Sorry, Fate Postponed—The Supreme Empress Won’T Be Dying Today!
Part 001
Narrator
So my name is Ophelia, and I am a gallivanting connoisseur of novels.
Narrator
Do you even know what that means?
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Of course you don’t.
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Allow me to illuminate your tragically uninformed brain.
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It means I am a person, nay, a cosmic wanderer, who traipses from one novel to another like some literary vagrant with too much free time.
Narrator
Is that the right meaning?
Narrator
Honestly, it sounds suspiciously wrong, as though my brain cells collided and duplicated the same sentence twice, but whatever, so long as your mortal comprehension can keep up.
Narrator
Yes, I drift from story to story, ink to ink.
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You must be scandalously bewildered, wondering how on earth a sentient being can leapfrog between novels, because, well, novels are but sorrowful, motionless objects you plonk on dusty shelves.
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How, then, does one frolic across printed words?
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Sit down, sweet summer child, and let me regale you.
Part 002
Narrator
It all began on a day of cosmic peculiarity, when the universe had nothing better to do than nudge me toward destiny.
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One fine day, I sashayed to the night market near my humble abode.
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Mind you, I almost never grace that place with my presence because,
Narrator
to be quite blunt, the night market is about as interesting as a stale biscuit, utterly uninspired.
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Yet for reasons unfathomable to the laws of nature, my soul was thrashing and howling to go there that evening.
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So there I was, meandering in grand, sloth-like fashion from one stall to the next, spectacularly unimpressed by the wares on display.
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And then, behold!
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I stumbled upon a “stall,” though to call it a stall is an insult to actual stalls everywhere.
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No, this was merely a square of cloth flung upon the asphalt,
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where an elderly woman perched serenely, hawking a smattering of the most absurdly random objects the multiverse could cough up.
Part 003
Narrator
Her collection of randomness was a poem of chaos:
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one single wristwatch, lone and solemn; a solitary shoe (not a pair, just the one, probably missing its soulmate forever);
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and other trinkets so arbitrarily selected, I half suspected she’d conjured them out of thin air.
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Oh, and by the way, the vendor was a little old granny,
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the sort of grandmotherly figure who instantly dissolves all your defences and turns your heart into a dripping puddle of sentimental goo.
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There she sat, sweat shimmering on her face like melancholy dewdrops.
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Naturally, my compassion detonated.
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I decided, with all the nobility of a half-baked heroine, that I simply must buy something from her.
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Because if I scurried home empty-handed, her weary face would haunt me in my dreams, appearing in the corners of my ceiling to scold me with grandmotherly disappointment.
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So I crouched, yes, crouched, because it felt unspeakably rude to loom above her like a tyrannical giraffe, while she sat among her singular oddities.
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