Author's Preface
The chamber is blandly furnished.
A grey tenement tepidly illumined by a few grey candles, and tin lantern-forks.
Like silence, made skin and temporality, she drifts and snakes down the low lintel and onto a rough-planked floor blotted by the sour droppings of miniscule vermin.
Her unnatural gaze is untroubled by impenetrable corner-shadows, and the inky aureoles cast by uncertain candle-fire.
Ahead at the foot of an unhinged doorway, and a bland hallway beyond, lay a crumpled pile of common seeming cloth and flesh.
Its once-upon-a-time proportions are unidentifiable from where she settles.
Nearby to this ill-proportioned heap, with its bent back turned towards her, assiduously unstringing a short, crimson bow, is a figure enwrapped in the same silky reds that had flashed in her periphery.
Before the arrow that had sent her tumbling from her tall perch struck.
"O, little blood-worm..."
A voice, all grinning and grim self-assurance.
The disciple unsheathes with a molasses-drip slow lissomeness, her horror-hardened, hand-span of edged Innulian steel.
The folded forge-metal, another gift from Father .
A monstrously keen gift.
It is said that the cunning blades of the deep Innulians would cut even the tendons of Sufa , the obscene platinum consort of the Paper God.
"You should have fallen, little blood-worm. You may have outlived the stones below.
"You will not outlive me..."
The figure turns in a spiral of odd, silken-weave.
Its rubiousness drowning the unwholesome grey of the chamber in an abrupt tide of deep wine discolored crimson.
A Weaver...
Suddenly the room warms, unbearably. The wood-grain beneath the figure crackling and groaning. Smoke pouring across the planking like an ashen tide.
The weaver's face is a mask of sun-fire curlicues, licking, orange ribbons, and burning streamers.
All human aspects consumed by flowing, pyroclastic horror.
Where once there might have been a mouth, there parts now the winking pit of a furious pyre.
Its voice the roaring of a naked crematorium furnace.
"I will keep but a pinch of what remains, little blood-worm.
"A little ash, for Father's failure..."
She then bounds with supernal, unheeding inhuman haste.
Thoughtless and unseeing, backwards. Towards the rough window-aperture.
An inferno follows.
Avaricious, slavering fire-tongues enfolding, cutting, searing, immolating...
The disciple tumbles and burns, voiceless as she falls into night's fathomless charcoal cauldron.
This time she reaches for nothing.
Seen from afar a sad, pretty little star, drops flame-bright into the dark from a gangling spire, winks and is gone.