The world of Eridia was coming apart at the seams.
The rolling green hills dissolved into raw, textual code. The singing cheese screamed a final, operatic note and then vanished into a stream of pure narrative energy. The entire reality was being slurped up by the Bard King like a noodle.
"Well," I said, my voice a calm, detached counterpoint to the universal apocalypse happening around us. "This is a suboptimal outcome."
Lia stood beside me, her logical mind already processing the new, dire situation. His power is absolute within this narrative, she sent. He is not just a consumer of stories; he IS the story. To fight him is to fight the very concept of plot itself.
"A clever design," I admitted. We were not just in a cage. We were in the belly of the beast, and it was currently digesting us.
The Bard King, now a colossal, laughing figure made of stolen stories and forgotten myths, loomed over us. [Thank you for your service, little god,] his voice boomed, a chorus of a billion different characters. [Your chaos was the most delicious meal I've had in eons. Now, for dessert.]
He reached for us, his hand a swirling vortex of narrative potential, ready to consume our own, very potent stories.
My court—Lia, my Echos—prepared for a final, hopeless battle.
But I held up a hand. "Stop."
I looked up at the laughing, all-powerful god of tales. And I smiled.
"You've made a mistake," I said, my voice filled with a strange, almost pitying calm.
[Oh?] the Bard King chuckled. [And what mistake is that, little morsel?]
"You're right," I said. "My story, my chaos, is the most delicious meal you've had in eons. But you've forgotten a very important rule of fine dining."
I tapped my own chest. "You should always, always check for allergens."
I had just spent the last week actively, and joyfully, sowing the seeds of pure, unadulterated, and nonsensical chaos into this world. I had turned its very fabric into a playground for my own amusement.
And the Bard King had just eaten all of it.
I was not just a story. I was a virus. A glitch. A piece of indigestible, paradoxical code.
And he had just swallowed me whole.
I did not fight him with power. I did not try to out-chaotic him.
I simply… relaxed. And I let him digest me.
The effect was instantaneous and glorious.
The Bard King, the great, cosmic parasite, suddenly stopped laughing. He clutched his conceptual stomach, a look of profound, divine indigestion on his face.
[What… what is this?] he stammered. [This taste… it's… illogical! It's full of plot holes! The hero's motivation makes no sense! The magic system is inconsistent! This story is… badly written!]
"I know," I said with a serene smile. "I wrote it."
I had not just given him a meal. I had given him food poisoning. My own, sovereign, chaotic will was now a virus in his system, a piece of bad code that was causing his entire being, his entire collection of perfect, logical stories, to crash.
He began to glitch. His form flickered, shifting between a heroic king, a tragic villain, a comedic sidekick. The perfect narratives he had consumed were being corrupted by the sheer, nonsensical stupidity of my flaming chicken saga.
He was a perfect, ordered library. And I was the one book that was just a single, repeating, misspelled word, and it was corrupting his entire catalogue.
[NO!] he roared, as he began to come apart at the seams. [GET OUT OF MY STORY!]
"I think," I said, as the world of Eridia began to stabilize, its narrative energy now flowing out of the sickened god, "that it is time for a new author."
I opened my own System, my Chaos Department Workstation, and I performed the single most hostile, most shameless act of my corporate career.
I didn't just defeat the Bard King. I filed a formal complaint.
[TO: MULTIVERSAL MANAGEMENT (THE JANITOR)]
[FROM: DEPARTMENT HEAD KAELEN]
[SUBJECT: HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF A QUARANTINED ASSET]
[The entity known as 'The Bard King' (a Level-10 Narrative Parasite) has breached its quarantine. Furthermore, it attempted to consume a department head (me). This is a clear violation of corporate policy.]
[As per section 7, sub-section 4 of the 'Sovereign's Prerogative', when a quarantined asset becomes a direct threat to a Manager-level employee, said employee is authorized to seize control of the asset and its containing reality for the purposes of 'restructuring and re-education'.]
[I am hereby officially taking over this entire fucking mess. Send the paperwork.]
It was a move of pure, bureaucratic genius. I was using the company's own rules to justify my conquest.
The Bard King stared at me in horrified disbelief as a new, golden, and utterly inescapable chain of pure, corporate law wrapped around his being. He was no longer a free-roaming parasite. He was now a company asset, and I was his new manager.
But as my victory settled, as the world of Eridia reformed around me, now my own, personal pet project, a new, unforeseen twist emerged.
The act of consuming my "badly written" story, and the subsequent system crash, had had an unexpected side effect on the Bard King's own, vast library of narratives.
A single story, a single file from his collection of a billion tales, had been corrupted by the glitch. And it had been "ejected" from his memory banks, spat out into the real world to prevent it from corrupting the others.
A new figure materialized before us. A man, dressed in the simple, travel-worn clothes of a wandering adventurer. He looked confused, lost.
But he was a being of immense, quiet power. A character from a story that had just been violently brought to life.
And Lia, my logical, all-knowing Echo, stared at him, her serene composure finally, utterly, and completely shattering.
No, she breathed in my mind, her thought a shard of pure, forgotten terror. It's impossible.
It was a face from a story I had never known. A face from a life she had never told me about. Her life, before she was a Warden, before she was a blank slate. Her life as the original Lyra.
The man standing before us was the protagonist of her original story. The one she had been a part of, long before she had ever met me. Her original, fated, and long-dead hero. And he had just been accidentally resurrected into my reality.