Day 717

Ballet is beautiful, graceful and deadly to both dancer and audience when used correctly. The stages they dance on are ancient, full of old souls brimming with hatred for the new talent surpassing them and erasing their shining successes with each delicate twirl and step.

Every story has its fiction based on some obscure fact from somewhere and opera ghosts are no stranger to adaptions and remakes and new films when the theatrical mood strikes. Of course this well known tale has a very real birthplace in Bolshoi, Russia with 240 years worth of damned souls waiting for one wrong step, one single unbalanced entrelacé.

Stories of girls "collapsing under the pressure" are all too common and very well suppressed. Failure looks bad against such establishments, a blemish on their perfect façade and another thing to keep fresh blood out of their studios and stages.

The living were forever in competition with the dead, dancing with them in their reflections, trying to keep their own away from the dark blurry figures that moved with utter perfection as their mostly incorporeal arms reached for the reflection's necks. Their bodies were graceful curves and fuzzy edges, no real detail but for their eyes which were seen as clear as day, peering out from dark grey mists with utter loathing.

It wasn't uncommon for studios to be closed for an hour or a month, depending on how long the spirits lingered within the mirrors, pacing and waiting for someone to dance against them. Few people survive these dances unscathed. In fact this has been going on for so long that costumes which cover the majority of the body are seen as typical, just as the scars left behind by the dead are seen as signs of strength and courage against their predecessors. They show that the dancer is truly worthy of their place in the school.

That being said the occasional death hardly goes unnoticed, especially with the amount of blood that is so often left behind. The wooden floors would be better off stained a deeper shade of brown than their beige and cream with brownish red stains in all manner of horrific positions. In some of the rooms (usually sealed off to all but the most experienced of tutors) there are smeared handprints on the ceiling from where poor young dancers have been lifted clean from the ground by the envious dead.

Their bones are the loudest sound around - you never quite forget how the sound of someone's spine snapping as it collides with a metal rail over the sound of languid classical compositions. they don't always manage to scream, you see. The dead go for the throat first, keep them quiet and kill them quick. make every second of their afterlife hell. You can see them in some rooms where the bloodstains were fresher, chasing familiar looking blurry figures whose mouths seem permanently frozen in a wide scream of terror.

The older ones don't have mouths, they often forget that they once needed to eat or sleep and so their "bodies" adjust to fit their newly perceived self. The oldest of them all look nothing like humans, they've forgotten that they once were like us. How they tower and bend at impossible angles, contorting into terrifyingly beautiful dances as they perform to songs only they can hear.

So perfect and so grotesque. Everything ballet was ever meant to be.