“This is gonna be the last night you ever weep,” he promised her. The dead swirled around them without hearing him, but her head tilted to show she understood. Her golden hair lay in curls on the floor, in a molten torrent emerging from the death-mask that covered her face and the top half of her skull. Their pale hands brushed.

They seemed to be absorbed completely in the dance they wove among the other masqueraders, but her pale blue gaze and his dark black one fell over each other’s shoulders, watching the dead around them. They moved as they had in life, but a little more quietly, a little more uncertainly. Something missing. When the dead spoke, it was like the wind speaking through rain on a quiet night where only the earth knows every star is piercing behind clouds- too quiet, too many things hidden. Expectant.

One of the dead- she didn’t know which one, when she looked at them their outlines shivered with a live gaze on them and she couldn’t see clearly- spoke then, asking her for a melody in that almost pleading way. She couldn’t refuse. She couldn’t let go of his hands. “Don’t worry about the tears, you can sing blind,” he told her bravely, pulling his fingers from hers too quickly. She might have looked terrified behind the mask.

She strode to the stage set for her with the dignity, grace, and poise of royalty, because even if she hadn’t been a princess among the living, she was a princess among the dead simply for being alive. Beneath the mask her tears were like the sharpness of hidden stars. As she opened her mouth and her melodic song began, around her notes fell from the mouths of the dead as they tried to imitate her beauty, every spirit present shivered with the essence of life that she fed them. The violinists’ hum became a mere drop of rain in the torrential downpour of song she breathed.

When they were at their weakest, he ran to her and ripped off her mask, she sang, she sang, she shone among the dead and they were blinded with all the beauty of being alive, she ran.

They ran together, the prince and the princess, away from the wrenching howls and into the impenetrable nothingness of death. She sang a door for them, and they slid through and crouched together, breathing too hard. She listened with her mask pushed up over her forehead and her cheeks tinged.

“The music’s stopped.”

“Life seems simpler without a soundtrack,” he whispered into the silk of her hair.

It didn’t need to make sense.