Page 13 of The Opening Act is Death
Corvan - We’re Just Ghosts in Reverse
The dead don’t haunt me, she does. I thought dying would feel more final, but it turns out it just feels like breath caught in my throat and her hands on my chest. The memory isn’t clean. It comes in flashes; sharp like glass, slow like drowning. Her silhouette over me, eyes wide and shadowed, her hands trembling, then steady. Her mouth opened like she might speak my name… then closing around silence like it’s sacred.
She saved me.
And that’s what terrifies me most.
Because Madame Noire does not save people. No she punishes, performs, she watches the guilty bleed out to the beat of her ballet, but she didn’t let me die. I lie on the floor of my tent, heart still stuttering like it forgot how to beat correctly. The candlelight throws long shadows across the canvas. The air smells like sweat and salt and dried roses. The remnants of illusion still crackle at the edge of my magic embers refusing to extinguish. My show had gone wrong. Violent, unforgiving, I lost control mid-performance. The sky bled too fast, the mirrorsscreamed, and the faces in the glass weren’t just illusions; they were the ones I failed. Elena’s face stared back at me, not accusing, but disappointed.
The Carnival didn’t intervene.
She did.
She burst onto the stage like an executioner draped in silk, her blade flashing, not at the audience, but at the world itself. She didn’t look at me like I was weak. She looked at me like I mattered. Like she had something to lose. I can’t stop shaking.
* * *
The Carnival doesn’t sleep. It seethes and sighs, breathing through the bone-chimes and blood-slick wood. I walk the corridors long after the lights dim, trailing fingertips along velvet curtains and aging posters. I think I’m looking for her. Or maybe I’m waiting for her to find me. Behind the Hall of Knives, I find a stage with no audience, no music; just the echo of a memory. I stood where she stood, I can still see the shadow of her outline in the dust, like a burn mark. My chest tightens.
She’s in my head now.
Visha.
She haunts me, not like a ghost; but like a heartbeat, unrelenting, constant. Fuck, I can’t stop wanting her.
FLASHBACK of Elena’s Voice
“You always wanted to fix the broken things, Corvan. You just never asked if they wanted to be saved.” Her voice was soft, smoke-wrapped, on the night I let her walk out. I thought I was being noble, letting her go. I didn’t realize until it was too late that some people want you tochase them, not save them. Sometimes love is a cage and sometimes it’s a knife. I didn’t open the door that night. I thought I was doing the right thing. Now I wonder if I’m doing it again, with Visha.”
I find her behind the knife curtain. The stage has changed, the mirrors are cracked, the roses are all dead. But she’s there; kneeling in the middle of it all like a queen without a throne. The blood on her slippers has dried, but there’s still a smear along her cheek. I don’t know whose it is. I don’t ask. Her back is to me, but I know she hears me.
“I didn’t need you to save me,” I whisper and she doesn’t turn.
“I didn’t do it for you,” she replies.
But she did. I saw it in the shake of her hand, in the way she flinched when my body hit the floor. Her mask had slipped, just for a second and I saw her. The girl beneath the knives. The one she keeps buried under bone dust and rules.
“I saw the girl,” I say softly, stepping closer. “The one before the stage. Before the blood.”
“I buried her,” she says.
“Then why do your roses still bloom?”
Her breath catches, almost too quiet to notice.
I crouch beside her, not touching, not daring to, but close enough to feel the electric pull between us. She doesn’t look at me, but her hands twitch in her lap like they’re remembering something.
“You’re not supposed to feel anything here,” she says. “That’s the price.”
“But you do.”
She turns then, finally, her eyes locking on mine, and it feels like gravity tips sideways. Her gaze is molten, grief and rage andhunger all coiled together. She looks like she’s about to devour me or disappear.
“You don’t get it,” she hisses. “This place feeds on cracks. If I break, if I let go, it wins.”
I reach out, fingertips brushing hers.
“What if we break together?” I ask. “What if the act isn’t survival? What if it’s surrender?”
