The being's countless lights drew slowly inward, and when it spoke again the great voice had changed. Some of its vast, patient weight had gone soft, the way a hard old voice goes gentle around the one thing it loves.
"Far from here," it said, "in a place these old coils cannot reach, there live the Doffor Wisps."
The air above the broken plinth shimmered, and an image gathered in the dark. Small creatures floated there, no bigger than a cupped hand, drifting in loose and lazy clusters through some faraway air. They had no claws and no teeth. They were only soft round bodies of pale light, pulsing slow and gentle like dozing hearts, each trailing a thin glowing thread behind it as it bobbed along. They bumped into one another and drifted apart again, aimless, harmless, untroubled by anything at all.
