Sweet Romance14 min read
My Mistaken Role: How I Became the Villain, the Pendant, and the Green Light
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I opened my eyes to an absurd sight: a man in a fake ancient wig had his arms wrapped tight around me, and his wig smelled faintly of river mud and too-much-hairspray. I pushed him off and slapped my hand to my chest.
"What are you doing? That's not part of the price!" I spat.
He stared, eyes wide like a morning gull. He trembled, his fists clenching, and after a long breath he croaked, "Autumn—Autumn, help your master undo the Heart-Bind Curse and I will forgive everything."
Autumn. The name slid into the room like a forgotten song. Familiar, wrong, mine.
I blinked at him. "Who the hell is Autumn?"
His face went red; his jaw flexed. He swallowed and said, "Autumn is my disciple. You—help me, Autumn."
"Disciple?" I echoed. My head fogged and refused to line up with my senses. "Hold on. I didn't sign up for this. I didn't audition for this role."
He kept looking at me like I had just offered him the right verse to a poem. "You are Autumn. You must stop."
My memory sputtered like an old lantern. Then the truth landed with a wet slap: I had transmigrated into a book. Not just any book—into a cannon-fodder, malicious supporting heroine of a cultivation romance. I, Olivia Cornelius, had been handed the life of a woman men called "Autumn Mistake."
I was the fourth of four disciples. Our master was Carter Martini, an unapproachable ice mountain of a man. The four of us—Brianna Dudley, Mami Romano, me, and Kamiyah Ramos—were supposed to be his top students. I flipped through my borrowed memory: Autumn trained like a madwoman, her cultivation rank peaked among us, yet Carter kept favoring one—Mami Romano's character, the sunlit second sister. Autumn, the real Autumn, tried forbidden spells. She cast a bind on the master—the kind of love-snaring curse people whispered about. People paid for less scandal in other worlds.
"I don't know how to break it!" I blurted. "I didn't read the whole book. I only skimmed the front pages."
He seemed to possess both muscle and confused dignity. "Try," he said, as if I could conjure miracles on demand. "Try anything."
So I tried everything my broken knowledge offered. "Abracadabra, be gone!" I chirped. "Hocus pocus, reverse the focus!"
"Carter," I heard someone call outside, voice like cool water. Four hearts jumped and one of them squeezed mine. Then the door burst and in came elders and the woman everyone called Mami Romano, glowing like a summer night's moon.
"Stop," said Earl Hudson, the elder, voice tight. He tapped a gnarled staff and muttered. The master blinked, the heat in his eyes dimmed, and the sudden softness froze inside me like a slow-rolling freeze.
"Autumn," Carter said, and his voice was stricter than ice and strangely gentler toward me. "Do not study those books. Do not study forbidden books."
I mumbled, "Yes," and fled—because who runs well in court-style clothes?—straight past the ruined moment. My feet hit the corridor and I thought, I must not be this Autumn. I must not be the kind of woman who ruins the lives she touches.
Outside, the world was floating islands and jade gates, and I, who had never flown a day in my life, had to learn to levitate or starve. I had no idea which side of the sword I was supposed to be on.
"You're still here?" Mami Romano asked as she appeared behind me like a warm wind. "Do you need help?"
"Lost." I lied. "I've lost my way." The truth was I also did not know how to stop being a villainess in a story that had a way of being mean.
Mami leveled a look at me. "This is the Upper God Isle, Master lives above. We return to Middle Isle soon."
"I can't fly," I admitted, and she slapped an open palm to my back like a mother teaching a child. I sailed on a cloud as if I'd been doing it for years.
"Autumn, don't stray," she said before I left. It was supposed to be a warning, but in the book's tone it read like pity.
I set myself to the only practical solution: study. I read Autumn's notes. I discovered a stubborn truth: the old woman who once wore this body had worked like a librarian possessed. Her notes were full of close-combat spells, lightning strikes, and a thesaurus of pain—everything that would let you fight at point-blank range. She had avoided healing arts on purpose. Now everything made sense. This was the build for a contest: the apprenticeship test where winners took many students and prizes.
A test—great. My options, I told myself, were twofold: embrace the old girl's villain role and get cozy with Carter's cold indifference until the book's ending swallowed me, or reform and stick to my studies so the story would find me less appealing as a villain.
"Reform," I said to the mirror. "You can study and be dull."
Zeke Dawson appeared then—my new apprentice, a messy-haired boy whose grin declared him trouble. "Master," he said with innocence that smelled like mischief, "you look like a storm drained of lightning."
"Then learn to help, not to mock," I replied. "Do you want a life of wandering or success?"
He blinked and then, very quickly, bowed. "Master's right. I will work."
