Page 1 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)

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.

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.

That was 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…