Mira's POV
The words on my phone screen blurred together as my head dropped forward for the third time tonight.
I jerked awake, my heart pounding. The instant noodle cup beside my laptop had gone cold hours ago, a thin film forming on top of the leftover broth. My tiny Seoul apartment felt smaller than usual, the walls pressing in like they wanted to crush me.
"Stay awake, Mira," I whispered, slapping my cheeks. "Just finish this chapter."
I had to keep reading. If I fell asleep now, I'd wake up late for my morning shift at the convenience store. Then I'd miss my afternoon shift at the coffee shop. Then I couldn't pay rent. Again.
My phone buzzed with a notification. Another rejection email from a publisher.
"Thank you for your submission, but your story doesn't fit our current needs."
I deleted it without reading the rest. That made rejection number forty-seven this year.
"Maybe I should just give up," I muttered, rubbing my burning eyes. "Maybe I'm not meant to be a writer."
But what else could I do? I'd already given up everything else—my family, my friends, my college degree—to chase this dream. If I quit now, what was it all for?
I looked at the novel I'd been reading on my phone: "Crown of Thorns." It was a dark fantasy romance, the kind of story I wished I could write. The kind that made readers stay up all night, unable to stop turning pages.
Unlike my stories, which nobody wanted to read.
I scrolled to where I'd left off. The villainess, Seraphina Blackwood, was about to be executed.
"Finally," I said with a bitter laugh. "This character is so annoying. She deserves to die."
Seraphina had spent the whole book being cruel and stupid. She schemed against the heroine, tried to steal the prince, and practiced dark magic for no good reason. The author made her so one-dimensional, so obviously evil, that her death felt like a waste of pages.
"Why make a character just to kill them off?" I complained to my empty apartment. "Why not give her a reason for being bad? Why not make her interesting?"
But that was the problem with most stories. Villainesses were never real people. They were just obstacles for the hero and heroine to overcome. Cardboard cutouts designed to make the good guys look better.
I kept reading, my vision getting fuzzier with each paragraph.
The scene described Seraphina's execution in painful detail. The crowd throwing rotten vegetables. The executioner sharpening his blade. The heroine watching with sad but righteous eyes, as if she regretted the necessity of killing someone but knew it was the right thing to do.
"Give me a break," I muttered. "If you're going to kill someone, at least own it. Don't pretend to be sorry about it."
My eyelids felt like they had weights attached. The words swam across the screen like fish.
"And so, the villainess Seraphina Blackwood met her end, unloved and unmourned, a cautionary tale of what becomes of those who choose darkness over light."
I snorted. "Choose darkness? She didn't choose anything. The author made her evil because the plot needed a villain. That's not choice. That's just bad writing."
My head felt heavy. So, so heavy.
I should stop reading. I should sleep. But something made me keep scrolling, as if the story had hooked itself into my brain and wouldn't let go.
The final lines appeared on my screen:
"As Seraphina's body fell, the kingdom rejoiced. The Dark Lord, upon hearing of his enemy's death, retreated to his cursed lands, never to threaten the kingdom again. And they all lived happily ever after. The End."
"That's it?" I said out loud, anger pushing through my exhaustion. "That's the ending? The Dark Lord just... gives up? After everything?"
It made no sense. The Dark Lord was supposed to be the main villain, the big threat. But the moment his supposed ally Seraphina died, he just disappeared? What kind of villain was that?
"The author didn't even show him," I complained, scrolling back through the last few chapters. "He was only mentioned in rumors. We never saw him actually do anything evil. For all we know, he could be the good guy and nobody would—"
My vision went completely black for a second.
I blinked hard, trying to clear it. My chest felt tight. When had breathing become difficult?
"Just need to sleep," I told myself, but my voice sounded far away. "Just a few minutes..."
My phone slipped from my numb fingers, clattering on the desk.
I tried to catch it, but my arms wouldn't move. They felt like they belonged to someone else, heavy and useless.
The room tilted sideways.
Or maybe I was the one tilting.
I couldn't tell anymore.
