Author's Preface
Here the stink is sour and mycelial, a fungal ferment of rotten metalcraft and creamy dripstone.
Umin recoils, recalling his not altogether distant captivity in a similar, if dustier oubliette.
There is but the faintest light in this ghastly place.
A grim and wan amber glow, leaking from a creaking basket-lantern, pendant and precarious from a nearby teetering long-pole.
"What is this place..." Umin's low whisper is rough and prickling to his own ear.
It is, it was.
A menagerie dear.
A cruel space, once.
Now none are
Here but for
One.
Pyna twists her open hand slowly as she utters.
As though marvelling at a piece of plucked fruit unseen by any but her.
Umin raises the cold-glowing stone in his palm, hurling a dash of spare and scrambling shades across the pulpy walls and scattered, senescent implements of confinement.
Drowning the tepid topaz smoulder of the lamp.
He narrows his eyes when something in the clotty tangle of cages ahead shifts, as though shying from the torrent of unforeseen and intrusive radiance.
But one.
Beast of intrigues and
Betrayals. Come.
With that she slips ahead, gracefully moving between pools of bitumen-black, reflecting opaque and oily. Some seeming a few fingers shallow, others of unfathomable bottom, keeping sodden and wistful secrets.
Umin following with less grace, arduously endeavoring to avoid touching or brushing against any of the putrid wetness of the place.
Pyna at last halts before a mass of blighted iron and stinging drip-salts.
What would appear to have been a sometime spacious enclosure, but was now worn by rust and stony decay into a thing like to have burgeoned, fungal from the earth.
Something therein again apprehensively shifts.
Something shying and ragged, soiled twig-fingers raised against the sudden pale brightness.
There is something thrillingly familiar about this rancid bundle.
Umin struggles for a heartbeat to understand, before memory blossoms chilly, like the snowdrop against winter-melt.
"Thimblebrom..."