The Saintess and the Villainess

Chapter 103

The truth was that the Goddess Coris, or Quire to the elves, or Cory to her friends, was, when you got right down to it, rather scatterbrained.

This was, at least in part, because her brain—or her mind, anyway—was, in a quite literal way, scattered throughout every time and place within the pages of The Foundlings Wings (and a few times and places beyond that), constantly, all the time, all at once.

It was hard, but if she really focused, Cory could concentrate on one particular thing—like explaining narrative metaphysics to her guests, or trying to convince them to play a board game with her (maybe backgammon), or even being the point-of-view character for a little while.

On the other hand, if she truly let go of any effort to focus on anything specific and allowed herself to broaden outwards, not blocking anything out, but not holding onto anything too tightly either, then all of the noise she was constantly bombarded with would sometimes coalesce into something bigger and more whole.

It felt a bit like riding a hot air balloon so high up into the atmosphere that you became able to see the flow of the wind currents across the whole world. Or like standing so far back from a gallery of pointillist paintings that all the paintings formed by all the little dots became little more than dots themselves, and then those dots formed together into a solar system superimposed with one of those warped grids designed to visually represent the way gravity distorts space.

Cory's daughter, the Saintess, could, in a vague sort of way, see the audience—the readers whose viewership helped to make the story what it was.

Cory could see the story.

She wasn't very good at the whole linear time thing, so she wasn't sure how long it had taken her, exactly, but she had watched the story long enough that she had become intimately familiar with all its shapes and patterns, its ebbs and flows, the ways it constantly changed and yet remained the same, both liquid and solid at once.

The new Anne's arrival had come as something of a shock, both to Cory and to the story itself, like a massive stone thrown into the center of a dancing mountain brook.

The story had, of course, as mountain brooks tended to, found a way to flow around the stone, back to something (sort of) resembling its original path.

And yet, by watching that process, the all-knowing, all-seeing Goddess had, in fact, seen something new.

A weak point.

A place within the flow that, if disrupted in the right way, would burst the story open like a popped balloon.

Ultimately, that was what she was trying to tell Anne and Corvina, although she could recognize that she was doing a poor job of getting her point across, or even getting around to her point at all, really. But, you know, she was doing her best.

There was just so much information in the world it was really hard to distill it into just what was actually relevant or made sense.

And there were so many distractions all the time, like how cute Anne and Corvina were together. She loved, loved, loved that they'd found each other like this, and that Sebastian and Elyon had found each other, and that there were several other promising pairings shaping up on the horizon as well, if things continued to ebb and flow in the right directions, and she really hoped they would.

It was just so nice to see young people fall in love in a way that (probably) wasn't destined to be the ultimate downfall of them both.

Anne and Corvina were in their room right now—the one that Cory had assigned to them both on the first night they'd slept there. It was decorated with more bright purples than pinks, which is why Cory thought Corvina might feel a bit more at home there. The two of them were under the fuzzy lavender blankets, Anne tucked under Corvina's arm, up against her side.

Corvina stared up at the ceiling, a serious expression on her face, and Anne stared up at Corvina's face, a worried expression on hers.

"Are you doing okay?" Anne asked, hesitantly. "I know before you said you were fine with knowing that this world is a book or whatever, but I also know this has all been a lot to take in, even for me, and so much has happened lately, and I just—"

Corvina let out a loud groan and screwed her eyes shut for a moment before turning an apologetic smile towards Anne. "Sorry, but I really want to talk about any of that right now. I don't want to think about any of it. Can we talk about something else? Anything."

"Right, of course..." Anne's brows furrowed deeper as she thought. "...I can't think of anything."

Corvina shifted herself around so she was more fully facing Anne, both of them still holding each other. "Tell me more about your world," she said, her voice soft. "Tell me who you were there."

So Anne told her as much as she could. About her family, and why they hadn't kept in touch. About her time in school and her struggles there. About her boring job and the things she did to try to escape it. Anne knew that some of the details wouldn't exactly paint herself in the most flattering light, but she told Corvina everything anyway, and she watched Corvina's eyes as she accepted everything Anne said with genuine interest and without judgment—and seeing that healed something within Anne, a shame and embarrassment and a sense of inadequacy buried so deep within her that she had stopped even noticing it was there.

Corvina, for her part, was truly fascinated by everything about Anne. Everything she said, every small movement of her face as it cycled through different expressions, every little idiosyncrasy in her speech, everything that made her her, in the specific. Not another version of the Saintess, but Anne, who came here from another world to find her and save her—and Corvina found it comforting, too, to think about that other world, to know that there was something that existed beyond the walls of this 'story,' the walls that felt increasingly like they were about to collapse in on her.

Anne paused to take a breath in an anecdote she was telling about an annoying coworker and Corvina took that opportunity to lean forward, bringing their lips together in a gentle kiss that quickly became far less gentle and—

Whoops! Probably shouldn't watch that part too closely. It was hard to truly give people privacy when you were omniscient, but it was worth putting in the effort to try, anyway.

The story and its weak point. That was the thing to think about. Somehow Cory still hadn't gotten around to telling them the crux of it, even though it had been several days. Perhaps she should write it down before she got lost in the weeds again.

Cory pulled out her fuzzy pink ballpoint pen and her diary with the tiny little padlock on it which was never actually locked, and she jotted down some quick notes.

"Put it back the way it was," she mumbled to herself as she wrote. "Follow it all the way up to its proper ending. And then don't let my daughter die."

There. Simple. That ought to clarify everything.