Page 1 of The Opening Act is Death
One
Warning before reading:
This book will not tell you the truth.
Every page is a stage, every voice a performance, and the one speaking to you is already unreliable. They will confess, they will contradict, they will seduce you with details so sharp you’ll swear you can taste the blood. Believe them if you like. Or don’t. The Carnival doesn’t care.
What matters is immersion. You are not meant to watch from a safe distance. You are meant to step inside. To hear the curtains rustle, to smell the sawdust and iron, to feel the spotlight sear your skin. You are meant to lose yourself in the act until you no longer know where the story ends and your own reflection begins.
Every performance demands a price.
And here, every act must end in death.
Welcome to the stage.
— Visha Graves
II
Welcome to The Opening Act is Death
Two
ACT I: The Cage Forms
She built the carnival from corpses. He came to make her feel again.
Three
Prologue – Madame Noire - Visha
“I became the stage they left me bleeding on.”
They say that the stage remembers the blood of every girl it breaks. The velvet curtain, the ivory floorboards, the music box lullabies that sound like the mothers who never wanted you. I bled my soul there, once. Blades in my shoes, bruises along my ribs from the teacher’s cane. I kept a smile painted on my face with rose-petal lipstick to match the color of my ruined toes. Every time I cracked, they applauded, they wanted me to bleed. Yet, when I finally shattered, when my bones sang loud enough to be heard over violins they threw me out.
I remember the alley, the rain and sour stench of champagne and piss. I remember the way I curled my arms around my knees; hoping I could make myself small enough to disappear. I was only 16, or way past nineteen, maybe I was ageless back thentoo. The kind of broken where time eventually stops counting.
That night a man stepped from the shadows with teeth too white for a world this ugly, he offered no name, only a question.
”Would you like to become the thing that they fear?”
I didn’t answer, I only nodded, because somewhere in the marrow of my bones, I knew; I already was. He reached out to grab my hand and I placed my palm into his. He began carving a sigil into my palm with a sliver of jawbone, it looked human. My blood hissed as it touched the ground, blooming black and red like a funeral bouquet. It was also in that moment something deeper than death opened its mouth and swallowed me
whole. The darkness that engulfed me, I was reborn.
A few days later I decided to return to the theater on a moonless night. Dressed in tulle, satin and silence. They didn’t recognize me, not truly anyways. I was just another girl auditioning, begging to be seen. The head mistress smiled, a cruel thin smile, like she was still above me. She thought she was still superior. She corrected my posture with her boney fingers, so I broke hers, one by one. As people around me screamed, I danced. I let the music swell as I moved, graceful as ever, but this time, the knives in my pointe shoes were not for the show. The lead ballerina, who laughed every time I bled, was the next to fall. I slashed her from ankle to thigh and pirouetted through her screams. I let the blood arc in rhythm with the music. A crimson ribbon in the air if you would. One by one, I made art out of them. This wasn’t murder, this was a performance.
When the curtain rose for that final time and there was no audience; only corpses. That was when roses began blooming from the mouth of the stage, rotted and glistening with decay. I, Visha, at the center, smiling. I buried the girl beneath the floorboards and sealed her coffin with applause. The Carnival shortly came after. No, this carnival wasn’t built, it grew. It grew from my wounds, my rage, my need to make meaning from mutilation. I called the lost to me, those discarded, broken and damned. I gave them a place to haunt, to perform. A place to punish every soul who entered as they chose their own fate. Thatwas the rule. I never lied, and I never forced them. I, however, never showed mercy either..
What did I feel? Nothing, no grief, no guilt, no love, that was the bargain I made. No more heart, just an audience. That was until he arrived. Corvan, The Escapist. A magician who bleeds illusions, a man who smiled like he already knew how the story ended. Corvan looked at me like I was still human, and that made something inside me, something I buried long ago, stir. Soft, dangerous, emotion is a disease here. Yet, Corvan is a symptom I cannot cut out. He says we could rebuild this place together, not as a temple of vengeance, but a refuge. A home for the lost, a stage where pain becomes beauty and nobody gets thrown away. I want to believe him, I do. However, I don’t know how to dance without blood anymore…
Four
Visha — The Curtain Never Falls
The curtain parts like a wound splitting open, the smoke curls from the floor, thick and sweet with rot. My heels click against the stage, blades disguised as ballet slippers, sharpened from months of rage. A soft murmur of hush sounds roll through the crowd. They never know if this is theater or a warning. That’s the fun of what I have made. Blood is beautiful when it lands on silk. I glide across the stage, with weapons laced into my pointe shoes, each step a whisper of metal against the wood. The music swells around me, not from a speaker but from the mouths of the damned. They hum like little cicadas; discordant, and hungry, my little audience, my ghosts. They never leave, they can’t. They are mine to keep.
A man begins to scream from the front row, yet he is not part of the act. He stumbled towards the stage, sweat slicking his brow, drunk on whatever nightmare drug we laced into his ticket. The crowd thinks it’s all an illusion, that I am simply a magician, a trickster, a dancer who has the utmost perfect balance and sharp blades. My balance is my rage, and my bladesare real. He rushes towards the stage, frothing at the mouth over his wife. How shedisrespectedhim and how nobodyputs the baby in a cage.He must think this is a show where he is the star now. How cute this little idiot is.
