I bolt upright, gasping— And promptly fall off my bed.

Oh, thank God. It felt so real—the pain felt so real. Tires swerving and brakes screeching, my airless cry as the car slammed into me, the flash of bright blue sky as I was tossed in the air and hit the ground with a crack—But no. I was fine.

Look, my right arm. In the dream, it had twisted beneath me, sending pain scorching up my shoulder. But in reality, I'm able to move it just fine, I can turn my elbow in any direction—

I freeze.

In horror, I stare down at my right arm. Flip it forwards and backwards.

It works just fine. But it looks—my skin looks—

It's white, on both sides. Creamy and smooth, with just a smattering of freckles on the back of my wrist. My skin is the skin of some model on Vogue, not me, Gemma Tran, very Asian and with skin that writers might poetically call sallow from being indoors year-round.

I swallow.

Heart jumping like a rabbit inside my chest, I look away from my arms and up at my surroundings.

I had fallen out of a bed onto the floor. But the bed isn't my twin from Ikea, it's not even really a bed. It's a sleeping pallet, fitted with straw pillows and fur blankets. And the floor isn't soft dark carpeting in a nice three-bedroom house, it's roughly-fitted wooden timbers in a one-room cabin. In front of me, multiple bows and quivers of arrows sit neatly arranged on shelves, looking far too deadly to be just props.¹

"You okay, honey?"

I jump, whipping my head to the right. A feminine silhouette stands backlit by the door. As I squint, trembling, she steps forward, and suddenly I can make out her features. She's so tall it makes me jealous, with fiery red hair that she'd swept neatly off her gentle face in a bun, and soft smile lines around her mouth and eyes. If she were still this gorgeous in middle-age, I can't imagine how beautiful she must've been in her twenties.

The lady frowns. She places the platter she's carrying down on the table in the middle of the room, and then moves across the room to lean down towards me. The back of her hand is cool against my forehead.

"You don't feel hot," she muses. "Are you feeling sick? You don't usually wake up so late, and you look—"

I scoot away from her touch nervously.

"I'm fine," I say, with a fake smile. "Bad dreams, just fell off the bed."

I'm definitely not fine, given I'm in the wrong place and the wrong body. But I'm not going to tell her that, nice as she seems so far. Until I know what's happening, the lady's going to have to deal with a lying Gemma.²

For a moment, she doesn't seem like she buys it, her frown deepens.

But then she visibly shrugs it off, and straightens.

"Well, I suppose if there's a day to oversleep, it'd be the Harvest Festival. And you weren't planning to go hunting today anyway, right, Aurelia?"

Aurelia—? The Harvest Festival—?

Oh no.

I have a really. Really. Bad feeling about this.

Slowly, I inch my head to the side, just enough to peer over my shoulder.

Falling down my back are luscious curls in a deep, auburn red.

Oh no.

"Aurelia?"

The lady—Mrs. Morrell—says again, more uncertainly this time, as if to confirm my nightmarish conclusion.

I am, somehow, Aurelia Morrell.

Aurelia Morrell, from Chess Games of Blood, the third-rate fantasy novel I'd been reading it right before the car crashed into me.³

Aurelia Morrell, the beautiful eighteen year old girl, the childhood friend and first love of the protagonist Alexandrius Silverwood.⁴

Aurelia Morrell, one of the many victims of the surprise attack on Silverwood Keep on the night of the Harvest Festival.

It's her death, and the deaths of everyone else he holds dear, that originally starts Alex off on his murderous revenge quest—one that ends with him ascending the kingdom's throne.

By magic or my comatose brain or some twisted version of the afterlife, I am Aurelia Morrell.

And I'm going to die tonight.

Again.

1. I know very very little about bows or arrows—funnily enough it wasn't in my high school education—but I'm pretty sure props don't look so heavy and well-oiled and sharp.

2. If all the books I've read have taught me anything, it's that the dumb honest ones are always the first to get themselves in trouble.

3. There's no way this is a coincidence. Why oh why did I have to be reading that book out of all the wonderful fantasy series out there? I should've gone for some sexy, British steampunk adventure. If it had to have been a handwavy medieval fantasy book, I could've at least gone for Lord of the Rings, or even Chess Games of Blood's very-obvious-'inspiration' Game of Thrones. GOT's world is pretty murderous, but at least the world-building makes sense. No, instead, it had to be Chess Games of Blood and its derivative and paper-thin (ha) world. My mom was right. I regret not reading classier books.

4. Don't ask me why his name is Alexandrius. I too, have always wondered. I guess Alexander wasn't pompous enough, so the author had to stick the -us ending onto it. And then nicknamed him Alex—which was the name of like, three kids in my kindergarten class—to defeat the whole point.