Page 44 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)

Forty Six

Corvan Alone — Wrestling the Truth

The tent is empty now. No whispers, no footsteps, just the fading echo of secrets I wasn’t meant to uncover.

I sink to the floor, the brittle pages slipping from my grasp like ghosts.

The words burn in my mind, each syllable a shard piercing my heart.

How did I not see it? How did I fool myself into believing this was love, not a trap?

Visha, my queen, my torment, woven from pain and power, the puppeteer of The Carnival’s dark web.

And I… a pawn dancing in her shadow.

I trace the cracks in the wooden floor, each fracture mirroring my unraveling soul. I want to hate her. To curse the lies and the silence, but beneath the rage, there’s something softer, fragile. A flicker of understanding, maybe even forgiveness.

Because beneath the layers of betrayal, I see the woman who made impossible choices, who built this twisted world from shards of broken dreams. And despite it all, I still want to believe in us, in the possibility of something real beyond the illusions.

But belief is a fragile thing, and right now, mine feels like it’s slipping through my fingers,

like smoke in the dark.

I close my eyes and whisper into the silence, what now?

The answer is uncertain, a storm waiting to break, a final illusion hanging by a thread.