“Am I a ghost?” Qube burst out. “Other ghosts are visible, but are there invisible ghosts? Are they around us all the time?”

“I — no, you’re not a ghost,” the Chosen One seemed surprised that this was the issue she was most concerned about. But really, he couldn’t just tell Qube that she was supposed to be dead and not expect her to fixate on the practicalities of it.

“Right, but the Evil Emperor never actually cursed me,” she said, seeking clarification.

“No,” he admitted.

“So what did he do to me? How did he get a lock of my hair? Why do I remember him saying he’d take my head, but not actually taking my head. If I’m not a ghost, does he have a ghost version of my head? Why wasn’t my hair a ghost hair then?”

The Chosen One swallowed. “Oh boy,” he said faintly, “that’s a lot of questions at once.”

Qube ruthlessly suppressed the urge to apologise for having too many questions.

“So you know how when you take certain Temple items, they duplicate?” the Chosen One said carefully.

“When I make twins, yes,” Qube replied.

“Right, well, that’s because those items are strongly tied to the main story of the simulation. I did tell you about the fact that this world’s a simulation, right?” He gave them all a bleary-eyed stare.

“Yes, but you said that tech was just another word for magic, and we already knew that it was a spell,” Qube waved away that revolution. “A simulation is just like a sustained spell, right?”

She’d already had her existential horror over discovering that her entire world was tied to a mana pool. This was old news.

“Sure, freaking out over the not-dead stuff but cool with the matrix stuff,” the Chosen One muttered.

“So my baby making is tied to the fact it’s a spell—Sorry, simulation?” Qube prompted.

“Yeah, so, the main story, which involves the Golden Prophecy, has stuff tied into it, like the gems and items and stuff,” the Chosen One said, slowly shuffling through the main hallway of the castle. “And the story involves you being dead, but the Devs expected me to have the others with me.”

He looked at the group. Sexy Screamy Spider Briar was still digging her claw into his shoulder, stopping him from getting too far ahead, but wasn’t looking at him. It was almost as if she was trying to give them some space to discuss Qube’s aliveness, without letting the Hero get away from the conversation. Sencha Bard was rearranging some of the flags tangled around Squiggles’s crowns, a task which seemed to absorb all his attention. Only Definitely Bad Guy, with his mishmash of bright red and icy blue hair, eyes and tattoos, looked back at the Chosen One.

“Well, not exactly looking like this, but the characters,” the Hero amended. “What it didn’t account for, however, was you.”

He looked at her on that last line, and she felt a thrill of power at the idea that a story strong enough to rule a world still hadn’t been enough to anticipate her.

Then she remembered that was because the Chosen One had broken it, rather than any intrinsic specialness in her, and felt marginally less powerful.

“So basically, when something happens that the story can’t account for, like someone it thinks is dead grabbing an item it knows that only the official party should be able to take cuz it’s in the Temple, it freaks out and does weird things,” he explained. “It’s the same with your spells.”

“I thought it was because my spells were tainted with my curse,” she whispered. That was her true special power. That was what had drawn the eyes of the Devs towards her, wasn’t it?

“Well, it’s cuz you’re supposed to be dead,” the Hero crushingly countered. “And since your spells are, uh, a part of you, and the story thinks you can’t be here, it messes with the parameters embedded in the others to keep them on track with what the story wants.”

“I knew it!” Sencha Bard exclaimed suddenly, startling everyone. He cleared his throat, and made an apologetic gesture. “My sincerest apologies for startling you all. But I knew that we were being forced in certain directions by a greater narrative. Why, I’ve found myself taking actions anathema to my character, and there was no chance I would have been so easily taken prisoner by that subpar Thieves Guild if fate hadn’t been guiding their hands.”

“Wait, what have you been doing that’s against your character?” the Chosen One asked, startled. “Was it all the creepy love stuff you were saying to everyone? I thought you were supposed to be the playboy guy.”

“My appreciation for all female forms is not, and has never been, creepy love stuff,” Sencha Bard said, sounding deeply offended. “I meant my chequered past as a Rogue. I was never able to reconcile my inability to make it as a Bard with my natural talents, and why I was continuously forced to turn to petty thievery.”

The rest of the group, who’d all heard the truly stunning songs composed by Sencha Bard, nodded along at this revelation.

“It didn’t make sense why someone with your genius for songwriting wouldn’t already be a fully fledged member of the Bardic Association,” Sexy Screamy Spider Briar said seriously.

“While I find your work derivative, and designed only for mass appeal rather than attempting to elevate the art form, I do find it strange that the uncritical public failed to become enamoured with you,” Definitely Bad Guy confessed.

“I knew you were destined for greatness!” Qube enthused, clasping her hands together. “Once you’re free from the restrictions to keep you in line with the story, I just know you’re going to become the most famous Bard in the world! Both worlds!”

Sencha Bard actually blushed at all the support.

“Many thanks, my dearest friends,” he said, his voice shaking with emotion. “When the rage becomes too much, it’s reminders of my very sincere affection for you all that helps me remember what’s important.”

“That’s why friendship is so important,” she reassured the Bard. “We all deal with heavy emotions, and the support of our loved ones is so vital.”

