Page 9 of The Opening Act is Death (The Carnival of The Damned)

Eleven

Corvan — The Note Left Behind

My tricks are unraveling, the crowd is seeing my grief now. The Carnival didn’t steal my magic, no. It stole the part of me that knew when to stop. The card was still warm when I touched it. Not from fire, but from her.

Visha.

No Signature, no flourish, just five words that ripped me wide open;

I see you. Even now.

Not “I forgive you.” Not “You’re safe.” Just…

seen, and I’m not sure which is worse. Because if she sees me, it means she knows what I’ve done.

What I let happen. The door I didn’t open.

The girl I couldn’t save. The man I became when I stopped trying.

And yet… she didn’t slit my throat. She didn’t vanish into silk and silence.

She left a card. A confession, or maybe a dare.

That night, I stepped onto the stage half-asleep and all-devoured.

The illusions came, shimmering and obedient but they weren’t mine.

The sky turned red too fast. The smoke stank of copper and old wine.

The audience gasped not in awe, but dread.

I tried to conjure the garden of glass roses.

I had perfected it once, each petal a mirror to some lost soul’s secret.

But this time they bloomed with teeth and bled.

The glass cracked mid-performance. One shard sliced my palm, warm and real.

I clenched my fist and smiled anyway. The crowd thought it was part of the act, they always do.

They don’t know what it means when the illusionist bleeds for real.

They don’t realize that tonight, The Carnival was using me as the illusion.

After the show, I staggered down one of the back corridors, half-drunk on memory, half-starved of mercy. The walls moaned like something inside them wanted out. My footsteps echoed like I was being followed, or maybe chased. I leaned against the velvet and whispered her name like a sin.

“Visha.” She didn’t answer.

But something shifted at that moment. The air thickened, and the mirrors began to hum.

Behind one, her reflection shimmered. Not a woman, a storm in silk.

Blades at her ankles, blood on her hem, her eyes…

fuck… her eyes weren’t cold this time. They were breaking, so I reached for the glass. It shattered and she was gone.

Later, I sat cross-legged in my tent, hands still bleeding, trying to recreate the rose illusion.

Just one. Just one goddamn bloom that didn’t scream.

But the magic wouldn’t listen. Instead, smoke poured from my fingertips, forming her shape.

Not Visha as she is now but as she was .

Younger. Fragile, laughing. Then crumpling under a blow I couldn’t see, then standing, dancing, blood on her slippers.

I tried to dismiss the image, to bury it in smoke and mirrors, but she stayed.

The Carnival was showing me what I wasn’t meant to see. Her pain, her beginning. The girl beneath the floorboards. I choked on the guilt, because maybe she wasn’t the only one who buried someone. Maybe I buried myself, too.

I didn’t sleep that night. I don’t breathe right.

I dream of her touching my wrist, not with a blade but with that strange, holy sadness she wears like perfume.

I dream of what it would feel like to kiss her and taste the rot of roses between our teeth.

I dream of pressing my forehead to hers, asking her to remember who she used to be just long enough for me to fall in love with that version of her.

But even in my dreams…she turns away. She always turns away.

By morning, the mirrors had gone silent.

The Carnival has turned its face from me.

And still, I want her. Even if it kills me.

Especially if it saves her, even if the only way to reach her is to dig through the bones of her past with my bare, bloodied hands.