Chapter 13– The Laughter in the Mist
The forest grew denser as they climbed away from the valley. The trees here were ancient, their roots twisting over the path like arthritic fingers.
Uzo walked in silence, the rhythm of his steps syncing with the throbbing ache in his side. The map Silas had given them was tucked into his belt, but the path to the Weeping Pass was still days away.
"You're quiet," Ronnie said, breaking the stillness. She was walking backward, eyes scanning the trail behind them.
"Just thinking," Uzo replied.
"About the King?"
"About the Clowns," Uzo admitted. "Brutes break bones.
Necromancers enslave bodies. But a House that weaponizes madness... how do you fight something that doesn't follow the rules of reality?"
Ronnie adjusted her grip on her chain-dagger. "You stab it. Same as everything else."
As if the forest heard her challenge, the wind changed.
The smell of damp earth and pine vanished.
In its place came a sickly, sweet scent like burnt sugar and rotting meat.
Uzo stopped.
"Do you smell that?"
Ronnie sniffed the air and grimaced. "Cotton candy? In the middle of nowhere?"
Then came the sound.
It wasn't a roar or a footstep.
It was a giggle. High-pitched, wet, and coming from everywhere at once.
He-hee...
Silas's warning screamed in Uzo's mind: If you hear laughter, don't run.
"Steady," Uzo whispered, his hand hovering over the Lexicon. "Don't look at the shadows."
The mist ahead of them began to churn. It didn't swirl naturally; it jerked and spasmed, changing color from gray to a bruised purple, then to a sickly neon green.
From the colored fog, a ball rolled out. It was a simple leather ball, painted with a smiling face. It stopped at Uzo's feet.
Then the face on the ball blinked.
"Tag," the ball whispered. "You're it."
Before Uzo could kick it away, the ball exploded into a cloud of glittering dust.
Uzo coughed, waving the dust away. When he opened his eyes, the forest was gone.
The trees were now tall, twisted pillars of candy-cane bone.
The ground was a checkerboard of black and white tiles that pulsed like living skin. The sky was a swirling vortex of yellow and red.
"Ronnie?" Uzo shouted,
"I'm here!" Her voice sounded distorted, like she was speaking underwater. She stood ten feet away, but she looked stretched, her limbs elongated like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.
"What is this?" she yelled, stumbling as the floor tiled beneath her tilted.
"An illusion," Uzo yelled back. "A Domain Expansion of the House of Clown!"
A figure dropped from the sky, landing silently on the checkerboard floor between them.
He was tall and impossibly thin, His suit was a patchwork of motley fabric diamonds of red and black but the fabric seemed stitched directly into his skin.
He wore a porcelain mask that covered the top half of his face. The mouth was exposed lips painted black, filed teeth bared in a permanent, gums-bleeding grin.
He bowed theatrically.
"Welcome, welcome! To the Stage of Broken punchlines!"
His voice scraped like a violin bow on rusted wire.
"I am Jester Malix. And King Lazarus has paid for a private show, he he he he"
Ronnie wasted no time. She threw her dagger. The chain lashed out, aiming for Malix's throat.
Malix didn't dodge. He simply popped.
His body burst into confetti.
Ronnie stared, confused.
"Missed me!" Malix whispered in her ear.
She spun around, but a gloved hand backhanded her hard—not with a fist, but with a rubber chicken.
The impact, however, sounded like a cannon blast. Ronnie flew backward, crashing into a candy-cane tree that shattered into razor-sharp shards of glass.
"Physics is such a bore, isn't it?" Malix giggled, pirouetting toward Uzo.
"Now, Nameless One. Let's see if you're ticklish."
He pulled a massive wooden mallet from his pocket—an object far too large to fit there. Runes of Distortion glowed pink along the handle.
He swung.
Uzo ducked, but the air pressure alone knocked him off balance.
The mallet hit the floor, and the tiles turned into quicksand. Uzo sank to his knees.
"The Word is Law!" Malix shrieked, swinging again. "And the Law is a Joke!"
Uzo struggled, the quicksand dragging him down.
He couldn't fight this with logic, He couldn't fight it with strength,
Malix was rewriting reality with every swing.
Silence, Uzo thought. Silence creates a blank page.
He closed his eyes, ignoring the spinning colors and the screaming laughter. He touched the Lexicon.
He didn't try to unmake the Jester. He tried to unmake the joke.
"Solemnity," Uzo whispered.
A wave of gray energy rippled out from him.
It wasn't violent. It was heavy. It was the feeling of a funeral, of a court sentence, of absolute, crushing seriousness.
The neon colors drained from the world.
The quicksand hardened back into dirt.
The candy-cane trees turned back into rotting pine.
Malix stumbled mid-swing. His giant mallet shrank, turning into a simple, rotting tree branch in his hands.
The Jester froze, his grin faltering.
"You..." Malix hissed, his voice losing its playful bounce. "You ruin the punchline. You're no fun."
Uzo pulled himself free from the dirt. The illusion was breaking. The House of Clown relied on chaos; Uzo had forced order upon them.
"I'm not here to entertain you," Uzo said coldly.
He lunged forward, not with magic, but with the spear he had kept from the outpost.
Malix tried to somersault away, but the "Solemnity" weighed him down.
He was just a man in a suit now,
Uzo drove the spear through Malix's shoulder, pinning him to a tree.
The Jester screamed—a sound that sounded like a balloon deflating.
Ronnie scrambled up, bleeding from her forehead where the glass had cut her. She rushed over, dagger raised.
"Wait," Uzo commanded.
Malix laughed, coughing up glittery blood.
"You think... he-hee... you think this stops the show? I'm just the opening act."
He looked at Uzo with wide, manic eyes.
"The Ringmaster knows where you are now. He smells the void."
Malix reached into his vest.
"And for my final trick..."
"Stop him!"
Ronnie yelled, but Malix crushed a small glass vial in his hand.
"BOOM."
It wasn't an explosion of fire. It was a flash of pure sound—a sonic boom of laughter that hit them like a physical wall.
Uzo and Ronnie were thrown backward, their ears ringing with a high-pitched whine.
When they looked up, the tree was empty.
Only the spear remained, embedded in the wood.
And hanging from the spear shaft was a single red nose, honking softly in the wind.
Ronnie groaned, holding her head. "I hate clowns. I really, really hate clowns."
Uzo walked over and yanked his spear free. The forest was quiet again, but the silence felt different now. It wasn't empty. It was watching.
"He marked us," Uzo said, crushing the red nose under his boot. "The illusion wasn't just an attack. It was a beacon."
He looked North, toward the mountains that were still miles away.
"We have to move. Run. Now."
They took off into the woods, leaving the smell of burnt sugar behind them, as the sun began to set on a world that was slowly losing its mind.