The Underwater Ballroom Society

Four Revelations from the Rusalka Ball

The food is always sumptuous, spectacularly and shamelessly allegorical: glass apples made of spun-sugar; shoes, reinterpreted as all manners of confections; dragon, slow-roasted with fish sauce and holy basil; vermicelli the color and consistency of a newborn blonde’s hair; ruby pomegranate seeds polished to a shine, piled up in vases made to resemble the faces of every princess that the narrative left behind.

It is a spectacle, a spectator’s sport, this culinary line-up of what’s what from the bible of myth, and one can bet your first-born son on the fact the caterers won’t skimp. No abridgement of fables, no matter how obscure. No censoring, no truncation, no elison for clarity. Nothing but raw metaphor, wholesale and pure. Everything that anyone has ever put to pen, quill, syllable, or scratch on a mountain face, it’s all here.

And if a human child were to sample from the buffet, if they popped a caramelized pear between their teeth or ate from the spidered bones of a swan wing, if they drank the dark honey-wine, precisely one thing would follow: dissatisfaction.

For the rest of their lives, they’ll dream of the rusalkas’ ball, its lithe and long-throated girls in frothing lace; its lords and their entourage of boys, glass smiles and the glint of gold pearling on their earlobes.

And they, these children allowed to go free, will wonder why they weren’t good enough to keep.

The clothing is always phantasmagoric, always elegant: plastic-wrapped bodies dripping with neon, dead languages tattooed on skin worm-pale, vernix-slick; bearskin capes over armor like scales of a shark; dresses of blood, barely congealed; feathered collars on three-piece suits, all in colors with names yet invented.

Sometimes, they wear dreams or a stretch of nightmares like a noose around their neck. Except they are more splendid than any sacrifice. Even Odin, belly-bleeding and swinging from a branch, isn’t anywhere as handsome.

And sometimes, they wear words. Words that no one has spoken, words that people have forgotten. A necklace of syllables; particles, past and perfect, like bangles of bone on silk-smooth arms; prepositions and adverbs, nouns without number, buttoned up around wasp-waists and legs so long you couldn’t find their start.

They wear them all.

It’s the rusalkas’ ball, after all.

The halls are always half-drowned. In the aphotic deep where a cruise liner has laid itself to rest, one pocket of breath to share. Down in the river beds, buried in the silt. Down in the dark of the deepest lakes, the waters cold and black as a broken heart. Down where no scream escapes, no corpse lies unvarnished by the chill, no one is left lonely.

It is dark here, but these halls are always beautiful.

The hearts are always eaten at the end.

It is the price of admission.

About Cassandra Khaw

Cassandra Khaw is the business developer for micro-publisher Ysbryd Games. When not otherwise writing press releases and attending conventions, she writes fiction of varying length. The first two novellas in her Lovecraftian noir Persons Non Grata series—Hammers on Bone and A Song for Quiet—are available from Tor.com Publishing.

You can find her on Twitter and on Ko-Fi.