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Mousesong, dark and pale, stood on the cobblestones in some vast cathedral-ceiling'd building.

All Malu knew, of course, that the gods and the goddesses had never left--that they had clung to the walls and wasted away to faint, dying echoes. But sometimes Mousesong knew that it is not only the gods that leave ghosts.

Mousesong liked to think that she heard secrets--the scraps of old hymns littering the floors, or the rustling whispers of devotions long past shuffling through corridors; the phantom smoke of history's incense and sacrifice and the faint, faint echoes of ritual mingled in the white noise of nightfall. There were, she was sure, voices praying in the language of the long-dead mixed up somewhere in the shrill cicada song.

The unfortunate truth about rampant imagination is that at some point it is all too easy to begin to believe your fantasies, and now, as Mousesong stood on the cobblestones, she flattened her ears against her head, and rattled her feathers because any sound at all was comforting, and realized, much to her inward chagrin (despite, as always, outward composure), that she had succeeded in frightening herself with her own silent ghost stories.

Alarmed by the sound of Vivaldi's startlement, Mouse jumped--it was a curious little buck, all four feet leaving the floor at once and returning almost instantly as, out of long-honed habit, she attempted to regain an expression of cool, detached, and enigmatic composure. Her wings gave her away, and rustled uneasily.

For a moment, she let a silence run. Mouse was a firm believer in the power of creative pauses.

She broke it: "It appears I am an unexpected sight. I apologize for startling you." Oh god, the damnably mysterious and nonchalant way she said that, as if she, too, hadn't nearly leapt out of her own skin.

"All places in shadow are my god's shrine," she answered, and her voice was detached and distant and faintly dreamy, her eyes meandering across the ceiling and down to the stranger. "And some places in light."

"You are?"

"Mousesong," she said briefly, and said nothing as to her path. Not entirely unheard of, but still somewhat unusual--and, as it turned out, perfectly suited to her belief.

"Roses," she mused absently, picking her way across the cobbles in a way that suggested that she, like a superstitious child, was avoiding the cracks. "The petals or the thorns?"

"Ah," she said, and seemed content to let it rest there. She was drawing up to a halt, perhaps because of Vivaldi's all-too-apparent nervousness, but instead of simply stopping, she began circling, rather than coming any nearer, apparently to inspect him from all angles, as if he were a particularly interesting frog she was wary of startling into a leap.

And then she stopped.

"Do you hear that?" she asked, ears jerking upright, body going rigid. It was all a facade, of course, but let Vivaldi strain his ears for some ghost-sound that wasn't there.

Mouse, in typical Mouse fashion, played along, dipping her head in a theatrical fashion as if scanning the stone walls for any signs of supernatural hanky-panky, and shielding Vivaldi behind the sweep of an elegant wing--perhaps the only elegant thing about her.

"I'm not sure," she whispered. "What's it sound like to you?"

In the distance the light sound of paws gently crossing the stones, followed by the crisp clear cut of the hooves echoed down the hall.
By the step and the pace, they were coming closer at a steady rate. There was no sound and the figure seemed to be around the size of an adult Malu.
Within a moment the noise suddenly switched to the beating of wings and hovering for several moments.