Shoulders and collars lightly feathered with white, moth-like tufts, faces hidden behind featureless ivory domes, the acolytes that had gathered backstage retreated against the walls as Norgash emerged among them. Her own white robe was densely furred, so heavy that it barely swung as she moved. Her own ivory mask bore ten red stones – two lines of five like eyes arrayed left and right – which shone with contained fire. A blazing heat likewise poured out from beneath her robe. She was a lantern, her robe the cage around the concealed wick of her body. Her acolytes inched toward her, trying to come just near enough that the light touched their feet. It was a strange thing to see backstage, these human creatures half-shadowed against magic light, pushing fearfully yet eagerly against one another.
“What are you doing?” Norgash spoke without moving, a monument of red-orange shadow erected in the narrow hall. “You have work you’re meant to be doing.”
The acolytes fled, leaving Norgash alone in the dark.
Then a fragment of the dark stepped forward, a figure in midnight-black garb with an oily shine to it, face invisible beneath a veil of thin hair under the wide brim of a dark hat. “They’re so eager to be your fuel. But, when I claim someone’s life, they always complain. It’s not fair.”
“You’re late, Sethian Skin.” Norgash pivoted to face that dark man, and the air rattled around her as she moved. “It’s making me late.”
“Ask your master for an allowance so that you aren’t so dependent on me, then. You know I loathe making deliveries to your kind.”
“My kind?”
“Mortals. House-calls are a privilege I save for beings that live longer than a blink.”
“You should be happy, then. I’ll outlive you by eons, at the very least.”
Sethian Skin snickered. “They clearly don’t worship you for your humor. Here.” He stepped to a side, his presence scarcely more than a slight interruption in the firelight, and gestured to some vague angular shapes in the dark against the wall. “Young as you like them. Beauty on demand for you, my love. Don’t forget my price.”
“To be delivered on the Veiled Night. Goodbye, Sethian Skin. My audience awaits me.”
“Maybe one day I’ll stay and watch. Though, I suspect that your artistry would be wasted on me.” He’d already vanished into the dark. There came the sound of a stony scratching, the groan of a door opening and closing. Then silence.
Norgash waited for a few seconds, and then she moved with a graceful suddenness, spinning down the hall one way and then the other. Her robes rose and fell with the movement, firelight and the rhythmic rattling of her magic. Red and orange illumination shone on a hallway empty but for her and the stacks of long, narrow crates Sethian Skin had silently lined up along one wall. As Norgash settled back into her place, the magic she’d pulled through the hallway settled over the crates, and they burned. Their contents screamed briefly, for only a second or two, and then all that remained of the wood and meat were ashes, quietly roiling coals, and power that fanned the flame in Norgash’s body.
Moments later, on a stage at the front of a warehouse overcrowded with some hundred admirers, prefaced by no herald and with no harbinger but for the raucous rattling that went ahead of her, Firedancer Norgash suddenly emerged. She was in the center of the stage in a flash of movement and firelight, settled firmly in place with her heavy robes churning around her. The crowd gasped, shocked to silence. From beneath her mask, Norgash could see them perfectly, their gaping mouths and wide eyes. Yes, you devout and you soon to be converted: your god has come.
Gradually, as the shock abated, cheers went up. Standing very still, Norgash took hold of the rattling sound around her and focused it into a throbbing beat. It became music, a thrum that pulsed out of her body in time with her heartbeat. The firelight from beneath her robe swelled and faded along with it, like she contained a great drum. Norgash stood there, her shape concealed for the moment beneath her robe. She let the crowd look on her as, second by second, the drum beat louder and louder.
