The earliest known performance of the Dance of Death in North America took place in New Orleans in 1738. Césaire Sauvageot, a thanachoreography specialist from France, was reported to have thrown a lavish soirée in the French Quarter, resplendent with live music and copious alcohol. Guests were instructed to arrive fully costumed with their faces concealed by masks until the chimes of midnight. When the unmasking finally came, guests were shocked to discover that many of the people they'd danced with over the past several hours had been animated skeletons. This also included the waitstaff, musicians, and—according to some apocryphal sources—Sauvageot himself.

In the decades that followed, preter-performers from all over the world immigrated to America, bringing their own national flavors of Danse Macabre with them. A woman from Leyte brought ghoulish tinikling, with bones used in place of bamboo and flaming corpses that danced until their feet were cinders. A Turkish apostate with a taste for the sacrilegious brought undead Whirling Dervishes that twirled in flowing skirts sewn from their own flayed skin. One enterprising impresario made a small fortune performing with a chorus line of fleshless can-can girls. By the mid-19th Century, the Dance of Death had acquired a new name in the New World: the Skeleton Dance.

The rich and varied history of the practice posed a unique problem to Mr. Fuller. To have a Circus of the Disquieting without the Skeleton Dance would be as unthinkable as Thanksgiving dinner without cranberry sauce. However, with dozens of Skeleton Dance performers in the United States alone, singling out the best act in the world would be no easy task. During his years of international and extradimensional travels, Fuller encountered hundreds of thanachoreographers of every conceivable sort, but none could be found that befit a place in The Greatest Show in All the Worlds.

Then Herman Fuller met Síofra Bradigan.

It is well-documented that scores of bodies rest beneath the bogs of Ireland, naturally mummified, perfectly preserved. Less well-documented are the self-proclaimed witches who have studied this natural process and elevated it to an artform. By preternaturally augmenting the preservative qualities of anaerobic acidic sphagnum bogs, these women have devised a method of rendering a fresh corpse leathery and boneless within a fortnight.

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Ask any thanachoreographer and they will tell you that the Danse Macabre relies on the rigidity of hard tissue. Without the stability of a corpse's bone structure, it is virtually impossible to manipulate a body in a lifelike manner—this is the reason why we have the Skeleton Dance and not, say, the Meat Fandango. Síofra Bradigan, however, was not bound by the rules of any thanachoreographer. Through a combination of innate skill