"How are you doing, kid?" I asked the bedraggled young man.

He peered back at me through the iron lattice of his jail door. Hungry eyes locked onto the tray of food in my hands and he took half a step forward before hesitating.

"You want it?" I asked, holding the tray towards the dedicated slot in the jail door. This was, if you listened to the usual tales, an unusually humane feature to be found in the dungeon of a Dark Lord.

But this realization had not yet struck my young guest. Instead his hunger steadied into resolve.

"Enchantress," he spat. "You won't trick me that easily."

"Two days," I said, and left him to ponder what that meant.

Two days later he accepted the tray of food without protest. I watched him eat it greedily, and then as if realizing what he'd done, he hurled the empty tray back at me.

It bounced off the jail door, and clattered harmlessly to the ground.

"What now?" he asked hoarsely. "What cruel fate have I harnessed myself to? Will you turn me into a horse to draw your carriage? Or a sheep to grow wool for your spinning needle?"

"A pig," I said before I could stop myself, "to fatten for a feast. No, don't look like that, I was joking. I won't turn you into anything you don't want to become."

He did not seem particularly reassured by this. "I've heard of men who willingly submitted to the magic of beautiful sorceresses."

"If you genuinely want to become a pig," I said, " then they really did do a number on you. What's your name?"

"What's yours?" he asked craftily, and I remembered the old sermons we'd been taught about the power that names were supposed to possess.

"Ladria," I said.

"Ladria, "he repeated, and then more shocked, "The Ladria?"

"Yes," I said. "The very same."

"But I remember you. I had just joined the monastery when the monks picked you as the Chosen One. You look..."

"Wiser?" I suggested.

"Older," he said, until my sigh reminded him that he was still talking to an evil enchantress and probable companion of the Dark Lord. "Wait, I didn't mean... but you were the Chosen One... they told us you were dead."

"Better older than dead," I observed.

This observation also failed to find agreement. "Not if you had to join the Dark Lord."

"Oh," I said breezily. "You mean Fred? He's not so bad when you get to know him."

"But he's an evil wizard!"'

"A very skilled engineer and scientist," I amended.

"But he kills people!"

"A highly successful disinformation campaign," I said. "Mostly propagated by the monks who raised us in that wretched cult of an orphanage. And who, I suppose, also told you that you were the new Chosen One?"

"I am here to defeat the Dark Lord!"

"To murder him, you mean?"

"Well...," he said, and trailed off.

"There is no magic," I said. "There is only sufficiently advanced technology. Technology that could help people and save lives."

"But the monks- "

"Would have a lot less influence over us if we didn't need them. "

He tried one last defence, one that he'd obviously been saving. "If you can't use magic to see the future, how did you know it would take me two days to accept the food you've been bringing?"

"Because," I said, "ten years ago I sat in your place in that very cell, and that's how long it took me. Now, would you like to see what we really do here?"

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