heat_haze

Air that has been heated, standing in front of something. A blend-queue card that reads the lit opaque scene behind itself and offsets that read along a rising, churning cell field, so the colonnade behind a brazier bowl and the ridge behind a noon plain both swim, while the card itself never appears.

The card dissolves toward its own rim and is strongest along its bottom edge — where the fire, or the hot ground, is. One material serves any card; the size and the placement are the entity's.

noon.water builds the plain's shimmer for shot 22 and hands out water.shimmerCard(...) so the mechanism and court slices raise one over a brazier or a hot stone without authoring a second refracting shader.