"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life."
— Oscar Wilde
***
Blue light from my monitor was the only thing keeping the darkness at bay in my shoebox dorm room. Empty energy drink cans had formed what could generously be called a "collection" around my laptop. A more honest person would call it a cry for help. The clock read 2:47 AM.
Excellent. Prime time to hate-read this garbage novel again.
The comments section of Heirs of the Azure Orb, Chapter 347, had turned into a warzone. I watched fans trip over themselves to praise Leo, the golden boy protagonist, for his "heroic restraint" in dealing with the story's designated punching bag. Some villain so pathetically evil that even I, a man who had read over three hundred web novels of varying quality, felt personally insulted by the lazy writing.
Heroic restraint. Sure. Because humiliating a guy weaker than you in front of the entire academy is peak character development.
My fingers went to work on the keyboard. Sleep deprivation had stripped away whatever filter I might have had left:
Kaelen Leone is a character so fundamentally flawed he threatens to collapse the entire story under the weight of his own pathetic villainy. A perverted coward who preys on servants and commoners?
Really?
And now we're supposed to feel satisfied watching Leo 'discipline' him? This isn't character development—it's just lazy writing that uses a strawman villain to make the protagonist look good by comparison.
If I were Kaelen, I'd have thrown myself off a cliff by now just to stop embarrassing the family name. At least then he'd have accomplished something worthwhile.
I hit enter and cracked my knuckles. Good. Productive use of my time. The comment would get buried under Leo simps within the hour, but at least I'd contributed something honest to the discourse about—
The screen went weird.
I blinked. My eyes had been threatening to quit for the past hour, so this tracked. Except when I opened them again, the screen was still doing... that. The pixels twisted inward like someone had pulled the plug on a bathtub, and reality itself started bending around the edges of my laptop.
Okay. Okay. This was just my brain giving me the middle finger for years of abuse. Caffeine dependency, chronic sleep deprivation, an obsession with fiction that most people would call "unhealthy" and my therapist called "avoidant behavior." All coming home to roost.
"What the—"
My voice died in my throat. The world folded. My comment burned white-hot on the screen, the letters searing themselves into my vision. Then nothing.
I fell through something that had no business existing.
===
Then... cool fabric.
That was the first thing my brain latched onto as consciousness dragged itself back into my skull.
Soft. Really soft. The kind of soft that my student loan balance had never allowed me to experience firsthand. A breeze drifted through, carrying the scent of flowers I didn't recognize.
I kept my eyes shut. This was a dream. Had to be. My body had finally given up and collapsed at my desk, and now my subconscious was mixing the novel with my anxieties about my useless English degree. Made total sense. People didn't get sucked into computer screens. That was bad fiction. I would know. I was an expert on bad fiction.
Come on, Alex. Open your eyes. You'll see the water stain on the ceiling, smell Dave's gym socks from next door, and everything will be terrible and normal.
I opened one eye.
The water stain was gone.
Instead, I was staring at a vaulted ceiling with hand-carved wooden beams. Tapestries hung on stone walls, showing knights fighting monsters I recognized from illustration after illustration. A massive arched window dominated one side of the room, and morning light streamed through it, making little particles of dust float around like they were showing off.
The bed beneath me could have fit three of me with room to spare. The sheets were silk.
Oh no.
A mirror stood across the room. Ornate. Gilded. The kind of thing museums put ropes around.
I didn't want to look. Every instinct I had screamed at me to stay in this bed and pretend nothing was wrong.
But I had to know.
My legs didn't cooperate the way they should have. The proportions were off. The weight felt wrong. When I reached the mirror, I grabbed the frame hard enough to hurt, because I already knew what I was going to see and I needed something solid to hold onto.
Black hair hung across a face that wasn't mine. Light grey eyes stared back at me instead of the dark blue I'd seen in every bathroom mirror for twenty-two years. The face was young, seventeen at most, with aristocratic features that belonged on a period drama or a pretentious cologne ad.
Sharp cheekbones. Pale skin that had never seen honest work. A face that would have been extremely handsome if not for the hollowness in the cheeks, the shadows under the eyes, the general aura of someone rotting from the inside out.
I'd seen this face. I'd seen it getting punched by the protagonist in fan art. I'd spent an hour ripping it apart in a comments section.
No. Absolutely not. I refuse.
The universe, apparently, did not care what I refused.
A knock on the door made me jump so hard I nearly knocked the mirror over. My chest went tight with panic. Or rather, Kaelen Leone's chest went tight with panic, because that was apparently whose body I was piloting now.
"Young Master Kaelen?" A woman's voice. Soft. Concerned.
I didn't answer. I couldn't. My brain was still buffering.
Okay. Okay. Let's think about this.
I was inside Heirs of the Azure Orb. Inside the body of the story's most pathetic villain. A character whose entire purpose was to make the protagonist look good by comparison. A guy who got publicly humiliated, stripped of his status, and eventually killed off in such an insignificant way that the novel spent exactly three sentences on his death.
And if I remembered the timeline correctly, Leo's "heroic restraint" demonstration was happening soon.
I'm going to die.