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Logline
Betrayed and beheaded, Empress Calypso wakes up one year before her execution with memories of another life where she lived as a modern woman in South Korea—now she realizes that she is nothing but a background character in a tragic novel, and she makes it her mission to seek vengeance on all who have wronged her.
Blurb
Countless people have suffered tragedy simply for a protagonist to shine and rise as heroes. But are they heroes if they ruin everyone else's stories for the sake of their own?
Ever since Empress Calypso Berenice nearly drowned in a lake, she has been recalling some very strange memories that are not her own. Memories that belong to another life, another time—where she lived as Park Hanbyeol, a thirty-year-old music producer from South Korea. If that isn't bizarre enough, the proud and dignified empress also discovers that the world she now lives in is nothing but a tragic fiction novel Park Hanbyeol once read and hated with a passion.
Calypso, along with all the main characters from the original story appears to have traveled back in time with the memories of the first timeline. But she isn't even one of the main characters—she's merely an unimportant extra; the male lead's wife who was executed by the villain without a second thought. Her tragic death wasn't even mentioned in the story, so why on earth has she regressed as well?
~Chapter One~
Empress of Graniel
The imperial garden used to be full of beauty and splendor, but there was an eerie silence across its paved courtyards and gently babbling fountain that night, for it had turned into a graveyard of the unburied.
Countless corpses lay among the buttercups and forget-me-nots; their clothes torn and burnt, weapons strewn just out of reach.
As I stood motionless on one of the Imperial Palace's watchtowers, my eyes rested on the harrowing sight before me, not unblinking but slowed.
There was no such thing as a beautiful body when death has claimed its soul; no such thing as a romantic corpse.
Death was death.
The flesh would rot, bones would follow, and hair would mat into the soil.
It never discriminated.
I tilted my head skyward. The sun had already started to set, and the flames that engulfed the imperial castle front gates added color to the sunset as if God himself had splattered rainbow embers upon the evening sky. It burnt like hell, blazing red and bold.
I took a deep breath as I slowly lowered the bow in my hand.
I always kept my appearance elegant; it was how I was raised–but these past few days, I had no time to sleep let alone arrange my hair. Now it was a black, tangled mess, whipping in the wind that howled around me.
