The party was. It had always been, and always would be. From the outside, there was nothing peculiar about it. Dancers twirled, enormous dresses spun with them, just a half second behind their wearers. Tailcoats fluttered in the quick movements of the waltz. Masks covered every face, hiding them from the intruding glances of other dancers. There were feathers and sequins, rhinestones and bright colors, lace and tulle, satin and velvet. There were tables pushed against all but one of the walls, covered in glasses of red wine. An orchestra played the quick waltz from the tableless wall, keeping all the dancers moving indefinitely. The floor was a grand marble design, a scene indistinguishable under all the dresses and coats and feet. The party was, just as it had always been.

From the inside, the party still was. However, it was no longer so phantasmal, so ethereal. It was something else entirely. It was violent. It was dark. It was insidious, and it was deadly. Dancers made of collagen and fabric grasped each other's hands tightly, bone fingers between bone fingers. Dresses of scraps and tailcoats of tatters hung limply on fleshless figures. Dancers held together by nothing but needle and thread spun with dancers who weren't dead and weren't really alive either. Dancers who weren't human, though they were very much still alive, waltzed with pale figures whose feet only rarely touched the floor. The wine on the tables was a little too red, a little too thick sometimes. The orchestra played cellos and violins and harps that were bowed and bent, warped out of shape by time, with such expertise that music was still produced, that the waltz was still danced too. The floor was spattered with something, a something that reeked of pennies, that covered the design in the marble. A great black figure, etched into the marble in a dark cloak with a sickle of silver stood among a graveyard of grey and white stones. There was no light to see by, yet all the dancers could anyway. All but one

A couple danced, their dresses flowing and mixing with each other. The girl in the red dress was only mostly alive, though she danced. Red feathers and rhinestones hid her face, showing only her full lips and bright eyes. The girl in the white dress faded in and out of view, feet an inch off the floor at all times. A mask of white tulle and white hair done up in a chiffon left her shoulders and collarbone exposed, but covered her eyes enough so they couldn't be seen. The girl could still see. The partners twirled to the beat of the waltz, bouncing and spinning and leaping. They separated, they danced with others, but they always ended up with each other again.

The party continued, just as it was. The couple danced through the night, through the darkness of the empty moon, through the blank sky of stormclouds that blocked every star, through the blackness of the dance floor, devoid of light though perfectly visible to every dancer but one. The only mostly alive one, the girl in the flowing red dress, she could not see the rest of the dancers. She couldn't see her own hands, or her partner, though the apparition in the white dress could see her. The girl in red, the only human in the entire party, the party that was, could feel her partner, though she couldn't see her. She didn't know what her partner was, she didn't know what the dance was, but she loved it. She loved the ethereal feel, the perfect beauty of it. She could not have known what was truly going on in the party, for she was still human.

She could not see the dead and half-dead and undead dancers, the wine that wasn't wine, the orchestra that shouldn't have been able to play the waltz so splendidly, the images of Death himself that covered every wall and floor and ceiling. She could not see any of it, and that was for the best, for if she could have, she would have tried to flee. She would have tried, but there was nowhere she could have gone, nowhere she could have departed the party from. She had come to the party, but she could not leave. She could never leave, could never go anywhere else.

~~~

The party was. It had always been, and always would be. There was no changing the nature of it. It would always be, just as it was, just as it had always been. The dancers twirled and spun to the waltz like they had for years and years before. Dresses and tailcoats were in tatters and would always be in tatters, hanging raggedly on creatures and beings who had danced for as long as any of them could remember. Masks hid faces of decaying flesh and empty eyes, the flesh that would never decay more and the eyes that would only grow more and more empty as the dance continued. In the midst of this sea of death and undeath, a couple twirled. The girl in the white dress and the girl in the red dress spinning perfectly, just as they had for years. The girl in red was even with the girl in white now, her feet an inch off the ground too.

She could see the dance now, could see the horrors and nightmares and terrors that lay beneath it's surface. They no longer frightened her as they would have when she first joined the dance, now they comforted her, they made her feel welcome because she was one of them now. She was like them, she had been like them for as long as she could remember now. She knew, in the back of her mind, that she had once been unlike them. She had once not been able to see the party as it was, and she knew that she once would have been terrified, but she could no longer feel such powerful emotions. She could only dance to the waltz. She could only spin and twirl and leap and dance.

The dancers moved perfectly, as if they had done this for years, for decades, for centuries, forever. The party was, and would be, and as long as it did so, the dancers would dance. The party simply was.