Otogy

It drifts the lanes and old shrines of Pawbury after dark, its flickering inner glow waxing and waning with some private rhythm, and it feeds on the retelling of old tales, growing brighter and more present wherever people gather to frighten one another with stories. It is shy and easily dispersed, thinning to nothing in bright light or loud company, and it haunts the quiet edges of things, the abandoned shrine, the last lit window. On certain old festival nights the Otogy gather in numbers along the shrine-paths, a drifting procession of pale flickering lights, reenacting, it is said, a story no living person remembers the whole of.