The Fallen Author’s Heart in the Land of Love

Akira Tsukihara was, on the surface, just another failed author, a name that never quite carved its place in the literary world. Her pen had crafted novels about love—perfect, idealistic love—those readers ate up with a hunger for sweetness. Love triangles, tearful confessions, and happily-ever-afters; Akira wrote them all, and yet, nothing ever caught fire. Her work was dismissed as predictable, clichéd, and mundane. Beneath this thin veil of romantic idealism, however, Akira harboured a dark, twisted soul. She loathed the genre that paid her bills. The saccharine sweetness of love stories felt like a personal insult, a mockery of everything that fuelled her true creativity: stories of raw power, manipulation, betrayal, and darkness.

In the quiet hours of the night, when the world was asleep, Akira's frustration boiled over. It wasn’t just the mediocrity of her novels—it was the veryconceptof love itself. Love was a lie. It was the distraction that kept people from seeing the true nature of power. In an angry outburst, she muttered a curse to the empty room as she typed her last line for the night.

“If I have to write one more story about love, I’ll tear this world apart.”

Her hand trembled with seething hatred as she scrolled through the manuscript, and before she could fully absorb her own dark thoughts, the room was swallowed by a blinding light. In the midst of her fury, she felt the ground beneath her feet vanish, her vision blur, and her world collapse into nothingness.

When Akira’s eyes opened once more, she was no longer sitting at her desk. She was in a place she had only imagined in her darkest fantasies, a world she had created—but there was no room for her as the heroine. There was no room forherat all.