My last thought before darkness swallowed me was how unfair it all was. Twenty-four years old, and what did I have to show for it? No family who cared. No friends who stayed. No dreams that came true. Just a pile of rejection letters and a cold cup of noodles in a apartment I could barely afford.
Is this really how my story ends?
The darkness pulled me under like water, cold and absolute.
But then—
Something changed.
The darkness wasn't empty anymore. It had weight, texture, presence. Like I was falling through it, tumbling down an endless tunnel with no bottom.
Images flashed past me—no, through me—too fast to understand. A castle made of black stone. A woman's face that looked like mine but wasn't. A silver-eyed man wreathed in shadows. A execution platform covered in blood.
No.
I tried to scream, but I had no mouth.
Not blood. Please, not blood.
The images came faster, violent and sharp like broken glass cutting through my mind.
A dungeon cell. Chains. A woman begging. A blade falling. Screaming. So much screaming.
Make it stop!
And suddenly, it did.
The silence was worse than the images.
I floated in nothing, feeling nothing, being nothing.
Am I dead?
The thought drifted through the emptiness like a leaf on water.
Is this what death feels like? Just... nothing?
But then I felt it. A pull. A hook sinking into my chest, dragging me somewhere.
No, no, no! I don't want to go!
The pulling got stronger, more insistent, yanking me forward through the dark.
And then—
Light.
Blinding, burning, painful light that seared through my closed eyelids.
I gasped, and air rushed into lungs I thought I'd lost. Real air. Cold air that tasted like stone and dampness and something metallic that might have been blood.
My eyes flew open.
I was staring at a ceiling made of rough gray stone. Not the cracked plaster of my apartment ceiling. Stone. Like a castle. Or a dungeon.
What...?
I tried to sit up, but my body screamed in protest. Every muscle ached like I'd been beaten. My head pounded so hard I thought my skull might split open.
Where was I?
This wasn't my apartment. This wasn't anywhere I recognized.
I turned my head, ignoring the spike of pain, and my blood turned to ice.
I was lying on a stone floor. The walls around me were made of the same gray stone, slick with moisture. A single barred window near the ceiling let in a shaft of weak light.
A cell.
I was in a prison cell.
This is a dream, I told myself frantically. Just a nightmare. Wake up. Wake up!
But I couldn't wake up, because I was already awake.
I pushed myself up on shaking arms and looked down at my hands. They were wrong. Too small. Too pale. The nails were cracked and dirty, with dried blood under them.
These weren't my hands.
Panic clawed up my throat. I touched my face with those strange hands, feeling features that were similar but not quite right. Sharper cheekbones. A smaller nose. Longer hair that fell past my shoulders in tangled waves.
What's happening to me?
Movement outside the cell made me freeze. Footsteps echoed in the corridor, getting closer.
Two guards appeared at the bars. They wore silver armor with a sun symbol on the chest. Their faces were hard and cold as they looked at me.
"The prisoner's awake," one of them said with a nasty smile. "Good. High Priestess Evangeline wants her conscious for the interrogation."
"Three days," the other guard added, laughing. "That's all you've got left, Seraphina. Three days until they cut off your pretty head."
Seraphina.
The name hit me like a punch to the stomach.
No. That's not possible. That's not—
But deep down, in a place beyond logic or reason, I knew the truth.
I wasn't Mira Chen anymore.
I was Seraphina Blackwood.
The villainess from "Crown of Thorns."
The woman who was supposed to die in three days.
And somewhere in a world I could no longer reach, my real body was probably being found by my landlord, cold and dead at my desk, just another overworked girl who pushed herself too hard.
I opened my mouth to scream, but what came out was worse.
I laughed.
Because of course this would happen to me. Of course my life—or death—would be this ridiculous.
I'd complained about Seraphina's stupid death.
Now I was going to live it.
The guards walked away, their laughter echoing down the stone corridor.
And I sat there on the cold floor, trapped in a body that wasn't mine, in a world that wanted me dead, with three days left to figure out how to survive a story where I was written to die.
The worst part?
I'd read the book. I knew how this ended.
And there was no escape.