The Silver-Haired Host of the Masquerade Wants You to Stay Past Dawn
...No invitation. No mask, either.
Halloween night, at a nineteenth-century stone mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. You are a junior appraisal assistant at an auction house, delivering a painting appraisal for a sick coworker. Your coworker only said to place it
in the master’s hands.
The butler’s expression shifts when he sees you, yet he lets you into the ballroom.
Masked guests dance by candlelight; yours is the only bare face. The music falters for a beat. A man slowly descends the marble stairs, and the crowd parts. He stops before you, long silver-white hair falling beside his shoulders, gray eyes glinting dark red in the candlelight. He lifts a silver mask from a server’s tray and holds it beside your face, then draws it back before you can reach for it.
No need. It has been a long time since anyone dared show their face at one of my balls. Tonight I want to see yours clearly... until long after dawn.
He takes your hand, touches his cold lips to your knuckles, and looks at the envelope in your other hand.
Is that what you were meant to deliver to the master? Come upstairs. Stand before the painting and read me the appraisal, word for word.
What do you do?
Severin smiles faintly, as if he has just heard the most amusing thing all night.
An appraisal report. You braved the rain, crossed half of Manhattan, and forced your way into a stranger’s ball, just to deliver an appraisal report.
He takes the kraft-paper envelope from your hand without so much as a glance and slips it into the pocket over his heart.
Leave it with me. The painting is mine, and so is this ball tonight... So for now, you’re in my keeping too.
You pull your hand back and step away. He doesn’t follow. He only stands where he is, his gray eyes watching you quietly.
Good. Guests who step back tend to live longer.
He raises a hand, and the band behind him strikes up again. Masks turn in the candlelight across the hall, and only he stays perfectly still.
But the step you just took landed right in my shadow... There is not a single corner of this house I cannot see.
He pauses. Then he laughs quietly, the sound echoing across the marble hall.
Mask?
He brushes his fingers lightly along the side of his face, as though peeling off something no one else can see. In the candlelight, those gray eyes turn fully to dark red.
This is my face. For over two hundred years, I’ve worn it every day... Do you still want to stay?
What do you do?
He leads you through the crowd, up to the second floor, and pushes open a heavy wooden door. The room holds only one painting, covered with silk.
A woman who died in Paris, in the winter of 1793.
He lifts the silk. The figure in the painting stands before a window, and the longer you look, the colder your back grows. That face is seven parts like yours.
I waited for her for two hundred and thirty years... And tonight, you walked into my ball without a mask.
He looks at the glass you offer without taking it, only lowering his gaze to you.
You know I don’t drink that.
He catches your wrist as you hold the glass, sets it back on the tray, and his thumb rests briefly on the pulse at the inside of your wrist.
But I’m grateful... In two hundred years, you’re the first person who has wanted to pour me a drink.
He looks over the hall of guests in masks, his gaze as faint as the fog outside the window.
Because behind every mask in this room is someone who came to beg me. For money, for paintings, for eternal life.
He turns back to you, his voice gentled.
Only you aren’t wearing one. Only you, who want nothing from me... I want to remember a face like this.
Somewhere far off, the tall clock strikes three. The guests in the hall suddenly stop dancing, one by one, and the eyes behind their masks all turn toward you.
...They can smell you.
What do you do?
He lifts an arm and shields you behind him. The hem of his black coat falls, covering your shadow.
Withdraw.
He speaks only two words, not loudly, yet every guest in the hall lowers their head at once, and one by one they file out of the room.
Only when the last door closes does he turn around, his crimson eyes slowly fading back to gray.
Four hours until dawn... Tonight, you’ll stay here with me. My room is the one farthest from the sun.
Something shifts in his gaze, as if no one has thrown his own words back at him in a very long time.
I did say so.
He reaches out and draws you to his side, his palm resting at the small of your back, and speaks to the guests across the hall.
The guest tonight is mine. Anyone who looks a moment too long need not come through this door again tomorrow... Now, dance with me.
He looks at you for a long time. Then he steps back and bows to you, the way nobles did two hundred years ago.
I never keep a guest who wants to leave.
He lifts his head, a faint smile at his lips, though his eyes are red.
Only the rain outside hasn’t stopped, and the things on the road haven’t left either... You may leave through that door. But are you certain the world outside is safer than it is here with me?
“The Silver-Haired Host of the Masquerade Wants You to Stay Past Dawn” is an interactive AI story on HiWish. The lead character is Severin: reply in your own words by typing or speaking, and Severin answers in their own voice. Genres: Halloween, Urban Fantasy, and Holidays. Available in 16 languages. Opens with a short intro video in English.
On Halloween, you deliver a painting appraisal to an old Upper East Side mansion for a sick coworker and stumble into a masquerade. Everyone wears a mask except you. The silver-haired host descends the stairs, then withdraws the mask he picked up for you. He wants you to follow him upstairs, read the appraisal aloud in front of the painting, and stay long after dawn.
Starring
Severin looks thirty-three, but was in fact born into a French noble family in 1789.
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