Sweet Romance14 min read
I Woke Up in My Own Novel — Live, Loud, and Ruinous
ButterPicks14 views
"I… ow—my backside really hurts!"
I opened my eyes to a roof hung with nightpearls. For a beat I thought it was a fever dream: silk curtains, walls inlaid with rose-crystal, and a carriage upholstered like the throne room of a princess I knew too well. I touched my hip, squinted, and whispered, "Where am I? I was sitting in my room finishing the end of my book… the chair gave way and—"
"Princess, you look unwell," a voice said. Amber Hart leaned in through the curtain, worried and earnest.
"Amber? You look like Amber," I said, because half my brain still lived in my author's head.
"Your Highness? Are you hurt?"
A cuckoo called, sharp as a dropped needle. My heart did a stupid, traitorous little leap.
"In the book, after the thirtieth cuckoo, bandits attack," I said. "I—no. I didn't write this, did I? I didn't sign up to dodge swords."
A childish voice popped into my head like a broadcast ad. "Welcome, Freya Albrecht. You have been bound by the Petition System. This is not a dream. This is real."
"Petition—?" I blinked. The carriage rocked as if on cue. Time stilled around me; only I could move.
"Who are you?" I demanded aloud.
"We are the Petition System. You are the host. The live-stream has started. Please complete your tasks."
"Tasks? Live-stream? I didn't ask for any of this!"
The blue screen floated at the carriage's corner, comments cascading like a waterfall. "First time frame! Freya, don't chicken out!" "Freya, do your thing!" "Oho, the princess just woke up—let's watch!"
"Ugh," I said, wiping imaginary stars from my face. "Fine. If this is a dream, I'll just… play it and leave. I wrote my book for a reason—Happy Ending? No, I wrote a BE because I was fed up with sappy romance. But if I can get out faster by running the script, I will."
"Host," the System chirped. "You signed the contract. Many readers petitioned to alter your ending. You were selected. Tasks appear on completion. The faster you clear each world, the sooner you may leave."
I wanted to scream. "You didn't even ask me! Do you have any idea how cruel this is?"
"That is the rule," the System replied blandly. "Survive, complete. Rewarded items assist your exit."
"Rewards? Like… free ice sugar haws?"
The System froze, then blinked in pixelated embarrassment. "Reward #1: Ten skewers of candied hawthorn."
"I'll take the hawthorns. And I want out."
The carriage curtains parted. Outside, a line of masked bandits—laughing as if in a storybook villain sort of way—threatened us with cleavers.
"Princess, what do we do?" Amber whispered.
"Simple," I said, chest puffed, because in my book the heroine was absurdly brave. "We talk sense into them."
"Talk—sense—?" Amber's lip trembled.
"Yes. Talk them into polite surrender, then reward Amber with candied hawthorns if she performs well."
Amber blinked, then punched the nearest leader in the jaw, twice. He fell, teeth scattered in the leaves. The rest staggered, bloody and bewildered. The blue screen exploded with hearts and shrieks. "Freya! Freya! Save the world!"
"Task 1 complete," the System said. "Reward: ten candied hawthorns."
I pocketed them like trophies and grinned at the camera. This is ridiculous, I thought. And yet the world moved beneath my feet in the exact cadence I had once written, scene by scene—except this time I was the one in control. Or at least that's what I thought.
We left the road and a figure staggered up: a man in blue robes, hurt and splendid in the way certain tragedies make men look beautiful. He moved like someone who had been half-killed and found a reason not to die.
"Who are you?" I asked without thinking.
He sniffed disdain and danger and everything that had once been my fictional hero. "I am Luca Moreno of the Clearmoon Order," he said, voice low enough to make a dozen marshmallows melt. "What mischief is this?"
"He looks like the kind of man who will ignore his wounds and then win the world," I muttered.
Luca's eyes met mine for the first time. There was no warmth. He had the sort of dangerous silence that made you want to confess sins you hadn't committed. Live-stream chat melted. "Oh my god," they typed. "Respectful male lead awake."
I dashed at him, reckless as an idiot. "Hello, Luca!" I hopped and smacked his shoulder in a move that would be described in many author notes as "boundless audacity."
