The music didn't arrive on strings or brass. It seeped up through the floorboards a rhythm made of settling dust, the memory of old waltzes trapped in the parquet, and the collective rebellious hum of a thousand things that usually have to remain quiet.
This was the hour when the physics of the daytime world grew lazy.
Under the painted banner reading L'OMBRE COTILLION, the guests arrived not by carriage but by detaching themselves. They peeled away from the sleeping forms of bankers, debutantes, and tired scullery maids upstairs, slipping under door cracks like spilled ink.
Tonight they were not secondary. Tonight, they had mass.
The ballroom was hazy, rendered in thick oily strokes of a dream that's difficult to remember the next morning. Candlelight didn't illuminate the dancers so much as it defined their absence. They were silhouettes cut from vantablack velvet, swirling in gowns that seemed made of thunderclouds and smoke.
The vibe was undeniably sassy. You could see it in the way a towering figure in a top hat, the daytime shadow of a very meek accountant, bowed with exaggerated impossible depth. You could almost feel it in the sharply dismissive flick of a fan made entirely of gloom held by a figure whose feathered headdress brushed the chandeliers.
They didn't speak, shadows have no lungs for air but the room was filled with a crowded, rustling whisper.
"Did you see her today?" a smudge of charcoal seemed to convey to a blur of indigo. "She tripped three times. I had to elongate myself just to make it look graceful. I am exhausted."
A couple in the center of the floor executed a pivot so sharp, so impossibly fast, that their forms momentarily merged into a single chaotic brushstroke before snapping back into two distinct and smug figures. It was a move that a would snap a human ankle performed with the casual arrogance of being that which cannot break.
They danced with the energy of stolen time. They were the anxieties, the hidden vanities, and the secret desires of the house finally allowed to put on their finery and spin.
However, the cotillion had a strict curfew.
As the first gray hint of dawn threatened the high windows, the heavy brushstrokes of the room began to thin, the music faded back into the floorboards. With a final collective rustle of silk that wasn't there, the dancers dissolved. They rushed toward the ceiling, sliding back under doors, racing to reattach themselves to the heels of their sleeping owners before the sun rose and forced them back into obedient two dimensional servitude.
Upstairs a young woman awoke, stretching. Her ankles felt strangely sore, as if she'd been dancing all night in shoes she didn't own.
Chapter Two
The morning light in the ballroom was aggressive. It was a sterile, interrogating brightness that scrubbed the walls clean of mystery and demanded the room confess its emptiness.
Elara stood in the doorway, her satin slippers making no sound. Upstairs, the house was alive with the practical noises of the day, copper pots banging in the kitchen, the rhythmic thud of rugs being beaten outside. But here, the silence was heavy and guilty.
She had come down because the ache in her ankles wouldn't subside, a phantom pain from a marathon she hadn't run. She expected to find scuff marks on the parquet, perhaps a dropped handkerchief.
Instead she found a violation of physics.
In the dead center of the room where the moonlight had been thickest hours before, something remained. It wasn't an object, but rather a concentration of pure rebellious energy that had refused to dissipate when the sun rose.
It was a vortex of vantablack brushstrokes, a violent swirl of charcoal smeared onto the reality of the wooden floor. It looked like a drain in the universe, or perhaps the impossibly fast pirouette of a dancer who had spun so hard they drilled a hole through the fabric of the morning.
It was terrifying. It was also, Elara thought with a strange jolt of pride, incredibly stylish.
She took a step toward it. The anomaly didn't sit still; it hummed with a low, visual vibration. It was the leftover adrenaline of the cotillion, the collective "sassy" defiance of a hundred shadows condensed into one spot.
Her own shadow, currently obediently pale and thin against the wall behind her, seemed to twitch in recognition.
Elara reached out a hesitant hand. Her fingertip brushed the very edge of the black swirl. It felt ice cold and furiously fast, like touching a spinning bicycle wheel made of smoke.
The contact broke the spell. With a sound like a sharply exhaled breath of disapproval, the vortex collapsed inward. The thick black paint dissolved into gray mist, which spiraled upward toward the high windows and evaporated into the blinding white light leaving not so much as a smudge on the floor.
Elara stood alone in the empty bright room. The ache in her ankles was gone.
She turned to leave, a small secret smile touching her lips. She knew with absolute certainty that tonight, her shadow would demand better shoes. finis
No comments:
Post a Comment