[b]TEAM RELAXATION![/b]

A lotus is pressed into Eclair's hands as she is guided up into the center of the room. The lotus glows, too. An opalescent light which reflects off your lights, your heart, and the dancers, and their shadows. It does not reflect off the walls. Where are the walls? Not lit by Eclair's heartlights. Her arsenal of blades. Her intentions and her wards. Those just shine on the dance.

Someone has a fiddle. Someone else has a set of pipes. Someone else, presumably, has a tambourine. Maybe more than one someone. And there is [i]clapping[/i] as the Shadow Ball begins. ([i]My[/i] Shadow Ball.) The courtesans of the Chrysanthemum link arms and dance in circles, then split up and, doing jigs, grab more partners. The smell of perfume covers everything: soft, floral, veiling whatever else might be here.

Yuki is danced with, which is to say, she finds that the dancers are happy to take the lead, to take her hands in opera gloves (was anyone here wearing those?) and guiding her, twirling her, dipping her low--

--where she gets to look into the empty pits of a skull, with Eclair's lights playing over the yellowed bone, making it seem like something out of the Day of the Los Muertos--

--and spun back up, link arms, join the line, kick one two [i]kick[/i] one two, faster now, faster, the fiddle screams like a goblin as the bow all but catches flame, and the partner on her left is covered in vines and manages, without eyes, to look absolutely befuddled, and across the way someone is dancing with a marble statue, and the perfume mist gathering all around your feet is [i]nothing[/i] like the sweet venom of the Walking Elm, because you are dancing in [i]my[/i] house, my home away from home, and wherever else you are, that's still true.

Eclair, inside the lotus is you. All of you. All the yous that could have been, insofar as a beautiful star could guess at them. And you can see them joining in the dance among the courtesans and the service workers and the dead being spun from partner to partner, until you could almost weep from seeing all the yous there could be.

And Yuki, you--

[hr]
[b]Hazel![/b]

In through the doors you go, Hazel, between those shadowed figures, past Alcideo glancing up with sweat on his brow from his tablet and how is he doomscrolling at a time like this, you might think, as your foot catches on a root and you tumble into the dark, across the filthy cobblestones of a castle claimed by the forest, across cold things that you cannot think about because if you allow yourself to think about the fact that they are bones then you will lose your nerve to get untangled, even as you feel roots slowly slithering against your skin, even as the vast dark of Sayanastia floods everything behind you and this is it, you're finally caught, you've been tricked and bamboozled by the Aestivali one more time and soon, oh so very soon, the claws of the dragon will be on you and she will whisper as she wraps her coils around you and claims you as a prize.

Only, the thing is--

Only, there, in the dark, in the deepest dark that there could ever be, in the darkness of absence and emptiness--

A bow scrapes across the strings, and a sweet breath whistles through the open holes, and light shines, not the insistent light of your antlers but beautiful opalescent light, surrounded by lights like those of your gift-giving Christymas day or luminous stained glass, and all around you, the dead of Aria Thendragon's court, knights and courtiers and damosels, are swept into the arms of the dancers which emerge from the shadows, and you are grabbed under your armpits and pulled back onto your feet and you can no more resist the dance than the dead can, and you catch a glimpse of Seli with the fiddle tucked under her chin and her eyes closed and her body more animated than you have ever seen her, feet moving furiously, and then you are spun about by a groaning skeleton with a ribcage cleft in two by maidly arms and then, oh, and then--

[hr]
[b]Handmaidens![/b]

This is the sort of dance which is an expression of the power of a Fallen Star, my dears. Sayanastia could end it, if she liked, even as her puppets are swept up to join the dance with the shadows and the dead, only, only, you see, the thing is, there is [i]light[/i] at the heart of it, and the light is broken and the light is beautiful, and the light says we play with the rules like [i]this[/i] so that you're in your brilliant black gown from the time you tried to seduce Heron to the cause of the void, and it is [i]vital[/i] that you both catch the Golden Fawn but also, but [i]also[/i], that you get to the center of the dance while playing by the dance's rules, that opalescent light and the music and the joy of it flooding into you, a false flickering that promises more.

(You were here, once, when the castle fell, with real swords and real shields, and the memory of that day is why our little Thellamie fears the swords of the Order of the Aurora. You were here, Sayanastia, as a queen who screamed and cursed and promised to crack the world open as the knights of Morning, Noon and Evening ran you full long on their spears. Here there was death. And here, now, there is a dance, for as long as I declare it so, which is for as long as Eclair Espoir holds her lotus and shows her lights.)

Around you, curses thaw. Around you, there is laughter and the sound of music and the void is full.

And at its heart, a woman so beautiful it hurts to see her shine.

[hr]
[b]Hazel! Yuki![/b]

--you suddenly find yourselves swept up together by the dance, just like you never were at prom. Sweating palms, fingers interlocked, and all around you the mad ecstatic revelry of a world turned inside-out by Eclair Espoir's heart and the music of two very, very good [i]ashiqs[/i]. And you have a breathing space, and are not torn away by the dance, and for the first time since Crevas you are [i]together.[/i] In the castle of Aria Thendragon. In a cafe of the Chrysanthemum. Here.