Page 23 of The Opening Act is Death
“Because she already knows,”The Carnival sighs.
A gust through the crimson curtains. A heartbeat under the boards. I wonder if the others know. If the Marionettist feels the tremble in my fingertips. If the Mirror Maiden sees the moment I shattered. If the Twins laugh in the dark because they already guessed I’d break. But Visha never laughed, she just looked at me like she was counting my sins in real time, and weighing each one against her own.
“She’s not yours to ruin,”the Ringmaster hisses now.
“She’s ours.”
I know. Fuck, I know, and yet I keep going. Back to her tent, back to where the air smells like ash, rosewater, and something sweeter rotting beneath. It’s empty, but not abandoned. The candle’s snuffed. The chaise is still warm, her perfume lingers like a ghost with teeth. And on the table, black wax, a sealed letter. Her ring stamped into it, deep like a wound that wanted to be remembered.
I don’t breathe.
Ican’t.
Because I saw her write it.
In the dark, from the edge of the shadows I didn’t mean to slip into. She never saw me, or maybe she did, she always sees me.
“She wrote it,”the Ringmaster growls, almost gleeful.
“And that means she bled. And that means she’s slipping.”
The letter burns my fingers, and I realize; shestilldidn’t ask me to explain. Didn’t write this for me to justify anything. She’s not waiting for me to redeem myself. She already chose. Already saw the ruin in me and stepped closer anyway.
That’s what undoes me.
Not her silence.
Not her gaze.
Not even the letter in my hand.
It’s thefactthat she never needed my confession.
Because she’d been living in its echo long before I opened my mouth.
“So what are you now, magician?”The Carnival sneers.
“Her salvation—or her collapse?”
I drop to my knees, the letter trembles. My hands shake. The wax is unbroken but I feel it. Like it’s screaming. I don’t open it, because some truths don’t need to be read to be known. I press it to my chest. Let it carve a hole there. Let it bleed into me through osmosis, pain, gravity, and in the corner of the tent, where shadows thicken and the Ringmaster waits behind the curtain of this world…I swear I hear a laugh.
Not mocking.
Not cruel.
Just…
expectant.
Thirty One
Carnival Interlude IV — The Velvet Throne Bleeds
The Carnival stirs, not like a lover in tangled sheets, not like a dream rousing from slumber.
No.
This is a beast waking to the scent of betrayal in the air. A fucking god with blood in its teeth and theater lights behind its eyes.
