“I want to go back to the real world”, Seungwan spat out angrily before the man in front of her could begin some useless speech. “I don’t need to hear anything from you”

“Yes, I know all about your plan”, he said with a wave of his hand, easily dismissing this admission of omniscience. “And I know you have only good intentions, but there’s a lot you’re not considering” So she was right. He was in charge and he knew everything that was going on in the story. And his words certainly seemed to hint that she had the ultimate power of decision, or she doubted he’d try to convince her of anything. He’d just snap his fingers and she’d be one of his puppets.

“And what am I not considering? That you kidnap people? That you wipe their memories? That you’re going to do the same to me and then move on to your next victim?”, she enumerated with increasing venom. The man sighed, a sad frown appearing on his face.

“No, Seungwan. That I make people happy”, he said gently, curving his lips into a benevolent smile. “That’s what I’m here for. It’s my… Well, It’s my job, but more than that. It’s the very reason for my existence”

She scoffed, not believing a single word. He tried to step closer, but she moved backwards, keeping the same distance between them, and he sighed as he stopped walking. “You know it’s the truth. You weren’t happy in your old life. In fact, you were so miserable that you asked me, begged me, to come here. And I let you join my little fairy tale, because all I want is to make you happy”, he concluded softly, a look of empathetic suffering in his eyes, like he couldn’t stand that Seungwan would be unhappy for even a moment when he could prevent it.

She took another step back, even though he hadn’t moved from his place. His words, spoken so gently, were harsh in her ears, and she needed more distance from them, from him. It scared her how he sounded so sure of himself, how he was offering her exactly what she’d wanted.

“Now, now, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Well now I’m here, and I’m not happy either’”, he said with a good-natured chuckle. Seungwan was startled as she realized that the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. That she was already so prepared to accept what he had to offer. “That’s only because you’re fighting it. Every tear that you’ve shed since coming to this world was because you refused to accept the happiness that I gave you”

The happiness that he’d given her. The beautiful princess who’d fallen for her at his will. “You gave me lies”, she said simply, swallowing around the knot in as pain turned into rebellion. “You want me to forget myself and become some fake character, all so I can receive the love of somebody who doesn’t even exist. A love that you manufactured to make me happy” It felt strange to raise her voice against such a calm, well-mannered individual, but she couldn’t help herself. She needed to be angry because she was afraid of what she’d feel otherwise.

He smiled conspiratorially and leaned forwards, though he didn’t try to step closer like before, mindful of the distance that Seungwan had imposed. “Do you want to know a secret?”, he asked with childish mischief, a lopsided grin drawing itself on his face. “I didn’t make her love you. I only did what you asked. Make you a noblewoman, have you meet the princess. Check and check”, he added playfully. “Everything else was all you”

The revelation stunned her and she could only stand in silence for a moment, reeling as he studied her patiently. Joohyun had fallen for her. The beautiful and wonderful fairy tale princess had fallen for Seungwan. Just because of who she was. No strings pulling at her limbs, no duty dragging her in the right direction. Just Seungwan.

“You’re lying”, she argued shakily, but he shook his head without hesitation.

“I don’t lie. I don’t need to. The truth is wonderful enough. I wrote the most perfect princess I could imagine and she fell in love with you”, he said with a chuckle. “I didn’t change anything about the world or her circumstances, I simply stretched things around to fit you in here with the rest of us and then…” He let his words hang in the air, only raising his arms to shrug like the rest was history.

“Now, why don’t you stop fighting what’s right in front of you and let yourself be happy? Go back in there, get the girl, and then we can talk about who you’d like to be in the story”, he offered with his most convincing smile. “You can be the prince. Better yet, be a princess and marry her anyway, anything is allowed here. Or be who are now and just run off with her to the next kingdom over, that’s fine by me. I’ll give her a sister and she can marry the prince. Or I can get rid of the prince altogether, it’s your call”

His words, spoken pleasantly but with contagious enthusiasm, began to dig into her heart and tug at it with irresistible force, but the reminder of how easily her life could change, how he would shuffle them all into place and start things over, was like a bucket of cold water over her head.

“It won’t be real”, she managed to say with some effort. He paused, his smile growing smaller as he looked away with impatience.

“Real, real, real. You have got to let go of this obsession with what’s real, Seungwan”, he declared, his voice slow and even through evident effort. “Real is just a useless category. Who’s to say that real is best? What makes the real world so much better than this one? The real world won’t have her”, he finished with sudden venom, making it very clear who he meant.

Seungwan was startled by the sharpness that arose in the previously playful man. She took another step back, wary of his new attitude. What did he really want? And what was he hiding from her?