He looked on, baffled. "You are… the princess my order guards? You are reckless."
"Reckless is a personality trait I own," Amber said, punching another bandit. I took that chance. I forgot I was supposed to die in this scene and flopped in front of Luca as if to stop his dagger. The knife sank into me.
I felt a ridiculous burst—pain, then nothing. The viewers sighed in sympathy. "Aww."
Luca caught me as I collapsed, blood soaking through silk. "You saved me," he rasped, a hand pressed to where mine had caught the blade.
Of course, the script demanded it: he puts me in his arms, he sees me as an anomaly, he softens. He murmured, "You are a mad thing. Live."
I did not die. Amber force-fed me strange little pills that drained the blood and returned me to wobbly consciousness like a cartoon character. I sat up, touched my chest, and—because I'm a shameless author who had a live audience—I stroked his jaw and kissed him a little on impulse.
He coughed up a mouthful of blood and stared at me as if I'd smashed a priceless vase. "You are insane," he whispered. "You will get people killed."
"Good night," I told the camera, and then we moved on. We were to reach Double-Bridge town and "rescue" a pitiable, shunned child with a smudged face and a name like a bad omen.
At Double-Bridge, ropes bound a boy to a post, his face marred by black birthmarks. People traded cruelty like ripe fruit. "One coin," the trader said. The boy spat, "I'd rather die than be bought."
I cracked my knuckles—this is the part where a tidy heart-swelling rescue happens. "You are coming with us," I told him. He lifted his eyes, and I saw a fire behind that scar that made me melt in a terrible, motherly way.
"Who are you?" he croaked.
"Call me Freya," I said. I liked the sound.
"Freya…? Freya Albrecht?" the boy asked when Amber whispered my last name.
"Yes. Say it."
"Freya," he repeated, and the simplest syllable landed like a coin.
Amber hugged him like a mother. "You're filthy," she said, delighted. "But now you're ours."
"What's your name?" I asked. He looked like he'd been starved of care for a hundred years. "My—name—Baylor," he said.
"Baylor?" I tried it once and laughed. "From this day on you're 'Baylor,'" I declared. "Say it!"
Baylor mumbled it like a vow. The chat exploded with hearts and "AWWWW."
They asked if I would buy him as a servant. "He is coming with us because I chose him," I announced, which I thought sounded noble and dramatic. "He will study at Clearmoon Order. He will learn to stand. Also, I paid the trader with one candied hawthorn. Live-stream rules are very capitalist."
Amber grinned. Baylor shyly offered his hand, and I took it. It felt like a promise. I had no idea what else we were stepping into.
Days later, I stood under the canopy of a petrified forest with the Order's trials, the very place Luca had come from. He appeared, pale but intact, and the atmosphere shifted like weather.
"Freya," he said without a smile. "You should not be here."
"Who said?" I pouted theatrically. "I have work to do."
Amber and Baylor hovered behind me. We were small, ridiculous, and somehow honest.
The system offered tasks: "Rescue the mute fox elder at midnight," "Leave an impression on the male lead," "Gather five hundred points." The blue screen winked and kept tally like an unforgiving accountant.
"Freya, you are sure this will work?" Amber whispered.
"Of course." I tapped the screen for emphasis. "The faster I make Luca fall in love, the faster I scoot."
Luca watched me with narrowed eyes, bafflement and irritation warring on his face. I tried being charming. He tried being cold. Live-stream chat debated whether his blush was real. He pulled a silk bandana and forced my chin up. "You are absurd," he said, but his fingers lingered.
"Is the order against dancing with fire?" I asked.
"It's unwise to tempt disaster," he replied.
"Exactly. So let's tempt it."
When I said that, something in him trembled. The screen flagged a new counter: Heart-Value 26%. I cheered internally like a tiny villain with a glitter cannon.
We were not the only ones watching. A foxlike elder who had escaped his clan arrived—Bronson Henry, sly and unbearably pretty, oozing danger like perfume. He charmed with a tilt of his head, said smelling things that made Baylor stare, and irritated Luca until Luca's jaw clenched.
"You two shouldn't be here," Luca snapped, like a man who had been denied comfort for too long.
