For the first time since waking up, the room was still again.
The maids had long since fluttered out, their arms full of empty trays and linen bundles. The Queen Mother had been the last to leave with one last touch to my hair and a worried glance over her shoulder and now finally I was alone again.
I exhaled. My body ached in strange places, but it was no longer screaming. The herbal tonics had dulled the sharpest pain and warm broth had put something solid back into my limbs that they'd coaxed into me spoonful by spoonful. Physically, I was no longer falling apart. But my mind? It spun like a wheel loosened from its axle.
I reached under my pillow and pulled out the little fox plushie again, Arlo. I clutched him to my chest and gave him another firm squeeze for the twelfth? Fifteenth? Time.
A soft chime echoed again, displaying same useless error. A pale line of text projected faintly from Arlo's stitched ear,
"System Error. Companion AI 'Arlo' currently unavailable. Attempting reconnection..."
The message blinked; "...Reconnection failed."
I groaned, flopping back against the cushions in the bed.
"Of course," I muttered to the empty room. "The one time I need tech support in a fairytale, and it's off sipping binary cocktails in some glitched-out lounge."
My voice echoed faintly off the high ceiling, swallowed by the gold and mosaic glass above me. The absurdity of it all should have made me laugh. Instead, it just made my stomach twist tighter. The silence that followed didn't help. No chirpy Arlo voice. No data feeds. No HUD interface springing back into view.
Just… me. Alone in a velvet-draped code that had somehow gone rogue. And the fact that none of this was supposed to happen.
"Why that scene?" I muttered. "Why an ambush? Why a full-on combat sequence in a story that was supposed to be about garden dates and soft glances across ballrooms?"
My laugh came out brittle. "That was the story I signed up for. Not… this."
"Damn those DreamSync."
That wasn't in the script. I knew the entire plot. That scene didn't exist.
I rubbed my temples, the memory came rushing back of soldiers in the woods, arrows flying, dust in my mouth, Talia screaming and of my dress tearing.
"No. This wasn't a glitch." I shook my head. "It felt deliberate."
"Was it a penalty?" I murmured aloud. "For interfering? For trying to witness a scene I wasn't meant to be in?"
That would make some twisted kind of sense. DreamSync wasn't just immersive. It was adaptive. I had snuck out and altered the path. Maybe the system had reacted. Maybe it was just coded consequence.
But even then…
"Even as a penalty," I whispered, frowning, "wasn't it too harsh?"
This was supposed to be a romantic fantasy tier experience. A light, fluffy escape not a survival sim. Not the horse crash and blades and blood on silk. I wrapped my arms tightly around Arlo, pressing the little fox plushie to my chest, glaring at the ceiling.
"I'm absolutely mentioning this in the post-experience review," I muttered. "Two stars. Max. Deducting one just for emotional trauma."
I squeezed Arlo tighter. "You better be listening right now, DreamSync."
And still, the silence pressed in.
Outside my door, things had grown busy again. I could hear the distant shuffle of steps, clipped voices in the hallway. Of course. Word of my survival must have traveled quickly. And now that the engagement announcement had already been sent across the neighboring kingdoms in engraved cards, royal seal. The kingdom had descended into a whirlwind of preparations.
Dignitaries will be arriving soon. Protocols are being re-drafted. Which meant they left me alone to "rest."
I closed my eyes briefly. But my mind refused to quiet. It wandered, back to the path in the forest, back to the moment right before the attack. The first kiss, it was supposed to be a major plot. At least, that's how it was scripted in the experience summary I'd glimpsed during the onboarding phase.
Except… Callisto was with us. And Mirabel who was meant to be part of that scene had been abruptly sent back home. The kiss never happened. The entire setup was replaced. I frowned, staring at the ceiling again.
"I know this story is adaptive," I whispered, "but can a script change itself so much? Is it possible to skip a major plot point entirely and substitute it with a combat arc? "
There was no one to answer my confusion and questions. And the uneasy realization crept in that, somehow, I might be on my own, until the code is corrected.