Come

Come

Where other

Unspeakables walk,

Here 

There

We will to

The

Stair.

Umin rises painfully from the powdery dunes of violently disheveled particulate, and draws in a few gasping breaths through the covering thickness of his scarf. The air is ponderous.

A matronly pluck, curiously incongruous, at his arm and he’s up, brushing away the adhering filth.

Pyna then moves without preamble or compunction through the nearer arch, melting into the lightlessness at the margin of Umin’s frost-light.

It is not 

Winding nor

Far now.

He moves swiftly in kind in order to keep pace. 

The stitch in his side, and lingering ache in his wrist where the desiccate horror sought to angrily unwind skin from bone, is soon blunted by the sepulchral vista that unrolls luridly before them.

The vault moans, like an oceancraft becalmed. 

Languidly straining against windless doldrums.

Umin raises his hand and light races around the narrow and tall soapstone grotto, hurling obscenely slanting shreds of darkness across shapes of concretions and bony protrusions. Contorted and braided tortuously into pits and pleats and scalloped hardness.

Some still stretched like sepia-paper on lattices of thin bone-work, like a leather worker’s efforts suddenly and sadly abbreviated.  

Here they sinned.

Here they dream.

Umin swallows back the rising bile. A bubble in his belly.

Recalling scholarship. Legends concerning the venerable Gate of Candles and its architects.

“This isn’t Meshmin’s work. This is the Paper God...”

Yes Love. Here

He forged all his

Failures.

Before he

Fell 

Back into

Otherwhere.

A creaking, like cedar-twigs pulled by an irritable and cruel wind.

Playful shadows lend the look of slow life to the entombed corpora, as though they struggle enduringly against their stony embrace with agonizing sloth.

By the appearance of some of the hollower nooks and folds, it would seem that they sometimes succeed.

A coldness scratches at Umin as he casts about, before following the ever ceaseless Pyna through a narrow aperture opposite, and thus out of the ghastly space.

Down a long, tall hallway of the same cobalt-tinted soapstone and mealy drifts of dust, they approach another looming maw set deep with a molded, metal gate made ragged by corrosion.

Pyna sighs and taps together two fingernails.

Oily brands set abreast the arch then flare into mellow, caramel life and fill the stifling hall with the tang of smouldering pitch.

Her eerie mammet-eyes bright and amused.

Father

Teaches such

Pretty

Tricks.

With uncanny ease she draws open the gate which grunts with ferrous protest, russet flakes chipping and fluttering. Beyond is a pale-washed and narrow stair, that ascends at a frightful inclination.