Pyna had allowed Umin another bell of dreamless sleep.
Following which they began a trek along the nameless, onyx-obsidian strand. The Great Lower Sea, a torpid black tongue, perennially licking the lifeless shore upon their right hand.
Pyna appeared to have reclaimed her wry, uncanny grace as she drifted ghostly, and occasionally danced across the sands ahead of Umin.
Her bare milky toes, leaving barely the penumbra of any impression against the sifting cimmerian grains.
In contrast, Umin sank and stumbled often across the sandpiles.
Weariness, and the shifting, uncertain footing robbing him of his roguish alacrity.
He paused to draw a heady breath, and to sip parsimoniously from his palm-width travel canteen. As his gaze wandered across the featureless, aphotic s ea's false horizon.
The darkness painted bloody by the belching of distant fire-mounts - he could hear their furnace-fire repine above the viscous, lapping wash - beyond the halo of pale coldness that was his frost-light.
Pyna had also paused to watch him, in her distempering rag-doll fashion.
Crouching and head cocked like a little magpie. Limbs hanging loosely like a marionette.
Umin pursed his lips as he met her eyes. A thought unfolding.
"When were you born, Pyna?"
He asked, not expecting any sensible answer.
Still as an effigy, her odd, glassy eyes rippling in the frost-light. She blinked, then pursed her own bow-lips as though playfully miming.
I was
Born upon
The skirts of
The woodlands
Of Pirn
My mother was fine
My Father was
Kind...
"When..."
He corrected gently. Still not expecting anything other than nonsense.
Ahhh...
Pyna smiled then, a cardinal little bow bending.
Her gaze shrewd.
By reckoning
Of the Great City
The fourth year of
Poron the Eighth of
House Joon...
Umin squinted, and licked his lips.
A moment in passing, and he visibly paled.
"Ohh... My, then you..."
I am
"And, this..."
Unto
Old Night
Yes
I think
It was
There
My twenty-third
Year...
She stood with such soundless ease, as to appear a thing comely composed of more spirit than flesh.
A few feathery paces brought her to within a handsbreadth of Umin, where she sat herself down again upon the sand. Umin joined her, stretching to unknot the aching of his limbs.
Do you
Know?
My old
Old friend...
She paused then, peering into some unseen, distant place.
A fleeting lament, a shade upon the brightness of her gaze.
Do you
Know?
My old
Friend would
Say
That we are
Children of the
Paper God
And its
Dreaming.
Umin leaned back, his expression uncertain.
"I've read of such accounts.
Bestiaries, fables. No scholarship of great certainty remains, from out that antiquity."
I will
Tell
The tale of Nimblethorne
As he told me
Then long agone.
By his own
Words as
I remember them.
She lifted her hand, marble-creamy fingers still flush with an inhuman warmth.
Gently cupping Umin's chin and cheek.
If it is well
If you would
Then
I can
I should...
Umin simply nodded, his brow furrowed.
Suspended somewhere between consternation and anticipation.
Pyna smiled, her crimson-bow lips prettily bent and, reached out...
Umin felt himself suddenly floating.
Then falling, falling. Abruptly down again, to the Dream Roads .