Villain's Second Heart: Trapped in A Fantasy Novel (BL)-Chapter 1: Swapped

Ezra hit the ground hard.

His lungs seized. A blade flashed - coming down fast.

MOVE.

Instinct kicked in. He rolled. Steel bit into the dirt where his head had just been.

'What the hell is happening?!'

A second ago, he was somewhere else. Somewhere colder.

A dark cellar. A contract.

His only way out.

He pressed on, into the cellar.

At the farthest end, where the darkness was deepest, something waited.

A shape, devoid of life, yet brimming with purpose. Whether it was an evil beyond reckoning or the vessel of some forgotten deity, he couldn't say. He knew it only by name.

The Storyteller.

Not moving. Not breathing.

A shadow, darker than the surrounding dark.

His fingers still felt the damp brick walls, the rough frayed pull-string of a lightbulb. The moment he yanked it -

Click.

A sickly glow spilled across mold-blackened walls.

And then he saw 'her.'

The Storyteller did not flinch. Did not turn. But now, she was known.

A skull. Smooth, polished, unnervingly pristine. Antlers stretched from its crown, gnarled and root-like, casting spidery shadows against the brick. Her clawed fingers drifted over the surface of an open book, moving in slow, deliberate circles.

Ink bled fresh beneath her touch. A fate still being written.

Ezra's breath came too loud.

The skull snapped toward him in a sickening jerk, its jaw hanging slightly ajar. Hollow sockets bore through him.

The Storyteller was waiting.

"I heard you're the one who can take people to another world."

His voice cracked.

He'd heard the rumors. Dreamed of this moment. But standing here now, reality curled tight around his ribs.

The Storyteller did not answer. Instead...Shhhk.

A single claw dipped into an inkwell, then pressed to parchment. When she lifted it, a name burned into existence where there had been nothing before.

EZRA.

His stomach dropped.

The room held its breath.

Then, finally, she spoke.

"I am."

The voice did not come from her unmoving jaw. It did not echo from the walls.

It simply was.

A whisper curling into the air. A presence coiling around him, tightening in his bones.

Ezra's pulse hammered. "And the price?"

Another pause. Another page turn.

Shhhk.

"Your soul."

He had known. Every whispered legend said the same thing. But still, the words twisted in his gut.

He forced himself to breathe. "And what does that mean, exactly?"

Another page turn. Shhhk.

"You already know the answer if you made it this far."

She was right.

He knew. He just didn't want to say it aloud. Because once he did, it would become real.

The legend went like this:

The Storyteller could rewrite a person's fate, weaving them into a world of their choosing. A perfect life. A paradise.

But when they died, there would be no heaven. No afterlife. No reincarnation.

Their soul would belong to her.

An eternity in the dark.

But what did eternity matter, when he had never truly lived?

Shhhk.

Ink spilled onto the page, threading outward, winding through lines that had not been there before. She was already writing.

Her claws poised over the parchment, waiting.

"Will you become one with my stories, Ezra?"

His name slithered through the air. Ezzzzrah.

Ezra licked his lips. "I can... choose the world? It can be anything?"

The Storyteller did not answer. Instead, she lifted her claw, and the ink on the pages began to unravel - slowly at first, then quicker, spiraling outward like living tendrils.

His heart pounded as the words crawled toward him.

This was it.

"What is your most precious wish?"

The Storyteller pressed her claw to the parchment.

The ink stilled.

Ezra didn't hesitate.

"I want to be someone who matters," he said, exhaling words that had weighed him down for years. "And I want to know what it feels like to be in love."

A whisper. Not spoken, but written.

Then it is done.

The room lurched. Twisting, shifting, contorting. Breaking.

Ezra barely had time to gasp before the ink leaped forward, bleeding outward like living threads.

They coiled up his legs, twisting up his arms, tightening at his throat.

No.

Not ink.

Words.

The Storyteller's tale consumed him, sinking into his flesh, carving itself into his very being.

They pulled. Hard.

He unraveled like a ball of yarn, and his body came undone.

The world he knew for twenty-seven years vanished.

He woke choking on air that wasn't his.

The sky above was wrong.

Crimson clouds churned over an unfamiliar horizon.

His body -

His body was not his own.

Ezra staggered to his feet, limbs unfamiliar, too strong, too steady. Taller. Broader. His hands are weathered, scarred.

A warrior's hands.

He wasn't just reborn.

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He had become someone else.

A flood of memories not his own crashed against his mind. He was eighteen. He was a lieutenant in a villain's army. He was -

He clutched his head.

This wasn't right.

A sound.

Footsteps. Purposeful, rhythmic.

Leather boots striking stone.

Ezra whirled, scanning the ruins around him. Nothing.

Then a voice, laced with venomous certainty:

"I found you at last, Harbinger."

The unmistakable hiss of a blade leaving its sheath.

Ezra's heart slammed against his ribs.

The assailant was upon him -

He didn't even have time to scream.