That’s right. Even as her worldview was altered, she still had her friends with her. Taking a deep breath, she tried to ground herself. This revelation that she was supposed to be dead, while primarily affecting her, was packaged with a lot of information for the other party members.

But no. She had to stay focused. She needed to find out more about herself, before diving into how it affected her friends. Otherwise, she just knew she’d never end up asking.

Squiggles, still clanking with all her crowns, wriggled free of Sencha Bard and slorp-clanked her way towards the Healer. A timid tentacle reached out and curled around Qube’s ankle.

“What about the lock of hair?” Qube managed to force herself to ask. “And what, exactly, happened in the village with the Evil Emperor and —”

A slicing motion. Pain, unending. The blue sky overhead, holding her, protecting her.

She didn’t finish her sentence.

“Well, you know how the story makes, uh, twins when it can’t reconcile what you’re doing with what’s supposed to be happening?” The Chosen One gave her a sheepish shrug.

“Yes,” Qube replied.

“Well… so, the Evil Emperor was supposed to have a lock of your hair from when he, uh, killed you. So it just made a twin.”

“Oh,” Qube said calmly. She was having trouble holding on to the comforting thick fog that had been so helpfully suppressing her deepest emotions for her.

They’d walked past the offshoot that led down to the dungeon, and had ignored all the other entrances that temptingly existed. Despite the city guards and thieves dire warnings, they hadn’t run into any castle guards. They hadn’t even detoured past the courtyard where the soldiers did their drills to the Evil Emperor’s daily motivational speech.

Where the Evil Emperor had looked at her.

The Chosen One, ignoring the pressure from Sexy Screamy Spider Briar’s claw, stopped walking and turned to look at Qube. Behind him, a grand staircase, identical to the one in her numbers dream, rose to dizzying heights.

It felt a bit like she was in a dream right now, being pulled inexorably towards the throne room. Before, she would have thought that it was her destiny dragging her to face the Evil Emperor. After all, that’s what she’d been training for her entire life. That’s what she’d been picked out by the Golden Prophecy for. That’s why she’d learned how to control her emotions, to always subjugate herself to the Hero, to be the best support and guidance she could be.

Her whole life had been dedicated to following the very thing that dictated her death.

And not just her death.

She realised suddenly that, if the Golden Prophecy had been carried out exactly according to its wishes, then no one originally from the village would have ever left it.

Felix was dead. Dead enough that even the Evil Emperor couldn’t revive him and use him to hurt them. He’d died that morning, when the golden light had sped across the sky and selected his house. All the other Potentials had died. Every single villager, except for maybe Mr. Igma, had been fated to die in the village that destiny-filled day.

It was an extraordinary waste of life.

And it was also utterly, utterly pointless.

“Why did we all have to die?” she asked the Chosen One, indignation seeping through the fog of nothingness in her mind.

“What — oh, in the village?” The Chosen One immediately caught her line of thought.

“Yes! If this is all just a story for a simulation, why would they need every single person in the village to die?” Qube felt as if she’d finally found solid ground beneath her feet.

She wasn’t gently sad about the situation. She was mad.

“It made sense if it was part of a Dark Prophecy, because that was for the side of Evil. Terrible, but from their perspective they were trying to do Evil, so of course they’d want to kill the village where all the Potential Chosen Ones lived. But if it’s one story, for some military, then what was the point of slaughtering our entire village? If the Evil Emperor was so bound by the narrative that the story couldn’t even imagine that I wouldn’t be killed —” she shoved away the painful flashbacks that flared the instant she said that. She didn’t have time for trauma, she was making a point! — “then it also means that it knew you would have to follow the Golden Prophecy and leave the village. There wasn’t any room for you to be killed that day according to a Dark Prophecy!”

The Chosen One rubbed his nose as he thought.

“Yeah, I was always going to be leaving the village,” he confessed.

“But you’re not even from the village!” Qube nearly shouted. “You’d only shown up that morning! So why kill everyone there? It doesn’t even work with your ‘people must have free will and Evil is a result of that’ argument, since the script was so heavy that it took you throwing me into the sky to break me free of it. There wasn’t any free will from any of the villagers that day! We never even had a chance!”

The Hero grimaced. He’d progressed from rubbing his nose to rubbing his entire face. A fragment of Qube felt guilty about piling so much on her already beleaguered friend who she knew full well wasn’t responsible for the Devs’ decisions, but the rest of her was aflame with passion.

“I think… it was meant to motivate me?” he half suggested, half asked.

“But you were already motivated! You had a Golden Prophecy to fulfil!”

“I dunno,” the Hero confessed. “It’s just what they always do.”

“They always murder a bunch of villagers to motivate an already motivated Hero?” Qube asked, aghast.

“It’s tradition,” he explained. “It’s practically a cliché at this point. Maybe they were trying to be ironic?”

“Everyone I’d ever known was killed for tradition?” Qube hit a new octave in indignation. “I was decapitated — shut up, memories! — and parts of me stolen from my ironic c-corpse just because that was the way things were always done?”

That was it. That was the absolute last straw. When she next met the Devs, she was going to have words with them. And she was going to make it her life’s mission to destroy the tradition of village destruction if it was the last thing she ever did!

Then they would know the true meaning of irony!