A dream of drifting through wan birchwood under a sky, cornflower blue. Senescent leaf-litter velvety and snow-drift deep. Gentle, against bare feet. 

Ivory-sweet was her brother and mother.

Brooding honey and coal-dark soft was her father.

Green lemon-grass, crisp thistle was her sister.

The disciple blinks slowly, rising with the ease of a morning fog from dimming dreamscapes.

The deep hours - by estimate of diffuse moonlight - of a mild night and a coquettish, cool air traces the now supple but still tender swathes of pied and angry patches of skin, dappling her otherwise porcelain body.

She cannot say for how long she has dallied upon the roads and unmeasured pathways of sleep, but it has been long enough to bate the recollection of unrelenting fire, transmuting it into a distant, thrumming ache.

With marble-wan fingers, she reaches up to gently pluck at her wheaty curls, returned now to blooming fullness, from what had before been mere strings of greasy ash.  

Silent as down-feather she turns upon the spare, but not uncomfortable bed of patchy, rough dyed wools, in order to peer through a wide arch opening to her not too distant right. There beyond, the remembered solarium and its still, quicksilver mirror-pool fill her gaze.

She then turns her eyes to dissect the listless corner-shadows through the dim, wintery-silver light of the near chamber. 

A place fretted with labyrinthine astronomical frescoes, and piled with instruments, alchemical and otherwise, of baroque design and florid configuration. Assiduously arranged and by all accounts, very well cared for.

Ample scents of syrupy milk-sours, molasses and other, more odd astringents clot the meekly ambling breeze, briefly tickling and irritating her nose.

“At last! Out, from the many mazes …”

“Come, my lovely guest, up and I will show you things.

I think I have given over sufficient haematic-stuff, so that you need not thirst for some while now…”

A voice, mild and masculine. 

Projected like to a player upon the stage, and touched by good-natured mockery.

She’d had no inkling of his approach. 

Were he any other manner of creature, she would have heard him, smelled him, apprehended him by means both animal and unnatural.

Instead he had drifted into a nearby plastered nook, as surreptitiously and swiftly as a mote of wind-wafted night-pollen.

His slightly too angular aspect, lank and willowy tall, as snowy-bloodless as her own, if not conceivably more. So much that his skin presented as near translucent. 

However most striking were the watery yellow irises of his bright, glassy eyes, and the drifting cerulean flecks therein, which marked him as a being of Innulian stock.

All of this compounded by the oddness of soundless motion imposed by his preternatural state - wrapped up in a grave-shroud grey mantle - made him a discomposingly spectral figure.