When I found myself in a fantasy world born from a perverse person's imagination, I didn't imagine my life unfolding like this. 

When I fell into this make-believe-made-real world and met all the fictional characters I'd become invested in...

It wasn't meant to be like this.

We weren't meant to be stuck together like this—glued together by the strings fate spun. None of it was supposed to become like this. 

All I wanted was to survive when I woke up 5 years old for the second time in a story I once enjoyed. 

But I'd found myself in a story I didn't recognize and made decisions I never thought I'd choose. The characters I thought I knew, the world I thought I'd known, were suddenly all foreign to me. 

It's as if this chance at life was a revision of the original work, edited entirely until it became a new story. Characters I hated and characters I loved—somehow, we found ourselves unable to separate like addicts who craved one another. Somehow, we all became something unrecognizable.

Somehow, we all found ourselves in the depths of a redeeming depravity, together like one entity. 

Where did we begin, and where did we end? It seemed as if we were simultaneously enmeshed yet separate. 

Somehow, we existed as a paradox instead of beings living different lives.

Were we all unique individuals, or were we a simple singularity?

I don't know.

Our lives felt like nothing but smoke and mirrors, one past sliding past the other. But our futures...were they something we could control, or was it something that has been decided for us? Was our lives a formulaic trope and plot line, or were our lives a new written version of fate and future? 

I wish I knew. I wish I had an answer.

Instead, I became a personified cliché—reincarnated as the narcissistic, psychopathic, incompetent villainess of a webnovel I read in a past life.

You know.

The one where she's destined to die at the hands of the protagonist for coveting the male lead and harming the female lead. The one that drives the plot and causes the lovers to grow more and more fond of one another. 

The one the readers love to hate. 

The villainess character used to springboard dull love into something beautifully tragic and create a satisfying ending.

Somehow, I am regrettably this antagonist with her tragic fate and catastrophic life.

My name is Iristella Noviette Vera Orzo, and I am the unfortunate only child of the moody, blunt, detached, complicated, gave-Iris-daddy-issues Duke Cedric Asher Orzo.

And this is my cliché villainess fantasy romance story.