The room expanded into a broad oblong gallery. 

Lit by narrow and tall, oiled and burnished brass canister-lamps that cast a grainy orange illumination, breeding macabre-bending shadows that raced across the bare, basalt-flagged ceiling with every twist and curl of candle-fire.

In nearly every corner there loomed innumerable stacks of symmetrically arranged glass panels of diverse dimensions.

A large number of which were festooned with the tottering, leaning, upright shapes of bleached and watery-yellow beeswax candle-sticks, in sundry states of deliquescence.

Pyna paused just across the threshold in order to wordlessly marvel at the queer salon of glass plates. 

A staggering variation of which strung the length and breadth of the chamber-wall. 

Cramped and overhanging. Tucked under, askew. Round and square and oval. Cracked, jagged. Thick-rimmed, thin-edged as splinters. Tiny and broad. 

All pressed unevenly and overlapping, like the scales of a pied and blotty-painted, glass-skinned Wyrm.

Her wide, eerie eyes reflected and danced with the agitated, orange light of the room. 

She noted that although every piece was singular in dimension and shape. They all framed what appeared to be the same, if not a similar abstraction:

An image dark and silvery. 

A dense smudge at the center, that softened outwards into an airy aureole of indistinct rays, flares and uneven particles.

Nimblethorne moved with a ghostly excitement along the rows of piled plates, peering up into the cacophony of frames and glossy shapes.

“The gallery of the enchained sun! Bound…

Look you!”

He would gesticulate with a long, bloodless and knotty finger, towards this and that blot. Hanging, here and there.

“Here the very Day-Star Herself, is snared perdurable, in glass, unburning!”

Pyna’s gaze wandered across the hanging clutter and jumble, scrutinizing the odd array of silver and inky splotches and vaporous aureoles.

With a touch of uncertainty she watched as Nimblethorne pulled a small, hand-span circle - the breadth of a noblewoman’s travel-glass - from beneath the hodgepodge and ran his spidery fingers, white as bone, with great affection across its gleaming surface.

“This…

This was my very first…” He crooned.

So, in ink and coal.

You paint.

The sky and sun…

Her voice was softly pitched and sweet, and wary.

Nimblethorne laughed then, rich and soil-dark, threaded with self-mockery.

“Dear me, you think age has left me cracked…

No, come. Look here.”

He led her to stand before a waist-high box of florid proportions, embellished convexities and concave angles, with a single large aperture, propped before another heavily-curtained window.

“When I sleep you see, and through the window She peeps. Of Her, something I steal…” 

Nimblethorne’s splinter-thin smile bent his sallow lips into a little arch of triumphant obscenity. His eyes nearly disappearing into the translucent albino folds of his marmoreal flesh.

“Still! The alchemy is imperfect. Soon, soon though I will poach her hues…

And all the near unremembered blues, of the sky.”

Her wispy reply is too low, too rarefied for any mortal ear.

So, you have plundered

From the sun?

Something akin to coldness pricked at Pyna’s heart, as a seed of understanding took root. 

Sun-thief…