The bass line thumped through the floorboards of Club Elysium, a mechanical heartbeat that seemed to mock the organic rhythms of its patrons. Under the dusty crystal chandeliers, the light fractured and dim like broken memories, the dancers moved with an eerie precision. Their steps were too perfect, too rehearsed, as if they were clockwork figures performing on command. The air shimmered with sequins and silk, punctuated by the sharp glint of military medals that adorned shoulders and chests like fantastic constellations.
A superannuated colonel, or at least that's what his epaulettes made him out to be, spun past in a blur of midnight blue and tarnished brass. His medals clinked together with each turn, a discordant melody that spoke of battles no one cared to remember anymore. The wars had taken everything, even the meaning of valour, leaving behind only these trinkets that people now wore as fashion statements rather than battle honours. In the hazy light, his face was a mask of calculated revelry, painted with the same desperate joy that seemed endemic to the club's patrons.
The air was thick enough to chew on, a potent cocktail of cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and expensive regret. It clung to the velvet walls and settled on the lungs of the dancers like a second skin, a shroud they wore willingly in their nightly ritual of forgetting.
Aphrodite observed it all from her position against the wall, one hand holding a half-empty glass of wine, the other bringing a cigarette to her lips in a gesture as old as vice itself. The wine was mediocre, but that hardly mattered anymore. Nothing here was quite what it pretended to be, herself included.
Her eyes, ancient and knowing, cut through the elaborate masquerade before her. These weren't party-goers, they were survivors, each one carrying on their own personal war beneath layers of makeup and manufactured glamour. They moved faster and faster, as if they could somehow outrun the ghosts that chased them across the dance floor. The music aided their flight, its relentless rhythm demanding movement, insisting on distraction from the ruins that waited outside the club's heavily draped windows.
She'd been watching long enough to see the patterns. Seven out of every ten faces were unremarkable, blending into the backdrop like particularly well-dressed pieces of furniture. Four out of five moved through the space in a daze, their eyes glazed and distant, their bodies operating on automatic as they performed the expected motifs of enjoyment. They were sleepwalkers in their own lives, barely conscious enough to maintain the illusion of living.
The cigarette burned down between her fingers as she observed them with the detached curiosity that came from millennia of watching civilizations rise and fall. This wasn't her first death dance, nor would it be her last. Pride had become their last refuge, their final fortress against despair. They wore their carefully constructed identities like costumes in this designer world, changing personalities as easily as they changed their clothes.
The wars had stripped everything else of meaning, leaving only this desperate dance in a crumbling temple to a god that no one remembered how to worship anymore. Even she, Aphrodite, once revered as the goddess of love and beauty, now walked among them unknown and unrecognised. Her former divinity had become just another accessory in a world too broken to believe in gods.
She could taste the misery, bitter and sharp beneath the veneer of shallow laughter and cynical conversation. It was her misery too. Some sought solace in each other's arms, in darkened corners and on plush divans, but even their passion was hollow. These were mechanical pleasures that never quite reached the hearts of the revellers in the club. Real love had become as rare as the stars, now hidden behind the perpetual haze that shrouded the city. No one loved anymore, and so her divinity had faded, until she too was now mortal and resigned to her fate.
Tonight felt different, though. She could feel it in the air, in the subtle shift of cosmic weights and measures. Something was coming, a comet, a revelation, a moment of truth that would tear through their carefully constructed reality like tissue paper in a soaking storm. The balance was beginning to tilt, though the dancers were too lost in their revels to notice.
But they danced on, clinging to their illusions, too proud to stop and too broken to stand still. Aphrodite watched as a young woman in a tattered ball gown twirled past, her face a perfect mask of ecstasy that didn't quite hide the trembling of her lower lip. They were all like that, beautiful, desperate, doomed.
With a deliberate motion, Aphrodite stubbed out her cigarette on the marble floor, adding one more scar to a surface already pitted with similar marks. The truth would fall upon them all soon enough, burning away their fabricated world like morning mist. But tonight, for this one last night, she would let them have their moment of false grace. Let them dance and drink and pretend that tomorrow would never come.
After all, even moribund gods could be merciful sometimes.