The chamber is blandly furnished. 

A grey tenement tepidly illumined by a few grey candles, and tin lantern-forks.

Like silence, made skin and temporality, she drifts and snakes down the low lintel and onto a rough-planked floor blotted by the sour droppings of miniscule vermin.

Her unnatural gaze is untroubled by impenetrable corner-shadows, and the inky aureoles cast by uncertain candle-fire.

Ahead at the foot of an unhinged doorway, and a bland hallway beyond, lay a crumpled pile of common seeming cloth and flesh. 

Its once-upon-a-time proportions are unidentifiable from where she settles. 

Nearby to this ill-proportioned heap, with its bent back turned towards her, assiduously unstringing a short, crimson bow, is a figure enwrapped in the same silky reds that had flashed in her periphery. 

Before the arrow that had sent her tumbling from her tall perch struck.

“O, little blood-worm…” 

A voice, all grinning and grim self-assurance.

The disciple unsheathes with a molasses-drip slow lissomeness, her horror-hardened, hand-span of edged Innulian steel. 

The folded forge-metal, another gift from Father.

A monstrously keen gift.

It is said that the cunning blades of the deep Innulians would cut even the tendons of Sufa, the obscene platinum consort of the Paper God.

“You should have fallen, little blood-worm. You may have outlived the stones below.

“You will not outlive me…”

The figure turns in a spiral of odd, silken-weave. 

Its rubiousness drowning the unwholesome grey of the chamber in an abrupt tide of deep wine discolored crimson.

A Weaver…

Suddenly the room warms, unbearably. The wood-grain beneath the figure crackling and groaning. Smoke pouring across the planking like an ashen tide. 

The weaver’s face is a mask of sun-fire curlicues, licking, orange ribbons, and burning streamers.

All human aspects consumed by flowing, pyroclastic horror.

Where once there might have been a mouth, there parts now the winking pit of a furious pyre.

Its voice the roaring of a naked crematorium furnace. 

“I will keep but a pinch of what remains, little blood-worm.

“A little ash, for Father’s failure...”

She then bounds with supernal, unheeding inhuman haste. 

Thoughtless and unseeing, backwards. Towards the rough window-aperture.

An inferno follows.

Avaricious, slavering fire-tongues enfolding, cutting, searing, immolating…

The disciple tumbles and burns, voiceless as she falls into night’s fathomless charcoal cauldron.

This time she reaches for nothing.

Seen from afar a sad, pretty little star, drops flame-bright into the dark from a gangling spire, winks and is gone.