Page 21 of The Opening Act is Death
ACT III: The Final Illusion or is it?
The Carnival will devour them both-unless they burn it down first. But what do you become when you kill your cage?
Twenty Eight
Carnival Interlude III — When the Gods Are Disobeyed
The Carnival does not forgive. It remembers.
They broke the script, and the ringmaster dropped her blade. The illusionist refused to vanish, the dance faltered and the world noticed.
I felt it. The moment the blood did not fall. The breath they shared when it should have been a scream. It tasted like rebellion. Like rot in the center of a sugared apple. They do not yet understand.
This Carnival is no stage.
It is not a performance.
It is a fuckinggod—old and starving.
I made them. I raised them in velvet and thorns, steel and bone. I gave them roles.
Pain to bear. Masks to wear. Scripts to follow, and still, they turn from me. They think love is a weapon sharper thanobedience. They think their hearts can burn brighter than the spotlights I lit for their destruction. But I will show them.
Let the tents twist. Let the mirrors fracture and the performers bleed until their screams become music again. The Carnival does not die.
It devours.
It bends.
It becomes.
And now?
Now I write a new act.
No mercy.
No curtain calls.
Only ashes.
Twenty Nine
Visha - The Blood Letter
I write a note I swore I never would. To him.
The ink bleeds before I even touch the page, maybe it knows. Maybe the paper has waited longer than I have for this to happen. But still, my hand hesitates. The Carnival is quiet tonight, not dead; no, she doesn’t die. But quiet, like something is listening. Like it’s holding its breath with me. I sit on the ruined velvet chaise in the back of my dressing tent, the one Corvan fixed once with thread and silence. My skirts pool around me like spilled wine. My fingers shake, traitorous things. They only tremble when I think of him. The letter begins the way all doomed things do; with his name.
Corvan.
And then I stare at the blank beneath it, at the endless ache beneathme.Because I don’t know how to say it. How do you tell someone that the person you are now would have killed the person you were, just to be near them? That I, Madame Noire, would slit the throat of the ballerina who once cried in a blood-soaked garden for the boy who disappeared? How do you tell a ghost you loved him when he was flesh?
You don’t.
You write it in blood instead.
So I bite my fingertip until the skin splits open. Not the wrist, not for him. That would be too dramatic, and I’ve bled enough for this Carnival already. Just enough to smear the truth across the page.