“Here, you’re happy. There, you’re miserable. Here, you have Joohyun. There, you’re alone. And the best part of all is that, if you stay, you won’t have any of these doubts biting away at your happiness”, he said with growing animation. “As soon as you’ve forgotten about this, it’ll just be you and her. Together. Happy. No worries in that little head of yours. Wouldn’t that be nice?”, he asked, his tone insistent but his words sounding painfully appealing.

“Ignorance is bliss, then?”, she asked. She wanted to sound sarcastic, but the question came out uncertain.

“Well, isn’t it?”, he returned easily, voice gentle again as he reached out his arm. “Let me make you happy, Seungwan. Everyone is happy here”

“Everyone?”, she asked dubiously. He finally took another step forward, and this time she didn’t back away.

“Everyone”, he confirmed with an encouraging smile. “Every peasant, every maid, every guard. Heck, even the bandits are happy. And they never hurt anyone, either. The benefits of a magical world. Now, come on” He stepped towards her again, cautiously, and smiled when she remained still. “Take my hand. Say yes. I’ll give you your happy ending”

“I think”, she said slowly. “That you lied to me” The man froze, stunned by her words, the smile sliding off his face as his features shifted in surprise. “Either that, or you’re just a bad storyteller”

“What?”, he asked with sudden rage, face reddening and contorting in anger before he composed himself. “Whatever do you mean?”, he carried on, a bit calmer, though the corner of his lips still twitched with something barely suppressed.

“You said that you didn’t make Joohyun fall for me. You didn’t change her personality at all for this cycle of the story”, she began. The man nodded in agreement, urging her to continue. “And you said that everyone here is happy”, she concluded simply. He gazed at her in confusion, and she couldn’t help but smile at the sight. For once, she had the upper hand.

“I saw Joohyun with the prince. She didn’t just pick me over him, she genuinely didn’t care about him at all. She thought he was boring. I mean, he is the most handsome man I’ve ever seen and she barely spared him a second glance” The man studied her blankly. “She’s gay, okay? You’ve made a gay princess. If she hadn’t fallen for me, she still wouldn’t have loved him. She would have married him and joined him in his kingdom and she wouldn’t have been happy. She might not have realized it, but it’s still true. In the story I read, she wasn’t happy”

“So, either you lied about her being happy or you lied about us falling in love without your meddling”, she stated smugly, happy that she’d caught him in his trickery. She wondered how he’d explain himself, one side of her pleased that she wouldn’t fall for his lies and the other treacherously hopeful that he’d still manage to convince her. That there would still be a reason to stay.

There was a moment of silence where the man only stared at her and Seungwan stared back, feeling a bit like she was in a contest of wills. Finally, he turned away with a grumbled “Okay” that almost startled her with its unexpected bite.

“So, here’s the thing. If you don’t accept my generous proposal and join me and my wonderful cast in this magical little place I’ve drawn up for us, then it’s the end. Capital letters and everything, do you understand? The End”, he spelled out, stretching out his hands as if to frame the words. He changed in an instant, features carved by disdain as his very body seemed to shift, growing sharper, less human, closer to whatever he really was.

“You and your little friends go off back to the real world and everybody else is gone. No more magical kingdom, no more prince and princess. More importantly, no more me” He paused, probably just for dramatic flair, and took a deep breath. Seungwan could barely follow his words, though. Her mind seemed to have frozen at the thought of Joohyun being gone. She didn’t know whether the characters in the man’s story even existed while nobody real was inside it, but still, the idea that Joohyun would vanish from existence entirely was horrifying.

“As you can imagine, I am very attached to my own existence. I would like to keep existing, if that is at all possible”, the man carried on, his words completely meaningless to Seungwan. Who cared if he was gone? Who cared if anything was gone? How could she care about anything other than Joohyun? “So yes, I might have… taken some liberties with the truth”, he muttered reluctantly.

“You lied”, Seungwan specified in a hollow voice, barely able to care anymore.

“Fine, fine, I lied. Congratulations, detective Son, you caught me”, he rambled sarcastically, throwing his hands in the air in fake surrender. “But I can tell you two things that are definitely true. I’ll swear it on my honour as a storyteller” He lifted his left hand and let the right one rest on his chest, over where his heart would be if he had one. Seungwan genuinely wasn’t sure, since he certainly wasn’t human.

“One, I did not make Joohyun fall in love with you”, he began, smirking at the way his words still managed to affect Seungwan. “Two, every real person in this story is happy”, he added, emphasising the world ‘real’ with heavy sarcasm.

