Chapter 15 – The Carnival of Pain
The Tumbler was three feet away, his jaw unhinged, needle-teeth dripping saliva. He didn't look like a man anymore; he looked like a hunger with legs.
Uzo didn't scream. He didn't panic. He just felt that cold, dead switch flip inside his chest. The place where the silence lived.
The roots crushed his ankles. The mud sucked at his boots.
He stared at the Tumbler and let the darkness spill out.
"Sever."
It wasn't a spell. It was a command to the physics holding the world together.
The effect was instant and ugly.
The roots binding Uzo's legs didn't just break; they withered, turning gray and crumbling into dry powder in a millisecond.
But the word didn't stop at the roots. It hit the Tumbler.
The clown's left leg simply... stopped working. The muscle detached from the bone. The tendon forgot its job.
Mid-sprint, the Tumbler's knee buckled backward with a wet snap. Momentum did the rest. The creature face-planted into the mud at fifty miles an hour, sliding past Uzo in a spray of dirt and broken teeth.
Uzo gasped, clutching his chest. The word tasted like ash in his mouth. His nose began to bleed—a slow, dark trickle.
That's the cost, he thought. You take from the world, the world takes from you.
High above, on the branch, the Ringmaster didn't look worried. He looked delighted.
He clapped his gloved hands slowly.
"Bravo! A rewriting of the script! I haven't seen improvisation like that since the fall of the Western Spire!"
The Ringmaster twirled his baton.
"But you're still thinking small, Nameless. You think this is a fight. No, no, no."
He pointed the baton at the sky.
"This is a production."
The air pressure dropped so fast Uzo's ears popped.
Purple light exploded from the Ringmaster's baton, shooting upward and curving down like the ribs of a giant skeleton. It formed a dome over the clearing—a translucent, glowing circus tent.
Domain Art: The Big Top.
Gravity lurched.
Uzo fell to his knees, vomiting bile. Down wasn't down anymore. Left felt like up. The horizon tilted forty-five degrees.
Ronnie groaned from the base of the oak tree. She tried to stand, but fell sideways, clutching her stomach.
"I think... I'm gonna be sick," she choked out.
The Ringmaster floated down from the branch, defying the twisted gravity. He landed softly on the ceiling of the dome, walking upside down as if it were the floor.
"In the House of Clown," the Ringmaster crooned, his voice echoing from everywhere, "Logic is the first casualty."
He snapped his fingers.
From the mud, grotesque shapes began to rise. Not Tumblers this time.
Props.
Wooden cutouts of lions with real teeth. Unicycles with blades for wheels.