For three days the warm quick things have been thick upon the floor of this hollow place, thicker than any migration I have felt in a long age, packed and shuffling and radiating so much heat that even I, who take a thousand years to notice the sun, felt something like a fever pass across my face.
They have come dressed in a second skin. This is the part that would puzzle me, if I had the patience for puzzlement. The soft creatures have wrapped themselves in the shapes of other soft creatures: fur where they have no fur, tails that do not grow, great grinning heads worn over their own small ones.
I have watched real fur come and go across my back for longer than these hollow places have stood, mammoth and fox and the things before them, and it always left the same way, in the ground, as a smell that fades. This fur will not fade. It was never alive.
They made it, and they wear it on purpose, and it makes them happier and slower and much, much hotter.
They embrace. Enormous plush arms close around enormous plush arms, and something rises off them that I can only call warmth, a great communal steam of it, drifting up toward my cold ceiling and thinning into nothing.
Then, as swiftly as a shadow crossing me at noon, they are gone. The floor cools. The last heat lifts and is drunk by the stone.
I will keep the warmth a while, the way I keep every warmth, and then I will lose it, and by the next long freeze I will not recall whether the bright things had tails or not.