After most of the paper lanterns were released, the festival sounds returned to normal, lowering from excited screams, toasts, wishes and excitement to the constant murmur of a city in the middle of its most important night.
The lanterns were everywhere now. Thousands of them, launched together at midnight, climbing through the canopy in a tide of amber light that transformed Ukai's airspace into something that looked like the sky had been inverted - stars below, rising upward, warm, flickering and alive. They moved swaying by the wind, grouped by the wind into rivers of flame that flowed between the trunks, merged and separated and merged again, each individual light part of a larger motion that nobody had planned.
