Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

In the Above, Autumn makes forth. 

The goddess An’ii of the Sere Leaf strides again across verdant wolds, wringing the sap from Summer’s failing heart.

The disciple, her patron now lost to the abundant and faceless throngs of the pleasure concourse, clutches her warming reward, and pads furtively into the labyrinth of sistering tenements and torpid alleys.

Her toes aching from the remorseless edges of bricky boulevards and splintered pavements gnawing endlessly at her sandals.

Her intended destination is just within the Opal Quarter. 

Beyond the beggar’s nests and merchant hovels, to where the martinets of the Burning Houses wage perpetual cold and subtle war against the Guilds, and through them the unreachable Lower Houses. 

Such ebb and flow below the spindly veneer is rarely evident to the journeyman, the hawker of apples, the cloth and fishmongers, the faceless passersby. Or even the great Lords and Ladies of the Upper Houses.

No. But she understood...

She knew her place in the vasty Unseen.

Her shadow now made emaciated, stretched like soft amber-gum by the grasping dawn as it claws across the horizon. 

She arrives breathless at last to her nook. Unremarked upon, thankfully by neither martinet nor other ill-intentioned dwellers upon the edges.

Plucking and dislodging a loose number of bricks, she shimmies like a frightened flitter-mouse into the gap between. Then turns in the narrow space, pulling the broken masonry back into its proper place. 

She then slides down into her little hidden and unassuming domicile.

It is immaculately kept. She abhors filth.

No other soul dwells in the ramshackle above. Not for many years now, and all other ways were long ago shut against intrusion.   

Her patron had directed her here. Ensured her safety.

And though it is an otherwise modest space, he has provided well for her. 

Here she piously and jealously treasures his gifts.

Assiduously brushing away the dry, clinging soil from her shapeless robe, she settles into heapy pillows piled into the shape of a bed. 

Gently then, she unstopples the ampoule, filling the single room with a succulent metallic scent. 

Sickly and enticing all the same. Strange and preternaturally stinging.

Fingers tremulous, she downs the heat of it in one swift unhesitating draught.

A fiery, honeyed liquid, like wonderful, horrible copper. Molten creeps into her belly. 

Annealing her arteries and filling her brim-full with the promise of sensual Forever. 

And how she coveted this Forever. 

How she wrung every shred of yearning desiccate in order to wet the thirsty fabric of her haggard soul.

All that Father had promised her...

Hoveling here in her ascetic abode now, bundled in blankets against the hurtful sun.

Dreaming in vividly inhuman shades of discolouration about her great work yet to come.