Chapter 19 – The Curtain Call
The tip of the Ringmaster's baton glowed.
It wasn't the purple light of the gravity dome. It was black. A violent, unstable void that seemed to eat the light around it.
"Grand Finale: The Curtains Close."
The air began to suck toward the baton. Leaves, mud, light everything was being pulled into a singularity at the tip of his wand.
He was charging a spell that would erase the entire clearing.
Ronnie tried to stand. Her legs gave out.
She fell back into the mud. She was exhausted. She had no more bombs. No more tricks. Her dagger lay five feet away, too far to reach.
She looked at the boulder where Uzo was buried.
I'm sorry, she thought. I tried.
The black sphere on the baton grew to the size of a melon. The sound was deafening a high-pitched shriek of reality tearing apart.
"Say goodnight!" the Ringmaster screamed.
Then;
A sound cut through the noise.
Not a shout. Not an explosion.
A whisper.
It came from beneath the boulder.
"...Reverberate."
The Lexicon.
It wasn't Uzo speaking. It was the book. Reacting to the imminent erasure. Defending its carrier.
CRACK....
The boulder split down the center.
A beam of pure, gray light shot up from the mud, piercing the rock.
It hit the Ringmaster's black sphere.
When the gray light touched the black void, they didn't explode.
They canceled out.
Silence met Madness.
The backlash was instant.
The Ringmaster's baton shattered in his hand.
The feedback loop traveled up his arm. His sleeve disintegrated. His skin turned gray and cracked like old pottery.
"NO!" the Ringmaster shrieked, clutching his withered arm. "Not the arm! I need that for juggling!"
He looked at the cracked boulder. For the first time, there was real fear in his eyes.
"The script is ruined! The critics will eat me alive!"
He threw a smoke bomb at his own feet.
POOF.
Purple smoke filled the air, smelling of sulfur and rotten sugar.
"Intermission! Indefinite intermission!" his voice echoed, fading away into the trees.
When the smoke cleared, he was gone.
Only his crushed top hat remained in the mud.
Ronnie lay in the silence for a long moment. She waited for the trap. She waited for the laughter.
But there was only the wind.
She dragged herself through the mud to the boulder.
It was cracked in two. She pushed at the smaller half. It shifted, grinding against the stone.
"Uzo?"
Below, in a pocket of mud saved by the curvature of the rock, Uzo lay curled in a fetal position.
He was a mess.
His left arm was twisted at a wrong angle. His face was pale as death. Blood pooled beneath him.
But his chest was moving.
Shallow, ragged breaths.
Ronnie screamed in tears as she didn't know she was holding, She reached down and touched his face, It was cold.
"Act Three is over," she whispered to him in tears, brushing sands from his eyes. "We won."
She looked North.
The snow-capped peaks of the Weeping Pass were glowing pink in the sunset.
They were alive but they were utterly broken.
And the House of Clown would not forget a canceled show.