The world freezes.
Birds hang motionless in the sky.
Wind stills mid–gust.
The Execution grounds becomes a painted scene.
Only the two cursed ones can move:
Elsbeth and the Jester.
They are still holding each other when the moment locks in place.
The book hovering above them, pages fluttering without wind.
The jester stiffens in her arms a strangled sound escapes him the curse still burns his skin for touching her.
He drops to his knees, arms falling limp around her. Elsbeth stumbles back a few steps, startled.
Time has stopped. Completely.
His pain vanishes in an instant like someone snuffed out a flame.
"The pain..." he whispers.
He stops.
His hands fly to his mouth.
The voice that emerges is not a riddle. It is not a rhyme. It is not a shriek.
It is low, rough with disuse, and terrified.
He blinks, and something hot and wet spills over his painted cheek. Then another drop. Then another.
He stares at the wetness on his fingers, bewildered.
"I'm... leaking," he whispers, his voice trembling. "Princess Elsbeth, I'm leaking."
Elsbeth takes a hesitant step toward him. The horror of the execution is gone, replaced by a sacred, quiet awe.
"You're not leaking," she says softly.
"My eyes feel warm," he gasps, a sob finally breaking through his chest, raw and jagged. "I'm... I'm crying."
He looks up at her, his storm-grey eyes wide with the shock of a miracle.
"I'm crying," he repeats, the words fracturing. "So this is how it feels to cry."
Elsbeth reaches out. This time, she doesn't hesitate. She doesn't flinch. She lays her hand gently against his painted cheek and brushes away the tears.
He doesn't recoil. The bells don't ring.
"I can touch you," she whispers, her own eyes filling with tears. "And you... you are speaking without jest."
"It feels so good," he weeps, leaning into her palm like a starving animal offered food. "It feels so good to cry."
He sounds like a child. A child who has been lost in the dark for six hundred years and has just seen a lamp.
"Yes," Elsbeth says, her voice a mixture of joy and devastating sadness. "I can hear you and i can see you."
She sinks to her knees on the rough wood. She takes his face in both her hands and guides his head down until it rests in her lap.
He curls there, trembling, clutching the fabric of her dress.
"Cry," she commands softly, "Cry all you want. I am here. I will stay with you. I will hear you."
For a long time, there is only the sound of him weeping a sound of ancient dams breaking, of poison finally leaving a wound.
When the sobs eventually quiet to ragged breaths, he speaks again.
"Princess..."
"No," she murmurs, brushing a thumb over his brow. "Just Elsbeth. For you, just Elsbeth."
He tests the word, rolling it over a tongue used to sharp edges.
"Elsbeth... Elsbeth... Elsbeth." A faint, broken smile touches his lips. "Pretty name."
He sits up slowly, wiping his face with a trembling hand. He looks at her with a clarity that pierces her soul and reaches into his motley. With a flicker of his old dexterity a muscle memory of tricks he produces a single, worn card.
He hands it to her.
It is a Tarot card.
The Fool.
A man walking off a cliff, a dog barking at his heels, a white rose in his hand.
"This is the only thing my mother gave me," he whispers. "We can't have names. I inherited the curse when I was still in her belly. To name me would be to claim me..."
Elsbeth looks at the card, the edges soft from centuries of touch.
Suddenly, the card is ripped from her fingers.
It flies upward, drawn by an invisible force, and slaps against the open page of the hovering Black Book. The paper absorbs the card instantly. Ink begins to bleed outward from where the card vanishes, swirling into shapes, into moving shadows.
The Fool's Past.
Elsbeth gasps as the Book pulls her in.
She isn't just seeing it; she is feeling it.
She feels the cold. A biting, rotting cold.
She stands in a trash dump. A decayed wooden sign is half-buried under rubble.
THE STARVED QUARTERS Capital Outskirts of Lowenred
She recalls the passage she once read:
"Lowenred, the fallen kingdom of four centuries past, is known in courtly record as a place of whispers a resting ground for the forgotten."
A newborn stands on trembling legs in a pile of trash.
Born not in a crib, but here.
His bells chime faintly with every tiny step, though no metal is attached to him.
The cursed child looks up, expression too aware for a newborn.
His mother is a young woman, her face painted in bright jester's colors, her whole appearance echoing the same sorrowful whimsy he carries.
"I wasn't like a normal child," the Jester's voice narrates, echoing all around her, sad and resigned. "I could walk when I was born." I had my own consciousness because of the curse.
The bells were sewn to my soul, paying for the crime my mother and my clan committed.
"She didn't hold me," the Jester whispers. "She didn't even touch me."
Elsbeth feels the woman's agony. She wants to pick up the child. Her arms twitch with the need to hold him. But she knows that to hold him is to claim him as hers, and to claim him is to trigger the curse.
