[b]The Dark Carnival[/b]

What now? What now? The Dark Carnival lies in ruin all around, crushed and torn and smashed up by the gods of a terrible noplace, and the Grail at its heart is sinking into torpor. So two rather alarming things happen roughly at the same time.

The first is that the Grail's blood begins to flow freely. If you followed that thick, viscous blood, flowing from pipes and down gutters and oozing up around your feet, you'd find your way to the desecrated Big Top, to a shining cup and a promise of honking immortality forever. Really, this would just be gross and awkward and require some serious disinfecting once you left (because nobody wants to catch clown) if that was all that was happening.

The other thing is that the Dark Carnival begins to fold in on itself like a flower closing its petals. Boardwalks tear up out of the ground and become inclines, then walls. Tents come crashing down in on themselves in huge storms of canvas and tangling electric lights. Fried pickle carts become meteors. Clowns go flying with doleful honks. It would take a miracle to escape alive.

(And Jackdaw nearly doesn't, tumbling backwards and getting Grail Juice all over her coat, a ridiculous little bundle bouncing down to the Big Top until a certain wolf in a tatty red-and-gold coat of her own tackles her and pins her down into the Wicked Sauce, holding her tight and close and safe until a claw the size of a fried pickle cart scoops them up, and even then she has a hand on the back of her head smushing her into bones and thinning fur and a smell like a burning candle wick, and the thumpa-thumpa-thump of a heart more important than the one you all dared plumb.)

(Lucien clinging to the stiff-limbed professor and a tent pole, limbs still unsure about whether or not they were really supposed to be whole and unbroken and thus whether or not they were supposed to be holding this much weight at all? Much less homoerotically charged.)

And the whole farce ends on a short scrubgrass hillside. The cavern roof overhead is beginning to twinkle with black stars, the walls sloughing away as the nature of this inbetweenaplace changes, the Forest beginning to predominate. In the distance are the hoarse croaks of migrating owls, and this place won't be safe forever. But it's a beat of respite, a safe place to watch as the whole Carnival goes right down some cosmic drain, there to pupate again.

Grail-soaked clothes are tossed aside. A blanket is retrieved from somewhere inside Sasha. In undershirts and underthings, almost everyone lounges, and fried pickles are shared, and some hot ham and jam and biscuits. There is a conspicuous bossy absence, but Lucien is (of course) sure to reassure that Ailee's somewhere safe and fine and good, probably. Almost certainly.

In the ceiling-sky above, neon-teal bees dance in geometric angel-banishing patterns. Sasha radiates heat as her boiler slowly cools.  Distant and far away, there is the sound of another Sasha's roaring horn, as Black Coleman races off to chase a better world. Jackdaw finds herself in the lap of a scruffy Wolf, and those bare arms around her torso are saying more than a hoarse and starved voice ever could, except in the unlight of something not a candle, and her heart is a drumbeat against Jackdaw's bare spine.

Even down here in the crucible of worlds, there is goodness. You bring it down with you.

***

[b]Coda[/b]

[i]And so died King Dragon, Goldmouth, Ratlord, Point Constant, the Consuming Fire, destroyed by a pawn that made it all the way across the chessboard. Lothbruk melted in the fires of his unraveling, and with it melted the rat cults, and with them melted a web of wickedness and vile intrigue, and with it all melted the dark dreams of Control, Consumption, and Greed that found their nexus in that figure of Sin. One day, one day there will be something that is like King Dragon, an accretion of the desires he embodied, but it will not be for a very, very long time. And until that day comes, we can sleep more soundly, knowing that Sin itself has been diluted and made, if not harmless, at the very least purposeless.

All because of the sacrifice of one brave soul. All because Ailee, Angel of the Heart, chose her dreams over His power, chose meaning over meaninglessness.

Chose, in the end, Love.[/i]

- Surma Sundish, "[i]On The Death of King Dragon: A Narrative,[/i]" retrieved from the Heart by the Bransmuth Literary Society's Detritus Branch.