The Warping Board

Following the mass, Sibila did not depart with her retinue. She intercepted me in the high gallery of Flemish tapestries, where the ringing of the midday bells smothered the whispers of courtiers.

"Do you truly deem it wise to keep playing the pious duchess, Violante?" she demanded without prelude, dropping all trace of her naive maiden persona. "Prince Aurelio has already countersigned your trial docket."

"Aurelio signs whatever the High Constable slides across his desk before he rides out hunting," I shot back, pivoting to face her. "And you seem remarkably hurried for an orphaned convent girl."

Sibila took a step closer. The smirk upon her lips was not of this era: it was the mocking, condescending chill of someone watching a chessboard knowing she holds checkmate in two moves.

"You thought yourself terribly clever dodging the wine goblet at the banquet, didn't you?" she hissed under her breath.

The way she delivered the word 'clever', with that crisp modern cadence, turned the blood in my veins to frost.

"I did what anyone with an ounce of sense would do."

"No, dear. You broke the canon event. By this chapter you were supposed to be locked in the east turret awaiting summary sentencing. You cost me three entire days reprogramming the death flags."

Spotting another imposter in the hall doesn't make you free; it only multiplies your enemies.

The flagstones seemed to fall away beneath my brocade slippers.

'Canon event'? 'Death flags'?

Nobody in this realm of castles, fiefs, and ecclesiastical Latin possessed those concepts. Those were terms from gaming discords, from an afternoon sprawled across a couch in Bogotá arguing otome walkthroughs on Reddit.

I stared into Sibila's face. For the first time I saw through the veil: she wasn't an AI-generated heroine programmed to be pure and naive.

She was a player.

The silence in the tapestry gallery weighed heavier than the plate armor lining the walls.

"Who are you?" I whispered in an unvarnished modern rasp, discarding every shred of courtly etiquette.

Sibila burst into a clean, youthful laugh, utterly stripped of medieval modesty.

"What does it matter who I was before?" she replied in flawless contemporary Spanish. "In the real world I was a junior associate at a corporate law firm in Madrid working eighty-hour weeks for peanuts. Here, I am the beloved maiden of the empire, I have the crown prince eating out of the palm of my hand, and a guaranteed happy ending in the epilogue."

"You're sending an actual living human to be executed, you psychopath."

"In this story you are the villainess, sweetie. That is how the route is structured. If the character of Violante doesn't lose her head on the scaffold, the system refuses to unlock the imperial wedding. Do you honestly think I'm giving up the crown because of some third-rate designer who can't even lace a corset?"

Two souls who memorized the same script can only contest the stage to the bitter end.

The revelation struck me like a city bus running a red light on Carrera Séptima.

For weeks I had believed the game's system was an impersonal cosmic force trying to drag me to the block. But the system wasn't a blind algorithm: it was her. Sibila knew every snare, every bribe, and every dialogue branch because she had cleared the game a dozen times before dying.

"I moved your trial date up forty days," Sibila added, leaning in until her lavender perfume grazed my ear. "In seven nights you will mount the scaffold before the entire mob. And nobody is going to believe your sob story about another world. In this century, they don't prescribe pills to crazy women: they burn them as heretics."

She spun upon her heel with an immaculate swirl of white silk, leaving me standing in the drafty hall, my fists shaking with white-hot fury.

"This epilogue belongs to me, darling," she threw over her shoulder before vanishing around the colonnade. "See you at the guillotine."

Chicory coffee tastes of scorched soil and the stale memory of a public government office on a rainy Monday morning.

Violante cupped the porcelain mug in both hands as she watched rain stream down the curved glass panes of the winter conservatory. The scent of rich potting soil and towering tree ferns muffled the footsteps of the duke's guards patrolling the gallery perimeter outside.

Damián sat opposite her across the wrought-iron table, his greatsword resting between his knees. His left shoulder, freshly dressed in clean linen following the alley ambush, remained stiff.

—This is not oak gall ink —the knight remarked, pointing with the tip of a paring dagger at the parchment bearing the Grand Chancellor's seal on the sideboard—. Court ink oxidizes to a reddish-brown tinge within twenty-four hours. This fluid retains an icy, almost steely sheen, as though distilled with concentrated sulfuric vitriol.

—It is iron-gall ink cut with synthetic alum —Violante replied with a wry, exhausted smile—. In my former life we used it for notary contracts at the turn of the nineteenth century. It dries in thirty seconds and leaves no smudge on the fingers.

Damián raised a heavy brow, studying her closely.

—Your 'former life' sounds like a realm obsessively preoccupied with clerical paperwork, milady.

—It was a place where I learned that people who look like radiant angels in corporate headshots are the exact ones skimming pension reserves —Violante retorted, taking a slow sip of the bitter chicory—. Sibila is no saint sent by Providence, Damián. She is a junior lawyer from Madrid who played this visual novel so many times during quarantine that she memorized every dialogue tree. And her sole ticket home is seeing my neck stretched upon the scaffold in the main plaza.

—Why must you die? —Damián whispered, leaning in—. If she foresees every outcome, why not settle for your exile to the southern marches?

—Because in the original script, the realm's moral redemption demands an unequivocal scapegoat —she explained, tapping her manicured fingernail against the iron rim—. If the villainess perishes confessing her sins, the Crown Prince secures papal absolution, Duke Beltrán absorbs my family's estates, and Sibila unlocks her 'True Golden Ending.' To her, my continued breathing is a software defect obstructing the end credits.

Damián drew three inches of hardened steel from the scabbard. The blade caught the gray light of the storm.

—Beltrán's men are no stage players, milady. They are campaign veterans from the Biscay wars wearing mail shirts under signed imperial warrants. If the tribunal ratifies the execution decree tomorrow in the basilica, no rhetorical wit will stay the headsman's axe.

—I have something far deadlier than rhetorical wit —Violante said, sliding a quadruple-folded folio from her underskirt pocket—. I have a motion for procedural nullity under the Imperial Charter of 1492. In this empire, nobles retain the inviolable right to public disputation before a jury of peers prior to summary execution.

Damián smiled for the first time in three days—a lean, razor-sharp grin.

—I do admire when you speak like an inquisitor nursing a hangover, milady.