Page 19 of The Opening Act is Death
I’m on the stage, the center of all eyes, a deadly dance poised to end in blood. But then, I see him.
Corvan.
Not the haunted illusionist The Carnival demands I despise. But the man beneath; the fragile, broken soul who reaches for me despite everything.
Our eyes lock.
I feel the world is narrow around me. My knife should find its mark, but my hand falters.
The steel wavers.
I want to kill him.
I should.
But I don’t.
The Carnival snarls in the dark, hungry for the inevitable betrayal. From the wings, a voice that is sharp and cold.
“Visha. Finish it.”
I swallow the lump in my throat, but my fingers refuse. Corvan’s eyes hold nothing but pain and something else; hope.
“Why?” he breathes, voice barely audible over the crowd.
“Why hesitate now?”
I want to say, because I’m tired, I don’t want to be the monster anymore. Because I’m terrified of what I’m becoming, but I say nothing. Instead, the knife slips from my fingers. It clatters against the wooden stage like a death knell. Gasps ripple through the crowd. The silence is heavier than any scream. Corvan steps forward, cautious but unafraid.
“I’m not your enemy,” he says.
“Not anymore.”
The crowd shifts, the tension crackling like electricity. From the shadows, figures begin to move; Carnival enforcers, their eyes cold and unblinking. They don’t understand hesitation. They only understand obedience.
“Visha,” a voice hisses from behind me.
“You’ve broken the rules.”
I turn, heart pounding, to see Madame Despair with her smile a cruel slash in the dim light.
“There are consequences.”
I know this, but I also know something else. This moment, this choice, is more than a breaking of rules.
It’s a fracture.
A shift.
A chance to fight back.
To be something more.
“We don’t have to be what The Carnival wants,” I whisper as I lift my gaze to Corvan’s. He nods, fierce and hopeful. But the enforcers close in. The crowd’s eyes burn into me expecting the blade, the blood, the end. And I stand frozen at the edge of everything. Between the monster I’ve become, and the girl I buried long ago.
A choice hangs in the air, to surrender. To fight, to obey, or to break the cycle.
The Carnival waits.
