It felt like a thousand shards of glass began mercilessly ripping into my face, gouging the skin off. After the skin was the muscles… then the bones… then the marrow… until nothing was left. I couldn’t scream or even move. All I could do was stare into the endless white of her hand as it eventually covered my line of sight.

Everything was so bright… My head was pounding. My eyes felt dry and tired as vision began returning slightly.

            “…ch…”

I felt like there was something… echoing in the distance.

            “..ait….i….how…e….”

The voices seemed a bit closer… Ah… It must have been the doctors… I suppose it’s time for three more ye-

“YOU WITCH!! YOU DESERVE NOTHING BUT DEATH!”

I jolted my eyes open. My head was pounding, and everything was blurry. There were people shouting something… at someone? I couldn’t see properly. The ground was cold… Did I fall off the bed due to a seizure or something? I think this floor was made of stone. Was the hospital floor made of stone? I’m pretty sure it had a more plastic-like texture to it…

My vision began to focus, and the first thing that caught me off-guard was color. In that instant, I knew I wasn’t in the hospital.

A vivid twilight blanketed the gigantic hall I was in. Everything was orange to the point it looked almost as if it were on fire. The voices echoing in the surrounding space were foreign to me. They were shouting, but I couldn’t hear them properly. I didn’t care about the voices, though. All I could do was look around in awe, for it was my first time seeing something so beautiful in my life. 

I was laying on a floor made of stone… I think it might have been marble. It’s not like I had ever seen marble in real life, so I could have been wrong too. It just looked similar to how the mineral was usually depicted in video games.

It felt incredibly smooth for stone, almost like there was a thin layer of glass covering it.

Something dark was obscuring my line of sight partially, and it felt a bit itchy against my face.

As I tried to wave the darkness in front of my face away, I came to realize it was my own hair. My hair wasn’t long… or dark…. Hastily grasping for it, I found my hands full of black and silky hair. It was a bit wavy and covered my face. I tugged on it just a few times to make sure it was actually attached to my head.

I probably looked a bit weird in doing so.

My hair had somehow become jet black, like the darkest night.

I seemed to be wearing a violet, yet simple dress of some kind. I think I might have had high heels on too, but that’s about everything I could see or feel from my position. From the whole ensemble, I deduced I was maybe wearing clothes meant for a ball of some kind.

Before me, a bunch of men and women I didn’t recognize at all were screaming at me. While my eyesight was still very blurry, I could tell the people around me were also dressed up for a ball. There was a young woman surrounded by a group of tall men pointing at me. She was screaming… maybe at me?  

She was shouting something about abuse… jealousy… love.

I couldn’t understand.

I figured I had to be dreaming. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Surely, I’d wake up in my miserable bed again soon. This was probably some sort of hallucination caused by the painkillers. That white figure from the ceiling… It was definitely a mere hallucination too.  

The weight of several adult men crushing me jolted me out of my moment. The guards were dogpiling me, grasping for my limbs in almost what felt like panic.

It really hurt. Their armor dug into my body, leaving bleeding scrapes all over as they roughly forced me to stand. I was still reeling from the pain as I suddenly got slapped. My eyes finally began focusing.

A classical beauty with hair of gold stood before me. A young lady, maybe in her early twenties, with eyes like the purest emeralds. She wore a fancy ballroom dress that matched with her bright hair color.

But the pain and aching all over my body was nothing. I couldn’t help but stare wide-eyed in all directions.

Everything was so beautiful. Stunningly beautiful even. I think my eyes started to get strained from me looking everywhere in my attempt to absorb the scenery before me through my retinas.

The giant hall, the people, everything. My eyes darted around as I let the twilight glow in. It felt like something out of a fantasy novel. Everything surrounding me had a gently sparkling and an intense sense of saturation to it. Like all the colors of my previous life, were amplified by a hundredfold.

Everywhere I looked, I could see these very faint glimmering sparkles appearing in my peripheral vision. Tiny shining orbs flashing in and then disappearing before my eyes could fully comprehend their presence.

As my line of sight slowly returned to the golden-haired beauty before me, I noticed she seemed to be lecturing to me about something. I had a really hard time focusing on her words, because there were glimmering little sparkles slowly rising out of her body too, only to disappear as quickly as they appeared.

I couldn’t help but wonder if she was an angel. Furthermore, I pondered if I had been taken to heaven, but then… why did I have my hair color swapped…? Did heaven have…a dress code or something?

Slowly, awareness began returning, and I realized I was probably not in heaven.

The woman was ranting to me about something really shallow. Something about… Not deserving the kindness of the crown prince? Something about… being a traitor. Something about trying to hurt her.

The men behind her seemed to hold her in high regard. They nodded their heads at her words, some stared at her with adoration, almost as if enchanted by her mere presence. The men were quite handsome. Nothing short of a reverse harem group. In fact! I’m somewhat confident it probably WAS a reverse harem situation with how adoringly all the guys were staring at her.  

