Chapter One: I Hate This Book
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*"Seraphina deserved her execution. I don't understand why anyone feels sorry for her."*
I read the comment three times, and each time it made me angrier in a way I had absolutely no right to feel.
It's not like I could defend myself. I couldn't exactly reply, *Actually, I wrote her, and if you'd bothered to notice the entire subplot about her mother, you'd understand why she turned out that way.* That would get me banned from my own comment section. Also committed.
But I *did* write her. Three years ago, at two in the morning, fueled by instant noodles and a breakup I was still bitter about, I gave Lady Seraphina Valemont a dead mother, a father who looked through her like glass, and exactly one person in the entire kingdom who ever told her she mattered — and then I killed that person off in chapter nine because I thought it would be *dramatic.*
So yes. She turned out a little unhinged. That was the point.
Nobody remembers the point. They just remember that she was cruel to Elara, and Elara was perfect, so Seraphina had it coming.
I closed my laptop halfway, then opened it again, because apparently I hate myself.
*The Rose and the Crown* had sat untouched on my hard drive for two years, quietly humiliating me from a folder labeled *old drafts (don't look).* I'd written it when I was twenty, back when I thought "plot twist" meant "kill someone nobody liked" and "character development" was optional. I'd moved on. I'd written better things since — things with actual pacing, things I wasn't embarrassed to put my name on.
And then some random editor at a translation site had picked it up, and now it had four hundred thousand reads and a comment section full of strangers deciding who deserved to die.
I scrolled further than I should have. That's always the mistake, isn't it — scrolling further than you should.
*Elara is literally so kind though, I'd die for her.*
*Cassian was too good for that entire kingdom honestly.*
*Can't believe the author let Seraphina live until chapter 40, she should've died on page one.*
I winced at that last one, mostly because — fair. Pacing-wise, that whole first act dragged. If I rewrote it today I'd cut at least six chapters before the coronation scene.
But Elara — okay, fine, Elara I'd stand by. Elara was the one character I'd actually gotten right. Gentle without being stupid about it. Kind in a way that cost her something. I remembered being proud of her, back when I was proud of anything I wrote. If I ever rewrote this book, Elara wouldn't be the one I'd fix.
Seraphina, though. Seraphina I'd built to be hated, and then apparently forgot to make anyone understand *why.*
It was almost one in the morning by the time I found the last chapter. I knew exactly what was in it — I'd written it, obviously — but there's a difference between knowing you wrote an execution scene and rereading it at one a.m., alone, with nothing else to distract you from how bleak it actually was.
Seraphina, kneeling in the square. The crowd, cheering. Cassian, standing at the edge of it, saying nothing, because in my infinite twenty-year-old wisdom I'd decided the second male lead's love story didn't get to end in anything but silence.
I remembered writing that scene and feeling *clever.*
Rereading it now, I just felt tired. Tired, and a little sick, and strangely defensive of a woman who didn't exist.
"Honestly," I muttered to my empty apartment, "if I got reincarnated into this book, I'd rather be her than sit through one more chapter of Elara being perfect at everyone."
It wasn't even a real thought. It was the kind of thing you say to make yourself laugh at one in the morning, the verbal equivalent of closing seventeen browser tabs out of spite.
I put my head down on my folded arms, just for a second, to let my eyes stop burning.
I didn't mean to fall asleep. I never do.
---
The first thing I noticed was the smell.
Not my apartment's smell — the specific, familiar smell of old carpet and reheated noodles — but something floral and faintly like beeswax, the smell of a room that gets cleaned by someone other than the person who sleeps in it.
The second thing I noticed was the ceiling. It was too far away. My apartment ceiling was the kind you could touch if you stood on a chair and stretched. This one had *molding* on it. Gold molding, in a pattern I would've described as excessive if I were still in the business of judging other people's decorating choices.
*I fell asleep at my desk,* I thought, with the confidence of someone who has never once successfully talked herself out of a dream by reasoning with it. *This is a stress dream about the comment section. I'm going to wake up with a crick in my neck and a message from my landlord.*
The blankets were the wrong texture to be a dream, though. Too specific. Silk doesn't usually show up in my subconscious — my subconscious is cheap.
A door opened.
"Good morning, Lady Seraphina."
I did not sit up. I did not scream. I did the only reasonable thing a person can do when a stranger in an apron calls them by someone else's name at what is apparently morning: I lay perfectly still and hoped, with my whole chest, that if I didn't move, this would simply stop happening to me.
It did not stop happening to me.
"Shall I open the curtains, my lady?"
*My lady.* Not *miss.* Not my actual name, which — I noted, with the distant, floating calm of someone watching her own life happen from several feet outside her body — nobody in this room had said at all.
I sat up.
The room was enormous, and unmistakably not mine, and full of the kind of furniture that exists specifically to remind you someone in this house has money and wants you to notice. Across from the bed was a mirror — tall, gold-framed, the kind of mirror that belongs to a person who is used to being looked at.
I told myself not to look in it. I looked in it anyway. I have never once in my life successfully told myself not to do something.
The face looking back at me was not mine.
Silver hair, longer than I'd ever grown mine out. Sharper cheekbones. A mouth set in a line I recognized immediately, because I'd described it myself, more than once, in a document titled *TROTC_FINAL_v3_ACTUALLYFINAL.docx.*
*Seraphina's cold, unreadable expression, the one that made the whole court certain she felt nothing at all.*
I knew that face. I'd built it out of adjectives at two in the morning three years ago.
And then, the way memory sometimes arrives all at once instead of in pieces — I knew the date.
Not the date on a calendar I could see. The date in the story. The one I'd written into the very last chapter, the one currently sitting open in a browser tab on a laptop in an apartment that, as far as I could tell, no longer existed anywhere I could reach it.
Six months.
Six months from now, in a square full of people who had decided they hated her before they'd ever bothered to ask why, Seraphina Valemont was going to kneel down in front of a crowd and not get back up.
I wasn't dreaming.
I was Seraphina Valemont.
And in six months, I was going to die.
