Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

Corded in smoke and consumed by an incorrigible, corroding preternatural fire, the disciple twisted through a chasm of black air.

A roiling ember. 

A boiling star, tipped from the pitchy lip of Old Night's boundless cup.

“Failed… Fail-.”

Down, down, through the Opal Quarter’s mad vertical maze-work of unlikely architecture, she tumbles. beribboned and scarred by a kindless, unnatural incandescence.

Her burning, insensible form at last careens like a dropped coal, smouldering and crackling, into and through a window of angled panes shaped from a thick, flowing glass and bronze. 

Her wingless flight then ends with abrupt, bone-splintering immersion into a shallow, but mercifully cool mirror-pool within the bowers of a silvery-lit solarium.

There follows for a while, nothing.

Soon, in between the caressing oily wash of the soothing pool, a pair of slim cream-pale fingers, a pointer and thumb, with kind gingerness unfolds the lids of her aching eye.

“Ah, cracked like mine. Pretty glass. Like broken marbles.”

Above her, she now sees through her propped eyelid, a cinnamon moon-crescent, sharp Ikrit the Cinnabar, as it arches across a ruin of edged glass and marred, dull bronze beams. The unfortunate solarium window is a scalloped wound against the sky.

This firmament, although strung with hanging stars and murky; still her acute, eerie eye finds the first wisp of dawn brightness unfurling at the edges, like a first burning autumn-frost, curling leaves.

“Ahhh, I see you’ve ill-met my window.” 

A little rueful mockery hung upon a voice urbane, issues from the closely looming personage.

Her eye refuses to focus upon the space he occupies. He seems a brooding, shifting collection of pale sparks and shadows.

Her marmoreal heart, that incorrigible organ, once more begins to find its proper, clenching pace. 

A steadiness unlike moments ago, when it threatened and kicked like an unquiet child in a mother’s womb.

She feels scattered and unmade. Stretched like sun-cured leather. 

A sack full of grinding stones caked with blistering ash. Even as her now inhuman bones begin their slow, terrible work of knitting and binding. 

“Wh- W…?” 

She attempts to form words from breath at first, then from thought, but everything is silver-fish slippery. Like catching pond-frogs with unmoving fingers. 

“Shh, shhh now. This is Weaver's work. I’ve seen this before. Blinding and crackling. The Fire-spitters.

But you are not a common creature are you. You’re like me.”

He seems to find fathomless delight in his own soliloquy.

“Can you feel the waking day-star? I think you can. Come, we have little time. Later, we will speak again…”

Something from out the silver-touched gloom is pressed against her broken lips, spilling sweet copper fire across her tongue and down her ruined throat. 

“Now drink, and dream of poetry…”