“But Joohyun isn’t real”, she immediately pointed out. Would he trick her? Could she believe anything he said at this point? What if Joohyun was with her, making her happy beyond her wildest dreams, but not actually sharing any of that joy? Were these really her options? Living a lie in a made-up world or erasing every trace of the person she loved more than anything?

“Well, yes, but she said it herself. If you’re with her, she’ll be happy”, he replied, quoting what Joohyun had told her weeks ago, when she’d recovered from the soul-stealing curse. The suspicion, hope and dread that mingled inside her bubbled into the same simple anger she’d felt as she’d entered his room. With a few swift steps, she walked up to him and slapped him soundly.

He didn’t care. That was the only thing she needed to know. She wasn’t sure what he’d lied about, or how Joohyun truly felt, or anything about the rules of this world, but she did know that he didn’t care about her happiness one bit. She couldn’t trust him to make her happy. No matter how dire the consequences, staying here was a mistake. Letting him get his way was a mistake.

“I’m going back to the real world” There was nothing she could do here, no way to save the princess. Joohyun had been doomed from the moment she’d been created, a victim of this evil being’s actions. The storyteller must have known she wouldn’t change her mind, because he dropped any attempt at a pleasant smile and sneered at her with contempt.

“Go ahead. Make yourself miserable. Walk away from the love of your life”, he spat out viciously.

“She’s not the love of my life”, she argued, though she barely believed her own words. “She’s not even –“

“Real, yes, we know! She’s not even real. She’s fake, false, a figment, a phony”, he rambled on, gesticulating left and right with barely suppressed rage. “So say the word and go on your way. I’m tired of listening to you and your obsession with reality”, he huffed out, dropping down on the nearest chair with a hand over his forehead.

Seungwan turned to the door, steeled herself for that last painful goodbye. The last time she’d ever see Joohyun. If she could engrave every detail in her mind, she would at least have something to hang on to. Something to remember.

“Oh, terribly sorry to disappoint, but that’s not going to happen. Yes, I see you gazing longingly at the door, but you must make your choice now. Ask to leave and you’ll leave, you and all your friends from the real world. Walk out that door and you’re staying”, the man said pointedly, managing to coat his words in acid despite the tired lilt in his voice.

She whipped her head around at the news. “What? Why can’t I see her?”

“Because I don’t want to die and I will try anything to make you stay”, he replied casually. “Did it work?”

She blinked back angry tears at the unfairness of it all. At his pointless, hurtful cruelty, grasping at the last chance to hurt her before he’d be gone forever. “Get me out of here”, she said through gritted teeth. “Do it, now”

She woke up in her bed. It was morning, and the book still sat on her bedside table. When she opened it, she found that every single page was blank. It was all gone. Joohyun was gone.

(…)

The next Monday, they were all there. It was strange seeing them again, dressed in their school uniforms, still the same people but subtly different. The real Seulgi wasn’t as muscular, her shoulders not as broad. She was a shy, skinny girl who enveloped them in a tight hug as soon as she saw them, then released them nervously, like she wasn’t sure what was allowed in this new world.

The real Sooyoung looked about the same, maybe a bit younger, with the obvious exception that her hair was no longer bright red, but rather the typical shiny black. She wasn’t as eager to spit out biting remarks, talking to the older girls almost deferentially and appearing uncertain in her connection with anyone but Yerim.

Meanwhile, the youngest was the closest to her fairy-tale persona. She was just as short, just as young, just as flippant and just as shameless. She probably wasn’t as skilled with daggers, but Seungwan would rather not find out. It made sense, in a way. Yerim was a kid and she’d wanted to enter a child’s book so she could be free to run around and kick bad guys in the face. She didn’t need to change for that, only to be placed in a world where it was a possibility for her.

For the older girls, it was a little more complicated. Seulgi wanted to fight bad guys as well, but she was motivated by her experience with school bullies, who’d never targeted her directly but still made her feel helpless as she watched them hurt other kids. She’d wanted to feel like she could do something about it. Sooyoung loved science, but she’d never felt like it was something she could study seriously, discouraged at school and at home from following a boys’ field of study. She’d wished for the next best thing and become a mage, hidden from sight and from judgement, and finally comfortable expressing herself.

It made Seungwan wonder how different she’d be in her own iteration of the story. What could have changed about her, physically or mentally? She might be a little taller, that would be nice. She began to feel like she would never grow beyond her current vertically-challenged state and it wasn’t the most appealing prospect. Even Yerim would be taller than her in a few years.

In that first meeting, they shared all they could remember about their time in the book and their return to real life. Contrary to what they’d expected, the three girls had come back to find that they’d never been missing. Their bodies had been there, going about their lives on auto-pilot, ready to welcome their consciousness back as it escaped from the book.

