Page 47 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)

Forty Nine

Visha - Dance of the Damned

When the damned rise, only fury and fire can hold the darkness at bay. But love, fragile and fierce, may be the wildest dance of all.

The Carnival shakes beneath the thunderous roar of the uprising.

Bodies surge like a tide of broken souls, their snarls sharp as shattered glass.

The sickly lantern light flickers, casting grotesque shadows that leap and writhe across the bloodstained canvas.

I grip my knives, twin shards of cold steel, fingers tightening around their familiar weight.

The first attacker lunges at a twisted marionette with cracked porcelain skin and eyes like dying stars.

I pivot, blades slicing through the stale air, steel flashing, cutting a clean arc across his throat.

His scream is swallowed by the roar, a desperate sound lost in the chorus of chaos.

The dance begins, brutal, violent, unrelenting.

Feet pivot and slide across slick wood, knives trace deadly lines of fire and ice.

I move with savage grace, a predator in her element.

Every strike calculated, every dodge a whisper of years spent mastering pain and control.

Behind the blade flashes, memories cut deep, a girl once trembling in the dark, blood on bare feet, dreams shattered like glass beneath the heel of betrayal.

The echo of her screams, silent now, but always there, fueling the fury that surges through me.

Another attacker, a ragged thing with broken chains swings a rusted hook.

I catch it with a blade, steel biting metal, sparks flying.

Twisting free, I drive a knife through his chest, watching the light die behind hollow eyes.

The Carnival bleeds around me, a fractured symphony of fire and rage. Corvan’s voice breaks through the storm, steady and clear:

“Visha, don’t lose yourself.”

I spin, blades raised, fury blazing in my eyes, but then I see him calm amidst the chaos, a steady flame. His hand finds mine, gripping tight, grounding. The knives fall silent, the dance falters. A flashback sears through me;

The first time I held a knife to someone’s throat, not out of hatred, but necessity,

to survive a world that would have swallowed me whole. His eyes, pleading. My hands, shaking. The cold rush of power and fear intertwined. I remember the silence afterward, the weight of what I had done and the brutal resolve that followed.

Corvan’s voice pulls me back.

“We can be more than this,” he says. The uprising is far from over, but in his touch, I find something softer, a fragile hope breaking through the storm of steel and blood.

Together, we turn the tide, not just with blades, but with a reckoning of heart and soul.

The Carnival roars its dark approval, a beast both fierce and beautiful, and in that chaos, I glimpse a future where fury and mercy dance as one.