Maybe Galen was right. Maybe the world is unfair, and maybe fate cannot be escaped.
But maybe—just maybe, it can be rewritten. It has to be.
Jude shouts something, but it barely sounds like him. I can’t even make out what the words are—they break, cut into a scream that rakes nails down my heart, a guttural snarl heralding the end of a losing battle.
I look up, and Sil’s eyes blaze back from the darkness as Jude pulls the two of them deeper into the wings. My director’s enraged gaze locks on the Script, which is out of his reach.
Iam finally out of Sil’s reach.
I clutch the vial like a sword between us and look to Jude one last time, finding him in between seconds of dying golden light as Nyxene shreds into the last of his Craft. But the sight it illuminates cleaves whatever is left of me in half.
Thin scraps of skin stretch over Jude’s face like he’s wearing a brilliant mask, one of his eyes coated in a filmy layer of gold so thick, I wonder if he can see through it. The left side of his body is torn in devastating, gruesome layers, where Nyxene shredded through flesh.
My hands shake as I twist the cap off the vial. This Script was the possession of a god. I don’t know that there’s any way to destroy such a thing, a power strong enough to raise a Playhouse and trap us into it.
But if it has the power to cage us, I have to believe maybe it can free us, too.
It will. Fate herself will have to deal with my wrath if it doesn’t.
As Jude drags Sil backstage, luring Nyxene away, I raise the vial, conveying the question with a single warning look.
His eyes lock on mine, and his words peek through my memory as he nods once, and as the light around him dims.
To die is to be forgotten.
Flickers.
I imagine the world will never forget me.
Goes out.
The last thing I see is the Finders Keepers ring on his finger, glinting in the darkness as I say, “Find me.”
And tip the vial over the Script.
CURTAIN CALL
If reports from the ship sailing the Maskira Sea near Eleutherae that day are to be believed, it all happened at once: A flash of light flooded every opening of the Playhouse—which most claimed had risen from the ground only moments before to begin with.
The sailors had no choice but to believe their eyes: The Playhouse had returned to Eleutherae.
Then the shattering of windows, the crash of marble. An eruption of golden flames shot toward the sky and all the way up the hill, the heat so suffocating, the first mate would tell stories of how it tingled on his skin for days, how all the fish floated right to the surface, dead.
And just as fast, the Playhouse was gone, turned to ash.
But this was only the second most surprising thing that day.
Figures stood around the mountaintop in that same moment, then descended right into it, vanishing in the well, their bodies a surge of light brighter than the moon.
“Look,”someone called, face angled at the sky where the flames of the Playhouse whipped through the clouds, melting them like ice.
All at once, a flood of light cascaded over Eleutherae’s destroyed ground in a rage of golden fire that razed through the weeds and ash and left patches of brilliant color in its wake.
Then golden stars broke overhead, illuminating the mountain in all its ancient, lost beauty.
Of course, no one would believe the sailors. They might not have believed their own eyes, either, were it not for the lone survivor stranded at the edge of Eleutherae, hailing for passage on their ship.
An audience member, the man told them, who had not escaped before the Playhouse moved.
