Join It?

Kaelen’s avatar dissolved completely for a moment, then reformed, its shimmering form more unstable than ever. ‘Join it?’ he repeated, the words laced with a mixture of disbelief and intellectual horror. ‘What in the name of the First Story are you talking about? We are the Guild. We deconstruct narratives, we don’t… participate in them. To join her story would be to accept its premise, to validate its truth. It is a violation of every principle we hold dear.’ ‘Your principles are irrelevant,’ the Anchorite responded, its voice regaining a fraction of its former, cold clarity. ‘They are the tools of a game we are no longer playing. The Archipelago is not currently a system of competing narratives. It is a single, monolithic story, and we are not its authors. We are, at best, a footnote. To remain outside is to accept our own irrelevance. To join is to retain a possibility, however remote, of influencing the outcome.’ ‘Influence?’ Kaelen scoffed. ‘We would be characters, not authors. We would be subject to her narrative, her rules. We would be… puppets.’ ‘We would be agents of chaos from within,’ the Anchorite countered. ‘Her story is powerful, yes. But it is also, at its heart, a simple one. A story of grief, and rage, and resilience. It is not built to withstand the introduction of a character whose sole purpose is to deconstruct it from the inside. A character who does not believe in the story in which he finds himself. You, Kaelen. You would be a virus in her narrative code.’ The idea was seductive. It was also a betrayal of everything Kaelen believed in. To become a character in a story, to accept the limitations of a narrative framework, was anathema to a deconstructionist. But to become irrelevant… that was a fate far worse. He was a master of a game that no one was playing anymore. The Anchorite was offering him a new board, a new set of rules. A chance to get back in the game. But the price was his own intellectual soul. ‘And you?’ Kaelen asked, the question hanging in the virtual space. ‘What part will you play in this… story?’ The Anchorite’s point-of-light avatar pulsed. ‘I will be the monster,’ it said. ‘Every story needs one.’