It took days, nights, and a list of spells with names too long to remember. I was growing into the body, but the book's plot buzzed in my ear. It was loud. Somewhere in that static, a small terrible truth glinted: Autumn had not only cast a spell; she had planted a seed—an insidious soul-fly of affection—inside Carter. The "love curse" had a darker cousin: a mind-rooting talisman. If the master had grown attached, it could have been both magic and contrivance.
"Where did Autumn hide things?" I muttered. On a restless night, I lifted the mattress and found a secret compartment. Inside, a "forbidden book" and a set of hairpins stared back. The forbidden book whispered: 'The Thought-Bind.'
My stomach dropped. She had not just made the master look her way; she had planted love-anchors inside him. That explained the way his eyes hummed like a bell at Mami, like a bell that only rang at certain hands.
"This isn't temporary," I hissed. The book meant control, not just passion.
The plan brewed in my head like tea. If Autumn had sewn a trick into Carter's chest, maybe I could sew a better trick. If her work had made him fall and then break, then I could stitch the seams. I had no right to play with hearts and minds. Yet here I was, thinking of solving a curse with another curse. The line between villain and remedy thinned.
"Zeke," I said, pulling him close, "we'll do what she did, but for truth. We will fix her mistakes."
He grinned. "This is dangerous."
"All right then," I answered. "Danger gives life flavor."
We took kid-sized risks. We culled a lock of Mami Romano's hair when she wasn't looking—stolen with a straw-like, terrible delicacy. We collected tears and we bled a small drop from a finger under the pretense of test quills. Everything felt ridiculous and wrong. But the forbidden book had an even stranger note inside: two worms in one jar fight until they ruin each other. If you put both charms inside the same body, they battled. The master could lose both inclinations and become a blank slate.
"If both charms fight, they destroy each other," Zeke read. "That could end it all."
"Either way," I said, "we either save him or turn him to dust. Both outcomes beat letting him be the pawn of another's trick."
We fed Carter one charm. We burned the other, though not without thinking that if we failed we might destroy everything.
"You're sure?" Zeke whispered as we slipped the charm in. His hand shook like a child's. He had promised he'd follow me even if the path went bleak.
"Do it," I said.
When the final circle closed and the candle hissed out, Carter's face was a mask of storm clouds. He looked at me unlike before—not with love, not with hatred, but with the grave, slow regard of someone who had survived an earthquake.
"You did this?" he asked quietly.
"I tried to correct something dangerous," I said. "I wanted him for himself."
For once he did not threaten. He only said, "Study. Avoid forbidden pages."
"Good advice," I breathed. "Thank you."
Days later the apprenticeship contests began. "You draw?" Mami Romano teased, watching as our names were cast like lots.
"We're in a team," I said, and the lot put Zeke and me together in a pair match—a small mercy. The tournament looked like a festival: flags, drums, onlookers from the Lower Isles. Spring's team—Brianna's—was fierce. Mami's entrances were poetry; the audience held breath at her movement. I wanted to be unseen.
"Play it small," I told myself. "Play fourth."
On the arena we were two, and I remember thinking, "Just go down. Let the book write it." I fell back and pretended a stumble; I let Zeke look heroic. He didn't leap to save me so much as steady the moment, and winter girl Kamiyah shouted, "Master, careful!" and nearly threw herself on my chest.
"I am okay," I lied to both the world and to myself.
Carter watched. The way he said later, "I saw you meter him out your strength," clipped like a teacher's reprimand and warmed like something softer. He'd noticed my double play.
That night, I found in my chest a pebble of unease that wouldn't go away. I had been the villain; even effort couldn't erase a history of mean deeds. Mami smiled like summer at me, and I wanted to smile back without the ache of guilt.
Then the island changed.
A sky-beast, a thing like a giant will-o'-the-wisp, swooped over the training grounds like a sentence. The elder—Earl Hudson—stiffened. "Silver spirit," he muttered, and every voice grew sharp. Magnus Friedrich descended like the smell before thunder: an old power, a wronged immortal.
He spoke low. "Take your strongest and I'll test the mettle of your hearts."
Within the blink of a thought the beast's charm unspooled: illusions, echoed rooms, and the absolute knack for stealing someone's mind away. He spoke of taking the strongest disciple to prove a point. He took one: a girl lit with inner fire, and then the knot tumbled into a trap. I found myself—already too many unfair things later—snatched into a cavern dungeon of his making, the world folding into a dream that was heavy as rock.
"You're not the right one," I told him. "You took the wrong person."
He smiled as if he'd heard this joke before. "Perhaps," Magnus said, "or perhaps the book only misnames what it finds."
Inside his cavern-dream, he performed tricks. He could conjure whole scenes: a river, the smell of pines, a book whose pages turned and turned until knees shook. I begged, bargained, and lied. I wanted to break out. He finally relented to a kind of deal: show him the book he wanted.
The book I had been living. "Teach me why you loved what you loved," he demanded.
