Evelyn Rosetta's Past (1)
Please live, Evelyn-nim.
That line was strange.
I was clearly moving to survive. To dodge the original novel's execution ending, to stop the Rosetta family's downfall, and to keep Liana from ever climbing onto that altar under the name of saintess.
Yet Liana spoke as if I were someone who had already died once.
As if she had watched my final moments with her own eyes. And so I found myself remembering a morning from a very long time ago.
The day I first opened my eyes as Evelyn Rosetta.
When I first opened my eyes, I saw a ceiling.
An unfamiliar ceiling.
Too high, too ornate, too unreal. Golden vine patterns crawled across white marble, and outside the window the pale light of dawn filtered through thin curtains.
I simply blinked for a long while.
My body felt wrong.
Light, small, alien. When I lifted my hand, the fingers were far too slender. My wrists looked as if they might snap with the slightest pressure, and my hair was much longer than anything in my memory. Black strands faintly tinged with blue lay scattered across the pillow.
I tried to sit up and froze halfway.
This isn't my body.
A mirror stood beside the bed.
In it sat a girl who looked about ten years old. Pale face, cold eyes, small but sharply defined features. Even as a child she carried a chill that settled into the bones.
And I knew that face.
How could I not?
It was the face I had seen again and again in the novel's illustrations. The face readers had ranted about in the comments—pretty as hell, and that only made them hate her more. Standing beside the crown prince she looked like a poisonous rose; standing beside Liana she looked like black ink spilled across a field of snow.
That face was now frozen in the exact expression I was making.
I was Han Seo-jin.
Until yesterday I had been a man. My height, my weight, even the size of my voice and hands had never been this small. The sex was different, for starters. Now even the way I blinked felt foreign. Long hair tickled the nape of my neck, and the lines of the body beneath the thin nightgown refused to match any memory I owned.
The first emotion that hit me was not terror, but revulsion.
It felt as if someone had stripped my entire life away and forced me into the clothes of an absurdly lavish doll.
Evelyn Rosetta.
The villainess of a romance-fantasy novel.
"What the hell."
Even the curse that left my mouth came out clean. A clear, young girl's voice. I clapped both hands over my lips.
My fingertips were trembling.
Then came a few knocks, and the door opened.
"Young miss?"
A maid stepped inside.
The moment she saw me her eyes went wide with surprise.
"You're awake? His Grace has ordered you to come to the training grounds at once."
Training grounds?
His Grace?
I opened my mouth to speak and stopped. The second I asked who I was, it would all be over. If a noble family's young daughter suddenly claimed amnesia, physicians, priests, and mages would swarm in. I might be dissected before I ever got the chance to survive as a transmigrator.
So I forced myself to look as much like Evelyn as I could.
The original Evelyn. Cold, arrogant, a villainess who looked down on people. The novel never detailed her childhood, but at the very least she was not the sort to cry and beg for help.
"Clothes."
I said.
The maid bowed at once.
"I shall prepare them."
While she moved about I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to sort my thoughts.
My name had been Han Seo-jin.
At least until I became this.
I had been an ordinary man living in Korea, and I had died. That was what my last memories insisted. How I died was hazy. The final things I remembered were a late night, a phone screen, and the last scene of a novel I had been reading.
The Saintess Smiles Beneath the Imperial Crown.
That had been the title.
A textbook romance fantasy. A commoner girl named Liana Bell awakens as a saintess, wins the love of Crown Prince Kyran, and saves the empire. And as romance fantasies always do, it had a villainess.
Evelyn Rosetta.
Only daughter of the Rosetta ducal house. A woman who loved the crown prince, tormented Liana, and was finally executed.
The problem was that I was now that Evelyn. Age: ten. Which meant roughly seven years before the original story began. I drew a slow breath.
All right. Stay calm.
I had transmigrated into the villainess.
And my sex had changed on top of it.
Anyone who could accept that calmly would be the strange one, but outwardly I had to stay composed. I was the only daughter of the Rosetta ducal house. In the original, the Rosettas were a renowned swordsmanship family that guarded the empire's western border. A child who flailed about in this household would not survive.
And more than anything else—
I knew the ending.
Evelyn dies. In the finale her head is cut off. The crime of tormenting the saintess, of insulting the crown prince, of attempting to harm the saintess. The charges were many, but the core was simple. The original narrative required the villainess to die in order to be complete.
So I simply had to not die.
Easy.
Lose interest in the crown prince, never approach Liana, and keep a low profile in high society. A house like the Rosetta duchy could live perfectly well without ever getting tangled up with the original protagonists.
Back then, that was what I believed.
I changed clothes and headed for the training grounds.
The early-morning air was cold. The Rosetta estate was less beautiful than it was sharp. Black-rose banners outnumbered flowers in the gardens, and more swords hung on the corridor walls than portraits.
A man stood waiting in the training grounds.
Edrick Rosetta.
Evelyn's father, and one of the empire's strongest Sword Masters, guardian of the Western Front.
Black hair and gray eyes. In the original he falls after his daughter's execution, ruined by charges of treason. Right now he was alive, and he was looking at me with eyes cold enough to freeze blood.
"You're late."
I chose my answer carefully.
"I apologize."
The air in the training grounds shifted strangely. Edrick narrowed his eyes and studied me.
