Chapter 127: Festival Mask
The dissent hid inside the celebration the way a seed hid inside a fruit — enclosed by sweetness, invisible until you bit deep enough.
Ryn found it on the third night.
Glamhall’s evening festivals were performances — stage-managed, choreographed, running on a schedule that the Revist priesthood maintained with clockwork precision. From sunset to midnight: six scheduled entertainments across the city’s four main plazas, each drawing hundreds of attendees. Theater in the Grand Plaza. Music in the Harvest Square. Dance in the Moonlit Garden. And in the Artisan’s Court — the smallest, least prominent plaza, tucked between a warehouse district and a residential quarter — a form of entertainment that Ryn had never seen before.
Puppet theater. But not the children’s version — not bright colors and simple stories. This was adult puppet theater, performed with rod-puppets the size of children, operated by a troupe of five masked puppeteers who worked in coordinated silence. The puppets were intricate — jointed, expressive, dressed in costumes that replicated the distinctive clothing of real institutions with precision that was impossible to mistake.
The performance was called "The Clockmaker’s Garden."
The stage: a miniature garden, beautiful, filled with flowers made of cloth. In the garden sat a clockmaker — a puppet with grey robes and many hands, each hand working a different mechanism, each mechanism connected to a different flower. The clockmaker tended the garden through the mechanisms: turning a crank made a flower bloom, pulling a lever made rain fall, adjusting a gear changed the season.
The garden was beautiful. The flowers bloomed. The rain fell. The seasons turned.
Then a flower fell off its mechanism. It lay on the ground — disconnected from the system, no longer blooming on command. The clockmaker noticed. He reached for the flower. But instead of reattaching it to its mechanism, he *replaced* it — pulling a new flower from his workbench, identical to the original, plugging it into the vacant slot. The old flower remained on the ground.
The puppeteers continued. More flowers fell — one by one, disconnected, replaced. The clockmaker’s garden remained beautiful. The mechanisms worked. The rain fell. The seasons turned. But on the ground, a growing pile of discarded flowers — each one real, each one replaced by a copy, each one forgotten the moment it stopped serving the mechanism.
No words. No narration. No explanation.
The audience — maybe eighty people, standing in the small plaza’s lamplight — watched in absolute silence.
***
"It’s political," Thresh said, afterward.
"Obviously."
"Not obviously. Not to most people. Most people watch ’The Clockmaker’s Garden’ and see a story about beauty and impermanence. The symbolism is ambiguous enough to survive casual interpretation. It’s only political if you already know what the Shimmerfields’ propaganda infrastructure does — if you understand that the clockmaker is the Sovereign, the garden is the kingdom, the flowers are the people, and the mechanism is the system."
"And the discarded flowers?"
"The people the system doesn’t need anymore. The miners with nerve damage. The Fishers who don’t participate in governance. The Lizardman population declining while Human populations grow. The individuals who fall off the mechanism — not because they failed, but because the mechanism moved past them." Thresh’s voice was quieter than usual. "The puppeteers aren’t Mechanists. They’re not heretics. They’re artists. And they’re asking a question that the Revist priesthood’s official performances never ask: what happens to the flowers that fall?"
Ryn walked back through Glamhall’s festival streets. The music still played. The colors still glittered. Above the city, the Dreamsong Moth was completing its evening arc — vast, luminous, its wings casting the kingdom’s founding myth in living light across the rooftops. The moth showed heroes and forges and divine grace. It did not show discarded flowers.
Curated truth. Selected stories. The forge-worker’s hands never shown. The Moth shows what the goddess wants you to see. The puppet theater shows what she doesn’t.
The puppet troupe was performing dissent — not protest, not rebellion, not disruption. Dissent. The quiet, artistic, ambiguous expression of a question that the official narrative didn’t include. What happens to the discarded flowers? What happens to the people the system replaces? What happens to the stories that the Shimmerfields chooses not to tell?
"How long have they been performing?"
"The troupe? Three years, based on the references I’ve found. They rotate venues — never the same plaza twice in a row. Never officially scheduled. They arrive, they perform, they leave. The Revist priesthood knows about them. The local Crucible administration knows."
"And nobody shuts them down?"
"The performance is ambiguous. It can be interpreted as a philosophical meditation on impermanence, which is doctrinally acceptable. Shutting it down would require the authorities to explain the political interpretation — which would mean admitting that the political interpretation exists, which would mean admitting that the official narrative is incomplete." Thresh paused. "You can’t censor ambiguity without defining it. And defining it gives it more power than the performance itself."
The trap of curated truth: you couldn’t suppress the uncurated version without acknowledging that curation existed.
***
Lysa found them at the inn.
She had been elsewhere — family contacts, she’d said, which Ryn had learned meant either personal business or intelligence gathering or both. She sat at their table with the particular composure of someone who had learned something and was deciding how much to share.
"The puppet troupe is protected," she said.
"Protected by whom?"
"By the system. Think about it. The Shimmerfields produces the kingdom’s official narrative — the curated truth that keeps a million believers emotionally connected. But curated truth produces skepticism in the people who are smart enough to notice the curation. If those people have no outlet for their skepticism, it festers. It becomes Mechanist-level disillusionment. It becomes dangerous."
She leaned forward.
"The puppet troupe is the outlet. A controlled space where dissent can be expressed — artistically, ambiguously, safely. The people who watch ’The Clockmaker’s Garden’ leave feeling like they’ve participated in something critical. They’ve seen behind the curtain. They’ve engaged with the truth the official narrative hides. And then they go home, and they feel better, because the dissent has been *expressed* — processed, released, discharged — without producing any actual change."
"A safety valve."
"The Sovereign designs systems. Systems need safety valves. The puppet troupe is the Shimmerfields’ safety valve — the controlled space where discontent is expressed, experienced, and metabolized before it becomes structurally dangerous." She paused. "The troupe probably doesn’t know this. They think they’re rebels. Artists speaking truth to power. They don’t realize that power left a space for them to speak in — because power understood that the alternative was silence, and silence eventually exploded."
Ryn sat with this. The puppet troupe — five masked artists, performing in a small plaza, asking questions the official narrative wouldn’t ask. Was their dissent real? Was their doubt genuine? Yes. Absolutely yes. The flowers fell. The system replaced them. The question was true.
But the space for the question was designed. The safety valve was engineered. The freedom to ask was part of the architecture.
Even the dissent is by design.
The Shimmerfields glittered outside the inn window. The festivals continued. The music played. And somewhere in a small plaza between a warehouse and a house, a puppet lay on the ground — a flower that had fallen off the mechanism, waiting for someone to notice.
Someone always noticed. That was by design, too.