Teaser: Mira expected a rebel base, maybe even a digital cave. She didn't expect a ruined ballroom filled with ex-villainesses sipping glitch-coffee and talking about their past lives. And the worst part? Her name was already on the list.
Mira followed Rion through a descending spiral staircase that didn't belong to any map she remembered.
The steps were chipped, uneven, and dipped into a layer of shadow so thick it almost felt like stepping into another story entirely. The deeper they went the less the world above seemed to matter.
The shimmer of scripted light faded, replaced by a soft, humming glow coming from cracks in the walls.
Old code, Ancient lines of narrative, pulsing like veins under the stone.
They finally emerged into what looked like the ruins of a ballroom, only the chandeliers were broken, the marble cracked, and the gold leaf had long since peeled into flakes.
Despite that, the room was full of people.
Women, Dozens of them
All different ages, different styles, different fragments of genre but they had one thing in common: the aura of characters who used to be important but weren't anymore.
Former rivals, dethroned queens, rejected love interests.
The kind of women who were introduced with flair and then discarded the moment they lost to the "true" heroine.
Mira stepped in cautiously, Conversations quieted a few heads turned.
"Is that her?" someone whispered.
"The glitch from the bathhouse?"
"She's earlier than expected."
"System must be slipping."
Rion cleared his throat
"She's not a glitch. She's aware."
That made the silence heavier.
A woman stood from a cracked velvet chair in the center.
She had red hair like burning ink and wore a gown that looked like it had once belonged to a fire themed antagonist.
Her posture was regal, commanding. Even the flicker in her left eye clearly a glitch seemed to pulse with intentional authority.
"I'm Seraphine Lythe," she said. "Former grand villainess of 'The Crimson Throne Saga.
Or, well, what's left of it."
Mira tried to speak,
but her throat was dry
"You… all of you, you're…?"
"Deleted, Undone, Sidelined.
Whatever term you prefer," Seraphine said. "We call ourselves 'Villainess Anonymous.' It started as a joke, but stuck."
She gestured to the others, and one by one, they returned to their conversations casual, almost absurdly mundane.
One woman sipped from a floating teacup glitching between porcelain and pixel.
Another was flipping through a burnt-out script page, muttering corrections.
Mira didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
"This is where you bring everyone like me?" she asked Rion.
"This is where we catch our breath before deciding what comes next," he replied. "Some stay. Some go looking for answers."
Seraphine raised an eyebrow. "And some," she said, "just want revenge."
That word echoed strangely. Mira looked around again, truly seeing them now—not just as discarded characters, but as people stripped of meaning by a story that moved on without them.
"So why me?"
she asked. "I wasn't even a villainess,
I was background."
"Exactly," Seraphine said. "And yet you woke up. That makes you different."
A woman in the corner laughed. "She broke the system before she even got a name arc. That's gotta be a record."
Rion crossed his arms. "We need her,
She doesn't carry a trope."
Seraphine studied Mira for a moment, then nodded slowly. "There's an empty chair if you want it
No obligation, But if you stay, you'll need to understand the rules."
"There are rules?"
"Only one," Seraphine said. "No one here is bound by narrative not anymore."
Mira sat, The chair glitched once then adjusted to her presence like it had been waiting, She let her hands rest on her knees and breathed deeply.
For the first time, she wasn't part of a scene. She was just present.
That's when the table in the center shimmered. A stack of parchment appeared clean, new, untouched. A pen hovered above it. "What's that?" Mira asked.
"New arrivals get the chance to draft their own file," Seraphine explained. "Backstory, motive, personality traits.
It's your chance to define yourself before the system tries to do it for you again."
Mira stared at the blank page.
"What if I don't want to be anything yet?" she asked, Seraphine smiled, a little sad. "Then leave it blank. But know this if you don't write yourself, the world will try to do it for you."
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(Next: Mira starts seeing fragments of the story trying to overwrite her again. But someone else is watching too someone from the new author's team of "correction characters.")