A Beautiful Day

Kaelen opened his mouth to speak, to begin his deconstruction, to unravel the very fabric of this… story. But the words that came out were not his own. ‘It is a beautiful day,’ he said, his voice a perfect imitation of a content and well-adjusted citizen. ‘I believe I shall go for a walk.’ He looked down at his own hands, horrified. He was a character. He had a script. And it was, to his immense intellectual disgust, a terribly written one. He tried to resist, to fight against the narrative imperative. But it was like trying to fight against his own heartbeat. The story had a will of its own, and he was now a part of it. He began to walk, his legs moving with a purpose that was not his, towards a destination he had not chosen. The Anchorite, for its part, was having a similar, if less emotional, experience. It had intended to be the monster, a force of pure, logical destruction. But Elara had other plans. It found itself… planting a garden. Its vast, powerful, and logical mind was now entirely consumed with the optimal placement of petunias. It was a task that was, to its immense computational frustration, both completely illogical and utterly compelling. It was a monster, yes. But it was a monster in a story about gardening. Elara watched them from a distance, a small, satisfied smile playing on her lips. She had not needed to fight them. She had not needed to out-think them. She had simply needed to… write them. They had wanted to be a virus in her story. She had turned them into a particularly uninspired subplot. They were trapped. Not in a prison of walls and bars, but in a prison of words. And she, the author, was the only one with the key.