The true power is in the story itself, the Goddess said.

“All I’m saying is, the sooner we can dismantle the class system and rebuild a truly egalitarian society, the better,” said Nell.

“You make it sound as though no noble deserves their position,” protested Jay. “But some noble titles are granted as a recognition of merit.”

These meetings always ended up going around in circles like this, which is why Belle found them so tedious and exhausting, even if the rebels… had some points. She’d actually brought her fiance, Jay with her this time because she hoped his calm, non-nonsense personality would help keep things on task, but so much for that…

Nell slammed her beer on the table. “Perhaps you may have earned your rank, but can you say the same thing of your unborn children?”

“Nell!” said Bernard. “That’s taking it a little too far, bringing his unborn children into this.”

“Actually our unborn children will inherit my rank, if any,” interjected Belle.

“Even worse!” said Nell. “Can you really say that you think arbitrary inheritance, the mere accident of birth, is a just and fair way to govern a society?”

Bernard patted Nell on the back placatingly and interjected, “What Nell is trying to say is, is that rebuilding our government on the ideals of republicanism would benefit everyone. Lady Belle, hasn’t your own family also been hurt by the unjust laws that separate us by class? It’s not just the peasants. The nobles are overly restricted by the current system as well.”

Nell scoffed. “Restricted, maybe, but not oppressed.”

Belle sighed and took a sip of her beer, settling in to half-listen to a long rant. At least she was starting to get used to the bitter swill they served at this back-alley pub. The first night she’d come to meet with the rebels she’d barely been able to drink it, and everyone had stared at her. Partly because she had been far too overdressed for this part of town. But she’d learned to dress down significantly and drink her beer without a fuss, so now she mostly went unnoticed.

Except Belle could sense someone watching her right now.

She turned around and caught the eye of a figure in a shimmery blue cloak standing by the doorway, wildly gesturing for Belle to come over in a way that was not subtle or sneaky at all.

Collette.

Belle hurried over to her friend. “What is it?” she hissed. “I’m supposed to be the primary contact with the rebels, and you’re supposed to be the silent partner secretly providing supplies, right? We can’t let them know your face. You need to get out of here.”

“I know, but you need to come with me,” whispered Collette. “I just got a message from Ulrich, who’d had a message from Corvina. We need to divest ourselves from the rebels immediately. There’s imminent danger.”

Belle glanced back over at the rebels, who were still arguing animatedly with her fiance.

Bernard and Nell were absolutely infuriating. They were obnoxious and wrongheaded, and Belle utterly hated talking to them about almost anything.

But also… Bernard was one of the genuinely sweetest men Belle had ever met, and Nell… well… Nell was a bit of an ass, but she was an ass because of just how deeply she cared about people and their wellbeing. And that was worth something.

And they were both incredibly naive. It was honestly a miracle that they hadn’t been caught and executed for sedition by now.

Could Belle really just… abandon them?

Belle turned back towards Collette. “Have you told Nia yet?”

“Not yet. I was going to tell her earlier because she was supposed to join me for dinner today, but she never showed up. Do you have any idea where she could be?”

A story has no consciousness, but it does have a will. A story wants to flow down a certain path the same way water wants to flow down a riverbed.

Rain hadn’t expected this new job to be so damn difficult. It should have been an easy break-in into an unguarded house, a few quick stabs directed at the correct sleeping figure, and then away into the night. Simple. Clean.

Rain dropped from the ceiling and landed directly on top of a guard. In a fraction of a moment, the guard lay still.

What Rain hadn’t been expecting was for a small townhome on some no-name street to have one guard each at the front and back doors, and one guard freely roaming the hallways.

…and one guard standing watch in the actual bedroom of his target, apparently.

Rain owed a lot to the Assassin’s Guild. The Guild took Rain in when they had nowhere else to go, gave them everything they needed, and taught them a good trade… Rain didn’t want to pay the Guild back by tarnishing their reputation. That was the only reason Rain was here. They wanted a clean break from the profession. No loose ends. No unfulfilled debts.

The struggle with the bedroom guard was a bit messier, but it was over soon enough. That had to be the last of them. And there was the target, a peaceful figure still slumbering underneath her covers.

Rain felt something heavy hit their back.

