The jester raised his marotte to the ceiling and held it there, unmoving.

Above us, the glass dome of the ballroom chandelier began to shimmer like rippling water. Light fractured across its surface, and then time broke open.

Daylight.

Night.

Daylight again.

Then stars, blinding and ancient.

The world above the chandelier began to shift rapidly, flickering back and forth between radiant sun and a glittering void of stars. It was dizzying, beautiful, terrifying. The jester tilted his head, his mask forever weeping, and above us, the chandelier vanished entirely into the brightness.

In its place, a silent picture shows itself unfurled.

Not with frames or flickering images, but as if the sky itself had become a stained-glass window in motion.

Ten women stood in a circle—five on the left, cloaked in radiant gold, heads bowed toward a stylized sun. Five on the right, robed in silvers and midnight blue, knelt beneath the full moon. They prayed in unison, arms raised, hair flowing in slow, dreamlike waves.

The sky shifted again.

From the sun-worshipping women rose a being made of golden light. It resembled a seraphim, humanoid in form but crowned with six great wings, each one luminous and feathered with fire. Its eyes glowed with unbearable intensity, and its face was both beautiful and unreadable.

From the moonlit side came Umbrovultus.

Not just shadow this time. It emerged like a hole torn in the very fabric of the stars, its form coiling outward in slick, writhing masses, its many eyes glowing faint red, blinking slowly. Its mouth stretched open but made no sound.

They floated in opposition for a moment.

Then they collided.

The celestial seraphim struck first, a blazing arc of light slashing through the void—but Umbrovultus absorbed it, its form rippling. The seraphim wheeled back, wings flaring, casting lines of light across the vision.

But it wasn’t enough.

Umbrovultus expanded, black tendrils rushing forward, curling around the seraphim like vines of rot and ink. The image darkened. The light sputtered. And then—

The seraphim was swallowed whole.

The women—sun-prayers and moon-prayers alike were next. Their figures were consumed in a silent rush of void, like ashes drawn into a hurricane. The screen of sky shimmered, faded, and returned to a cold, still gray.

The jester slowly lowered his marotte. He did not speak. He simply watched us.

I turned to Dark Cynthia, my throat dry.

“Was that the past?” I asked. “Before both worlds split?”

Her gaze remained fixed above. “Maybe it was something older. The moment things broke. A war between beliefs. Sunlight and moonlight. Faith and fear.”

“And both sides summoned something they couldn’t control.”

“Neither side won,” she said, voice distant. “They both lost. It all ended the same.”

I looked up again at the now-empty sky above the ballroom, at the colorless ceiling, and then at the jester who stood at the center of the room. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

“Then why show us?” I whispered. “What are we supposed to do with this?”

Dark Cynthia’s voice was low, almost sorrowful. “Maybe… It’s a warning. Maybe it’s already happening again.”

We stood in silence. The jester remained in place, half clad in House Lucidus gold, half cloaked in the shadows of House Adumbral. Between us, the marotte trembled gently in his gloved hand, the bells silent.

The world had offered us a glimpse of its deepest scar.

And now it waited to see what we would do next.

The silence remained unbroken.

The chandelier hung motionless once more above us, cold and gray. The sky beyond the glass had emptied. The flickering between night and day was gone. No stars. No sunlight. Just stillness.

And time had not returned.

Oswald, Veronica, Cedric, Iris, and Harold appeared as if they had been teleported into the room from where we had left them. They were still frozen in place. The ballroom was motionless. The gray haze hadn’t lifted. We were alone in a world drained of breath and color.

“What if we’re stuck here?” I asked, voice trembling. “What if this is it?”

Dark Cynthia didn’t answer. She looked like she wanted to say something, but her mouth opened and closed without words.

A tightness built in my chest, panic twisting with frustration. I looked to the jester again, still standing with his marotte at his side. Watching. Always watching.

“Say something!” I shouted, the echo bouncing strangely in the frozen air. “What do you want from us?”

He didn’t move.

I snapped.

Fueled by fear, I ran across the ballroom floor. The marble tiles echoed with each footfall, each one more hollow than the last. My hands reached for him. I wanted to grab him, to shake him, to force him to explain why we were trapped here like ghosts in someone else’s memory.

But just as I reached out—

Two more jesters appeared.

They burst into being with no sound, no warning, no ripple in the air. One stood to his right, the other to his left, like mirror images reflected in opposite dreams.

They wore the same motley coats and cap’n’bells, but their masks were the twisted comedy to the original’s tragedy—smiling, stretched, unnatural.

One jester was robed in radiant whites and yellows, shimmering with golden sunbursts. The other, cloaked in the Adumbral colors of blood red and deep black, his sleeves lined in ivy and eclipses.

Both raised matching marottes.

The Lucidus jester’s was crowned with a grinning miniature of his own face, gleaming and bright. The Adumbral jester’s was darker, its bells rusted, its grin crooked like a cracked porcelain doll.

They pointed their marottes directly at us.

Light surged from the twin wands, and before either of us could react, we were yanked backward, lifted as though gravity had reversed. The air snapped and twisted around our feet, and the ballroom floor unfolded beneath us like a trap.

We slammed down at the center of the ballroom, at the heart of the motif carved into the marble. Neither of us could move.

It wasn’t pain that held us—it was presence. As though the room itself had hands.

We were bound by unseen threads, locked in place like marionettes with no strings, our arms frozen at our sides. The motif beneath us glowed faintly, pulsing like a heartbeat.

Then the jesters jumped.

All three launched into the air in perfect silence. They hovered, their limbs slack for just a moment, then began to dance. Twisting. Tumbling. Rotating in circles as if caught in an orbit. They moved with eerie rhythm, bodies tilting just slightly too far, heads rolling from side to side, bells chiming without sound.

Their marottes twirled.

The colors of their costumes bled into streaks in the air, light and shadow coiling together in long ribbons as they spun faster, the world spinning with them.

Then—

A crackle.

A shimmer.

Color returned.

The golden light of the chandelier reignited. Music, distant and echoing, filtered back into the room. The frozen guests stirred mid-motion. Iris blinked. Oswald exhaled. Cedric snapped back into his half-smirk.

The jesters were gone.

No sign. No footprints. No trace. Just me and my reflection, still standing breathless at the center of the floor, surrounded by people who hadn’t seen any of it.

As if the jesters had never been there at all.