Page 3 of The Opening Act is Death
Eventually, I end up at a tent that smells like roses, rust, and wine. Velvet sways like a breath beneath the stillness. The air here is heavy and thick with something that tastes likea memory?The first outside is darker than the rest, wet, stained. Petals litter the ground, some fresh, some rotted, some even still bleeding. I don’t need The Carnival to tell me who is inside. I already know.
Her.
The one with knives on her feet, that dances like vengeance. The one whose eyes didn’t just see me, theyrecognizedme. She has called for me, but I can feel The Carnival is preparing. Somewhere, bone chimes rattle like teeth, and petals bloom from places that should be barren, yet the roses I pass seem to turn towards me. Are they watching me, or should I take it as a warning? I don’t dare to enter, yet I sit outside the tent shaking. The perfume of rot and silk coils around my throat like a noose,and for the first time since Elena died, I feel something. Not just grief, nor guilt, butfear;and worse,curiosity.
The velvet shifts, but nobody opens it. Instead I feel The Carnival pull me in without even touching me. Suddenly I’m inside, or somewhere near, but not directly inside the tent. The walls fall away and I am not in my own skin anymore. I seeher.Younger, human, twirling in pink slippers smiling. She is beautiful, alive, until she isn’t. Blood splashes across the satin, hands pull her away from the stage and I can tell they aren’t meant to save her. They are hands that want to silence her.
“You were never meant to shine.”I hear a voice hissing. She tries to scream, but her mouth is full of flowers now and they choke her as she dances. Knives have replaced her feet, bones replaced her name and The Carnival wraps around her like a shroud, and she doesn’t shed another tear, instead she bows.
I jump back, gasping for air. Sweat runs down my spine like a blade and the velvet flutters. A shadow behind it moves, just once and in that moment she knows I saw, and nowIknow, that this place didn’t just choose her. It made her, she didn’t just survive The Carnival, she became it.
Six
Visha — Blood and Bone
They brought the offender to me just after midnight. He was dragged through the back of The Carnival like a sack of spoiled meat, arms bound in velvet rope, mouth gagged with a monogrammed handkerchief still stained with lipstick that wasn’t his wife’s. He thought that nobody would see what he did behind the Hall of Mirrors that were hidden among illusions and shifting glass. He thought he was invincible, but The Carnival sees everything. They all do, eventually. I don’t bother to perform for this one, no lights, no music, no applause. This is not theater, this is a correction. The tent is silent except for his breathing, which is wet, erratic. His eyes bulge behind the mask that I’ve granted him; red velvet sewn to his face, stitched with thread soaked in rosewater and rust. I hear him whimper when I approach, no fear, just entitlement. They always believe they deserve to be spared for their sins. I kneel before him and whisper.
“Tell me what she said when you grabbed her.” I chuckle as he tries to speak through the gag, so I decide to remove it,carefully. Almost reverently.
“She screamed, sure.” He gasps, “But it’s just a show, right? That’s what you want, isn’t it? A reaction?” he stutters.
This sack of meat thinks we are the same, he thinksI’m here for the drama.How sweet. How completely fucking wrong. I make a single incision down his sternum, not deep, yet it was enough as he begins to thrash around.
“She was sixteen.” I say laced with venom dripping off each word.
“And you followed her into the dark like a man who clearly has done it before.” he begins sobbing and I smirk.
“Please, I thought…” he chokes out and I cut him off mid-sentence.
“Youthoughtyou could vanish into the fog before I found you.” I dip my fingers into the opening I made and press down ever so slowly, and he screams so beautifully. No audience, no ghosts humming, only the sound of consequence. I watch as life fades away as I drink in his soul. Once it’s done I lay his body gently on the ground; I don’t bother wiping the blood from my hands. Instead, I place them flat against the tent floor, and The Carnival drinks it like fine wine. In the corner I hear the bone-chimes tremble, and then I feel it again.Him.The anomaly, he has yet to step inside my tent, but I feel the shadow of his thoughts. He just sits outside, as if waiting for something, as if he’s afraid to come close, that if he does there is no going back. I stand and my reflection in the silver basin is off-center, tilted slightly like somebody’s watching me through the glass. I see the roses in the corner have bloomed again, too soon,too red.They are feeding off something that I’m not feeling, a hunger that isn’t mine, and it circles back to him.
“Who is he?” I whisper to The Carnival, I feel the wind shift, the lights buzz, the shadows ripple, yet no answer comes. That is the part that unsettles me, The Carnival always answers…except now. After the blood seeps into the dirt, after the silence swallows the last gasp, I sit alone in the shadowed corner of the tent, the roses pulse faintly. Their petals trembling like a living heartbeat, and then a whisper. So soft it could have been the wind, or the breath of a ghost.
“He’s here.”
The name is unspoken, but The Carnival knows. I close my eyes and a memory fractures through the veil of time, a flicker of dark silk and shadowed eyes. At that moment, I saw him. Not the broken man who stumbles through my world now, but the one he used to be, or who he might become. He stands at the edge of the stage, lost in the flickering lights. Our eyes meet across the chasm of silence. He doesn’t speak, I don’t move. However the world tilts, the roses bloom out of season and The Carnival shudders. I open my eyes, the silence is heavier now. He has yet to come forward, but the game has now begun, and I will not be the one to lose.
Seven
Corvan — The Escapist Doesn’t Escape
They say The Carnival chooses you, yet I’m not sure it’s a choice at all. A Ringmaster, a man who wears half a mask and half a smile, offered me a place after the tests.A home,he said. A refuge for lost souls still clutching threads of magic, and I wanted so hard to believe him. So I built Illusions. Smoke, mirrors and shadows, my currency. The first was simple, bleeding skies, crimson clouds swirling across a starless night. The crowd gasped, breath held tight like they feared the sky might fall. Hell, I could almost believe the moment was mine, that I controlled light and dark. Another night, I conjured a garden of glass roses, fragile petals shimmering in the candlelight. They shattered in slow motion, revealing the faces of the trapped souls staring out, mouths open in silent screams.
I was no longer Corvan, I wasThe Escapist,yet every illusion I built was a cage. Every cheer tightened the chains.
Between the shows, I stalked The Carnival’s twisted corridors, desperate for answers, desperate to know why I didn’t need to confess. I just became. I followed whispers, fragmentsof song, scraps of conversation caught on the bone-chimes. Old scars on stage floors, like fingerprints pressed into blood and dust. I sought her,Visha,Madame Noire. The ballerina who danced with knives and death, the woman whose eyes burned through my soul that night.
One night, behind the Hall of Mirrors, I found a torn scrap of a journal page, pinned to the wall by a black thorned rose. The ink was faded, edges singed.
“…they called me a monster before I even knew my name. The blood I spill is not mine but theirs. The Carnival is my curse and my cradle.”
The signature was gone, but I knew the penmanship was hers. I traced the thread deeper, past old performance posters scrawled with warnings.
“Beware the Spider’s Dance”with a cracked photograph showing a younger woman in tattered ballet shoes, eyes haunted but fierce. Fire burned deep in her.
The Carnival folk watched me, silent and knowing.
A fire breather spat flames near the tents, smoke swirling like smoke snakes. He nodded once, I couldn’t tell if it was out of respect orwarning.