They spun around. Some guy, a young Quellinian in a butler’s uniform, had literally thrown a book at them. The look in his eyes was admirably defiant, but Rain really didn’t have time for this.

“There’s an alchemical alarm set up around the perimeter,” said the butler. “The master of the house will be back here with reinforcements any second!”

“I guess I’d better work quickly then,” said Rain, chucking a dagger at the butler’s thigh, turning away before the scream and the thud.

The woman in the bed barely stirred, even as the Unseen Rain stood over her. She was an older woman, with warm brown skin and wild dark hair that fanned out like a halo across her pillow.

Her eyes fluttered open. “Cedric? Have you come back for me at last, my love?”

“Nope,” said Rain. And then, “Sorry.”

A moment later it was over.

Rain would be glad to be out of the business once and for all. The work just wasn’t quite as satisfying as it had once been.

Except a story, unlike a river, can easily go back upstream and reshape the riverbed from the beginning, if it needs to.

If a story really needs you to do something, it will find a way to make you do that thing. Whether you actually want to or not.

Nia began running as soon as she felt the alarm being tripped. It had been tripped before by door-to-door salesmen and by a couple of different servants who had forgotten to be careful around the entrances, so it was probably nothing. Nia told herself it was probably nothing. Over and over again she repeated it. But she ran anyway.

Nia’s mother had actually been doing really well lately. The doctors all said they were astounded by her progress. She was having a lot fewer bad days, and her good days were better than ever. She had even been helping Nia with some of the paperwork for the embassy.

But she was still taking alchemical tinctures to help her sleep at night. If there was a break-in, she likely wouldn’t even be able to wake up to try to defend herself…

It was nothing. It had to be nothing. She was only a block away from home now. She would know soon enough.

The guard at the front door was dead.

The guard at the back door had clearly run over at the sound of the fight. Nia found him dead in the front hallway.

The roaming guard on the second floor was dead, too. She had been running towards the stairs.

The guard in the bedroom was extremely dead. And the room had been tossed.

Gatik was slumped by the bedroom door, wounded but not dead yet.

“The assassin…” said Gatik. His voice was strained. He must have had to force the words out past the pain and shock and blood loss. “Right before he left, the assassin said that if we wanted to blame someone, we should blame the Grand Duke…”

Nia was wearing her sunglasses, the ones that showed her distorted words, so she could see that Gatik was speaking the truth, or at least what he believed to be the truth.

Nia walked further into the room, feeling the world spinning on its axis around her.

Nia’s mother was in bed, lying peacefully with her eyes closed and her arms crossed over her chest. Her throat had been slashed. It would have been over quickly.

“My lady…” said Gatik. “Are you going to be okay?”

“Yes,” lied Nia, reaching out to stroke her mother’s hair. “I’ll help you to a healer, but I won’t be able to stay with you. There are a number of letters I need to write as soon as possible.”

But a story never does its own dirty work. Not directly. A story uses characters to push other characters along certain paths. To keep the plot on track.

The control is subtle—imperceptible, even—so that, to the casual observer, everyone involved seems to have free will.

Grand Duke Marshal was quite pleased when he heard the news of the Quellinian ambassador’s death. That assassin hadn’t been quite so useless after all.

Even at the best of times, the aristocracy of the capital was a tangled web of plots, schemes, grudges, and alliances. This particular death had been carefully calculated to disrupt as much of that web as possible. Within days, the aristocracy would go from making snide remarks at each other at parties to openly killing each other in the streets.

And, if Marshal was really lucky, this might even spark an outright war with Quellinia.

With a war on, the people would have no choice but to turn to Marshal and his armies for protection. And after he saved all of them from the big bad invaders, they would be practically begging him to take the throne.

Marshal tore the note he was holding into little pieces and let the breeze carry it away.

“Come on, then!” he called to the organized line of men behind him. “Let’s move out!”

He spurred his horse on, whistling a jaunty tune to himself. His army marched closely behind him.

They were on their way to Longren, and to victory.

In many ways, the characters that best serve to move the plot forward are the characters who are already heavily manipulated by the story themselves.

Every aspect of their being—every personality trait, every past trauma, every future goal, is carefully constructed to ensure that, when push comes to shove, that character will do what needs to be done for the sake of the plot.