"She wanted me," the Jester says. "Thus, she couldn't have me."
The mother places the tarot card beside the baby and runs, laughing, leaving the new born child amidst the rot.
The scene shifts.
Elsbeth feels a new sensation: hunger that isn't hunger. A hollowness.
She sees the child, small and pale, huddled against the side of a broken crate. And she sees a dog.
It is a mangy stray, ribs showing, but its eyes are kind. It drops a bone near the child.
"We stayed together in that dump for weeks," the voice continues. "He looked after me."
Elsbeth feels the warmth of the dog's fur against the child's cold skin. It is the only warmth in the world.
"But I couldn't name him," the Jester says, his voice cracking. "I refused to believe that 'I need him' or 'I want him.
' I told myself 'he is just a dog' so the curse wouldn't take him."
But the curse is jealous.
The shadows shifts again Other dogs wild, starving, feraldescend on the dump.
Elsbeth watches in horror as the protector dog stands its ground. It barks, snapping at the pack, fighting for the strange little boy who smells like ozone and magic.
It isn't enough.
The protector falls. And the pack turns on the boy.
Elsbeth tries to scream, to look away, but the memory holds her fast. She feels the teeth. She feels the flesh tearing.
"I was in pain," the Jester whispers. "Yet I couldn't cry. I couldn't scream."
From the child's throat comes a sound that chills Elsbeth's blood.
Laughter.
High, shrill, mechanical laughter bubbling up through the blood as he is eaten alive.
"I laughed as my flesh was torn apart. And then... I healed. Again. And again."
She watches the cycle of butchery and regeneration until the sun goes down and the dogs, full and frightened by the boy who won't die, slink away.
"I died after a while. It was dark."
Elsbeth sees a figure in the gloom a towering shadow with wings of ash. The Angel of Death.
The child reaches out a bloody hand. Take me, the gesture begs.
The Angel looks at him, pauses, and then turns away.
"He refused me," the Jester says simply.
The scene snaps.
Elsbeth smells antiseptic, herbs, and stale blood.
The child is older now but not by years.
"I woke up on a table."
A man stands over him. Tall, gaunt, desperate. Luther.
"He didn't save me," the Jester says. "He was an alchemist. His lover was dying, and he was willing to burn the world to keep her."
Elsbeth sees the Alchemist's Chamber. She sees a woman on the other table, pale and gasping. She sees Luther taking a knife to the Jester's arm.
"I was a living vessel. A little kid. He saw me healing at the dump. He used my blood, my marrow, everything he could."
She watches the boy grow.
"I grew ten years in two. Tied to that table."
Luther works with frantic, manic energy. And as he works, he listens to the boy's babbling the riddles, the mocking songs that are the only things the curse allows him to speak.
Elsbeth sees Luther picking up a brush.
"He painted my face," the Jester says. "It wasn't his decision. It was God's way of turning me into the archetype. Completing the joke."
Elsbeth watches the woman on the other table. She is getting stronger, yes. But she is changing. Her skin turns gray. Her eyes turn black. She hisses.
"Little did he know... I was cursed by the heavens. And you cannot cure death with cursed blood."
Luther had to kill her. The love of his life turned into a monster by the blood of the Fool.
"He went insane after that," the Jester whispers.
The scene becomes a blur of red. Luther, weeping, screaming, hacking at the boy on the table.
"He cut me into pieces. Every single day. And I would heal, and come back."
Elsbeth feels the phantom sensation of the blade. The dissociation. The laughter.
"One day... he shoved my pieces into a sack."
She feels the suffocation of the burlap. The swing of the arm. The crash of cold water.
The Sea.
"Even the sea wouldn't take me."
She sees the sack wash up on the shore, pushed by waves that refuse to swallow such a thing. Crabs and gulls pick at the ropes until he crawls out, whole again.
"I went back," the Jester says softly. "I went back to Luther's house. It was the only thing I could call home."
Elsbeth sees the boy, now looking like a young man, painted and belled, walking into the silent house.
He finds Luther hanging from the rafters.
"He had ended it," the Jester says. "He had the escape I was denied."
The memory fades, dissolving back into ink, back into the book. She slams back into her own body and into arms.
Arms.
She is being held.
Tightly. Desperately.
She realizes her face is wet.
Soaked.
Not with her tears.
But with his.
The Jester is on his knees, clutching her to his chest as if trying to anchor her to the world.
His whole body trembles.
His breath comes in broken gasps.
He is screaming.
Raw. Human. Terrified.
"Elsbeth—Elsbeth—wake up—wake up—wake up—!"
"Please—please—talk to me—!"
Elsbeth's eyes flutter opens and she blinks.
Just once.
His breath stops.
The world does not unfreeze.
The book still hovers above them, pages burning with unread memories.
But all he sees
all he cares about
is that she is breathing.