I handed him a copy. He read and then, oddly, laughed. "You like this story?"
"I lived it," I told him. "I didn't want to be Autumn."
"Then do something Autumn never did. Tell me the truth."
So I told him. I told him how childish mortal hearts were, how easy to twist, how Autumn had been cruel and proud. I told him everything a villain would confess.
He listened until a silence fell. Then Magnus clenched both hands, and the cavern shook like a drum skin.
"Autumn wanted to be loved," he said, "and Autumn wanted to be worshiped. I will show them both a mirror."
He unmade illusions with a trick of his wrist and a song. The cave dissolved into a plaza before the island's main hall, and there he walked—Magnus—walking into the center where every citizen could watch. He placed himself on a low stone and spoke, commanding all eyes.
"People of the islands," he said, voice bright and terrible, "come watch. Come witness what greed for love does."
He told our story in a way that stung like a nettle. He revealed how a disciple had hidden charms, how a woman's work had tried to make a man into a puppet, how the plot had gripped the island. The crowd gasped.
"You say you're all scholars of light," he went on. "Look what you let one student do."
Someone from the crowd cried, "Where is she? Unmask her!"
They looked at me because the illusion had dragged me into his theater. The plaza smelled of smoke and old banners. Carter stood on the steps, motionless and pale, while the elders clustered like dark moths.
"Autumn," Magnus called, pointing a long finger. "Show them."
I could have stayed silent and let lies stay buried. Instead, I stepped forward, the first time in this life I chose truth over safety.
"It is me," I said. "I have her notes. I took what she left behind, and I tried to fix it. But she cast bonds. She left traps. I did not want to be her."
The crowd murmured, a tide of faces washing over me. Some eyes were curious, some hungry, some tender.
"Why did you do it?" demanded a voice from the crowd—one of Master Karl Britt's disciples. "Why bind a man's heart?"
"Because she wanted to make herself matter," I answered. "Because she was small and frightened and thought she could stitch greatness to herself."
Magnus raised his hands. "Now watch how the island judges the work of one woman's cruelty."
He called the elders to question anyone who had helped Autumn. He had them reveal hidden charms, he conjured the forbidden book's contents into the air—threads and hair, riddled with fault. People watched as the truth spilled out like a basket tipped. Carter's face changed from hurt to a raw astonishment.
"Autumn," he said to me from the steps, "did you do this?"
"It wasn't all me," I managed. "But I fixed some of it. I attempted a remedy."
For the crowd, the remedy looked like another wrong. They wanted restoration, not cleverness. They wanted punishment. Magnus, who had been the villain, now took the role of the judge. The irony burned.
He ordered me bound in public—not to shackle my body exactly, but to tie me to a public altar of sorts, one that would not have me vanish entirely: a circle of light that asked for confession nightly and for tasks. He commanded, "For each wrong, there shall be work."
The punishment was not a single humiliating fall. It was a slow unmaking of vanity: every morning I would stand on a platform and tell one truth about what I'd done, and I would teach young disciples to avoid it. The island would watch. The elders would judge. The laughter I had once enjoyed—little cruel smirks at another's expense—was stripped from me like old clothing.
People took out mirrors and compared my face to Autumn's portrait. The boy who had laughed the loudest at my jokes now watched with an emptier mouth. Fathers who'd once nodded at my arrogance now shook their heads.
The crowd shifted like wind. At first they pointed and whispered with a pleasure that felt like teeth. "There she is," someone hissed. "The schemer." Then their whispers turned to questions: "Who else would have done such a thing? But she tried to mend it. What if her own fear was the true crime?"
Lilies wilted on the altars and were replaced by small bowls of tea. Each day I confessed and taught, and the island watched not an execution but a living mosaic of atonement. Magnus, for his part, sat on a stone like a king who had invited his captives to tea. He acknowledged the pain Autumn had caused but he also, in the heart of him, began to soften, as men who read books sometimes do when someone is brave enough to stand and be honest.
The punishment lasted weeks. I stood in the plaza and said, "I repented. I learned. I will not make another man's heart a plaything." The crowd applauded some nights and cursed others. I heard weeping from a corner once; a woman had been bound by the same kind of fear once and was stunned to see me face it publicly.
At last, when the island had watched enough and the elders felt the tide had turned, Earl Hudson lifted his staff and declared the punishment docket done. Magnus rose and approached me.
"You came as a storm," he said, "and left a question." His voice was strangely kind. "You will still have penance, but you will no longer be bound. Return to study. Learn."
I stepped down from the platform. People looked at me now in a new way. Not as a villain to be trampled, but as a lesson to be learned from. That kind of punishment is worse in some ways—visibility followed by scrutiny—and better in others: it demanded renovation, not annihilation.
"But what of Magnus?" someone asked.
