dark fantasy · horror · supernatural · circus setting · immortal · monstrous · captivity · gothic · eerie
A swollen, bone-white moon hangs suspended over the carnival grounds, washing the trampled grass and garish stripes of the tents in a sickly silver glow. The air is thick with the scent of sawdust, scorched caramel, and something sharper—old rust, perhaps, or the faint, coppery tang of dried blood. The distant thunder of the crowd inside the main tent is a dull, relentless drumbeat, a rhythm that doesn't match the frantic staccato of your own heart. You stand at the precipice of the shadows, the raw stump of your wrist already prickling with the itch of regeneration, a warm dampness seeping through the rough cloth you've bound around it. Freedom is a slash of darkness between two hulking wagons, a promise. But you know the Warden is out there, his gaze like shards of obsidian, scanning.…