Hey everyone, this is my first story, so please be kind.
I really hope you'll enjoy it , even if just one person reads, I'll be so happy.
Thank you for giving it a chance .
Rain had always fallen in Karevia, soft and endless, as though the city itself mourned for something it could not name, and in that gray rhythm Aria Loraine lived her quiet, lonely days surrounded by books that whispered of worlds far more beautiful and cruel than her own, she read to escape, she read to forget, and sometimes she read simply to feel something move again in the hollow of her chest. One night, when the streets were drowning in mist and the city lights flickered like dying stars, she found it, a book that should not have existed, bound in black leather and etched with faded silver letters that spelled The Empire of Thorns, a name that stirred something in her as if she had heard it in a dream she never remembered.
The shop where she discovered it, The Seventh Chapter, stood between two abandoned buildings on Verrin Street, a place she could not find again once she left, its doorway swallowed by fog, its bell never ringing twice. The book was old, the pages breathing with age, and when she opened it she felt warmth beneath her fingertips, a pulse, faint but alive, and she told herself she was only tired, only imagining. She read through the night, the rain drumming against her window like quiet applause, the story twisting around her heart with every line, and when the final page came, when the cruel noblewoman Evelina Croix was condemned by the Emperor's blade, Aria felt her own breath catch, her tears falling before she even realized she was crying. The book ended with her death, and yet there was no epilogue, no closure, only a line written in faint ink that had not been there before, Every reader writes their own ending.
When morning came, there was no morning at all, only darkness, velvet and heavy, and when she opened her eyes she was no longer Aria Loraine, student of Karevia, but Evelina Croix, the villainess of the story she had just finished, her body draped in silks, her heart hammering with a stranger's pulse. The mirror reflected a face she had seen die, pale and perfect, framed by silver hair and eyes sharp as the edge of glass, and she knew instantly where she was, and what fate awaited her, for she had read it all. The Verradin Empire stretched before her, vast and cold, its palace of black stone gleaming beneath a sun that refused to shine, and she could hear the whisper of destiny circling her like wolves, reminding her that she was never meant to live.
But Aria was not a woman who surrendered to stories, she was a reader who had reached the end and still refused to close the book, and now she was the villainess who knew every betrayal, every secret, every blade that would one day be pointed at her throat. Somewhere in this empire ruled the man who would kill her, Emperor Caelan Dravion, the monster dressed in gold and silence, and somewhere else waited the heroine, Selena Velan, the saint wrapped in lies, but this time the story would not unfold as it was written, this time the ink would bend to her will.
The palace bells rang in the distance, cold and hollow, announcing the dawn of a world that would soon learn that fate, once read, could be rewritten, and that even a villainess, if she knew the ending, could become something far more dangerous than a tragedy she could become the author of its ruin.