Adriana stared at the three pages of typing boldly staring up at her—her second story after several impromptu diversions, several of which conflicted entirely with her initial direction. It was wrong. Very wrong.

Was it, though? It had most of the requisite parts. Rue would manipulate the Gods into doing his bidding, thereby manifestly ignoring Deus Ex Machina, since fate can't generally be molded like a wad of warm clay. But her earlier sense of misgiving—unease inspired by the words practically scribbling themselves—surged through her entire body, sending chills rippling up her spine, upsetting her stomach with a bounty of butterflies. Adriana felt like she'd just thrown herself in front of a train, experiencing the disconnected agony only dismemberment by locomotive could inspire, flush with unreality and addled by shock, she couldn't even read the page without wanting to purge her dinner in the bathroom.

But why? Her mind kept repeating, it's just a story, like a mantra, a football cheer to a league-winning team. Of course it was a mere fabrication of her imagination and lauded fictional skills, but that was hardly the point. Dr. Z had taken her aside more than once, and asked what muse filled her pen with such mighty current, and hadn't she always laughed and shrugged him away as an insincere sycophant?

But this...

Rabbit Rue, thrust into the hot coals of not only manipulating the pantheon toward his own ends, but warped and twisted by aeons and decay into something terrible, a threat even to himself? Where was the resolution? Where was the finality, that Dr. Z would surely demand? Could she really turn this sample in, even knowing Rue only hinted about his ultimate methods, and likewise subjected himself to the mercies of fate? Wasn't fate a form of Desu Ex? Letting an arbitrary outside element dictate her main character's future... wasn't that the very mechanism of the God from the Machine?

Not only would she fail her assignment, or maybe earn a C for obviously misunderstanding the intent, but the words themselves, crafted from innocent phrases and otherwise innocuous scenery, disturbed every cell within her body. A chilling dread cascaded through her body merely thinking of the impromptu imagery that demanded inclusion.

In fact, she would never write anything like this. Her stories had endings, heroes, possibly even a cliche damsel in distress, pining for her hero, trapped in a tower, cavern, or fiendish doomsday device. Her father always suggested her style borrowed heavily from old fairytales, though not the twisted originals of the Brother Grimm. What she'd produced instead, rivaled those infamously dreadful chronicles, suggested even, shadowy futures she unquestionably knew.

But not if she concentrated. Even a minor attempt to pinpoint the final outcome resulted in absolute oblivion. It was torture! Somehow, an unbearable knowledge hovered tantalizingly within her grasp, as if all outcomes were obviously concluded, begging no quarter and giving no mercy to necessary aspects of destruction and misleading success.

But one unmistakable emotion that never left her psyche during the writing of her little tale, was one of abject desolation. Even while in school, she ached to die while tracing individual characters, as though the mere act of inking a page cut deep gouges into her soft flesh, unleashing a river of crimson gore impossible to staunch. Even the enjoyable diversion with Kyle only provided an echo of reprieve, while her mind screamed silently to him for help, wept hotly in resigned frustration as her hand jerked and dragged the pen through its inevitable motions without her consent.

Even then, she remembered, this filth composed itself. Every retelling foolishily presents boundless opportunity to articulate the unholy parable, and my soul is the unwilling medium.

And wasn't it all simply absurd? Stories didn't write themselves. Even the scariest campfire stories contained ghouls and laughably exaggerated caricatures of urban myths children secretly acknowledged as vaguely plausible. Her mother would deem her foolish, her father would nod and grin his condescending acceptance of her healthy teenage imagination, and nothing would change. Adriana herself found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on these admittedly unlikely and pointless theories.

After all, the uneasy parallels with her own pet Rue were obviously coincidence, a mechanism of convenience. Why worry? Wrong and scary are inseparable. Two peas in a pod, really. It's the grit—the fine skeleton clacking unheard within creatures good or ill, that twists common things into horrific possibilities. Those with that power, to interpret beyond the pale, always needlessly confound themselves. Without flesh, everything is terrible and malevolent.

Even your cute pet, fuzzy and chewing in his cage, is a bleached skull and skeleton covered loosely with organs and flesh. And those bones do clatter with glee, in the absence of light, thirsting for your companionship, your wandering soul, to slacken its ceaseless wont.

Absurd. Sure, everything was a skeleton underneath. Just as Jason Manny would suggest everyone was naked under their clothes; it was a worthless observation. Adriana decided she was being overly concerned. Life was no narrowly defined barrage of increasingly depressing anecdotes, regardless of where her pen and paper led. Forget, child. It's not worth the stress.

Right. Why worry? Her story made its point. Rue's mysterious future was left to the reader, and no being great or small appeared to resolve possible dissent. Adriana then forgot she knew the remainder of that depressing yarn, how she could have typed hundreds, possibly thousands of pages chronicling Rue's turmoil over the next interceding millennia. Eventually she only remembered she was finished typing her assignment, the one for Dr. Z, that she wrote during lunch.

And that was enough.