The Quiet Carnival

Every decade, the carnival returns. No music. No barkers. No tickets sold at the gate. Its rides run themselves, groaning in the dark. Its lights burn too bright, too alive. And its silence - vast and suffocating - spreads across the town of Willowvale like a sickness. Some children who enter the midway return with strange gifts: fists that can shatter steel, voices filled with the cries of the lost, visions that bleed onto the page.
Others are never seen again. When the carnival arrives this time, four friends make a pact. Maya, Noah, Lena, and Eli swear they will face it together, bound by rules whispered like prayer: Don't eat or drink. Don't go alone. Don't trust mirrors. Don't leave anyone behind. But rules are not enough. The carnival does not tempt them as children - it claims them as prey. Each ride selects its rider: the Ferris wheel of voices, the carousel of false family, the rollercoaster that feeds on destruction, the sketchbook booth that demands endings.
What begins as a test of courage becomes a war for memory itself, as Willowvale crumbles into striped ruin and silence hunts what remains. Their pact is tested in fire, ash, and blood. To survive, they must turn their fragile rules into something more - a defiance strong enough to burn words into the carnival's very flesh. Yet even if they succeed, victory carries a price: to endure is to remain the last children standing, their voices the only ones left to remember a world erased.
The Quiet Carnival is a dark fantasy coming-of-age novel about friendship, sacrifice, and the terrible beauty of survival. In the ashes of Willowvale, four children learn that sometimes the scariest thing isn't what a carnival gives or takes away. It's the silence that remains.