Together the niveous pair - one willowy tall, the other urchin small - drifted with the mild night air through Nimblethorne’s broad-halled manor. 

Footfalls mute as those of solivagant spirits.

The chambers were wide and lowering, and the narrow halls between peaked, bending into pointed, towering black and white tiling and idiosyncratically patterned parquetry. 

 Blackwood - which could only have been harvested at great cost, from the Below - polished to a wavy sheen, generously paneled most lower surfaces. 

There were also glimpses of stonework here and about, cunningly fitted in a manner of architecture that appeared to greatly pre-date much of the ragged, hurly-burly engineering that dominated and loomed above the Opal Quarter.

Many bright and sombre frescoes both, adroitly depicting alchemy, metaphysics, mathematical theorems and whimsical impressions from well known and regarded tales, like the swiftly flowing Parable of Apono, patterned the walls of particular chambers.

Heavy-woven, sumptuously stitched dark cloth hung from every window, pillar, plinth, lintel, arch and cross-beam. No doubt meant to blind the angry, prying eye of the sun from its peeking.

But for the Solarium alone - which opened naked under thickly molded, now repaired and refashioned glass - into which Pyna had, now nearly a full moon ago, fallen. 

Its mirror-pool and whitely polished surfaces refulgent with the silver and cinnamon of the twin moons: 

Fiin the Frostshorn and Ikrit the Cinnabar.

Pyna and Nimblethorne’s unhurried, meandering progress about the manor was largely speechless. 

It was early moon-rise, Old Night not yet even out of Her swathing clouts and cradle. 

There was little need for undue haste.

The pair, with their uncanny other faculties and senses gently touching and pressing one against the other as they walked, seeking unuttered accord in the unnatural manner of their kind where breath and words were incapable.

Still, Pyna held close to her hidden Innulian blade. It's bitterly cool, unyielding stuff, a small comfort against her thoughtlessly trailing finger-tips.  

Nimblethorne might pause here, or there to remark, like an old schoolmaster, in his affable manner, upon some peculiarity of design, or the nature of a particular fresco. 

Pyna, quietly inscrutable and with gaze unblinking, would observe, in the course of his oration, his practiced, smoothly lambent gesticulations.

The way his ancient-seeming luminous skin would crinkle at the corners of his thin, bloodless lips and wrinkle about his almond-shaped, cerulean-flecked, Innulian eyes.

She would attempt to pry with great care, in order to discern his age. 

Only to be met by a soundless sense of sardonic apology. His thoughts on the matter shut against all her voiceless scrutiny.

She was too young to compel him to yield anything to her curiosity.

Near the mid-region of their rambling progress, they passed through another small chamber clotted with alchemical organs and instrumentation, all painstakingly piled.

The room, a wellspring of sweet and pungent, alien odours. Like to a compact distillery of herbs and simples.

Then out into a wider, adjacent chamber, where Nimblethorne paused. 

His movements suddenly now more animated by some unreadable undercurrent of excitement, before a stretching and low wall. 

At least ten broad paces long, and fifteen handspan high, every portion of its surface covered to brim-fullness, concealed beneath what appeared to be a vast collection of odd images of blots and flares…