The golden-haired beauty had a strange quirk to her speech. Something the men behind her seemed to be unable to see. Or maybe they were simply too blinded by their love to see it, even if it was quite blatant if you asked me.

Whenever the talking subject would change to praising herself or being honorable, the side of her mouth would begin twinging upwards. It was like one half of her face was showing her true emotions, and the other half was still managing to fake it.

She seemed to really enjoy talking about herself.  

She was ranting about her being the victim to some… petty crimes, but the way she worded everything made it sound more like she was praising herself.

“I’ve done nothing but bring smiles to the faces of the denizens of this kingdom! What have I done to deserve your spite and jealousy?!” Even in victimizing herself, she couldn’t shut up about what a great person she was.

I had spent my entire life in bed without much to do. Looking at people was one of my few sources of entertainment.

Trying to analyze the microexpressions of those around me was something akin to a game to me. Figuring out when one of my nurses was having a bad day by how she’d react to my speech was a pretty effective way to stave off boredom from time to time.

Not that you really needed to be particularly good at reading people in this situation. This girl was so blatantly narcissistic, even a child would probably be able to recognize what was going on with her expressions.

The way she tried to hide her ego contorted her features in a rather unappealing manner. A waste for such a pretty face. She wore big and decorative earrings and a dress adorned with gold and gemstones. Her outfit shuffled subtly as she moved around and shouted at me. Judging by the sounds her footsteps made, it was easy to assume she was wearing high heels. She was the textbook definition of a beautiful western princess.

Like Cinderella, it seemed like she had been wronged by me somehow. I don’t exactly know what I did… But I guessbeing it wasn’t actually anything too serious, considering how happy the victim was to talk about it.

I suppose I was Cinderella’s ugly step-sister in this situation, then?

Her obviously dramatized words seemed to be getting to her audience. The crowd grew more and more audibly outraged the more she spoke. They began screaming about the death penalty, and about burning the witch.

I guess I was in the process of being falsely accused of something? It seemed the golden princess was having a good time listing all the bad things I had supposedly done to her. Her brainless audience hollered like a group of monkeys as she kept going, clearly reveling in her moment of glory and falsified justice.

Now, you might be wondering why I was so confident she was falsely accusing me? It was simply due to the fact, that she didn’t try to calm down the crowd at all whenever she pointed out one of my… evil deeds.

Let me give an example.

“She spilled water on my brand-new clothes just two weeks ago!” The little princess narrated.

“BURN THE WITCH!! KILL HER!!” The crowd screeched in response.

You probably understand what I mean now. The reactions of the crowd were completely excessive in relation to the seriousness of the crime, and yet the girl did nothing to soothe the fury of the mob.

It was almost a bit funny to see the absurd overreactions of the crowd to the incredible offenses this poor young woman had to live through.

These villainess accusation scenarios are a common trope in novels and manga for women. The gist of things is, that a person from the normal world gets reincarnated into their favorite novel, only to discover they’re the villainess character instead of the heroine.

The story often comes to a climax in a scene, where the villainess is accused of abusing the heroine, but with the powers of knowing the story of the novel, the villainess has become loved by all, and instead turns the tables on the heroine.

I read a few books like this. I’m somewhat familiar with the trope…

…

I lied… I’m VERY familiar with the trope, but that was beside the point.

I didn’t recognize this scene from any of the novels I read. It always annoyed me how I couldn’t find a single novel about a witch as a main character. There is no way I wouldn’t remember a situation involving a crowd accusing the villainess of being one.

I didn’t recognize any of these people as characters from any novels I read. Not the princess nor the men swarming around her.

Not to mention my pitch-black hair. The main characters rarely ever had black hair in these novels. Red hair and other powerful colors were a pretty common character-trait among villainesses. It probably symbolized their… fiery personality or something.

Either way, none of what was transpiring before me rang a bell.

Did I get reincarnated into a novel?

Did I die?

Was this a drug-induced hallucination? Somehow, the longer I looked around, the less I wished for it to be one. The beauty of this world was far beyond that of my gray past. If this was a dream, I didn’t want to wake up.

I’m sure I’d get even more depressed than now if I found out this was just a fleeting creation of my own mind.

The golden-haired woman was now talking to me in a pitying tone. I spent my entire life being pitied by people, so it was straightforward for me to detect when someone was simply acting like they had sympathy for me. Somehow, I don’t think she even knew what real pity is like.

This woman was having the time of her life, reveling in my supposed misery. I’m sure she would have found it very annoying if I suddenly started gushing about how pretty everything looks around here, so I decided to just keep my mouth shut.

“It wouldn’t be right to go against the hallowed laws of our kingdom. She will not be sentenced to death. I forbid it… Let us let the judge decide her fate… fairly.” … Something about the fact that she was giving commands to the people around us rubbed me off the wrong way. She seemed a bit young to be someone fully in charge, and yet all the surrounding lunatics followed her every word like it was some holy scripture manifesting at the moment.