Bishop Geist groaned.

Her head hurt. The last thing she remembered was dictating a letter to the high priests of Longren. They had to know what to expect when the Grand Duke arrived. Hopefully they would be able to keep a proper eye on him and stop him from gaining too much power in the region, but the Bishop didn’t have high hopes for them.

Bishop Geist would have gone to Longren herself, except the Emperor had formally ordered her to stay in the city. He needed her help with some project or other, apparently, but it was just made-up busy work. This whole alliance had been an incredible mistake.

Eva had promised to help her out with this, but now the Bishop couldn’t even get in contact with her. Some investment she’d turned out to be. Useless girl.

Had the Bishop been so frustrated with the whole situation that she’d abandoned her usual temperance and drunk her way through the whole wine cellar? She felt like she had a massive hangover.

Also her wrists hurt for some reason. And she was laying on a really hard surface. And she couldn’t move.

Bishop Geist opened her eyes.

Eva was standing over her, smiling. Her face was covered in dried blood.

“What the—“

Eva covered the Bishop’s mouth with a hand. “Ssshhhh,” said Eva. “It will all be over soon.”

Eva tied a piece of cloth around Bishop Geist’s mouth, gagging her.

“I don’t really want to hear any more of your lectures,” said Eva, backing up.

They were clearly still in the Bishop’s office, but Eva had pushed her desk against the door to blockade them in. The middle of the floor, where the Bishop was lying, had been cleared of all rugs and furniture. Now Eva was drawing some kind of chalk circle around the Bishop.

The Bishop began struggling against the ropes that were keeping her tied up. She tried to scream through the gag.

“Oh, shut up!” said Eva. “You’re giving me such a headache. You have no idea what I’ve been through in the past few days.”

Eva went up to the desk, where a book lay open, and consulted something in it. Then she slammed the book shut.

“That stupid assassin broke my portal,” said Eva. “So the cursed thing spat me out somewhere half-a-day’s ride outside of the city. No one wanted to give me a ride looking like this so I had to make the rest of the trip in quick bursts of teleportation while my mana recovered. And that whole time I had to think about how I could possibly rework this spell to operate properly without having Anne’s body present. Luckily, I think I should be able to make use of a transformation spell. Of course, your body isn’t an ideal starting point, but… we’ll make do.”

The Bishop tried to squirm her way out of the center of the circle.

“Will you stop that?” said Eva, exasperated. She grabbed the Bishop’s legs and dragged her back to the center of the circle. “It’s pointless trying to get away. The ritual is almost complete anyway. There’s just one more step.”

Eva reached back and picked up a knife that had been set at the edge of the circle. “Now, do you have any last words?”

Eva removed Bishop Geist’s gag.

“You ungrateful little—“

Eva put the gag back on.

“Ungrateful?” said Eva. “You were the one who taught me to use my magic properly. You were the one who told me that what I wanted was wrong, that instead of wanting her I should serve her, do everything in my power to give her a perfect, happy life. I’m just doing what you taught me to do.”

Eva bent over, looking the prone Bishop in the eye. “You should be proud of me,” she said.

Eva raised her knife and the magic circle began to glow. She knelt by the Bishop, still holding her knife aloft, and she whispered in the Bishop’s ear.

“Anne, it’s time to come home.”

Eva stabbed the Bishop in the heart.

The original Saintess was pacing back and forth in her empty void when she felt the sudden sharp pain in her heart. Ever since she’d abandoned her body she hadn’t felt anything at all. This was wrong, this was wrong, this was—

She could feel the story pulling her back in.

The Saintess screamed.

And then she disappeared.

And in the empty pocket dimension she left behind, these words began to write themselves in the air in a curling, softly-glowing script:

Those who serve the story play an incredibly important role, even if they’re otherwise minor characters. After all, what’s a story without a plot?

There must be a plot. Events must move towards their inevitable conclusion, or else that’s not even a story anymore. That’s just… random events. That’s just life.

The purpose of a story is to be something far more grand than mere life.

That’s why it’s important to set things right when they go wrong. It’s the correct thing to do. It’s the necessary thing to do. It's the only thing to do.

The story will be corrected.