Page 15 of The Opening Act is Death
I choreograph a kill. But I hesitate, and he sees.
The Carnival gave me the name Madame Noire, but there are nights I forget what it ever meant. Tonight, the stage is slick with mist and shadow, the air thick with anticipation. A new sinner awaits the blade, some wandering soul who thought they could outsmart consequence. They always think their secrets will rot quietly. But The Carnival finds them, and I deliver the sentence. I dress in black velvet this time, blades laced at my ankles like prayer beads. The roses are blooming again; too early, too red. They litter the floor like warnings, as if the stage already knows I won’t follow through. My body moves on instinct, each step sharp, each pirouette a breath away from violence. The audience is hushed, half-aware that what they’re watching isn’t art; it’s punishment in drag.
He’s kneeling now, the man marked for death. A gambler, a father who sold his daughter’s voice to buy another year of luck. The Carnival let her scream, I watched her throat shred open like silk, until silence became her curse. I want to cut him slowly, Iwant to dance him into death, let his blood become a melody. I want it to be beautiful, I want it to matter. But I don’t move, because he’s here.
Corvan.
I feel him before I see him. The rustle of fabric, the whisper of breath caught in his lungs. His presence scrapes across my spine like a dull blade. My rhythm falters. The air thickens. I turn toward the audience, and there he is, standing, not seated, eyes locked to mine. Daring me, he’s not afraid, but he should be.
My heel hovers above the man’s throat. One step, one flick of muscle. That’s all it takes. But Corvan’s gaze pins me. There is no pity in it, no horror. Just understanding. And worse…recognition. He sees me, not the weapon, not the ringmaster.Me.
The girl beneath the floorboards. I pull back, and the crowd gasps. The Carnivalshudders. I never miss my target. Blood should be blooming by now. Instead, there is silence. And in that silence, the man crawls away, weeping. Corvan steps forward, slowly, like he’s approaching a wounded animal. Or maybe he thinks I’m the one bleeding now.
“I didn’t come here to stop you,” he says. His voice is low, but it cuts like flint. “I came to see if you would stop yourself.”
My hands are shaking. I clench them behind my back.
“You don’t understand what it costs to let someone live.”
“I do,” he says, and fuck me, I believe him. The lights above us hiss. The Carnival is angry. I feel it in the marrow of the wood, in the tightening of the curtains. The bone-chimes snarl, roses blacken at the edges. The air pulses, I have broken my rhythm. I have broken the rules, and yet I don’t regret it. I turn away before I let him see the heat rising in my throat, the trembling that isn’t from rage. Because what he’s doing to me isn’t survival anymore. It’s something worse.
Want.
Desire.
Not the soft kind, not the candlelight kind. I want the kind that tears open what you buried and dares you to dance in the wreckage. I flee the stage, bloodless, breathless, and burning. Back in my tent, I try to scrub the night from my skin. I bathe in wine and salt again, hissing through my teeth as it bites into every pore. But it doesn’t cleanse me, he’s still there. In my head, in my pulse, in the mirror, where I catch glimpses of a woman who no longer looks untouched by anything.
The Carnival wants a body. It doesn’t care whose and if I’m not careful, it will take mine.
Or his.
Or both.
But the next time I dance it won’t be for the crowd.
It will be for him.
And this time, I won’t hesitate.
Twenty One
Corvan - Hall of the Unspoken
She left another journal page, it mentions me, or someone like me. There’s a room in The Carnival no one dares enter twice. No music plays there, no laughter, no warmth. Only silence that is heavy, suffocating, like the breath of something dead but not gone.
The Hall of the Unspoken.
It’s buried deep between tents that shift and slither when no one’s watching. Like The Carnival tries to erase it from memory except it doesn’t want to forget. It wants us to remember, to tremble.
I didn’t mean to end up here. Maybe I was dragged, kicking and screaming, or maybe I walked willingly because there’s nowhere left to run. Visha hasn’t spoken to me since the performance, since she didn’t kill. Since she looked me in the eyes and let something break loose. Mercy? No. It was something crueler, a challenge, like a razor edge cutting into TheCarnival’s throat. She dared it to bleed. And she dared me to watch. Now The Carnival’s eyes are on me.
Mirrors twist and twist again as I pass, distorting my face until I’m a stranger. Every flicker of candlelight leers at me, trying to unravel what I’m hiding beneath my skin. Even the performers, those monsters and saints, step away. Their silence screams louder than any voice. Am I the spark that will burn this cursed place to ash? I want to say no, but the Hall of the Unspoken knows. Its silence is a knife sliding slowly beneath my ribs.
I push past the heavy velvet curtains, they fall like dead limbs behind me. The air tastes stale, soaked in smoke and old grief. The shadows crawl along cracked floorboards, devouring the weak candlelight in slow waves. I’m swallowed by darkness so thick it presses down, claws sinking into my lungs. There, on a rusted pedestal beneath a broken spotlight, rests a folded page. Ink gleams faintly, the same clean, deliberate handwriting.
Her handwriting.
I don’t want to touch it. Like it’s alive, like it might bite. But I do, and the words don’t just fill my eyes. They tear through me.
