They followed the flame. The beings seemed to be moving in brief fluid motions before fading from existence, the eye could only catch where they had once been so they had been forced to look on, following their afterimages and piecing together their actions from what they saw. There, beneath a great weeping willow whose leaves were red yet covered in white from being heavy with snow, a shadow appeared that had bent down and reached out with two limbs to embrace a smaller one that rushed towards it. Both then vanished, the snow beneath their feet yet undisturbed. By a small pillar with a hole in the ground beside it leading into darkness below and surrounded by a ring of broken masonry ancient beyond reckoning, another shadow sat, as if a wall had been there. A limb extended from the shadow, translucent to the point where one could see the ground behind it, darkly, like looking through a window dirtied by age and smog, warped to the point where colour was distorted and darkened beyond their natural hues. It moved back and forth in the air towards the center of the ring of broken rock, as if playing in the water of what had once, apparently, been a fountain.