Chapter II: The Dancing Girl of Kaldwin's Bridge
(Content warning: Hey friends, there's mention of a near-death-experience and suicide in this one, so go ahead and skip in case that's not your cup of Gristol Cider. Take care of yourselves.)
Sweet Adelia was raised in the music halls of Dunwall. Her nursery rhymes were bawdy songs, her family a motley assortment of musicians, dancers and stagehands, constantly coming and going. By day she swept up sawdust and mopped sticky floors, and when she slept, it was on a pile of offcuts in a corner of a costumer's workshop.
There was no love to be found, but plenty of work to be done, even for a little girl. Her fingers were nimble with a needle and thread, and she became strong from carrying tools back and forth for the stage carpenters. She belonged to all of the halls, and to none of them. Her whole world was the Bottle District, with its narrow tangled streets and stinking alleys.
When Adelia grew older, she was handed a gaudy costume and thrust into a line of chorus girls and made her debut on a stage that was sticky with beer and worse things besides. It was a gruelling life, but in time her limbs grew strong and supple, her movements graceful. Although her singing voice was forgettable, her smile could light up the dingiest of halls. And people noticed - by the Void, they noticed.
Punters learned her name and chanted it before each performance. The dressing room she shared with the other girls was flooded with flowers and bottles of sweet Tyvian wine. By her eighteenth birthday, she had her own solo segment each evening, dressed in sparkling finery and suspended from the ceiling in a harness. High above the stage she twirled and dipped, delighting all who saw her. Posters of her name and face plastered the grimy walls of every street in the district. A guard had to stand outside her dressing room to dissuade her most ardent of admirers.
Despite Adelia's growing fame, she was far from loved amongst her fellow performers. There were prettier girls, older girls, girls who had been vying for years for their chance at fame. And this upstart had stolen it from under their noses! To make matters worse, Adelia had never known a kind word or gentle touch, so her tongue was sharp and she never forgot a perceived slight, or let it go unpunished. Many a performer was left in tears after a verbal lashing from the Bottle District's rising star.
No one quite knows how the accident happened, or if indeed it was an accident. Perhaps it was an act of sabotage, the work of a jealous rival. It was an evening the same as any other, a full house. Backstage, Adelia climbed the ladder to her harness just as she did every night. She strapped herself in - for she trusted no one but herself to do it properly - and, as the music swelled from the pit far below, she leapt from the ladder.
And fell.
Like a stone dropped into the ocean, she plummeted to the stage. It happened too quickly for anyone to stop it. There was a scream, a crash, the snap of bone, and the screech of instruments as the music stuttered to a halt. Sweat and booze hung in the air. A puff of chalk. A coil of frayed rope. The sharp tang of blood.
Have I died? Thought Adelia, before realising how utterly silent her surroundings were. When she opened her eyes, she was floating in a dark, barren world of bare rock and bone-deep cold. She began to shake with terror, for she recognised it for what it was - The Void. Just as she opened her mouth to cry out, a patch of darkness, blacker somehow than her surroundings, detached itself from the shadows. As it walked towards her, it spoke, in a voice like Wrenhaven silt.
I've been watching you, it said. I've seen the way you dance, like the glint of the moon on the ocean's surface.
Adelia did not think this strange. After all, who didn't watch her dance? She smiled sweetly, and the shadow slipped behind her and bent to whisper in her ear.
Stay in the Void, with me, and dance to the Whalesong, forever.
Flattered as she was by this invisible stranger, Adelia imperiously shook her head and said, "No, I won't stay. My audience will miss me, and besides, I have a performance to finish."
You would go back? said the shadow, drawing away. Its voice took on a mocking edge. Even now, as your lifeblood seeps away and your body grows cold? If you leave this place, you will never dance again.
"I can't die!" snapped Adelia, stopping short of actually stomping her foot. "There must be something you can do!" A cunning thought occurred to her. "If you save my life, I will dance like I have never danced before. And when I can no longer dance in my world, I will die, and then I shall come and dance for you."
There was a long pause as the shadow considered this.
Very well, Sweet Adelia, I will return you to your world, it said eventually. But at the end of your life, when you can dance no more, you will return to me, and remain forever in the Void.
All of this must have passed in a heartbeat, for when Adelia's eyes fluttered open and she sat up, the audience was still gaping at the spot where she had fallen. Screams rang out, but she rose swiftly to her feet and gave a bow, and hesitant applause rippled through the hall. It was a miracle, they said later, somewhat unnerved, for they were certain they had heard her neck snap, seen the claret pooling on the floorboards.
To the other performers, it was no miracle they had witnessed. It was witchcraft - it had to be. Their suspicions deepened as time went on. Something had changed in Adelia. A little piece of the Void clung to her, always ready to drag her back into its icy depths. Where she had once smiled so prettily, her teeth had the glint of Whale bone. Her eyes became hard, and the curves of her body gave way to sharp edges. Now, she was not merely haughty, but downright cruel. She took pleasure in taking lovers, then discarding them. She spread vicious rumours, and laced new girls into their corsets so tightly they fainted on stage. She never accused anyone of sabotaging her, but more than one girl left the music hall in disgrace in the months afterward, amid some scandal or humiliation or another.
Her audience loved her all the more. Despite her brush with death, she pushed herself to new, dizzying, ever more terrifying feats above the stage. First upon a single beam, then a wire, she danced, oh how she danced, taunting the shadow who waited so patiently for her to return to him.
What no one else knew was that, whenever Adelia stopped dancing, she felt the creeping chill of the Void seep into her bones, threatening to drag her back into the dark. It rose like the tide, receding only when she danced, and so she danced for as long as her body would let her, even as her feet bled and her muscles screamed for respite. It was a miserable existence, devoid of sleep or pleasure. Desperately she took men to her bed, but they complained of the chill that clung to her skin. Whenever she opened her mouth, ugly secrets she couldn't possibly have known spilled forth. She did her best to copy acts of kindness she had seen, but her hands, which had never known a tender touch, caused only suffering.
Eventually, Adelia could stand it no longer. Months passed, and any joy she might have ever felt had crumbled away, leaving despair in its wake. She could not rest, could not eat, or take even a single step without being wracked with pain - unless, of course, she danced. So she danced - all the way from the Bottle district, across the city to Kaldwin's Bridge.
She danced onto the bridge, ignoring the watchmen who tried to block her path and the people who stopped and stared, some calling her name.
She danced up the thick cables of the bridge, as sure-footed as if she were on her beam back in the music hall.
She kept on dancing, right up to the top of the bridge, until the city unfolded beneath her, greying brick and smog on one side, and the silvery surface of the river on the other.
She spread her arms wide, as if to take a final bow to the horrified crowd that had gathered on the bridge below her, and stepped daintily over the side.
Once again, the dancing girl fell, and this time, she slipped beneath the surface of the Wrenhaven River, never to be seen again.
•:•:•:•
NOTE: Over the years, variations on this cautionary tale have become a staple, everywhere from nurseries to bawdy houses. Sometimes, instead of a shadow, Adelia meets a leviathan in the Void, or a white serpent. Her tale is curiously similar to The Strumpet, an allegorical story written by High Overseer John Clavering in 1718. It is possible The Dancing Girl and The Strumpet are one and the same, as Adelia's numerous faults flout many of the strictures.