Yielding no knowledge of its innards from his present angle, Umin raises his gleaming frost-light in an effort to illumine the space within.
There is a sudden sighing, as if a serpent sifting through sand-fall.
A grasping agony engirds his ankle, sending him with a twisting to his knees.
A glimpse of jawless ghastliness.
Eyes cavernous and puckering like waterless plums.
He kicks and rolls, clasping the frost-light tightly, extinguishing its cooling radiance and precipitating a blind and menacing curtain of bitumen to descend.
An ossified reek boils through the room, sticky with the astringence of embalming resins and reminiscent of yawning canopic jars.
Once more a sandy whistling as twiggy-iron digits enround his wrist, and another sharp and desiccated limb wantonly flails and rips at his breast, as though crudely digging for the incarnadine wellspring of his terrified heart-flutter.
Umin with lips drawn back from teeth in the eyeless dark like a maddened hunting-hound, cuts and stabs at something yielding and papery like vellum, but with the tenacity of a wild boar.
At last there is a merciless wrenching, as the unseen grotesquerie is kindlessly plucked away, a mere ravening hand-span from his straining throat.
The unspeakable retch of rotten bone cracking follows, reverberating through the hollows as he forces open his palm, flushing the chamber once more with a cold light.
There but a footfall away is a knotty corpse-tangle, its skin a sinewy parchment-shroud, twisting obscenely in Pyna’s idle grasp like a crushed arachnid.
Her face is a softly smiling mask of momentary curiosity, before letting the strangely-angled nightmare slip mutely from out her fingers to slide motionlessly away with the swallowing dust.
Unlovely
Loveless
Ugly and
Bloodless.
The Undreaming
Were dressed for
Forever
Here.
“A tomb..”
Umin rasps, knees still buckled and breathing in broken gasps.
Yes love, a
Tomb.
Fenowed and
Finew these
Mausoleums are
Deeper than even
Father’s memories
Move.
