It was a ballroom. Of course, it was.

After hours of pacing and tossing and turning she had drifted off hearing a faint melody in her head thinking it was from the composer upstairs, but as her eyelids grew heavy and her body grew light the music stayed. It swelled, rising and falling in rhythm and complexity, breathy woodwinds joined strings plucked by deft fingers, here a bass line entered with a gentle moan and there, hands flew over keys and over the notes came voices. The voices rose, no gentle chorus, but whispers, laughter, chortles, and sneers filled her ears, surrounding her. Now she could feel the heat from nearby bodies and hear the rustle skirts and clink of shoes. A light caress met her hand and her eyes opened.

She was surrounded by a rolling sea of bodies. No masks lined their faces this time, but the faces which surrounded her seemed too fantastical, too wildly beautiful to be true. Sarah glanced down at her arms and legs, half expecting to see the sweatpants and t-shirt she slept in. Instead, her legs and body were draped in layers of iridescent gauze, not silvery pink of girlish fantasies this time, but the deep blue of the sky just before sunset. One her arms climbed delicate spider web lace shimmering with the faintest hints light as if she had dipped her arms into the night sky itself.

She moved forward, skirts billowing around her feet and the crowd, already dizzy from the siren call of the music, parted for her with eerie grace. She moved about the room, for in her dreams ballrooms were rarely for dancing, instead, they were for hiding and searching, tracking, and tracing. She was used to this cat and mouse game, they had been playing it for years. It had quickly lost its childish charm, instead, it left her restless and on edge.

Sarah skirted the edges of the ballroom and circled it's marble columns, gusted with gold always watching and waiting for that flash from across the room, a hand on her arm, but none came. She walked in and out of rooms, all thrumming with life; the noise and music gathering around her as she walked from room to room, every door open to her. Still the feeling of cat and mouse persisted, the feeling like something was watching her always out of her line of sight. She thought if it were quiet there would be footsteps behind her as the weight of the air pressed ever so slightly against the skin of her back. She was searching, she was pursuing, or was she being pursued? The more she walked, pushing through the crowd the more she wondered if she were the cat or the mouse.

Then she reached the end of the corridor. Sconces flickered on the wall and suddenly the sound of the part was far away, too far away, and in front of her stood heavy double doors covered in knotwork. The light of the torches behind her made her shadow dance along the wall and she watched, mesmerized as she stood still yet her shadow seemed to keep dancing with the other shapes on the wall. Something about the shadowy dance in front of her both rooted her to the ground while a small voice in her head began yelling for her to run. Yet still, she stood and watched the shadows, tall and lithe, yet predatory, move closer and closer to her own. Sarah could feel a bead of sweat trace down the edge of her jaw as she fought the urge to scream that was crawling up the back of her throat. The shadow forms became arms reaching out fingers, long and sinewy with too many joints and points, towards her. Reaching and stretching as fingers wrapped around her hand and pulled her away.

The magic was broken. The sconces flared to life on the walls, chasing the shadows away. Sarah, heart racing and able to move again looked toward her savior, hoping to see mismatched eyes and a cheshire grin smiling back at her.

The air next to her was empty, and Sarah glanced down to where large eyes in a wrinkled face beamed up at her. The oldest woman Sarah had ever seen stared up at her through wild hair and a broad smile. Sarah gaped at the sight in front of her, so out of place in the glittering palace around her, as the little old woman circled Sarah's hand in worn, callused, but warm hands, patting them gently as Sarah realized her breathing deepened and her shoulders relaxed.

"Do not worry, Vnuchka," the old woman said, her voice not craggy and worn, but gentle and ancient like the bending of trees in the wind. She waggled a knobbly finger in front of Sarah's face, "No one is so lost that they can't be found."

Before she could manage a word and with a smile that warmed Sarah from the inside, the little gnarled figure in front of her reached out and tapped Sarah ever so playfully on the nose as the sun broke through her bedroom window and drove the night and all its revels away.
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Sarah was offered a ballroom dance elective in college, and as an act of impudent rebellion, she turned around and promptly enrolled in Clogging 101.

She passed just barely with a C-, not because she was bad at it, but because the night before the final she threw one of her clogs at an annoyed-looking owl outside her window and was never able to find it again.

This may or may not have something to do with a short-lived fad among goblins for seeing how far one could skip wooden footwear across the Bog of Eternal Stench.