Did I mess up somehow?
Had the original Evelyn been the sort of child who never apologized? Cold sweat prickled as I watched his reaction, but he asked nothing further.
Instead he tossed a wooden practice sword.
I caught it on reflex.
Or rather, I thought I did.
In truth my body moved first. My wrist angled with perfect precision; my fingers closed around the hilt. My center of gravity settled into the soles of my feet.
This body knew the sword.
I had never learned swordsmanship.
At best I had the muscle memory of military drills and a handful of sword videos watched through a screen. Even in the army we shot guns; we almost never swung blades. Yet this small body was different. The calluses on my palms belonged to a child who had held a sword far longer than I ever had, and my elbows and shoulders already understood the angles of a cut.
That fact felt strangely cruel.
The original novel had painted Evelyn as nothing more than a villainess driven mad by jealousy. A woman who clung to the crown prince, tormented Liana, and finally collapsed in misery. But the traces left in this body told another story.
This child had never looked like she had time to play.
Calluses on a ten-year-old's hands did not look like the talent of a villainess, no matter how you squinted. Which left only one answer. Someone had been raising this child with a sword for a very long time.
Edrick, then.
If the father was a Sword Master, it was more than possible. So why had Evelyn become that kind of villain in the original…?
"Focus. Basic forms."
Edrick said.
I did not know them.
But my body did.
First cut.
Second thrust.
Third recovery.
The wooden sword sliced the air. I followed my own body's movements a half-beat late. It was alien and frightening. Yet at the same time it was strangely steady. The feel of my toes gripping the earth, the angle of my shoulders opening, the rhythm of my breath leaving my lungs.
The body remembered.
Edrick watched in silence for a long while.
"Again."
I moved again.
This time a little smoother. All I had to do was entrust myself to the body. Before the mind understood, the muscles found the path. Even in a ten-year-old frame, the training volume was already stacked high.
Daughter of the black rose. The child the original novel had consumed only as a high-society villainess had, in truth, been gripping a sword since she was small.
How many times did I repeat the forms?
My palms burned. A child's body tired quickly. But Edrick did not stop. The Rosetta training grounds showed no kindness even to children.
"Focus."
The wooden sword cracked against my shoulder.
I clenched my teeth.
It hurt.
This actually hurt. Something surged up from deep inside me in that instant.
Why am I standing here getting hit?
Why a villainess of all things?
Why in a body that had become a woman, why as a child already destined to die? Strength flooded into the hand gripping the wooden sword.
In the next moment a faint light gathered at the tip of the blade.
Somewhere between black and blue, like the shadow of dawn. Instantly Edrick's wooden sword halted.
The knights standing at the edge of the training grounds held their breath as well.
I saw the light only after the fact.
What is this?
The light vanished almost at once. But Edrick had not missed it.
He approached slowly.
"Evelyn."
For the first time he spoke my name.
"Just now… I saw Aura from you."
Aura.
The power that knights wielded in the novel. The starting point and the end point of a Sword Master. I stared blankly down at the wooden sword. My fingertips were trembling. Whether from fear or excitement, I could not tell.
More than anything, if one of the five living Sword Masters had seen my Aura, it could not have been a mistake. Of course that did not mean I had become a Sword Master. But the mere fact that a ten-year-old child had brushed the threshold of that path was already valuable enough.
That day I understood.
This body was not simply the body of a villainess. Surviving by running alone would never be enough. I would have to take up the sword. And if possible, I would have to cut a path open myself before the original story came to kill me.
Sword Master.
If I wanted to live, I somehow had to reach that rank.
That night.
Back in my room I unfolded a sheet of paper with trembling hands. One by one I wrote down every original-plot event I could remember.
My fingers still ached.
Every time I gripped the quill, the sensation of holding the wooden sword returned. A bruise was already blooming blue on my shoulder where I had been struck, and dust still clung to my knees. The bed was soft, yet the moment I lay down the truth hit harder than ever.
This was not a dream.
Tomorrow morning I would open my eyes as Evelyn Rosetta again. When someone called my name I would have to answer Evelyn, not Han Seo-jin, and every time I looked in a mirror I would have to face the face of a strange little girl.
So if I wanted to survive, I had to decide.
Whether to collapse as Han Seo-jin.
Or to endure as Evelyn Rosetta.
I wrote out the major upcoming events and the characters who would appear.
Liana Bell.
Kyran Arpelt.
The White Rose Banquet.
The saintess's awakening.
And then—
I steadied my breath and slowly wrote the words that would follow.
Evelyn's execution and the fall of House Rosetta. On the final line I wrote in large letters:
Avoid the villainess route.
That was when letters floated up before my eyes.
Synchronizing as the villainess Evelyn Rosetta.
The original storyline has begun.
I nearly snapped the quill in half.
"What the hell is this."
This wasn't a game. I stared at the floating text in sheer disbelief before letting out a long sigh.
"Begun, my ass."
Ink smeared between my fingers.
"If I don't start it, then it just doesn't start."
Back then I still did not know.
That the original story was not something that stopped simply because I tried to avoid it. That even while I ran, fate would take another road and wait for me first. And that the name Liana Bell would become the one name in my life I most wanted to escape—and the one I would never be able to.