bloom // a brief history of jauplin's dancing sweetheart

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How did a raggedy street child, come from a long line of rural farmers, come to study the art of the dance under the most renowned dance teacher in all of Jauplin?

Why did a child with no talent for dancing persevere under the Jauplin Dance Academy's harsh training for a year and a day with no complaints?

How did a jaupie with two left feet and a broken leg somehow unlock the secret of perfect balance, and use it to create the famed Dance of Falling Petals, the dance ritual that restored equilibrium to the spirit of the city Jauplin?

Stories in Jauplin, passed down from ear to ear amongst the lower classes, have long held that the art of the dance holds special power-- that those who become one with the music live preternaturally long lives, still as agile and lissom on their feet at a hundred-and-one as when they were nimble young pups. That the synchronized tap of a paw on those worn city flagstones can impart luck or bestow pain with just the twitch of the smallest toe on a skilled dancer's foot. That a gathering of dancers, moving all together, can shake the very foundation of order and chaos.

Is there any truth in these old tales, spun around a fire on a chilly night by some long-ago storyteller to impress a pretty girl? Maybe, maybe not. What the citizens of Jauplin do know, every one of them from the most superstitious to the hardened cynics, is that the street dancers of Jauplin are no ordinary folk-- twirling their ribbons and jangling their bellstrings in intricate, graceful movements, even the surliest old jaupie will drop a few coins in their green glass bowls as they hobble past, for it's considered bad luck to disrespect a performer in many parts of the city.

To be a truly great dancer, it is said one requires a luminous heart, a capacity to share, and -- so says the famed dance instructor who personally tutored Blossom Yali in her youth -- a perfect, instinctual balance. Do these traits, which make the swirl of a dancer's paws so mesmerizingly beautiful, simply come from years of hard work and backbreaking practice, like the cynics might say? Or is there perhaps something more to the secret of Jauplin's street performers? One who was not one of them would certainly be hard-pressed to draw a conclusion, because that tight-knit community is notoriously stingy with the secrets of their trade...

Yes, a tight-knit community indeed, with each dancer treating the next as their own kin, and all of them banding together to protect each other from the many dangers facing such a one as puts their talents and all their worldly possessions on show for the entire world to see. And on a bitter winter's night, miles from the glowing heart of the city, perhaps that is the reason that a lower-class dancing troupe on the east side showed such hostility to a young child, coming from the wide, winding roads, who had been traveling for a very long time indeed...