The music from the House rose to a faster and louder tempo as riotous laughter and the excited shrieks of women was accompanied by the generally raucous bellowing of many foolishly happy male voices. Then the voices died down a bit, and the music picked up a thumping tempo of heavy drum beats. The scent of the incense, exotic and strange, came to Si'Wren again, wafted through the drifting mists in the chill night air.
Chills racked her. The cold of night was at her back, and it's embrace was beginning to seize her with shivers and cramps. But the flickering fire was before her still, accompanied by the emotional warmth of the memory of Habrunt's kiss upon her forehead.
She lifted herself up until she was propped on one elbow, and tried to ignore her chills as she basked in the velvety, mesmerizing warmth and stared long into the glowing fire pit. She had a fever, and was too full of wonder at the behavior of Habrunt to go back to sleep. In the background, the rhythmical chi-chi-ching and reedy reeee-reeeee-reeeee of the music lulled her senses, as her eyes became half-lidded.
Suddenly, as she watched the flickering flames, they began to change shape before her delirious eyes, and became—fiery dancing girls.
Eerily tall, the tireless shapes of the dancing girls pranced and danced and jumped and leaped to the distant music from Master Rababull's House. They shifted and changed positions with each other again and again and yet again, as around and around them jumped up the black shadows of demons, chasing the breathlessly fast fiery dancing girls.
The demons were fast, but the thin, leaping, fiery dancing girls were swifter than lightning, impossibly fast and elusive, so much so that the persistent demons could not catch even one of the fire girls, who kept disappearing miraculously out of their clutches and slipping through their clutching black claws as easily as a collection of brilliant feminine fire wraiths.
The yellow firelight flashed in brilliance from the eerily thin leaping flame figures, and suddenly, Si'Wren became one of them.
As they danced, she danced, and as they leaped, she leaped with them, in an entrancingly intricate pattern of leaps and prances, as the light of the Invisible God shined from within herself to light the way for her tiny dancing feet.
All around her the demons whirled and chased, ever seeking to carry her away from the others, and away from the holy light of the Invisible God, but she, like the fiery dancing girls, could not be caught by them for all of their efforts, for that Perfect Light was like a living fire within Si'Wren.
The smell of the fire's smoke reached her once, and she realized that the demons were tormented by the fiery light of the eerily beautiful dancing girls, for she smelled the smoke of their torment, and as she lay staring unblinkingly at the fire, she danced endlessly into the darkness of the night.