A correction to my earlier reporting: the ballroom is not where relationships are revealed. The ballroom is where relationships are performed. If you want the truth, or at least something close enough to the truth to ruin somebody's evening, watch the door to the other room. Consider the Rake. Out beneath the chandeliers, she has spent the night collecting blushes like gambling chips. The Demoiselle was swept onto the floor, praised, dipped, kissed. The Flare received much the same confident treatment later. One could reasonably conclude that the Rake simply considers courtship another competitive sport. Then she disappeared into the quiet room staring at her palmhusk like it contained a death notice. No love songs, please. A little later, the reason emerged: somebody had broken up with her, suddenly, and she did not know why. There is something terribly effective about watching a woman spend an evening proving she can make anyone want her only to discover there is apparently one person whose wanting mattered. Whether tonight's flirtations were fun, distraction, habit, or an attempt to outrun that message is none of my business. This publication therefore intends to make it everyone's business. Meritomb deserves a footnote here as well. She followed, sat beside the Rake without demanding an explanation, endured an embrace strong enough to qualify as structural damage, and remained until the worst of it passed. Lovers? Probably not enough evidence. Trusted? Absolutely. You learn more about a relationship from who someone allows to see them collapse than from who they allow to kiss them. The Flare, meanwhile, may require a chart. The Vixen has already made her interest unmistakable, and the Flare was hardly unreceptive. Yet after several dances, the Flare retreats to the Side Room and encounters the Researcher, where the atmosphere immediately loses the quality of two masked strangers meeting by chance. The Researcher rests against her shoulder. The Flare leans back. A kiss is placed on the cheek and returned without hesitation. There is history there, whatever name belongs on it. Curiously, the Researcher had just complained that her moirail was absent. Perhaps they are simply affectionate friends. Perhaps the Flare has a complicated social calendar. Perhaps the masks are doing considerably less work than everyone hoped. Either way, anyone trying to claim these two met tonight should choose a more convincing lie. And then there is our Scarecrow, who may accidentally be generating enough romantic ambiguity to feed this column for all three nights. Alone in the Side Room, safely away from the crowd, he wonders aloud what songs "that lady" might like and begins playing one because, by his own admission, she makes him think of it. Which lady? At first, one might suspect the Magnated. He speaks of meeting the hostess as though describing an audience with royalty, visibly attempts to compose himself whenever she enters, and becomes a glowing, stammering catastrophe when she closes the distance between them. The Magnated does not exactly discourage this. She approaches within inches, studies him with unusual attention, listens while he plays for her, and departs after christening him "bumpkin," which somehow leaves him more starstruck than before. Yet while all of this is occurring, the Raven has quietly established herself as the gentler competing possibility. She watches his performances, compliments his voice, offers to keep him company in the main hall, handles his crows with remarkable tenderness, calls him "my dear," and spends portions of their conversation with her attention nearly exclusively on him. He, naturally, becomes flustered by that too. After the Magnated leaves him standing there bewildered, what does our poor straw gentleman think to do? Find Miss Raven. I am not calling this a triangle. I am merely drawing three dots and several extremely suspicious lines between them. The strangest line remains the one between the Mourner and the Shikabane. Their interactions have none of the ballroom's obvious flirting, which makes them considerably more interesting. The Shikabane speaks as though something about the Mourner is familiar without quite claiming to know him, offers him a reading, and drifts away. The Mourner then proceeds to track them into the other room. Not wander there. Not happen upon them. Find them. When noise threatens to drive the Shikabane elsewhere, the Mourner politely remarks that he would understand while privately preferring they remain. When he finally sits across from that little island of cards and fire, the sentiment underneath all the etiquette is wonderfully simple: I came to find you. Even the Magnated appears to have noticed that those two have "whatever they've got going on." I have no theory yet as to whether we are witnessing attraction, recognition, some spiritual familiarity between two creatures who both smell faintly of the grave, or the beginning of an exceptionally elaborate scam involving tarot cards. I only know that when the quietest man at the masquerade deliberately follows someone into another room, this reporter starts taking notes. #OutglutMasquerade
c< HM.... writteN well, iM glad 2 see sOMe tHiNgs are still tHe saMe, iN tHese NigHts >c
c< always a scribe, always.... well, gOOd 2 see aN Outside perspective ON tHiNgs, i guess >c
c< tHere was sOMeONe liKe tHis duriNg tHe first Masquerade, if MeMOry recalls, gave a siMilar perspective >c
Ah, I see. A simple mistake. I have never attended before. Technically, I am barely there.
c< well, barely is still MOre tHaN NOt at all! >c
c< aNd, well, yOur first guess was clOser tHaN yOud assuMe! >c