"Why don't you keep your hands to yourself?" Bronson drawled, coiling a silver brush behind him like a threat and a tail he refused to show.
The ridiculous melodrama crowed. I loved it.
Then the system pounced: "New task — keep the male lead with you. Reward: 1,000 points."
"One thousand?" I whispered. "Does he come with a warranty?"
"Just keep him," the Orb—the system's tiny hovering orb I nicknamed Orb—chirped.
I did the only sensible thing: I kissed him. He kissed me back, like the center closed on itself. The world tilted and the chat filled with panic. Luca's eyes darkened like a storm.
"How dare you," he breathed later, hunting for explanations and finding nothing but me and the urgent beating under my ribs.
He said, "Take care—this is dangerous." He meant his life, his heart, his very order. I said, "Then stay with me." He was the kind of man who, threatened, would make the world bend.
Days later, news and hunger and my own playacting saw me kidnapped by men who wanted to sell women to higher bidders. A fox demon named Dario Schmitt—bad in the way his smirk needed punishment—nearly had me. He dragged me toward a cave, hands slick with bad intention, triumph sour.
He whispered the usual lines: "First time, you'll like it," and other crimes meant for prison pens.
I did what I always did when acting: played the part. I feigned fear, let him get cocky. Then I hit the exact pulse I had saved for wrongdoers.
"You will die," I told him, with venom every reader had requested. He laughed and pressed closer. At once, a shadow moved and a sword cut through him, an invisible black blade that wasn't there before I planted it in his back.
He gasped, eyes wide, then collapsed.
It was Luca. He burst in like hell with his serpent-guard and my heart nearly broke. The moment he stood over Dario, rage like a black flower in his throat, I felt something old and dangerous and real: possessiveness.
Dario's end was messy, and swift. The live chat flooded with shock and gore filter warnings. I had not meant to kill, but Dario had earned every shiver of his end.
Even so, public justice had to be more than one murderer thrown into a pit. There were men who used greed publicly and made markets of suffering—Anders Perrin was one such man, a pompous pillar among traders who smiled while selling lives. I had collected whispers, notes, and threads of testimony through the streams, and I knew the world favored spectacle.
So I went to the market square at high sun, in front of the traders and the magistrates and the dozens of live viewers watching the stream that now felt like a town larger than some kingdoms. I climbed the wooden platform and felt the heat of the very public gaze.
"I am Freya Albrecht," I said, voice ringing. "You have been buying and selling people. Anders Perrin," I pointed. "You took dowries, demanded girls in payment, lied about debts. You broke families."
Anders, in the white coat he wore to mask his claws, sneered. "Who are you to talk? Some pampered aristocrat? I'll have your head."
"Do you know this man?" I asked, holding up a string of parchment. "This is a ledger of names. Girls forced into houses, boys sold instead of helped. Here are letters from those girls—some signed. Here is the merchant's mark you use in secret to launder funds. Here is your mistress's ledger where you paid bribes to silence witnesses."
He laughed with the kind of arrogance that smells like perfume and rot. "Fake papers. Slander. Who's going to believe some pretty girl's accusations?"
"Everyone," I said. "Look." I pressed my finger to the blue screen; the Orb hummed and widened the broadcast. The ledger, the letters, the signed marks filled the stream and spilled into real life as proof. The market froze like a held breath.
"Turn the camera up!" someone shouted. "Record!" Others drew knives in panic. I'd expected some to attack. Instead, Anders Perrin's face shifted. First a flash of mirth—then confusion. "How—"
"Stop obstructing!" the magistrate barked. The gathered crowd of merchants and town officials grabbed their own ledgers, discovered cross-references like hidden puzzle pieces. Murmurs swelled into roars.
Anders' expression went from colorless to pale. "This is a lie," he said. "They're forgeries! They plotted against me."
I smiled. "More for the stream." I nodded to the Orb, which conjured soundless evidence: notes, a ring, a dried flower he'd given an abused girl—things that couldn't lie. The crowd pressed closer. "You say forgeries, do you?"
"No, no—" Anders stammered. "It's—it's misinterpreted!"
