The Music swirled over Fabled Tindar. Fabled Tindar that had been lost in the midst of time and legend but that lived in the songs and nursery rhymes and in the fever dreams of poets and madmen. Masked dancers swirled across the marble floored great hall in odd intricate dances, the couples intersected to form complicated patterns of swirling silk and flashing teeth carried on by the music in their ecstatic reverie. The great hall was immense, a hundred meters wide with columns of marble decorated with intricate friezes depicting dancers seeming to swirl up them like smoke till the detail was lost in the source-less gloom above. The weird light that illuminated the room did not seem to come from any one place, but almost to congeal from the air like a luminescent miasma. In the distance the gentle crash of waves could be heard in the rare lulls of the music, though the air carried no scent of salt or sea. Rather it seemed redolent with spices and strange night time lotus flowers that one sometimes catches a hint of on tropical breezes driven of equatorial jungles. 

At one end of the great hall the musicians stood or sat at their instruments. There were a dozen of them, each a master of his or her art and dressed in a variety of styles and customs that would have baffled a scholar. Their hands moved as one with clockwork precision as they produced the same haunting melody in a deliberate discordance which seemed to make the music shimmer and hum as though alive. Julliete stood playing her gold chased lute with the same eerie perfection, her fingers moved, but her arms, body and even her eyes were locked in place, unable to move so much as a twitch. That didn't stop her fingers from hurting. Despite the callouses that resulted from years of practice they were already raw and tender. In that regard she was better than the strangely garbed viol player whose fingertips bled as he plucked his own instrument. She didn't quite recall how she had come to this place.  She had a vague impression of playing a song for some villagers at one of their rude rural celebrations. As some times happened when she played she had lost herself in the music, improvising and improving the tune as she went until she reached something so complex and sublime that it approached perfection. Then she remembered a darkly clad man  approaching her... and now she was here. Here in fabled Tindar.

At the other end of the hall sat a trio of thrones. Each of the thrones was made of stone, elaborately engraved with gold and other precious metals. Each was high backed to a height of sever or eight feet with fanning protrusion that drifted into arabesques of eerie and unsymmetrical form that made the view feel queasy to behold. Upon each of the thrones sat an androgynous figure, tall and slender and garbed in layers of silk that appeared ragged, yet had been layered to a perfection that could only have been deliberate. Every inch of the figures was swathed in the silk, save for the featureless white masks which covered their faces and the long wispy veils which concealed their eyes. Somehow Juliette knew that she didn't want to see the faces they concealed beneath those mask and beneath those veils, but she could no more look away than she could cease playing. The dancers swirled on in their endless procession. Juliette focused her mind, worked as hard as she could to make herself blink, to miss a note, anything at all to disrupt her utter inability to exercise any control. Her music continued, perfect and unchanging.