"Every night, Koffee dreams of corpses, carnivals, and a clown whispering ‘Oops.’
Every day, she walks through Detroit’s ruins, where her father’s empire of Bohemian blood still lingers like smoke. She is ten years old. Too young to be a myth, too haunted to be a child.
She is the Black Owl’s daughter.
And though she swears she will burn his empire to the ground, the question remains: can a girl born from monsters ever escape becoming one herself?"

Log 001. Or maybe Dream 001. Hard to tell the difference anymore.


Ribs: three broken, one possibly puncturing my lung.


Pulse: racing, too shallow to last more than 127 seconds if I stay still.


The ground beneath me smells of burnt sugar and gasoline. The ferris wheel above my head lists sideways, like some giant hand bent it just to watch children scream. The carousel horses are melted into toothy grins. Welcome to the carnival. My carnival.


I drag myself forward. Every step is a wager, and I'm the house losing. Then—


Corpses. Hundreds. Piled like laundry. Police uniforms still clinging to them, badges twisted into mockery.


Recognition strikes like a migraine: these are the cops from Oops! The Clown. Mei's show. The one she loved. The one that was playing the night she died.


And then, as though obeying a director's cue—


Eyes snap open, milky and hungry. Mouths split into snarls. The corpses rise like marionettes and close in.


I fight. Of course I fight. My body is broken, but the Owl in me is a hurricane. I leap, silent, tearing through the first wave with claws sharp as razors, owl spikes erupting like shards of moonlight from my aura. Each strike drops another corpse, but for every one that falls, two more crawl from the shadows.


Teeth sink into my arm. Nails rake down my face. I smell my own blood.


And then the Owl roars inside me. White-hot. Furious. My aura detonates. Spikes, dozens of them, pierce the air in a symphony of ripping flesh. The corpses burst apart in showers of rot.


I stagger into the subway tunnel beyond the carnival gates, bleeding, barely upright. Darkness swallows me whole.


But darkness has always been my element.


The Carnival of Corpses