Princess Nell did not travel in the common sense of the word. No, she sojourned, with the majestic ennui of someone bursting at the seams with pride at her glorious success at finally becoming prophecy-free.

Trotting alongside her was Benjy the Mountain Goat. He had a resting expression of mild disgust, which made him look either like a goat pondering metaphysics, or one who had smelled something gauche in the wind. In truth, it was both.

"Destiny," Nell intoned, flicking an imaginary speck from her silken shoulder epaulet, "does not knock. It swaggers in, demands wine, and has the gall to rearrange the upholstery."

Her monologue was tragically interrupted.

From behind a nearby clump of overambitious thistles emerged a gaggle of oracles, each robed in a patchwork of stars and bird bones. Their leader, a gaunt man with the complexion of a damp sandal, stepped forward and waved a gilded spatula.

"Hail, future acolyte!" he cried. "Have you heard of the great Murkadoo, Devourers of Probability and Lords of Improvised Outcomes?"

Nell blinked slowly. "I beg your pardon?"

"THE MURKADOO!" the oracles chorused, like a barbershop cult. "They who render logic obsolete! They who are far superior to those lesser, outdated cosmic entities. You know, like the Balthorate, and the Nymbricae. Pah!"

"We offer pamphlets!" one shrieked, chucking a folded bit of parchment at her.

Benjy ate it right out of the air.

Nell, ever the paradigm of composed fury, narrowed her eyes. "Listen, you orbital fungi. I don't subscribe to deities with names that sound like off-brand soup."

"But the Murkadoo are the future!" a female oracle squealed, twirling a staff topped with what appeared to be an old droopy cucumber. "They speak through dreams, toenail patterns, and suspicious winds!"

"And now," added their leader, "they demand that we call together the lost souls of the world to worship them; lost souls such as yourself!"

Nell exhaled through her nose like an offended duchess at a buffet running low on smoked figs.

"I have precisely zero interest in the Murkadoo," she hissed. "Go peddle your cosmic nonsense to someone who communes with mildew."

Then, in a splendid and tactically unsound maneuver, she yanked Benjy into her arms and dogged it down a narrow, sketchy-looking path lined with thorny brambles and a random boot nailed to a tree.

The oracles gave chase, chanting things like "Join the Interdimensional Conga!" and "Worship is just interpretive dance for the spirit!"

But Nell just screamed, "GO AWAY!"

Just as all hope seemed drowned in cosmic badgering, the path widened, revealing a figure in gold-laced riding trousers and a smirk sharp enough to bisect a bishop, just standing there in the middle of the pathway.

"Ugh, not you again." Nell's voice dropped an octave and became roughly the temperature of a chilled basilisk; "Lady Virelle."

"Still fleeing from social obligation?" asked Virelle. Her perfectly manicured fingers gestured toward a moss-covered trapdoor embedded in the hillside. "Secret passage. Possibly snakes, but most definitely safe."

"I don't need your pity tunnels, Virelle," Nell snapped, adjusting her tiara, which had become lopsided amidst all the running.

"Oh, darling," Virelle crooned, "it's not pity. It's charity. The lesser must be protected from their own flailing."

The oracles' chanting grew louder:

"Convert! Transcend! Bake astral muffins with us!"

Nell sighed, rolled her eyes with the grace of a woman who'd practiced disdain in a mirror, and nudged Benjy toward the trapdoor.

"Fine," she muttered. "But if this is part of some hackneyed prophecy of yours, I'm stealing your kneecaps."

Virelle smiled like a cobra wearing pearls.

"Oh, Nellie. That's why I invited you."

And with that, the two princesses disappeared below, leaving the oracles to stand baffled in the dust.

The trapdoor deposited Princess Nell, Lady Virelle, and Benjy the Goat into a vast, echoing underground catacomb. It smelled of damp soil, and something suspiciously herbal.

Glowing fungi clung to the rocks like an old meatloaf dinner to the walls of an inner bowel. Enormous stone pillars loomed from the gloom, etched with hieroglyphs of various deities, their many limbs and eyeballs positioned in ways that suggested they had strong feelings about omnipresence.

Benjy snorted and trotted forward with that unique combination of goatly apathy and passive aggression.

"This place reeks," Nell muttered, brushing cobwebs off her shoulder with aristocratic contempt.

Virelle twirled, letting her skirts flare behind her like a stage effect. "Isn't it divine? The Temple of the Forked Future. Dozens of deities once convened here to squabble over mortal fate like aunties over inheritance."

"Charming," Nell sneered. "Did they leave before or after mortals realized how catastrophically meddlesome they were?"

Virelle arched a brow. "You're so embittered, Nellie. Perhaps if you'd open your mind, you'd understand that prophecy is a comfort, not a constraint."

Nell stopped mid-step, the heels of her mud-encrusted boots echoing like punctuation.

"Comfort?" she scoffed. "You find comfort in being told what's going to happen? That your life is already charted out by some overgrown cosmic beanbag with a star fetish?"

Virelle crossed her arms, unfazed. "I find comfort in knowing it's not all up to me. That if I fail, it's not failure. It's fated. That everything is part of something greater. It means I can stop breaking my spine trying to be perfect."

A flicker of vulnerability cracked through her usual lacquer of smug superiority. "Every day, my parents tell me I'll be the greatest sovereign that the continent has ever known. That failure meant shame. So yes — I choose prophecy. Because if the gods wrote my life, then I don't have to be afraid of writing it wrong."

The echo lingered.

Nell said nothing for a beat. Then, she inhaled sharply and delivered the verbal equivalent of a gauntlet slap.

"That's not comfort," she snapped. "That's lazy. You want an excuse to stagnate. To do nothing unless it's been pre-approved by a nebulous astral book club. That's not courage, Virelle — it's surrender."

Virelle stiffened. "And what would you know of courage, Princess 'I-Ran-From-Oracles-and-Dramatically-Insulted-Their-Pretty-Pamphlets'?"

Nell's gaze turned flinty.

"When I was fourteen, I was kidnapped," she said coldly. "By a self-important, crusty-bearded wizard who believed in a prophecy: one that said I would marry him and 'unite the fractal thrones in holy combustion' or some equally stupid drivel."

Virelle blinked. "Yikes."

"He kept me in a tower for two weeks. Every day, he'd read from that prophecy like it was gospel. He said resisting him would fracture the universe, and I believed him. Until the night a woman, a total stranger, appeared out of nowhere, unsheathed her sword, and obliterated him."

Virelle looked stricken. "Who was she?"

"I don't know. She didn't say a word. She just smiled and left the door unlocked for me. But that night, I decided: no prophecy gets to decide who I become. If she can defy destiny, so can I. I won't be anyone's predestined anything."

Silence fell between them, heavier than the carved sarcophagus they now passed; one depicting a god with twelve faces, each wearing a different expression of passive-aggressive disappointment.

Virelle stared at the floor, her voice uncharacteristically small. "You think I'm weak."

"I think you're scared," Nell said. "Just like I was. The difference is, I chose to fight my fear."

They reached a fork in the tunnel, lit by flickering braziers. One path wound upward, toward freedom. The other spiralled downward into more catacombs... and possibly enlightenment.

Virelle paused, her gaze distant.

"I think the gods gave us these paths for a reason."

Nell snorted. "No. We choose the path. That's the point."

And with a huff, Nell patted Benjy and strode with him toward the exit, her silhouette sharp against the blue firelight.

Virelle lingered for a moment, then turned and followed after her.