Two nights passed, then three.

Pyna had learned that, as she slumbered deep in undesired convalescence, the Burning Houses and their martinets had laid open the Opal Quarter’s Hall of Stews. That it had been churned into an allagrugous ruin.

The pleasure houses; their marrow plucked, their frames and fortunes reduced to ash. 

To their roots cut. 

Salacious cellars unkindly unfolded to the supernal sky.

Those unfortunates who had outlived the martinets and their ministrations, were thrown like chaff to the nooks and corners of the Opal Quarter, and to other more modest bailiwicks and precincts of the Great City, Above. 

However, many also chose to descend into the Shallows, Below. 

Therein to the keeping of the Gate of Candles, its adumbral court, and the demesnes of the Lower Houses.

Pyna’s heart shriveled and bent, as that of a creature cruelly used, upon the hearing of this curdling news.

I fell.

I failed.

Fa-

“As you were meant to!“ 

Nimblethorne gently abbreviated her self-flagellation.

It was a temperate, late dusk under still tepid moon-shadows.

Once more, soon after waking they drifted. Two silent spectres, through the lantern and taper-gleam that bloomed, orange and russet - like the moon-sheen of Ikrit the Cinnabar - across the broad ways of Nimblethorne’s manor.

The window-glass throughout all the halls had been thrown open to the winter night’s mild darkness. 

Every thickly-knitted curtain, their knots and ribbons swaying like languid ghosts. 

The air, perpetually perfumed by numerous small, alcoved gardens and the stewings and mingles of Nimblethorne’s ever-prominent alchemical instrumentation.

“Fruitless fretting. 

Flesh will ebb and flow, endless.

All will burgeon again, like moss!” 

Nimblethorne smiled, thin and edged and wide, seeming pleased by his own assertion.

“Walk with me until dawn, beneath the vaulty firmament of Old Night. 

I am famished, if for no more than the scent of it alone…” 

A complicated, satirical flourish of his knotty, bone-wan fingers accompanied his words.

Pyna smiled, to spite the sourness.

And so through concealed stairwells and secreted narrow closets, they descended, in short measure upon the Opal Quays, where all manner of river-craft - barges, cogs, carracks and caravels - swayed at moorage against the lazy pull of the river’s current.

The eternal starfields above were cold and stark, but the billowing breeze from off the wide river Eniin was yet clement upon this middle-winter’s night.

Pyna could smell the soft, churned muck of the waterway. 

A reedy and salt-fish stink, alloyed with piquance and saporous perfumes, malodorous balms, and all the manifold, ripe fruits of commerce that bounded the quays.

But it was her unearthly apprehension of the thrumming choral, the enormous symphony, of the innumerable palpitating, bird-feather fragile hearts of men, women and children - present in the piles of encircling architecture -  which thickened and quickened, that familiar and intemperate longing in her breast.

“A desire, I remember…” 

Murmured Nimblethorne, tenderly mocking. 

A sickly-sweet susurrus - so soft as to be inaudible to the ear of any low spirit - in answer to Pyna’s sudden and sharp sighing.    

“And what does my ladyship long for?

An overripe apple. A sour-hearted plum in its prime. Or is it, perhaps, the fleshy peach o-”.

Nimblethorne abruptly paused, mid breath.

They had meandered, graceful and quiet as a roiling fog, through a blind defile of leaning ochre masonry. 

Here were dead iron lanterns, made black from the river’s unceasing breath, hung from the brickwork overhead. Their wicks, long unemployed, charred and osseous.

Some few paces forwards, the way opened sharply into a small hexagonal plaza, surrounded by a collection of low and inward-leaning, modest-seeming, grey and mustard tenements. 

Atrous and mute in their nighted slumber.

A single hooded-lantern, perched upon a slim pole, rose near the stone-flagged heart of the little court, spilling a honey-hued luminescence that contorted weakly against the lumbering gloom.

There…

Something lithe as

A hare.

A solitary, tall figure stood leaning - back pressed to the lantern-pole - his link-born shadow stretched and ambling across the plaza. 