"Then explain how the bribe receipts in your ledger match payments to a magistrate who took bribes to ignore your ships' cargo." I peered into his eyes like someone reading a bad novel. "Explain how the market girls who 'left willingly' were chained when rescued."
His smile cracked; what had been arrogance fell into denial. "You cannot prove—"
"Watch," I said. "There are witnesses."
Heads turned. A woman stepped forward—her hair gray, her back bent, but her eyes steady. "He bought my daughter," she said. "He bought her so she could be a wife's labor and paid the magistrate to look the other way. She never came back."
Another voice: a lad who'd once worked the docks, now trembling with memory: "I saw Anders' ledger, the mark. He forced a wife to sign false debts."
The atmosphere shifted. Anders' face moved through a whole private movie: first anger—then panic—then denial—then bargaining. "You lie! I—I'll pay the girls! I'll give them their dowries back! I will—"
Someone in the crowd spat. "Payback isn't justice." Cameras clicked. Phones recorded. The market's gossip turned to pitchforks. A dozen merchants came forward, naming losses, debts faked, cargo misdeclared.
His composure unraveled. He went from furious to shrieking, the sound of a mask tearing.
"Shut up," he begged at one point, voice threadbare. "You can't—this is my livelihood. I gave back—I'll pay back every coin. Please!"
"Please?" the crowd repeated. "Please what? Stop? Beg us? Beg the women you ruined?"
At this, his face changed into a grotesque parody of the man he once was—one hand fumbling for a ring, the other pressed to his heart as if his guilt could be bought with trinkets. He fell to his knees on the wooden planks. The merchants and people surged forward; some hurled insults, others took pictures, children screamed, and a few hands slapped him hard enough to sting his cheeks.
He begged. "Please! I didn't know she was—please! I can return the money. Take it. Take it and forget—"
"No," the magistrate said. He lifted the ledger Anders used to launder money and read aloud, page by page, the names of the girls, the dates of sale, and the currencies in which he trafficked lives. The market listened as if hearing the last chapter of a nightmare. Phones fired like flares.
Anders' face contorted from feigned pain into real disbelief. "No! This can't be—this is slander. You are lying! I would never—"
"You did," I said, voice cold. "You bought and sold women. You made commerce of human hearts. Today, the market sees you clearly."
"A wayward client!" he cried. "An enemy!"
"Look!" someone cried. The magistrate tore the sash Anders had worn for years, the same sash men used to indicate standing. "No more ownable status. Your stall—seized." He ordered the merchant houses to post Anders' crimes upon the market door. Lans of ink and accusation spread like wildfire. Men who had once sat with Anders now turned their backs.
The public had its arc: Anders' confidence became confusion, then rage, then bargaining, then collapse. Phones recorded his knees hitting the planks, his face pressed to the wood as strangers stepped around him. His voice grew thin and small. "Please! I'm sorry!" he sobbed. People filmed, some applauded, some spat. Children shook their small fists.
He begged. He wept. He pled ignorance. He scraped at the boards with the soles of his shoes, as if clawing at a memory in which he was the man he pretended to be.
No one bought his trinkets. No one sheltered his name. The crowd decided, then and there, that markets did not trade in people and that his privileges had ended. A dozen merchants marched him through the streets to the public stocks. They unrolled his ledger in the sunlight, and the magistrate read the names aloud, giving the world the data Anders had hidden.
He collapsed. "Please," he begged again, staring at the faces that had turned on him. Some nearby beat him soundly but did not kill him; they left a scar in the town and a reputation broken like glass.
When they finally left him to the authorities, Anders was hollowed. He pleaded, promised, denied. He stood humiliated on the scaffold, then was led to trial—where most of his assets were seized, and a public restitution was ordered. Photos traveled the world: the market, the ledger, the man on his knees, and my face at his side as the one who'd pulled the curtain back.
That scene—two thousand watchers, the market full, the live-stream exploding into even more witnesses—was what the readers had clicked to see. They wanted the reckoning. They watched Anders move from arrogant predator to broken supplicant, the crowd's chorus turning like a healing ritual. The Orb counted points: another task cleared.
After that winter's public scouring, the world began to take me seriously. I no longer was only a silly princess; I was a force that could hold the Mirror to a man's crimes.
