Page 48 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)

Fifty

Corvan - Shattered Reflections

The mirrors don’t lie but sometimes, they reveal what we dread most: ourselves.

The air is cold and still in the Hall of Mirrors.

A thousand fractured reflections stretch and twist around me like shards of a shattered past I’ve tried to forget.

I catch glimpses of faces long gone, voices whispered through cracks in time, memories I locked away deep inside because some truths burn too bright to bear.

I see the boy I once was, eyes wide and searching, haunted by silence and absence.

The man I became, wearing masks like armor, hiding wounds beneath layers of illusion.

Fingers trace the jagged cracks on the glass, each one a scar, a secret, a lie I told myself to survive.

No smoke and mirrors can shield me now, the illusions are breaking, and so am I.

Trembling, I drop to my knees, heart raw and exposed.

The Carnival’s silence presses in, a quiet witness to my unraveling.

I want to run to hide behind the tricks and shadows that once saved me.

But something deeper calls me to stand to face the fractured man staring back at me.

There is no escaping the truth. No more hiding in reflections or illusions.

So I breathe, slow and steady. I let the cracks in the glass become the cracks in my armor, and in that fragile breaking, I find the first whisper of freedom.

The Carnival waits watching, waiting for the next move.

Because the real risk isn’t breaking illusions. It’s what comes after.

The cold glass fades to black, and somewhere beyond the mirrors, I sense her, the Queen of Knives, the warden with a heart buried beneath scars. The reckoning between us is coming. And neither mercy nor cruelty will be simple anymore.