07/27/2026: The Carnival Eternal

On the grounds of Maladomini’s Carnival Eternal, there is tension between the friends and a group of violent clowns.  But as quickly as they descended, the clowns are gone — folded back into the crowd like a trick of the light. They leave only chalk dust settling in the churned mud and the faint, retreating jingle of bells. 

The friends stand a moment, catching their breath, before the Carnival Eternal reasserts itself around them: calliope music, the tang of sulfur-sweet caramel, somewhere a scream that resolves into laughter half a second too late to be reassuring. They scatter to explore.

⚔

Arman ducks beneath a curtain of strung marigolds, wilted and blackened at the edges, and finds a broad-shouldered blademaster already stepping out. The man’s face has gone the color of old parchment. He doesn’t look at Arman. He doesn’t look at anything, really — his eyes have the fixed, faraway focus of someone replaying a sentence in his head, over and over, hoping it changes on the fifth pass.

Inside, the tent smells of tallow candles and something older beneath it, like a drawer that hasn’t been opened in a century. Madame Voss sits behind a low table, her orange eyes catching the candlelight like a cat’s. She gestures Arman into the seat still warm from the blademaster.

She spreads the cards with a sound like dry leaves.

“I see a change of fortune for you,” she says, tapping one card — a figure draped in gold, drowning pleasantly. “Much wealth and power shall be yours. Success showers you with rewards.” She looks up, orange eyes unreadable. “Does this mean anything to you?”

Arman’s throat is tight. He asks the question that’s been sitting under his ribs since he first considered Gratchis’s offer, the one he hasn’t dared ask himself in daylight.

“What will happen to my friends? Will they die?”

Madame Voss studies him for a long moment — long enough that the candle between them gutters and rights itself — before turning the next card.

“Everyone dies. It is only a matter of when. The one called Vali,” she says, “has the shadow of a black feather that falls heavy upon him. I do not see immediate death, but…” 

She trails off before turning over the next card. “Another in your group — the barbarian, Borark — completes his transition. Finally forgives himself.” Another card, another. “The bugbear, Thunk, reconciles with his deadly enemy, Clunk. Your friend Reklaw wins something valuable, as does Gearloose, who gains a faithful servant.” 

She pauses on the last card longer than the rest, her painted mouth flattening. “And Kiki, the artificer, has angered a powerful goddess.”

She gathers the cards without further comment, as if the reading has cost her something she’d rather not discuss.

Arman sits back. No one is dying. No one is even permanently damned — not today, anyway. Kiki might be, eventually, but that’s a problem for a version of today that hasn’t happened yet. It’s enough. He rises, drops a coin he can’t really spare into the bowl by the tent flap, and steps back out into the noise.

⚔

In the shooting gallery, Kiki’s game is a long counter of tin ducks and glass bottles, all wobbling on a belt that never quite moves at a consistent speed — deliberately, she suspects, though she can’t prove it and the barker only grins wider when she squints at the mechanism. 

She sights down the barrel of a crossbow that pulls slightly left, compensates, and puts round after round through the moving targets with the flat, unbothered precision of someone who builds better guns than this in her spare time.

She wins. Three times.

The barker, delighted or perhaps just contractually obligated to seem so, produces a small carved box from beneath the counter and sets it in her palms with both hands, reverently, like it might go off.

“Powerful,” he assures her, tapping the lid. “Very powerful.”

Kiki turns it over, shakes it gently, holds it up to the gaslight. It tells her nothing. No hum, no warmth, no telltale scent of enchantment she’d recognize from her own workshop. Just a small, closed, faintly smug little box, giving away exactly nothing.

⚔

Borark finds the tower first by the sound of it — a pain devil in a striped vest, red-faced with the specific fury of someone who has just embarrassed himself in front of a crowd, glaring at the mallet like it personally betrayed him. His puck sits limp at the base of the tower, having climbed perhaps a third of the way before giving up entirely.

Borark rolls his shoulders. Chalks his hands. The barbarian who spent the better part of this campaign half-stone from the waist down grips the mallet like a man remembering, all at once, everything his body used to do.

He swings.

The mallet comes down on the lever with a crack that turns heads three stalls over. The puck doesn’t just reach the bell — it takes the bell with it, wrenching the whole fixture off its mount and sending it arcing into the crowd behind the tower in a long, ringing parabola. There’s a clang, then a screech that is unmistakably a devil’s, followed by a very aggrieved silence.

