Ramayon of Quyani

 The dance of shadows caused patches of glittering, milky white light to skim across the streets and houses.  Here and there a window was illuminated and a chiaroscuro of furniture appeared momentarily; there and here some poor soul would be transfixed by the light for a second, held immobile as it streamed in through their eyes and paralysed their minds.  Then the light moved on, the rooms changed and the victims were freed.

Ramayon stood in the deeper shadows and watched the dance.  High above the city, where the tallest minarets and cubical towers reached, huge dragonflies roosted.  When they launched themselves into the air, conducting a brief circuit of the city before alighting again on a high perch, their wings caught the moonlight, transformed it somehow, and cast it across the city like a strange net.  Those who dwelled their learned, eventually, how to read the patterns of light and dark, the shadows of the dance, and when to walk the streets to avoid them.  Those who visited, and they were few in number, were the ones caught and the ones sometimes afflicted.

A bell tolled somewhere off to his left.  There were churches in Quyani as well as mosques and synagogues and temples; a panoply of religion was available to anyone who wished to worship.  Many of them were near-empty now; the worshippers who came had no leaders, no spiritual guides, to assist them in their quest for metaphysical enlightenment.  Some were entirely empty, stripped of their furnishings as whatever god had held sway there faded away and their protection rotted like old wood battered by storms.  He shifted slightly, feeling chilled though the air was balmy still, and checked the time.  It was a little shy of midnight, and he decided that that was good enough for his purposes.

He moved through the streets with the ease of a native, walking along the shaded roads, passing through alleys where the houses leaned inwards and prevented the dance from penetrating and occasionally taking shortcuts through old buildings hewn from the stone floor of the quarry where no-one dared dwell.  There were silences in there that couldn’t be broken by speech or footfall; there were scratches on the floor not made by tools; there were strange drawings on the walls that hurt the eyes of observers if they spent too long there.  They were left alone, but some used them as byways, as passages to other places, and they risked themselves with every traversal.

Ramayon emerged near a butcher’s shop, closed up this late in the evening, his breath slightly laboured and his pulse slightly quickened but still himself and still in Quyani.  The building next to the butcher’s had a door a head shorter than himself and windows set with stained glass but it was narrow and mean and squeezed tightly by its neighbours.  He tapped on the door; no need for coded knocks and barely remembered passphrases: no-one would come to a house this old without knowing what they were coming for.  There was a creaking, perhaps of floorboards within affected by a change of weight, and a click that might have been the turning of a key, and then silence.

Ramayon turned the doorhandle and pushed and the door swung open into darkness.  Behind him, where the street opened out onto the Plaza dell’amici, the dance crescendoed and light from several different dragonflies lit it as brightly and as coldly as an icy dawn over a snowfield.  He glanced back at it, checking his watch again.  Five minutes after midnight — a positive omen.  Then he stepped inside into the darkness and locked the door behind him.