Author's Preface
The room is still and cool.
Downy linens having slipped from bare and wiry limbs.
His eyes wandering and still sleepy, light upon a shallow bowl bedside, piled high with minikin blood-hued oranges, bright like candle-shine against a heap of the scalloped and dull, mauve-grainy mushrooms that are a staple across the length and breadth of the Underhallows . Simple, filling fare.
A sturdy rye and honey-butter round out this modest board, alongside a carafe of pale aromatic wine.
All perfuming the low-ceilinged chamber with a malty gentleness.
With a constrained rapaciousness Umin sets to the meal, uncaring of its origin.
My esurient
Leaf-eater...
Hungering and reeking of
Unspeakable things.
Mildly mocking from the near shadows, making Umin pause.
But he has grown too used to Pyna's often sudden and always uncanny presence to be startled. Or is now too engrossed in his meal to take heed.
What knits his brow however is the incongruousness of this apparitional creature bearing a brass tub of hot, herbed water like to that of any maidservant.
No longer swathed in heart's blood hued ribbons and silk-spun. Her head bare, wimple gone and wheaty mane like white-gold pulled into a long, lambent braid.
A shapeless robe of dappled cerulean and onyx hanging from her waifish frame, shrouding her feet so that she appears to drift, like a legless ghost, silent across the polished porphyry floor.