Bridge-Anchors of the Lantern-Flood Crossing — an age when a river-city's grandest festival empties across a single high stone span in both directions at once, the whole populace pouring toward the far shrine on one bank and streaming back from it on the other, so the bridge becomes a two-way flood of shoulders and lantern-light with no still water in it; and the Bridge-Anchor is the one appointed to hold the exact center-stone through the whole night's crossing — not to guide the crowd, not to stop it, only to REMAIN at the pivot where the two rivers of people shear past each other in opposite directions, planted at the seam where the outbound tide is the returning tide, choosing to stay rooted while every body that brushes her is moving and every current wants to fold her into one direction or the other