For such a loud club, it sure was a dark one. I could barely see my hand in front of my face, much less whoever was on the dance floor below me. I leaned on the second floor railing and looked out over the expanse of moving shadows below me.
I am surrounded by hundreds of… things… and I am utterly alone.
I turned to go. The music changed. A bright shining and many colored performer took the stage and emptied it by their presence.
“Come down.”
I knew they were talking to me. “No.”
“Come down.”
I didn’t turn back to the railing. “There’s nothing for me there. I am not the focus of attention.”
A hand gripped my coat. An impossibility, I thought, as behind me was open space. I turned around and saw the performer clinging to the railing. “Then I come to you.”
“Harlequin.” Not so much a name, but a description. I knew they had no real name, anyway.
Harlequin bowed while somehow holding the railing with one hand and one foot. They made the gesture look foolishly easy.
“I don’t belong there. I am not you.”
“You are not. Come down anyway.”
I looked around. No one was paying attention. Everyone was watching. Harlequin and I were all part of a show and all background noise at the same time.
“Come down for whom?”
Harlequin made a gesture over my chest. My blood surged and heated while my heart tried to beat its way out of my flesh. I gripped my chest and fell to my knees, swallowing the smoke slithering out of my throat. Harlequin danced on the outer railing, parkouring in place and making levitation appear possible.
“What are you trying to suppress?”
“What are you trying to call out?”
“Come down. We’re waiting for you.”
“Who’s we?”
Harlequin’s mask did not hide their mouth, and they grinned a wide, toothy, and sharp grin to answer my question.
I realized I was dreaming and what the setting could be an alternative for. “Harlequin, I have no tribe, no community, no people to intercede for. I’m no shaman, no intercessor, and by all rights, I’m an Outsider even among my own kin. What coven, house, or closed society would have a bastard who doesn’t even know how to take care of herself?”
As I spoke, smoke continued to pour from my mouth in plops and gusts. “Everything I knew was built on faulty assumptions. There are a lot of things I just don’t fucking know, that I really fucking need to know, and the only languages I understand are full of doublespeak and intentional blinds. Fuck, Harlequin, I don’t even know if water is fucking wet at this point. You tell me to come down. Come down for fucking what? To be humiliated again? To be broken again?” It was very hard to breathe, very hard to remain conscious. The fire in my blood had spread to my bones, and the tendons in between were singing a dark and greedy moan.
I meant to lean my head to the ground of the second floor I was on, but I ungracefully just fell over instead. Harlequin lowered themselves on the exterior of the railing so that only their head and hands were visible at my level.
“Come down. We’re waiting for you.”
Harlequin let go of the railing and fell out of sight. My consciousness followed immediately after.