Page 22 of The Opening Act is Death
I hated you.
I needed you.
I buried you.
And yet, I never stopped dancing in the direction of your shadow.
I write of the way his voice haunted the tent poles before I ever knew he’d returned. How every illusion he casts tastes like regret, and every time he looks at me like he still wants to believe I’m real, it nearly unravels me. I write that I should have killed him the night he arrived. I wrote that I couldn’t, that I didn’t, that Iwon’t.
Not because I forgive him. But because the part of me that still feelsanything, the part I thought I buried under the stage when I became Madame Noire, that part doesn’t want to let him go. There is a kind of cruelty in being the woman who commands death, and yet trembling before a man who brings ghosts.
I write until my blood runs dry.
Until the wax candle beside me burns down and the shadows grow teeth.
Until The Carnival starts whispering again. Jealous. Hungry.
Because she knows I’m not writing this for her.
I seal the note with black wax and the imprint of my ring. The one I wear to remember what I survived. The one I almosttook off when he touched my waist like it still belonged to him. He won’t find this letter until The Carnival wants him to, and by then, I’ll be gone, changed, or something worse. But it’s written now, and that means it’s real.
Even if he never reads it.
Even if he burns it.
Even if it bleeds through the cracks in this cursed tent and into the dirt below us.
He’ll know.
And maybe that’s all that matters.
Because he never had to confess.
Not once.
I never made him say it aloud; the lies, the vanishing, the blood between us because I already saw it. I felt it. In the way he doesn’t meet my eyes when he’s scared I’ll see who he used to be. In the ache he carries like a second spine. In the illusions that flicker when I’m too close. Some people demand apologies, I learned to read silence. I learned to understand the way hands shake when they want to touch but believe they shouldn’t. I saw his guilt before he ever wore it like a cloak, and still I stayed.
That was my sin.
And maybe, just maybe, my salvation.
Thirty
Corvan - She Doesn’t Need to Ask
She never made me confess. Because she already knew.
The Carnival knows my footfalls now. She bends her bones to meet me, wood groans, tent fabric stirs even when there’s no wind. She’s listening, and worse, she’s remembering. I move through her arteries like I belong, I don’t. Not yet. But the velvet lets me pass. My name isn’t whispered like Visha’s is. No,hersis sung through the iron pins and cursed bolts that hold this place together. The Carnival speaks her name like a prayer and a threat. Mine is quieter, mine is… observed.
“He’s still lying.”
The Ringmaster in the Shadows watches from the back of my skull, always. He doesn’t speak in words, not usually. Just pressure, just weight behind the eyes. But tonight, I hear it clearer, because I’m slipping.
“She built this place with her pain. You arrive and think silence is sacred? No. That’s cowardice.”
I ignore him, or I try to. The Hall of Mirrors yawns open before me like a wound. Each pane warped, each one catching fragments of me I don’t want to see. In one, I’m the boy she loved. In another, I’m the ghost who left. In most, I’m just…nothing. A ripple. A hollow suit stitched with grief. I walk past the mirrors. Past the trapeze rigging. Past the illusion stage where I first summoned something I couldn’t control.
She never asked me what I did while I was gone. Never asked who I buried, or what parts of myself I left behind to get back here.
