Camille Miseria
There was a medieval romance fantasy I truly, genuinely loved.
The characters were magnetic, the world exquisite, and I had been a fan of the author since their previous work, so I still remember how eagerly I dove in.
Hair like red spider lilies, that captivating scarlet, and a pair of fiercely sharp eyes. Every word she spoke, every gesture she made, carried dignity and discipline.
The girl who appeared in the story as Daisy Miseria was my favorite character of all.
Through the middle of the novel I was certain that even if Daisy never ended up with the protagonist, she would at least be a sub-heroine. A defeated heroine, if nothing else.
Her clashes with the hero's party grew more frequent, and more vicious, as the chapters went on. Still, I told myself it was nothing to worry about.
Characters who start off at odds with the protagonist's group always end up as real companions later. That's just how these stories work.
That was what I believed. That was what I kept telling myself I believed.
"Daisy, how could you... how could you do this?"
"I'm sorry. But this is as far as we go. Kyle. Justia."
I went on believing it right up until Daisy crossed a line in the mid-to-late chapters. Right up until her crimes piled so high that no amount of narrative laundry could ever wash them clean.
Naturally, not many readers were going to stay fond of a girl who harassed the protagonist Kyle and the main heroine Justia at every turn and dragged the entire story toward catastrophe. My favorite character had already been certified, by readers and author alike, as the villain of the piece — a creature this world was meant to despise.
That was when I stopped leaving comments.
I had a vague sense of the end waiting for her. I didn't want to watch it happen. And still, every time a new chapter dropped, I opened it anyway and clicked through to the last line.
"The crime of sowing chaos through the Academy and inflicting grave damage upon property of national importance. The crime of harming numerous people in the course of those acts, and of threatening their lives. And... the crime of attempting to murder Justia, a leading candidate for sainthood."
"On these charges, the criminal Daisy Miseria is hereby sentenced to death by hanging."
"Be grateful to Saint-candidate Justia, who granted you the gallows when drawing and quartering would scarcely have been enough."
In the end, Daisy met a hideous death. The House of Miseria, of which not a single member remained besides her, was struck from the rolls at the national level. After they hanged her, they mounted her corpse in the street as an example.
Starting next chapter, the epilogue will begin serialization.
The author's note was short and to the point.
A happy ending for whom, exactly?
Of course the story belongs to the author. A reader can take a writer to task over plot holes or spelling, but you don't get to curse someone out just because the direction of the work isn't to your taste.
But this was too much. Wasn't it?
You design a character this magnetic, and her destiny from the first page to the last was to live and die a villain? I wasn't even asking for a redemption arc. But she never once got a proper chapter explaining what she'd been through, or why she had to go that far — and we're supposed to call it a happy ending because the villain died?
The word epilogue had barely registered before my fingers, moving without any permission from me, were already on the keyboard.
I had been reading web novels long enough to know that dumping an emotional essay-length complaint rarely ended well for anyone involved. I knew that.
But I couldn't just sit with this. I couldn't.
There had been a stretch, once, when I thought I might strike it rich writing web novels myself. I tried my hand at it. I figured out I had no talent almost immediately, and I quit just as fast.
The comment I was writing now, though, had more heat and more feeling in it than anything I had ever put on a page. The words poured out so easily I caught myself wondering if I had secretly been good at this all along.
The 5,700-character curse still hung over the web novel scene like an urban legend, and in my effort to outrun it I kept dredging up still more things that had disappointed me, packing the comment box tighter and tighter. There was far too much for a single post, so I split it across several.
I was midway through the second installment when reply notifications on the first one started chiming without a pause.
It helped, a little, to know that a few people still remembered me. Most of the comments carried the distinct flavor of I cannot believe you still love this story, and her — but still.
I finished the third installment and went back over everything I had written, partly to count the characters and partly to check for anything that might come back to bite me.
10,493 characters.
I had spent half a day on nothing but this comment. Every scrap of writing ability I did and didn't possess, poured out as if I were wringing dry every grievance I had ever swallowed. It was as close to a masterpiece as I was ever going to get. If I could have written like this back when I still dreamed of being an author, I might actually have been one of those writers people called promising.
"...Hah."
That was enough. I had no attachment left to this story. If the author started something new I might skim a chapter or two, but I doubted I would ever see another work through to the end the way I had this one.
I shut the computer down quietly and lay down where I was. A full day of staring into a monitor had wrung me out; I was exhausted down to the bone. The comment notifications kept chiming and I ignored them. Even if I opened them now, new ones would just keep stacking, and if I tried to read them all I would never sleep.
I did wonder, a little, what the author had made of it.
"That bastard of an author... they better have actually read it..."
My eyelids were strangely, crushingly heavy tonight. Imagination, probably.
It wasn't as if posting a 10,400-character comment was actually going to trigger one of those mass-produced web novel plots — drop a rant, get isekai'd into the book. Things like that didn't happen in real life.
"...Is that truly the case?"
Consciousness seeped back in, and with it came a voice I had never heard before. Had I fallen asleep with the computer still on? Left the door open?
"The mana core is considerably underdeveloped. It appears to be connected to the fact that her younger sister was born with a mana core far outside ordinary parameters..."
"Good heavens..."
"It would be best to keep this from the younger sister. It is hardly news that would sit well with either sibling."
Mana core? Younger sister?
What kind of nonsense was this? I had lived twenty-three years as a proud only child. I didn't have a little sister. I didn't have a sibling of any kind.
"She seems to be coming around."
"Hah... thank goodness."
I opened my eyes and found a middle-aged man with a magnificently kept beard. He did not exist anywhere in my memory. Men that handsome belonged in magazine spreads, not at my bedside.
"I shall take my leave. Should anything arise, please summon me at once."
"You have my thanks. This is your doing."
"Not at all. Then..."
A click. Not the cold steel of a studio apartment door, but wood meeting wood, and the nested sound of a hinge.
The strangeness of it hit me like a bucket of ice water. I stared, pupils blown wide, first at the man in front of me and then at everything around us.
"Have you come to, Camille?"
"Camil— khuh, keh!"
I had never in my life possessed a name as elegant as Camille. I opened my mouth to say as much, and what came out instead was a torn, cracking cough from a throat and tongue so dry they hadn't a drop of moisture left in them.
"Camille? Are you all right? Camille!"
"W-waater..."
"Someone! Is anyone there? Bring water at once! Quickly!"
The words had barely left him before a flurry of movement erupted beyond the door. A moment later a young woman in a maid's uniform hurried in and pressed a glass of water into my hands.
"Drink it slowly."
The cool water ran down a throat twisted dry as a dead branch, and life came flooding back into my mouth and the roof of it.
"You have been asleep for a full ten days. Does anything hurt?"
"..."
"What is it? Come now, say something. Please..."
The middle-aged man looked at me with eyes full of a deep, aching sorrow.
...I had been asleep for ten days?
I had spent a whole day locked in combat with a ten-thousand-character comment, sure. But ten days?
"You have grown so terribly thin..."
He held up a small hand mirror he had produced from somewhere and turned it toward me.
"Wh— what..."
The face in the glass was wrong. Profoundly, extensively wrong. It was gaunt and sunken, the face of someone who really might have spent ten days lying still — but it was not, in any respect, the face I had looked at for twenty-three years.
White hair spilling all the way to my waist. Irises stained yellow as chamomile in a summer field. Features too vivid, too distinctive, too beautiful to belong to any man I had ever been.
"Who... is this...?"
The person in the mirror was a stunning white-haired girl I had never seen before in my life.