Chapter 6: The Carnival of False MemoriesSaint Elora University, One Week After the Fog
658 Words
Reality had never truly returned. It only wore a mask now—tightly stitched, porcelain-thin, and cracking.
Classes resumed. Bells rang at exact seconds. Students walked in perfect synchrony. The laughter in the hallways sounded like it had been edited in, looped audio fed into the minds of puppets. And Linet—Linet moved through it all like a passenger trapped in someone else’s body.
She hadn’t slept. Not truly. Whenever her eyes closed, she found herself back in the chapel basement—the one that didn’t exist on any blueprint—surrounded by mirrors that showed versions of herself blinking at different times. One cried. One bled. One smiled.
Each version whispered the same name.
Rocky.
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It began with The Black Bell. No one remembered it ringing before, yet now everyone acted as though it had always signaled the start of the Carnival of Commemoration. An ancient school tradition, they claimed. A celebration of founding legends. A purge of misaligned memories.
Saint Elora burst into colorless pageantry. Pale masks, velvet robes, mechanical dancers wound by gears that didn’t exist. Every student wore white gloves. Every professor smiled too wide.
Kendi hadn’t spoken in days. She now wore a veil, claiming it protected her from “them”—though she wouldn’t say who they were. Her journals had changed handwriting. She denied ever writing them.
Eli was gone. Officially expelled for “fractal-induced psychosis,” a phrase Linet overheard behind one of the administrator’s doors—which had no handle on the inside.
No one remembered the fog.
Except Linet.
And Rocky.
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Rocky had stopped pretending. He no longer walked—he glided. Through doors that opened before he touched them. Past mirrors that refused to reflect him. Students parted like bloodless waves when he passed. Every clock he walked beneath ticked backward for five seconds. A ripple in the air followed him, subtle but undeniable—like heat, but cold.
He approached Linet in the middle of the so-called carnival. Music played, but it was off-key, bent like memory through trauma. Harlequins spun in place, whispering calculus equations backwards. A clown bled black ink from its grin.
Linet stared at him. Her vision doubled. He wore nothing extraordinary, but still managed to blot out everything around him. Like a dead star. Pulling all gravity inward.
“Do you remember the first lie?” he asked.
Her mouth trembled. “What…?”
“The first one you told yourself. Before all this. Before you let me in.”
She tried to back away, but her legs moved forward instead.
“You told yourself you were sane,” he said, his voice now hers, echoing in her head. “You told yourself you had choices.”
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They stood inside the Grand Library now. She hadn’t walked here. Time had jumped. Or bent.
Books rearranged themselves as she blinked—forming words, then gibberish, then sigils. She heard humming from inside the walls. A heartbeat from the ceiling.
Rocky opened a page in a black book. Her name was written over and over.
“Do you want freedom?” he asked.
She nodded.
He smiled. “Then choose your prison.”
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There were three doors. One golden, one made of mirror, one pulsing like flesh.
She picked the mirror. It shattered on contact, swallowing her in silver mist.
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She woke up in her dorm room. Sunlight. Laughter outside. Normalcy.
Kendi sat beside her, smiling. “You fainted at the carnival. Everything’s fine now.”
Linet blinked. The mirror reflected her perfectly. No glitch. No whispering.
Rocky was gone. No one remembered him.
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Weeks passed. Grades returned. The seasons changed. Linet made new friends. Studied. Slept. Dreamed. Laughed.
But sometimes, just before bed, she’d find a small smudge on the wall. Like a thumbprint. Or a spiral.
And once—just once—when she passed by a window…
Her reflection didn’t blink.
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- Writer