He wore a dark cassock of sorts, and a broad-brimmed hat that concealed all features. 

A book held loosely in one hand.

Quiet whispers arose from beneath the obscuring brim, as he read to himself rapt, in the muted lantern-glow. 

Within the brief span of a breath, and without an iota of sound, Pyna stood beside the figure, peeping sidelong beneath the hat-rind.  

What do you see?

What do you read?

So, so softly.

Startled by the weird of her sudden, unlooked for presence, the book slips from his hand, and with a papery sough, falls to his feet, its pages spread like a courtesan’s fan.

Pyna bends oddly at the waist, like a loose-jointed doll, down to peer upon the flattened spine of the volume. 

She can smell its succulently oiled animal-skin cover. 

The Sonnets of Serenemet.

“Poetry… It’s…” He mouths, like a fish startled from its waters, watching her with uncertain wine-dark eyes.

A familiar and febrile need, flutters richly throughout the folds of that marmoreal organ beneath the now inhuman skin of her breast, threading hungrily through each of her limbs.

She stands again, two heads shorter than him, gazing up with her wide, cracked-glass eyes into his own, now wet and broad as saucers.

Reaching out…

Caressing with snow-wan fingertips.

Caressing, wrapping him in a lacework of supple thought, frightful and alluring.

Lips now slack and gaze dumb, even oafish.

His poor volume of dropped sonnets all but forgotten, Pyna gingerly guides the boy deeper into the embracing murk beneath the oblique walls of the hexagonal plaza. 

A barefoot, soundless marble ghost leading a lover through the sepulchral dark. 

Sweet...

Give me your

Name.

“My, name is… Iearon”

Iearon

How fine, you are

Now come drown

In mine eyne…

Nimblethorne had lingered close and watchful, throughout. Unmoving as the masonry that surrounded him.

A soft indistinction in the gloom, wrapped in grey and umber.

It was less than five breaths, before Nimblethorne felt the boy’s heart flutter, and stop.

He smiled, as a profound well of melancholy opened within him, for a brief instant. 

He moved then through the night, as any mortal man. 

A measured pace towards the tenebrous space where Pyna had led the boy, Iearon.

He found her there, beneath the oblique and obscuring mustard and grey walls, resting upon her knees.

Abreast a ghastly husk, as woefully lurid as Nimblethorne’s own spectral countenance.

I take

Too much

I do not wish to

As such…

He could smell the still-warm copper-sweet upon her breath.

Her lips, now even more ruddy, even rubious. 

Skin painted a thin, tepid human-hued peach.

Still, she had shut herself. Her thoughts, silent and guarded.

Her face, a mask inscrutable.

“I think, I will teach her ladyship, how to sip.

Then she need not mourn, so much.” 

Nimblethorne reached down with his knotty, bone-wan hand and kindly brushed his fingers through her wheaty mane and smiled, thin and urbane.

“Go, return to the manor. I will attend to the boy. It is a familiar toil…”

The boundless landscapes of her inner-heart are overcast, and roiling like bright cumulus and bitter, deep-bellied cauldrons.

Her need and its imminence, ever stranding her upon a shoreline both vile and empyrean. 

Without rejoinder she stands and moves like a mist across the plaza, pausing to recover the fallen volume of poetry, before drifting with impossible haste, hurtling through the winding Opal Quarter’s unlikely alley-mazes, unseen as something composed of substanceless breath and air.

Returning at last by secret paths to Nimblethorne’s high house.

Before the parlor, and the silver-touched solarium and its mirror-pool she stops, on the sudden, like a stone-thing.

Still as statuary…

Tasting the air like a feral, hunting-hound.

The scent of something intimate, and the apprehension of something steady and monstrous. 

A soundless pulsing through the chamber’s stillness.

Soon there is the click of deliberate, ironshod footfalls, that heralds a voice. 

A voice both constrainedly amused, and curiously rueful. Rich with the odd accents of the Unremembered South, and its spice and prurient decadence. 

Emanates from beyond the arch and mirror-pool.

"So! Does the errant Daughter come home to the Father?"

Father…