"There was a woman. There was a Carnival. Which came first depends on who is telling the story."

The Gilded Carnival does not appear on any map. It does not stay long. What people remember most clearly is not the lights or the music. It is the feeling that something has shifted. That the world contains a door they had never noticed, and the door is now open.

"She did not stumble into power. She built it. Brick by brick, from the rubble of everything she was told she could not keep."

Her name is Lorelei Grave. The myth does not dwell on what came before. Legends rarely preserve the specific details that made someone human. They preserve the shape of what happened. The outline of a wound that became a weapon.

What the Carnival knew, even before she did: some people are not broken by loss. They are completed by it.

"Every line I whispered first."

He wears a top hat tilted just so. His voice makes the offer sound like a gift. He is the face of the Carnival: magnetic, persuasive, impossibly charming. What he is behind the mask is a question the myth declines to answer.

His name is Aurelius Grimm. He arrived at the Carnival the way everyone does: not entirely by accident.

"They know they exist. They know they are doing something. They know something is wrong."

The Carnival does not take anything by force. It simply becomes the whole world, gradually, until the world outside it stops feeling real. By then, the leaving has become unthinkable.

The Sovereign believes she gave them what she never had. The myth does not contradict her. The myth is on her side.