Work Text:
The Dance of Death
The moon is full, the air is still.
Like an omnipresent blanket, mist hangs in the air. Soft, ephemeral tendrils of white and grey caress tombstones like a lover's caress. It's just the wrong kind of cold—wet without rain, damp enough that it seeps into your clothes but dry enough that it refuses to leave. A raven caws a dull cry, and the snarled hedges weave around the cemetery. It's a cold Halloween night.
There's a strange tension, though.
Trees sway softly in the nonexistent wind, and the air is saturated with anticipation...
Perhaps from the skies of Heaven far above, or from the halls of the Hell far below, a figure appears. Timeless, eternal, endless, the man draws back his black hood.
Stretching his lean arms, his black and purple feathered wings outstretch as though to taste the air. The man—though a man he is not—has dark skin, honey colored eyes, and kingly features. And indeed, he is a king, the king of death. For he is Thanatos, the incarnation of Death himself.
From nowhere and everywhere, he pulls out an instrument of teakwood. At a first glance, it might seem to be a violin, though it is certainly not. It is a fiddle.
He sets the bow atop the strings, and begins to play. It's high and slow, almost experimental at first, growing faster and faster, before dipping into low notes once more.
As he plays, the wind begins to blow. The constant mist swirls and blows away, shooed by the growing atmosphere.
From the graves, bleached bones connected by necromantic threads claw their way to the surface. Fingers, hands, arms, chests, and legs emerge from the mud and dirt.
All around the cemetery, the long dead come to life. Some are scarcely more than bones worm by time and decomposition, others have clumps of mottled flesh in grey and black still attached.
Thanatos begins to play faster, tap tap tapping his feet, and the cadavers begin to do the only thing that matters.
They dance.
Some of their faces are gone, or missing arms and legs, but that doesn't stop them from dancing like the world was ending. Grotesque bodies, some with rotted holes in their stomachs and arms, hold each others' dead hands and dance like aristocrats in a big ball.
Tapping a tomb with his heel, Death plays gigue, the midnight moon high above his head. The pace is frantic and chaotic, as the dead dance faster.
The winter wind blows, the night is dark, the lime-trees groan aloud; white skeletons flit across the gloom, running and leaping beneath their huge shrouds.
Death continues, endlessly scraping his shrill fiddle! An orchestra seems to join him, a wild melody of strings and percussion celebrating the dead! They spin faster and faster and faster, building to a crescendo!
But shh! Suddenly, the dance is ended with the crowing of a rooster. The sun peaks over the horizon, and the dead all collapse like a marionette with cut strings. Death bows his head, and vanishes in a blur of cold air.
Nothing is left of the scene the night before.
Well, save for the bodies. Rest assured that the owner of the cemetery is most bewildered come morning, when he discovers that someone has unearthed and left the bodies strewn about the graveyard.
But it is not for the living to understand the dead. After all, understanding comes only once they join the ranks of the deceased.
Will you dance, as well?