Borark collects his prize without comment: a small taxidermied rat in a tiny monocle, dignified even in death, labeled in curling script — Mr. Wiggles.

⚔

Thunk sees it from across the lot — chained to an iron cage, massive head low and smoldering, guarding a barbed devil who looks like he’s had a very long shift. Thunk does not hesitate.

“Can I pet your dog?”

“Only if you wish to lose your arm,” the devil snaps, not even looking up from whatever ledger he’s scowling at.

The hellhound rolls over.

Belly exposed, tail thumping against the scorched dirt, tongue lolling in unmistakable, undignified joy. The devil looks up, looks at his hellhound, looks at Thunk, and appears to age several centuries in real time.

Thunk scratches behind one of its ears while the devil sputters through several attempts at outrage before settling, with visible defeat, into a negotiation. Soul coins change hands — the ones Gearloose passed him earlier, “for emergencies,” which Thunk has apparently decided this qualifies as. The devil counts them twice, mutters something about paperwork, and unchains the leash. The creature’s name is Adolph.

The hellhound trots after Thunk like it’s always known him.

⚔

Gearloose enters the bug-eating competition on what appears to be a whim, wedged between two hulking contestants who both look like they’ve done this before and enjoyed it. The bugs — glistening, many-legged, still faintly twitching — sit in neat rows on tin trays, and the crowd’s money is decidedly not on the gnome. A bell rings. Gearloose eats.

He wins.

The referee, a squat imp with a stopwatch and clipboard, checks the count twice, mutters something uncharitable, and declares it official anyway. The crowd’s collective groan is loud enough to startle a nearby flock of carrion birds off a tent pole. Somewhere behind Gearloose, a devil who’d bet heavily against him is already arguing with the payout window.

His prize turns out to be alive: a large, praying manticore, curled in an enormous wicker basket, its scorpion tail tucked neatly beneath it and a tiny religious figurine clutched in one front claw. It ignores Gearloose entirely at first — eyes shut, lips moving in a low, continuous mumble, utterly absorbed in whatever devotion it’s midway through. Gearloose crouches by the basket and waits, not quite sure what else to do with a creature more interested in prayer than in him.

When the manticore finally finishes — a last murmured word, a small, satisfied exhale — it opens its eyes, looks Gearloose over with what might be appraisal, and speaks.

“Horatio,” it says, by way of introduction, as though this settles the matter of what happens next.

⚔

The tent is smoky, low-lit, and smells faintly of burnt velvet. On stage, a horned devil is midway through an epic of Vogonic poetry, each stanza worse than the last, the crowd’s collective will to live visibly draining with every line. He finishes to a smattering of applause so half-hearted it barely qualifies as sound.

Vali takes the stage next.

Whatever he plays, it lands — real applause, the kind that doesn’t need coaxing, rippling warm through the tent. The horned devil, watching from the wings with his composition curling in one fist, does not take this well. He storms toward the cannon rigged on the far side of the stage — ostensibly a “special effects” piece for the finale — and fires it through the tent wall in a fit of pique.

It kills a devilkin who had the misfortune of walking by outside. It is the same devilkin struck by Borark’s bell.

Nobody in the tent seems especially surprised by this. The applause for Vali continues, if anything, a little louder.

⚔

Arman finds Gratchis waiting near the checkpoint tents, hands folded, expression arranged into something almost paternal. The offer is still on the table — it’s been on the table since the river crossing, patient and precise, exactly the kind of stability Arman has spent this whole campaign pretending he doesn’t want.

He accepts.

Arman finds Reklaw before he leaves, presses a few of his belongings into the monk’s hands — things too heavy to carry into whatever comes next, or maybe just things he doesn’t want to have to explain later. Reklaw takes them without a word, jaw tight.

Arman doesn’t offer an excuse. Reklaw doesn’t ask for one. It’s a short goodbye, the kind that doesn’t need to be long to hurt.

Then Arman turns, falls into step beside Gratchis, and the two of them walk off into the carnival’s smoke and noise, leaving Reklaw standing alone by the checkpoint tents, watching his friend disappear into Maladomini’s crowd.