A hollow, murky gaze swept around from within the shadowed folds of a hood, feeling its way like a wary shade flitting by in the night. Over the eyes that cast it, that of which it was the pale reflection slept in its silken tomb, unseen and ever open to its world of nightmares. The stare passed over each of the shapes assembled before it once, twice, now and again, swift yet heavy. It sank into the shadowy gaps between them, sounding the absence for hidden sights and motions, before emerging again with nary a sign of having strayed. To one who had caught it, it could have seemed that it was searching for something familiar, which it neither hoped nor wished to find. Yet no one could say, for it was deft and furtive, beyond the skill of even the wariest to seize, and it rose from twin corpses buried deep in an untimely sable grave.

The sightless pit that was the cowl moved to one side, then another, following the tones of speech, and the flickering light of the torches revealed glimpses of the face beneath it. The cadaverous glimmer of the eyes proved deceptive, for it was not the visage of a corpse that peered out from the abyss, but a genial smile, seated in a plump and affable countenance that could have belonged to a kindly prelate or well-to-do tradesman. Still, in the dim flashes of the wavering flames, even that face, which would have appeared perfectly harmless and even inviting in a daylit marketplace, had a vaguely sinister, even insidious impression to it. Perhaps it was because of this that it withdrew again into the shadows of the hood, leaving once more nothing visible but the cold eyes, now ever so slightly less daunting by virtue of contrast, before it spoke.

"I don't know if we oughta call that an 'object'," the man addressed the seemingly one-eyed figure in white. His voice was as low and steeped in solemn mystery as befitted their surroundings, but, at the same time, it carried undertones of rowdy mockery and plebeian boisterousness. More than the speech of a druid or hierophant, it resembled the playful blasphemy that dwells in shabby taverns and around crude clay hearths. "To me, it looks - and sounds - like something that mightn't like that name. Though, since we're apparently beasts -" he motioned with his head after the direction in which the skull-headed newcomer had gone, "- I suppose that's only fair. But, more to the point..."

The speaker tore himself away from the wall, all but invisible in the darkness, against which he had been leaning and drew forward by a step. As he did, he seemed to coalesce out of the formless blackness, materialising into a human-like figure whose contours were, nonetheless, still left blurry and undefined by the cloak that covered him. What might have been an arm, but was transformed into a ghastly amorphous appendage by the black folds draped over it, swept before the circle in a rapid gesture.

"Isn't strange that there's so many of us here and now? Real bloody treason -" the shrouded hand curtly waved at the bejewelled mirror, "- if you ask me, of anybody not to be out there." He was quiet for a moment, and the sounds of the revels outside could be heard, muffled and distorted by the distance. "While we still can." A grim, artificial chuckle. "But no. We're here, like corpses waiting to be brought down..." A finger, colourless in the dusk, wormed out of the cloak's folds and pointed to the Cathedral's floor. "One of us thinks she knows why, at least. But can we all say the same?"