You know, you're rather amusingly wrong.
Just call in at the torturer on your way out. See when he can fit you in.
Hat = wizard, wizard = hat. Everything else is frippery.
It's a god-eat-god world.
If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become a part of someone else's story.
People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.