Your Narrator Hatches a Plan

“Oh, yes, the Harvest Festival,” I hear myself croak to Mrs. Morrell. “Almost forgot it’s today.”

Surprisingly, Mrs. Morrell chuckles. “You really have just woken up, if you’ve forgotten. How many weeks have you been looking forward to it?” She reaches out an arm, and numbly, I let her help guide me off the floor and lead me towards the table where her platter still sits. “You’re lucky you have a mom that’ll cook you breakfast, hopefully it manages to wake you up,” she teases gently.

Not trusting myself to speak, I only nod, settling at the table with Mrs. Morrell. I stare down at the charred apple, the hard-boiled egg, the bowl of something brown and sweet-looking. With nothing else to do, I cautiously pick up the wooden spoon and force myself to take a bite.

The brown stuff turns out to be porridge, still warm, hearty and lightly sweetened with fresh berries.

It should taste good, but I can barely get it down my throat.

“When did you say you’d meet Alex today?” Mrs. Morrell says companionably as she peels her egg.

“Um…” I say, stalling.

In the book, it was in the evening. Supposedly, Aurelia Prime [1] had some family-related things to take care of before then.

But I can’t be with Mrs. Morrell until evening. By then, my (very dead) fate will basically be sealed.

“Right after breakfast, actually,” I hear myself saying.

“Oh,” Mrs. Morrell says. Her eyebrows rise. “Doesn’t Alex have to help with preparations at the keep?”

“You know Alex,” I say. Aurelia was in only two scenes at the beginning of the book, so I can’t be sure I’m getting her personality right, but I’ve got a pretty grasp on Alex’s [2]. “Always leaving things to his brother.”

As I hoped, Mrs. Morrell laughs and shakes her head. “That boy is so lucky he was born second and not first.” She finishes her egg with another bite, and then rises. “I’m going to head out to the square now to help with preparations for tonight. But I’ll see you there?”

God, she's such a warm, gentle, beautiful woman. She isn't anything like my my actual mom, really, who was a great deal larger, and louder. When she gossiped with the butcher at our local supermarket, everyone in the vicinity could hear her.

But when Mrs. Morrell looks at me—at Aurelia Prime, really—, it's almost as if it were my mom looking at me. For some reason, the thought stings. I look down to avoid her gaze, my throat dry. “Yeah. Definitely," I say.

She nods. I hear the scrape of the chair as she pushes it back and rises.

"I—“ I blurt out, looking back up, heart hammering.

“Be careful, okay, Mom?” I say. She opens her mouth, but before any words come out, I add, “I know we’re too close to the keep for bandits, but still. There are lots of people coming in today from far away. Just. Be careful.”

Her smile softens. She rounds the table and kisses my forehead warmly. “You worry too much about me," she says, and her voice as a thin, unplaceable thread of melancholy. She straightens, and heads towards the door. “Enjoy yourself with Alex.”

I watch her leave, closing the door behind her.

What had I even hoped to do by warning her?

Gestures like that are useless. Like Aurelia, she's meant to die in the attack. She probably will still die in the attack, I'm not capable of changing her plans, or the Keep's plans, not without risking giving myself away—

All their deaths won't be my fault, it'll be the plot's fault. The stupid plot's fault, because, honestly? In what world does it actually make sense for a heavily-guarded place like Silverwood Keep to relax its guard rotations on the very day when it opens the gates wide for people to come and gorge themselves on the Silverwoods' stores and cellars? You think in the couple of hundred years they’ve supposedly done this, someone would’ve gone, “Wait, friends, isn’t that a security risk?” [3].

The point is, I can't save anyone else, not if I want to make sure to save myself first.

And I would save myself. I won't be dying by dawn tomorrow in the attack.

So what if I don't know if I can actually die? I remember enough of the accident to know it was really bad, that my head had hit the ground hard. Maybe none of this is real, and I'm just experiencing dreams in a coma, or even already dead—

But what if I'm wrong and I can still die?

Or what if I can't die, but this whole dream-alternate world set-up is vivid enough that whatever my real body in the real world is doing, I’ll basically still experience Aurelia’s death?

That death had been a pretty brutal one too. The attackers had slit her throat, and torn apart her clothes and body. The book had said that if not for her signature red hair, even Alex wouldn't have been able to identify her. In the scene when Alex did find her, he'd taken one look at her remains, and scrambled behind a tree to vomit.

Dying [4] in a car crash was painful enough. I’m not really keen to find out what dying by murder feels like too.

So I eat , filling my stomach with porridge and apple—just in case this was my last warm meal for awhile—, and keeping my ears perked up, so as to track Mrs. Morrell's footsteps as she moves farther away from the cabin. In my head, I count down the time since her departure. One minute. Two minutes. Five minutes—

At ten minutes, I spring up from the table, and start looting the cabin.

What is it that video game characters in RPGs always load up on before embarking quest? Food, money, potions, and weapons, right?

That seems as good a starting place as any for a packing list slash survival pack. I'll find all the equivalent things in the Morrell's cabin, and then I'll flee far away, so far that none of the book's remaining plot can do anything to me.

What can go wrong with my escape plan?

---

1. Yes, Prime as in original Aurelia, in the original book universe. And yes, that’s taken from Star Trek’s “prime timeline”, because I’m a proud Trekkie (and for the record, it is 100% better than Star Wars).

2. Honestly, just think of a lazy jock, except make him quasi-medieval nobility with a hot temper and a vicious streak, and you’ve got Alex. Wouldn’t be my first choice for a king, but Chess Games of Blood is GrimdarkTM, so.

3. Convenient plot device yada yada, well, professional writers should write better, hmph.

4. Maybe dying. Theoretically, I could be not dead, just a vegetable.