“I need to show them,” I said, stepping back. “The others. They’ll believe me now, if they see you.”

Dark Cynthia shifted uneasily, her black skirts swaying like shadows caught in a breeze. “You’re leaving me?”

“Just for a moment,” I assured her. “Stay right here. Don’t move. I promise, I’ll be right back.”

She gave a small nod, wrapping her arms around herself again and shrinking into the shade of the marble archway like she belonged there. I turned and ran, skirts lifted slightly so I wouldn’t trip on the gleaming hallway floor.

The moment I rounded the corner and entered the main atrium, I spotted them: Oswald, Veronica, Cedric, Iris, and Harold, clustered near the refreshment table, chatting with strained energy as if waiting for the next piece of a story they still weren’t sure they believed.

“There you are!” Iris said, her eyes flashing. “You just vanished on us.”

“You’re not going to believe this,” I panted, grabbing Oswald’s sleeve. “She’s here. She’s real. The other me—the Adumbral me. She’s in the hallway near the conservatory. You have to come. Now.”

Veronica’s brow furrowed. “Wait—you saw her again?”

Cedric raised a skeptical brow, but followed. “If this is a joke, it’s elaborate. And I hate being part of performance art.”

“No joke,” I said, pulling them toward the back corridor. “You’ll see.”

We moved in a cluster, murmuring and stepping around curious festival-goers, our procession drawing a few curious glances. Oswald glanced at me as we neared the hall. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

“I’m not sure of anything,” I replied. “But I have to know what this means.”

We reached the hallway where I had left her, and there she was.

Dark Cynthia.

Still leaning in the shadows, her expression weary, her gaze flitting with doubt and fear. The sight of her again, the perfect mirror twisted by the weight of a gloomier world, sent a ripple of tension through the group.

I opened my mouth to speak to tell them this was it, this was the proof—

And then the world shuddered.

Not with sound. Not with motion. With absence.

The warmth of the air vanished. The gold light dimmed. Color drained from everything in an instant, as if reality itself had been bled dry.

The hallway, the chandeliers, the guests—even the ones at my back—all dulled to a uniform, haunting gray.

Veronica, mid-step, froze with one hand raised.

Oswald’s mouth hung open, caught on the curve of a word he would never finish.

I spun, panic rising in my throat. “What—what’s happening?!”

No one moved.

I turned to the others. “Cedric? Iris? Say something!”

Nothing.

Every face around me was still. The soft light of the chandeliers no longer flickered. Even the slight rustle of silk or the echo of shoes on marble had gone utterly, eerily silent.

“Are they—are they frozen?!” I demanded, stumbling toward Iris and waving a hand before her eyes. She didn’t blink.

“They’re not gone,” said a voice behind me.

I turned sharply to find Dark Cynthia still in the shadows, arms folded tightly over her chest. She hadn’t moved, but her eyes tracked mine with unease.

“I don’t think we should touch them,” she said softly. “Or try to break the stillness.”

“Why not? They’re stuck! This wasn’t supposed to happen. Why are they like this?”

“Because something pulled us out,” she whispered. “I’ve felt it before, like the world slipping. Like, we’re not entirely in one place anymore. Maybe this isn’t just a dream or an accident. Maybe we’re being watched.”

The gray around us pressed tighter, like fog that had forgotten how to move.

I looked again at my friends, Oswald’s eyes mid-squint, Cedric’s smirk half-formed like a mask. And I felt the pulse of something wrong at the edge of the silence. A humming, hollow presence behind the walls.

“Are we outside of time?” I asked, barely above a whisper.

Dark Cynthia didn’t answer.

Because maybe we both already knew.

The silence of the gray world stretched like gauze, thick and endless. I stood between frozen friends and the hollow pulse of stillness, heart racing with unanswered questions.

Then I noticed it.

Color, what little remained, was pulling toward a single direction. Pale tints of gold, sky blue, and silver-gray drained from the world like watercolor bleeding across wet paper, all seeping toward the far end of the hallway. Even Dark Cynthia’s black lace gown seemed to lose depth as the shadow tones in her skirt rippled and followed.

We looked at each other.

“The ballroom,” we said in unison.

We ran.

The color quickened its pace as we did, pulling faster, stretching, and spiraling like the tail of a comet. We chased it through the corridor, our steps the only sound in the silent, breathless house. Everything dulled behind us walls, banners, even light itself, as the vibrancy slipped through the air like ribbon toward the grand arch leading into the ballroom.

As we passed the threshold, the remaining fragments of color swirled like smoke into a single point on the marble floor—and then he appeared.

At the heart of the ballroom, standing as still as a statue surrounded by frozen dancers, was a figure dressed in a jester’s motley coat. Tight breeches clung to spindly legs, and a worn cap’n’bells dangled lazily, letting out tarnished sounding jingles. Covering his face was an ancient Greek theatre mask, the kind carved in tragedy—a weeping visage, solemn and cold.

The ballroom pulsed once. Light dimmed.

Then his garb changed.

When his eyes, though unseen behind the mask, turned toward me, the coat became soft white and radiant gold, embroidered with blooming lilies and sunbursts. The bells on his hat chimed with warmth.

But when his gaze flicked to her, his clothes dulled into shadowy velvets of black and red, etched with ivy and eclipses, the emblem of House Adumbral stark on one sleeve. The bells no longer rang.

Then he looked at both of us.

And his costume became something split—one half glowing with the gentle hues of House Lucidus, the other sunk in the deep, regal shadow of House Adumbral. A living contradiction. Harmony and ruin stitched at the seams.

“What… is he?” I whispered.

The jester said nothing.

Instead, he raised a hand and produced a marotte, the jester’s wand. Its head was fashioned in the shape of his own, with a mask like his and tiny bells dangling from the cap. It, too, mirrored the colors of both houses, half light, half dark.

“Hello?” I stepped forward, voice quivering. “Can you hear me?”

The jester twitched his head slowly, like a curious bird, but made no sound.

Dark Cynthia took a step toward him. “Are you the one doing this to us?”

Still no answer.

His hand slowly raised the marotte. He pointed it toward us, no words, no gesture of threat. Just a soft, deliberate motion.

Then the mask turned upward, as if gazing toward the chandelier above. The marotte followed.

He was showing us something.

“What does it mean?” I asked, barely daring to breathe.

But the jester only stood there, silent in his sorrowful mask, half wrapped in sunfire, half wrapped in dusk.

As if he were the keeper of a story we weren’t ready to read.