Yet the greatest danger had another name—Luca’s. He sat by a black pool, an ancient wound simmering like thunder. He was told by those who loved him that certain women would ensnare him. He had been taught from childhood: never love, never lose your edge. He had been told to kill the woman whose presence made his serpent-soul unfurl. He had been told to cut intel that might breach the foundation of his destiny.
He had not been told what it was like to meet me.
Sometimes, he looked at me like a promise and a threat. His possession was not just raw desire. It was darker: a claim, a vow, a coercion folded into tenderness.
"Freya," he said one night, voice low as coal and bright as blade. "You are… dangerous."
"Am I?" I said, leaning the wrong way into him, because why would I be anything but ridiculous? "I may be the sort who steals swords from unguarded hands. I may be the sort who steals hearts, too. You seem to have lost a good many things."
"I will not have you used," he whispered.
"Used?" I laughed. "What if I use you?"
His breath hitched. The Orb ticker clicked: Heart 72%. Shadow 40%. Black numbers in the corner—Luca's "blackening"—grew with each possessive sentence. The system called it "Blackness," a measure of a male lead's obsessive darkness. The Orb warned, and my blue screen winked dangerously.
"Then don't make me." He moved like someone handing over their last weapon. "Be mine."
I had many reasons to escape. I had contracts, petitions, and a half-mad audience to please. But then Luca, angry and solemn, kissed me in a way that left me without defenses. The world blurred. It felt like the line between living and fictional had been carved thin and argued over. He became something uncanny and whole.
I did not understand him, and he did not let me go. But I also did not understand the line between my schemes and his reality. Over and over, through fires and knives and markets and the Orb’s tally, I learned how to use the script for different ends: not to die too fast, to gather points and favors and allies, and—most dangerously—to watch a man I had painted in ink become something real and terrible.
I made choices worse writers would warn you against. I kissed men I did not love. I humiliated predators. I saved a hundred small lives and bought a thousand candied hawthorns. I took a fallen ledger and burned a dealer's status in the noon sun. I kept a serpent at my side and a little green orb that counted my sins and victories.
At night, when the live-stream finally slowed and my fingers cooled, Orb hummed soft and conspiratorial in my ear.
"Freya," it said. "You can set the condition. Male lead heart value must reach one hundred to clear this world. You must keep him. One hundred and he cannot be pried away."
"That sounds like a trap." I rubbed at my eyes. "What about his blackness?"
"The blackness increases as his heart grows," Orb said like it was listing a menu. "It will twist him. But it will also anchor him."
"Anchor him?" I thought of the market, the ledger, the public punishment that had made the town safer. I thought of Luca's hands, the way he had saved me and strangled my breath into an intimate map. "Then let's anchor him. But not break him."
"That is not how the world tends to go," Orb said. "You signed up for a live show."
"Fine." I straightened my shoulders. "We will write a better ending."
People saw me as a whirlwind: a princess with jokes as sharp as knives, hair frizzed from smoke and laugh lines at war with woe. They saw Luca as the man who would kill anything that dared touch the woman he wanted. They watched Anders learn humility, Dario fly apart in the dark, and a market reborn by a ledger set on flame.
I learned something harder still: being a creator in your own book is less about rewriting everyone and more about choosing the moment to save, the moment to strike, the moment to kiss. I wrote myself into a bargain, into a fight, into a public judgment day, and all the while my chat cheered and booed like gods on their day off.
When I finally lifted my head after one long public battle I looked at the blue screen. A single line blinked in lavender: "Freya: Rule One — You never leave without your Orb."
I smiled, surprised to find I meant it. I had been a monster of my own making—mischief, charm, cleverness—and yet I was still learning the cost of the crown I had written for myself.
"Orb," I told the small blinking thing, "when this is done, I want my life back."
"It is not yours yet," Orb chirped, with a strange, almost sympathetic static. "But you can keep the hawthorns."
"Deal," I said.
And I walked, hand-in-hand with a man whose blackness and radiance made him a small catastrophe, toward the next task—toward more strange rescues, more public reckonings, and toward rewriting an ending that, for once, might let us both keep our hands and still choose the world.
The End
— Thank you for reading —