Page 29 of The Opening Act is Death
The Carnival doesn’t forgive mistakes. Itdevoursthem. I can feel it now, the dark pulse underfoot, the air thickening like honey dripping with poison. Visha’s eyes find mine before I even realize what’s coming. That look; the one that saysYou’ve crossed a line, and I did.
The name slipped out, not hers. Someone else’s. Someone from before the fire, before the knives, before the blood. A ghost name.
“Elena,”I breathe it, and the words hang between us like shattered glass.
The moment breaks. The Carnival shifts, groans, whispers through the ropes and beams, a thousand voices rising in a murmur of warning. Visha’s jaw tightens. Her fingers twitch toward the knives at her waist.
“Who?”she asks, voice low, dangerous.
“No one,”I say quickly. But it’s too late. The air ripples. The mirrors flare. The tent closes in, swallowing the space betweenus. I want to reach for her, but The Carnival won’t let me. Not yet. It wants blood.
Not from knives.
From the truth.
And the truth tastes bitter.
Because the name I said wasn’t just a slip.
It was a crack. And now the whole fragile world we’ve built is trembling on the edge of collapse.
“You look like her.”I whisper… The words still echo in my ribs as I step into the fire. That way the ghost bleeds through but Visha stepsoverher. Not becoming Elena, not denying her butfinishingwhat Elena never could.
Thirty Six
Carnival Journal – Corvan
I swore she died. I remember the flames. I remember dragging her body out, or maybe just the memory of it. But Visha… she moved like her tonight. She bled like her, and when she looked at me I didn’t know who I saw. Elena. Visha. The same eyes, the same fire. But Visha is sharper. Louder. She dances like she wants to burn the whole world down, not just herself.
I tell myself it’s impossible, but impossible doesn’t survive here.
Only what The Carnival wants does.
So I wonder, what if The Carnival didn’t let Elena die?
What if it broke her and built something worse?
Thirty Seven
Visha - No Applause This Time
My final performance has no audience. Only fire.
The Carnival waits. Not with cheers or gasps or applause. Not with the expectant hush of a crowd hungry for spectacle. It waits like a beast, patient, fierce, and hungry for truth. I stand in the center ring, alone beneath the tent’s cavernous dome. Barefoot, the rough wood pressing cold through the ash dusting my skin. My knives rest at my hips, cold iron singing against my thighs an extension of my bones, of my fury.
Tonight, there are no eyes watching.
No applause.
No illusions.
Only fire.
Only us.
The first flicker of flame catches the edge of my vision, a circle of fire kindled around the ring, licking upward, hungry and alive. Its heat presses against my skin, coaxing shadows from every scar, every broken shard of me. I breathe deep, each breath tastes like smoke and memory.
I begin, a step forward, light as a whisper. The wood creaks underfoot. Then another deliberate, slicing through silence. Knives draw from my belt, cold and sure. They flash in the firelight like quicksilver in my hands.
