“I—Yes, I am. I saw—Well,“ I hesitate.

I know I wouldn’t want to know more about my would-be death. Remembering what I did before I blacked out is already traumatic enough, I don’t particularly need someone to also paint me a picture of how I’d looked under the car’s tires.

But maybe telling them the details of the gruesome fates they dodged will make them take me more seriously. And underscore how carefully they should now act.

I close my eyes, and pull from the back of my memories the most vivid images of the series’s opening. For as much as I complained about these books, that part had been done very well. After all, it had been that hook that had propelled me through the thousands of pages that followed.

“I remember… The Keep burning. Dead men and women, piled one upon the other. Luke, sword still in hand, speared through and thrown on top of the bodies of cowering children. The Duke and Duchess in the Great Hall, lifeless after a double suicide. Me, my body burned and disfigured I have to be identified by my hair.” I swallow. “Alex—Alex alive, mistakenly left for dead, shambling towards the ruins of the Keep. But he’s not… not the same.”

And that was true too.

I’ve only known my Alex all of two days, but this I know for sure. This Alex may be spoiled and brash, with a temper that made me uneasy. But he clearly felt every emotion. He’s not someone I can imagine… doing the things Alex Prime did in the books.

I blink open my eyes, and the images of mundane lives destroyed and Alex’s grief and despair and rage and slow descent into madness disappear.

“I saw the attackers report to the King and Queen. The King thinks you were about to turn against him—but alone by herself afterwards, the Queen celebrates your death, because a major obstacle to her consolidating power has been eliminated. She wants to usurp the throne,” I finish.

After I finish answering Luke’s question, there’s again silence. But unlike the silence that followed my last mic drop, this one is much less incredulous—and much more tense.

As it should be. For the first time since I arrived here, I’m telling the truth. The whole, unvarnished truth.

I look around, trying to gauge each of their reactions.

Hopefully by doing so, I won’t end in a, like, Cassandra of Troy situation. [1]

The Duke speaks first.

“The action we must take here is clear,” he says. His voice is doing that booming, authoritative thing again. I’m sure in his head he calls it like, his ‘orders’ mode.

All eyes—including mine—turn from wherever they were looking in thought towards him.

Oh God, it is going to turn into a Cassandra situation.

“We will do as we should with all discovered mages and send her to the King,” the Duke—no no, hold up, I’m not going to politely call him and his wife by their titles anymore. People this mean and rude deserve to be called by their first names—Magnus says. “If she is lying, those in the King’s employ will discover it and she will be duly punished. If she is telling the truth, then she and our delegates can rectify the King’s misapprehensions—and protect him before the worst can happen, as is our duty.”

Seriously, I just don’t want to die again slash still, what is so difficult to understand about this.

1. If you don't know her, long story short: Cassandra of Troy accurately predicts the future, no one believes her, she gets kidnapped by the enemy and then brutally murdered. The end.