As soon as they’d returned to their bodies and their normal lives, the details of the fairy tale began to fade from their memory, like dreams that were so clear in the instant after waking up and somehow became impossible to recall just a few minutes later.

Their interactions with each other were the clearest, with everything else slowly but surely disappearing as the days went by. The other three were fine with that, relieved that their fantasy alter-egos wouldn’t be filling their heads with false memories and impossible beliefs. Sooyoung was particularly amused by the effect, looking back on all the spells that had seemed so logical in the book but suddenly appeared completely nonsensical in the real world.

Seungwan hated it. She bought a notebook and filled page after page with everything she could recall about Joohyun. She described her eyes, every one of her smiles, all the constellations she’d painstakingly pointed out in the night sky over the palace, the words she’d spoken to Seungwan, how she’d asked her to kiss her. She kept Joohyun’s image fresh in her mind with an effort that she had never devoted to anything before.

They met every week, started talking about more than just their time in the book and everything that had led them to enter it in the first place. They talked about their families, their times at school, their hopes and worries for the future. They became friends.

Seulgi started learning Taekwondo. She was the oldest white belt in the class, but she didn’t let it discourage her, simply befriending all the children around her and happily carrying the youngest on her shoulders after practice. Sooyoung had a serious conversation with her parents and decided to study engineering in the future. In the end, they supported her, and even apologized for ever making her feel like it was something she couldn’t do.

Yerim started carrying a pair of sticks around to replace the daggers she didn’t have anymore. She’d stab them into the air, randomly jumping into walls or crouching down dramatically. She almost poked one of Seungwan’s eyes out with the things.

It was nice spending time with her friends. It made her feel a little better, even if the pain of heartbreak took frustratingly long to fade. She knew that when it eventually got a little easier to manage, they’d still be there. Life would still be there.

She watched Sooyoung wave her wallet in the air, offering to buy Yerim an ice cream if she put the sticks in the trash and stopped trying to stab her. Yerim paused her attack, seriously considering the deal, then dropped the sticks and reached for Sooyoung’s hand, pulling her towards the nearest ice cream place.

Seungwan felt fingers slide into hers and she knew it could only be Seulgi. “It’s okay to be sad, Seungwan”, the girl said lightly. She stood next to her, eyes on the younger pair as they nearly ran down the street. “I know you cared about her”

She smiled bitterly, unsure of how true those words could be. “She wasn’t even real”, she mumbled in a pained voice. The storyteller had hated that Seungwan kept reminding him of it and she had to admit that she didn’t particularly enjoy the fact either.

“Maybe not”, Seulgi admitted with a small shrug. “But your feelings were. They still are”, she pointed out gently, her words reaching something inside Seungwan that she hadn’t even known about. Something curled up in pain, something that growled as she poked at it. Something she couldn’t just ignore until it went away. “You need time before you can feel better. You need to give yourself that time. Nothing changes overnight”

She felt tears sting at the corners of her eyes, tears that she hadn’t let out since she’d returned from her adventure, from the story that seemed more dreamlike by the day. She clenched her jaw, forcing them back. She knew Seulgi was right, but she wasn’t ready. Not yet. She wasn’t ready to grieve. Maybe she could wait until it wouldn’t feel so painful, so impossibly overwhelming to face head-on.

Seulgi squeezed her hand. “I’ve been told I’m a great shoulder to cry on, if you ever feel like you might need one of those”, she joked. “Just give me a call and I’ll be there. And I’ll bring my shoulders”, she added with a smile. Seungwan laughed, squeezed her hand back.

“I will. Now let’s go test Sooyoung’s generosity”, she said playfully, trying to lighten the mood. “You do the puppy eyes and I’ll threaten to tickle her. One of them should get us free ice cream”

The sun was low on the horizon as she hurried home. She walked down busy commercial streets, hoping she’d make it back before it got too cold. With hands firmly shoved into the pockets of her jacket, she stepped into a wide plaza surrounded by stores and coffee shops. The lights had already been despite the weak clarity that still clung to the sky and Seungwan followed the row of lampposts to the opposite end of the open space.

“Seungwan?”, a voice cut through the bustle of voices and cars. She turned, confused by a familiarity she couldn’t place, and saw a figure standing across the street. Her hair wasn’t quite as long, only hanging a bit below her shoulders. Her face wasn’t as bright and unmarked by worry, although its beauty was still indescribable. Far beyond anything Seungwan had been able to write down in her notebook.

“Joohyun!”, she called out, dry and raspy. It was her. She was here. She was real.