With a disquieting mingle of emotions both caliginous and bright. 

Pyna watched the figure leisurely pace - producing a deliberate, echoing ironshod cacophony with each footfall - from out beyond the concealing wall of the Solarium, then slowly around the periphery of the mercurial moon-reflecting mirror-pool. 

His eyes, of a depthless smokey obsidian, grinned. Terrifyingly animate against ivory-sallow skin. 

He wore the shapeless, muted robes of a common, practicing miscreant of the Lower Houses, in stark and startling contrast to Pyna’s own fine, blood and snow-painted silken Weaver’s raiment.

Bitumen-black and slate gray, modest and practical. But for the sheen of an uncommon, silvery pin at his breast that winked, and appeared to twist in the chamber-light.

His hair was shoulder-cropped, as though having been shorn with a rough knife; a raucous, unkempt night-dark, converse to her long and wheaty-pale locks.

Narrow-faced, touched by a subtle Southern roundness. And clean shaven but for a sharp, inky tuft beneath the chin.

He loomed a head taller than her. 

Equally, under a head shorter than Nimblethorne. 

It could be said that Pyna was hauntingly pellucid in comportment. 

And Nimblethorne so supple as to border upon the ghastly. 

Father’s motions, while also smoothly eerie in their composition, nonetheless bore a wiry, earthy quality.

Something rakish, perhaps even boyish.

With a little shrug and a mildly abashéd-seeming demeanor, his ironshod boots brought him at last to stand a step facing Pyna’s still and unmeasurable presence. 

He then reaches out with long fingers and cups her face, gently between the cold palms of his hands. 

A gesture of brazen familiarity.

Pyna is unmoving. 

Like a porcelain mammet stood upright. Smoothly masked against all scrutiny.  

“My, daughter… I am sorry for so many things.

You are so warm! A late supper…”

His smile unfading, his words cosseting and soft. Cold obsidian gaze bright and wide. 

As wide as the glassy, impenetrable pools of her own eyes.  

There is then the sudden sensation of something immaculately hidden, making itself broadly known.

“Elshad…”

And there, between an eye-flutter, is Nimblethorne, a number of discrete paces beyond the arch of the Solarium.

Like a cadaverous thing reanimated, Pyna suddenly draws away from Elshad’s cold touch. 

Before his breast he folds his abruptly bereft fingers, as a brief shadow of sadness dances across the atrous landscapes of his eyes. 

Once more though as before, the grinning returns.

He adjusts his posture, almost imperceptibly, towards Nimblethorne.

“My Lord Lesshin! ”

“Do not call me that in my own house, Elshad.” 

Nimblethorne’s sharply mild smile is imperturbable.

“I have thrown that name away, and all its attendant nightmares. Long ago…”

“Forgive me then, good Nimblethorne. I find myself once more grateful, for yet another kindness.”

Elshad bows shortly at the waist, a touch of what might be construed as playful mockery tugging at his mien.

Studying him, Pyna’s molten, inner roiling then crystalized into something edged and gelid.

As Elshad turned once more towards her, she would anticipate any of the inescapable entreaties that would arise.

Father had never been cruel with her. 

He was ever subtle, and must be abbreviated. 

Ere the cosseting, cajoling could peel away the fibrousness that had knotted itself about her innermost kernel.

No

You will go, I

Will not…

As he easily returned his fullest attention to her, Elshad’s smile became a fixed thing. 

A disturbingly painted-on expression.

Only his ever-animate obsidian eyes unfolded to an atrous landscape of contentious and perilous emotions.

His gaze once more returns to Nimblethorne, something ponderous and unspoken passing between the uncanny  pair. 

His rejoinder is softer now. 

Eyes hooded like a lantern shut against a boorish tempest.

“As you wish’t, Daughter…

Stay! A decade. A century! It is of no moment.

You will find no finer tutor, than good Nimblethorne.”

He drifts, now a distance intimate, as though to embrace her. 

But only pauses to bend down and press his bloodless lips to Pyna’s still warm, brow.

“Remain, unquenchable…” 

Elshad murmurs. And then is gone from Nimblethorne’s high-halled manor. 

The only mark of his passing, a thrilling and ghastly rustle of knotty curtain-cloth.