Page 19 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)
Twenty One
Corvan - Hall of the Unspoken
She left another journal page, it mentions me, or someone like me. There’s a room in The Carnival no one dares enter twice. No music plays there, no laughter, no warmth. Only silence that is heavy, suffocating, like the breath of something dead but not gone.
The Hall of the Unspoken.
It’s buried deep between tents that shift and slither when no one’s watching. Like The Carnival tries to erase it from memory except it doesn’t want to forget. It wants us to remember, to tremble.
I didn’t mean to end up here. Maybe I was dragged, kicking and screaming, or maybe I walked willingly because there’s nowhere left to run.
Visha hasn’t spoken to me since the performance, since she didn’t kill.
Since she looked me in the eyes and let something break loose.
Mercy? No. It was something crueler, a challenge, like a razor edge cutting into The Carnival’s throat.
She dared it to bleed. And she dared me to watch. Now The Carnival’s eyes are on me.
Mirrors twist and twist again as I pass, distorting my face until I’m a stranger.
Every flicker of candlelight leers at me, trying to unravel what I’m hiding beneath my skin.
Even the performers, those monsters and saints, step away.
Their silence screams louder than any voice.
Am I the spark that will burn this cursed place to ash?
I want to say no, but the Hall of the Unspoken knows.
Its silence is a knife sliding slowly beneath my ribs.
I push past the heavy velvet curtains, they fall like dead limbs behind me.
The air tastes stale, soaked in smoke and old grief.
The shadows crawl along cracked floorboards, devouring the weak candlelight in slow waves.
I’m swallowed by darkness so thick it presses down, claws sinking into my lungs.
There, on a rusted pedestal beneath a broken spotlight, rests a folded page.
Ink gleams faintly, the same clean, deliberate handwriting.
Her handwriting.
I don’t want to touch it. Like it’s alive, like it might bite. But I do, and the words don’t just fill my eyes. They tear through me.
“There was once a boy with hands like smoke and a smile that meant nothing but hurt. I told myself I didn’t care.
That he was just another ghost wearing a pretty illusion.
But he watched me dance. And didn’t look away.
He should’ve. I don’t know if he’s the same boy anymore.
Or if I am the same girl. But I wonder… if he hears The Carnival the same way I do.
And if he’s afraid of what it’s starting to say. ”
She wrote this before. Before she let the man crawl away, before she let me live in her gaze too long.
She wrote this about me, or maybe about the ghost I’m becoming.
The paper twists in my clenched fist as I exhale through a raw throat.
My chest feels crushed beneath the weight of every unspoken word between us.
Because this is bigger than her, bigger than me.
It’s The Carnival, and it’s hungry. Its promise to shape us into monsters, into weapons, into nothing. Behind me, a mirror creaks.
I spin.
No reflection.
Only black, gaping void.
The glass refuses to show me the fractured pieces of who I am.
Or maybe it’s showing me the truth, I’m breaking.
Fracturing. Falling into something dark and unknown.
Someone Visha might fear, or worse; someone she might finally need.
A sharp wind cuts through the hall, snuffing out the candle.
The darkness surges, alive and ravenous.
From the silence, The Carnival whispers, not with words, but a hunger that gnaws at my bones.
It wants blood.
It wants pain.
It wants everything we tried to bury.
And then, a tremor. A flicker of doubt, the walls close in. The shadows press too close.
What if I’m not strong enough?
What if I’m already lost?
The thought claws at my mind, raw and terrible. But I swallow it down and breathe in the cold. I fold the page, the paper biting cold against my skin. I shove it deep into my coat and turn away. The velvet curtains close behind me like a tomb.
Let it come for me. Let it come for both of us.
If The Carnival wants a war, it will get one.
I won’t be its puppet anymore.
I’ll be the blade that cuts the strings.