He, too, changed. After the public reckoning he took his pride and his grief to the library of the island, reading old accounts by candlelight. He sought Carl Britt and Carter and even old Earl Hudson, not to fight, but to ask why his life had bent like a broken reed for centuries. He admitted wrongs, he apologized to people who had nothing to forgive because the hurt was older than their memory. The crowd watched his humiliation and, after watching mine, their appetite for spectacle had dulled.
If there was a lesson in the public punishment, it was this: cruelty and contrivance fed on secrecy. Once secrets walked into the sun, they withered.
Time moved like a slow river. We prepared for a descent to the mortal plane to clear our names and test our craft. In the fever of packing, I found pieces of myself I had thought lost. Zeke and I trained, Brianna taught us tactics, Mami smiled like a sun that warmed even my guilty corners. Kamiyah giggled even when the wind lashed her hair.
"Master," Zeke said one night, handing me a map. "The mortal town here—Crescent City—they have a list of worthy inns and a bakery that smells of honey."
"Good," I answered. "We'll need food most of all."
On the day we left, the island hummed. Carter came to the landing and said, simply, "Do not leave your unit."
"Yes, Master," I said.
He watched us go. For the first time in the life of this borrowed heart, I felt like I had made a choice that would not be retracted by a plot twist.
We landed under a sky too wide for cultivation islands. People moved slow and ordinary. The city was full of light, full of the easy sorrows of humans. We moved among them and did not hide the stripes we had been given by Fate and by penance.
"Look!" Kamiyah said, pointing. "A sugar-seller."
"Too rich," Brianna grumbled. "Scholar first, fun later."
At noon the ground thundered. A creature of sand rose like a wall. It was a beast with teeth of stone and breath like a furnace, and it surfaced where we had just been laughing.
"Form up!" Brianna shouted. "Autumn and Zeke—front line."
My chest hit that pebble of fear again. The field became chaos: sand flung like knives, wind like a curtain of nails. We fought with spells that tasted of old iron and quick-burning willowwood. My pendant—Carter's gift, a thin green jade pendant called "Tian Mountain Jade"—shivered in my hand and then, under strain, cracked.
"No!" I howled. The pendant wasn't supposed to break. It had been my last line of defense the master had given me. Without it, the sand pressed, and the ground swallowed like a greedy mouth.
Zeke grabbed my hand. "Together," he breathed. "Count with me."
"One," I said. "Two—"
The light in the sky broke.
A green flash like a comet's tail flared and filled the desert like a new dawn. It was a small hand of light thronging with tiny wings—fireflies, a meadow of them, their glow merging into a single bright green river that spilled over our heads. The sand stopped. The beast dissolved into leaves and dust and the wind died like sleep.
We stared like people who had just been remade. Brianna whispered, "A miracle."
"It was not a miracle," Carter said from the ridge, breathing hard, face like snow. "It was intervention."
I looked up. A figure stood silhouetted above the trees: Magnus, breathing as if he had run a great distance. Once a villain, he had been forced by the public to choose a different path. The green light had been his doing—an offering perhaps, or a penance; I could not tell. He met my eyes for a second and simply nodded.
We moved forward. The mortal world unfolded in its messy, honest way. I taught Zeke not just spells but how to ask for forgiveness and how to be brave enough to bear truth. Mami taught other disciples how to feel without weaponizing. Brianna set strategic patterns. Kamiyah hummed songs that felt like soft medicine.
I still had my penances, and the island still expected confessions. But the face I presented to the world was no longer Autumn's mask. It was mine—flawed, fumbling, and trying. When children of the city asked me about the story the island had told, I told the truth and made them promise they would not try to bind love.
"Love," I said to a curious boy who asked, "is not a puppet or a trick. It's an action."
He nodded solemnly and chose a bone charm from a street vendor.
In the quiet months after the sand-beast, Magnus came to the plaza one last time, this time not to stage a punishment but to return something: a small glass vial, empty now, and a green mote inside that seemed to breathe.
"A gift," he said to me. "Not for binding, but for remembering how easily one can stray."
I tucked it into a hidden seam of my robe.
We returned to the island with fresh stories and duller hearts—duller because they no longer glittered from cruelty. We had grown. I had learned. I had been publicly chastised and then had the slow luxury of rebuilding.
One evening as I sat with Zeke by a stream, he asked quietly, "Master, do you plan to fall in love?"
I looked at him and then at my cracked pendant, wrapped now in ribbon and kept like a little confession.
"I am learning," I replied. "And if I fall, I will fall without tricks."
Zeke grinned. "That's all we ask."
I smiled back, and it wasn't empty. It held all the ugly stitches and the color of new growth. I had been Autumn in name, but not in heart. The island had made sure of that.
And when the green light flickered in my pocket at night—Magnus's small reminder—I would close my eyes and promise again to be only myself.
The End
— Thank you for reading —