Elsewhere and otherwhiles…

Pyna gazed for a long while upon the silent space left in Elshad’s wake.

The encircling world receded and ceased to be, as she sank into recollections of her mortal family.

Above all, was that most acute reminiscence of her true father, and the infirmity that lay as a ponderous pall, upon his latter days.

Brooding honey and coal-dark soft was her father.

The winter had been prickly and cruel. 

Necessitating that he wander ever farther astray in his bartering and hunting.

Much deeper into the woodlands of Pirn than was wise, for any lonely sojourner.

Having at last crossed the path of something, within the tangled groves of that peculiar wood - an obscene relic from out the aeon of the odious Paper God’s Dreaming - he had returned gray and feverish. 

As the following year unfolded, her father slowly yielded to a febrile lunacy, as pestilent waking dreams wasted him from within.

Until at last, he was found upon a brumous morning of the first glistering winter frost. 

A sickly, boneless effigy drowned beneath the mill-pond.

Out of this, Despair and Debt had also come hand in hand to claim her brother.

For which Pyna herself had in the end, dearly paid. 

For the sake of her mother and sister, bartered away like a lovely trinket, into a kindless servitude.

Pyna didn’t care to recollect the subsequent months spent as a fearful urchin, within the confining Opal Quarter’s pleasure concourse…

It was from this place of penury and violation that Elshad had plucked her out, and raised her up into the Synods of Old Night. 

The Haemal Gift of Lucifugous Forever…

Pyna smiled inwardly. 

Such savagery and ghastliness coddled by high poetry.

Befitting of her rakish Father. 

Lover of words and worldliness. Of earthy flesh, both its lofty libations and base dankishness.

She turned slowly then to study the nearby, quietly attentive, Nimblethorne. 

His affable, but terrifyingly ghostly presence. Sharply delineated alabaster aspect a’crinkle with a hanging amusement. 

Teach me

How to be

This, to 

Adore it…

His reply is a simple nod, like that of a dearly regarded footman.

“And so I shall! Lady…”

Nights resolved into years, then into decades.

Indeed, into a century of moon-rise to moon-rest, and the beribboned paths of sleep between.

Nimblethorne proved to be an able tutor, and an ever amicable companion. 

As neither quite lover nor altogether sibling. 

Wanting for little, he demanded nothing. 

But gave over easily of his wellspring of deep knowing.

He taught her what he knew of Lesser Weavecraft, and the Adumbral Cants. 

In matters of alchemy and perfumery his instruction was nonpareil. Being particularly poignant and rich. 

Together, they sought to perfect his sun-theft. 

To imbue the stolen reflections of the Day-Star with the hues of vaguely recollected daylight.

Bladecraft, history, mathematics, astrology, paint and poetry…

The years passed in a tempest of scholarship.

Pyna thought him to be as ancient as the hills, which he may well have been. 

Though she was ever unable to cajole from him how long he had walked the world, or where from. 

With this one scantle of knowledge, he proved to be most parsimonious.

In truth, it mattered little to her, as they drifted together through the halls of unending dusk.

From rooftops and galleries - the lofty places of the Upper Houses - to the basest of cellar-taverns of the Opal Quarter, they danced and whirled for years on end, about the Great City and its environs. 

Two sensual, haunting apparitions.

In matters culinary, Nimblethorne instructed her how to take just enough…

To flush the skin and flutter the heart without homicide.

“Yet, sometimes you will find a fruit, a fig, so fair you must, hollow it out. 

Or.. Bring it in, enfold it, forevermore…”

Night, sequent to night, folded into night.

Still, for a long while, Father’s absence troubled her.

For many years they heard nothing further from Elshad. 

Then came whispers of his intrigues and wanderings.

Rumours of compacts sealed with the Gate of Candles and its monarchs.

And from time to time, as she and Nimblethorne wandered before the waking dawn, she might have apprehended something. A supple and distant pulse. The familiar and intimate palpitations of his marmoreal presence…

Then, nothing.