Julliette felt her hand freeze in accordance to the wishes of the Count of Tindar, his will silencing the musicans as absolutely as it compelled them to play. The knight stalked across the dancefloor with his mace held ready. The dancers began to circle him like sharks circling a wounded orca, they feighted in and out, skipping out of range of blows from the weapon almost mockingly. The circle moved with the advancing knight, not impeding his progress but threatening it, promising swift death or worse than death with the slightest mistep. Julliette focused all her will, tried to force her body to move, but it was still a useless endeavor. As the knight neared the throne the two robed figures flanking the Count rose in the same eerie unison as the dancers, but the Count made an obscure gesture and stood up. Despite seeming of a height with his companions a moment ago, he now seemed to tower over them like a grown man over children. An aura of palpable rage washed over Julliette and to her amazement her left eye blinked of her own volition.

"You were a fool to come here without an invitation mortal worm," a voice as ancient and terrible as the bottom of the sea sounded in her mind, seeming to come from all directions while still originating with the Count. Julliette could not have said what language he spoke in save that it wasn't common and she understood it as perfectly as she understood that fire was hot. 

"Take him," the Count commanded to the dancers with a contemptuous flick of his wrist. With a howl of dammned souls the dancers rushed in heedless of the danger of the knights weapon, perhaps even eager for the oblivion that it might promise. Abruptly Julliette could move. The lute fell from her neveless fingers and struck the ground with a tuneless thunk which might have been the sweetest sound she had ever produced with it. With the speed of someone who had spent subjective lifetimes planning what she would do, if only she were freed from the enchantment, she seized the harp which stood on a pedestal of antediluvian marble and hurled the gold and silver chased instrument into the crowd of dancers surrounding the knight, its heavy edge crunching into the press like a bludgeon.

Most of the musicians didn't react to her sudden outburst, but the conductor of the dammned ensemble turned and stretched a finger out towards her, flesh fell from the digit to reveal aged and cracked bone beneath and Juliette danced back, snatching a viol from the bleeding hands of another musician and smashing it against the conductor in a shower of kindling that seemed to blow the disarticulated bones of the creature across the hall like chaff before the wind. Screaming in terror she leaped from the dias where the musicans watched in vacant eyed non interest and grabbed for a sword clutched by an ancient suit of armor, pulling it free and sending the metal tumbling to the ground in discordant cacophony.