There is an idea of them, an abstraction, but there is no real Velstadt. What exists is a performance: a metaphorical mask meticulously manufactured by that muse, no melancholy minstrel, made of madness and monstrosity. Rehearsed and practiced to a pointed precision, the finesse and fortitude they employ so surreptitiously in their played perfection fools even They at times. It is at times like this, that Velstadt is perhaps more than just lonely literature and an actuality within the actor's mind: and so, they feel.
What they feel is a mystery in those moments, unknown to all but the poor player. It was in a moment like this, one moonlit eve, that they found themselves surrounded by stone in a sinfully sanctified sepulcher: some sort of tomb belonging to a thing that should not have ever needed one, and yet here it lay. It had not been exceedingly difficult for them to find, in truth; they merely followed what clues had made themselves apparent to them in their search. First, it was the scrawlings of a long-dead and ridiculed scholar, locked away in a book that had gathered layer upon layer of dust: unused, untouched, unopened, its parchment still smelling odorous and crisp, as if it had just been pressed. They read through it, what others had simply shelved and stowed away, sleepily forgetting it had ever existed. They dredged it up.
It was there, they read, of a dead place. What a strange thing to consider: how could a place be dead? The trees, the grass, the earth all around, these things could die. But a place? Places live on in memory. They always stand there, even if they change. Castles may fall to ruin, forests may burn to black and leave naught but ash and waste, lakes may dry, but the place that the castle, forest or lake once stood will always be there.
Not this one. Anyone who had ever known it was real, who had ever been so woefully misfortunate to stumble across it, was dead and gone. And even in the remaining time they took after, in the subsequent breaths they drew since leaving that horror behind, they tried their damnedest to forget it. Forgetting was for the best, after all.
And now yet another knew: through them, the crypt had gained new unlife, its memory a hazy ghost drifting through the walls of their mind and finding its way inside. There, it settled, twining with the twisting tethers of thoughts, until they had decided something they considered entirely of their own volition. They would go.
That is how they found themselves there, in that crypt, surrounded by a darkness they had formerly considered themselves a friend of. Where shadows were once a close comfort, they now encroached from every angle: the meager lamp they carried a laughable shield against the crawling black that lapped at their ankles and the corners of their vision. It was not unheard of, for them to fear: in fact, they had been afraid many times before in their life. Their first performance, nights alone in the house as a child, when their mother raised their voice. Fear was not a stranger. And neither, really, was death.
The lamp-light went out. Extinguished all too soon, snuffed by a cold breeze that bit at their fingers and cheeks and nose. The sepulcher's silence was all the more staggering then, their breath drifting in and out of their parted lips like the tide pulling back and forth on a moonlit shore. Each inhalation and exhalation rasped with a certain sort of breathlessness which was itself strange seeing as they had not moved hardly a muscle other than the ones heaving their chest up and down. Their air had left their lungs out of a meddlesome mixture of creeping, looming dread that towered over them in a way that only the tallest and blackest of castles could: and excitement.
The glass shattered. They dropped the lamp immediately, letting the metal clang noisily upon the stone below and roll about in the crunching shards all around it. Their breath hitched midway through their throat, then, and it left the entirety of their stygian surroundings in horrific quiet.
When one sits in silence for far too long: complete and total silence, with the breath held and not a single note of ambience splitting the muted environment, they experience a phenomena similar to the endless ringing of a bell somewhere off in the distance that grows and grows in volume perpetually until that silence is broken. It is something of a mortal compulsion, as if the fleshy forms of sapient things were crafted to always be engaged with noise and never to sit long without it. It is, too, something that they thought about at times. The performer, who had played and strutted and sang all their life truly envied silence, for they must be loud.
The whisper that came to break the quiet was not loud. It startled them all the same, eliciting a gasp of shock that started low in their stomach, raced upward through their diaphragm, and connected with the sharp breath somewhere in their chest. Their eyes of pitch and glassy green stared ahead into the waiting black, seeking something, anything at all to give an answer to everything they were feeling. There was nothing but the words croaked into their ear, creaking and crackling like a violin played just barely at an audible volume.
"Can you hear it?"
The question made no sense: at first. Then they did hear it. It sounded like sweet, splendid music, drifting around and around the unseen tomb surrounding. It wrapped itself around them like the gentle arms of a lover, hooking about their waist and caressing their neck and delicately tucking their hair from their face. The spectral, symphonic song carried them up, up, up: they could not see how far they rose, but they knew their willowy weight was being lifted. Lightly, they were held then, the music growing louder and louder until-- it came.
Crescendo.
The thing spoke to them, and they smiled.
Applause.
It held their hand, and they sighed.
Bow.
There was an idea of them, an abstraction, but now Velstadt was real. Every dance needs a partner.
Lights out.
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