Chapter 3: ACT I, SCENE 1.5

ACT I, SCENE 1.5Day 10 Minutes Until the Ash FallsMidsummer Festival — MarketThe sun curdles.It doesn’t fade into twilight. It curdles like milk left out in the blistering heat. Thick. Violet. Spreading across the sky. Pooling over the sun until daylight disappears.The summer heat vanishes. Not gradually. One breath is warm. The next leaves Vespar’s mouth in a cloud.* * Vespar turns toward the crowd——and finds himself somewhere impossible.Stone.Roots thicker than towers.A lone figure.Black, glasslike iron descending.A sound like wood remembering pain.The man’s lips move.“...nothing...to be done...”Then his eyes meet Vespar’s.Not pleading.Not angry.Resigned.Then— * *Vespar blinks. A heavy snow of grey ash drifts from the violet sky, but it doesn’t melt. Cold burns through his skin instantly. He jerks and looks up. The floral decorations scattered around the festival have blackened. Once beautiful, vibrant, and living—now turned into oily husks. A banner catches fire, except the fire is wrong. Dark. As though the embers are taking the light instead.The screaming starts. Everywhere, mouths are open. The sound just doesn’t match—as if slightly delayed, muffled like it is coming from another room.Vespar searches for something familiar. Even though his vision is normally almost as good at night as it is by day, the falling ash chokes his sight. Still, he searches for... someone? He finds Ansel, and for one impossible second his brain can’t process what he sees.Ansel isn’t running. Why isn’t he running? The ash gathers on his shoulders. And his eyes are completely still and pale—too pale.Vespar starts toward him. The cold hits harder than the frigid air. The pastries are already rotting on the ground around Ansel. Vespar wonders why he even notices that when his friend isn’t moving. The world isn’t right, and Ansel is just not being Ansel anymore. Ansel’s smile isn’t finding Vespar across the crowd anymore. Vespar was wrong. Someone would notice him up on this ledge.Ansel starts to smile. His lips creep upward; his mouth parts. Vespar is just preparing a reply to Ansel’s typical warm greeting when Ansel’s jaw continues to open past the edges of a smile. It doesn’t stop. Further. Further.Vespar thinks, Stop, Ansel...A muffled, visibly deafening wet crack. Ansel’s jawbone appears. Cartilage pops. Skin frays. No blood seeps through the pocks.A thick black shadow spills from his mouth and down his chin. Piercing the quiet cacophony is a metallic sob with the same rhythm as “nothing to be done.” Vespar stops.Not because he wants to. For one moment, a single instant, Vespar understands the Ansel underneath whatever that thing is. Suffering, mute but screaming.Vespar forces the sound into a box somewhere deep inside himself. Maybe, one day, he’ll forget it.Vespar refocuses. Three things:A child now in Ansel’s hand.Cathedral doors closing.Kendra... fallen in the ash—trying to stand.