The Last Laugh

The dressing room mirror is cracked. A spiderweb fracture right over my left eye. Fitting. It matches the way I see the world now—broken, sharp, and dangerous.

I wipe the greasepaint from my face with a rough cloth. The smiling clown fades, revealing the hollow cheeks of the widow Freiton. The crowd loved it tonight. They laughed at the "Soul of Viyu" jokes, thinking it was just absurd surrealism. They didn't know they were laughing at a ghost story.

"Thirteen years, Galar," I whisper to the reflection. "Thirteen years chasing a shadow that glowed."

Galarian... my brilliant, obsessed fool. He wanted to give the world free energy. The Soul of Viyu. A vantablack substance that hummed with life, a dark star you couldn't hold but could feel in your teeth. He thought he was saving the world. He didn't realize he was just digging a very deep, very bright grave.

I light a cigarette. The smoke curls up, grey and lazy, unlike the frantic, choking smog of Craninal's streets. I can still hear the bass of Hellbound thumping in my memory. The "Last Breath" festival. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

Agent Sprite. Agent Laozi. I know their faces better than I know my own anymore. They didn't look like monsters. They looked like accountants. Boring. Efficient. They slipped that needle into his arm with the casual indifference of someone checking a watch. Alilberry. A natural death for an unnatural discovery.

The coroner called it heart failure. I call it a state-sanctioned execution.

I open the drawer and pull out the small, velvet box. Inside rests a single cufflink. It glows faintly, a pulsating darkness. A fragment of Viyu. The only thing they didn't find. It's cold to the touch, but it burns my skin.

"They think I'm crazy," I murmur, tracing the edge of the box. "The grief-stricken widow turned jester. Let them think it. The Jester is the only one allowed to speak the truth to the King without losing his head."

My "Butterflies" are out there. I saw the pins glinting in the smoky haze of the club. They are listening. They are waking up. We aren't a cult. We are a immune system reaction to a sickness.

I stand up, smoothing the silk of my robe. The Sultan of Butterflies is dead for the night. But the hunt? The hunt never sleeps.

"Laugh while you can, gentlemen," I say to the empty room, snuffing out the cigarette. "The punchline is coming. And it's going to kill."