“Are you okay, Nova?” My mother hands me the water flask she always brings with her on trips and wipes the sweat off my brow with a handkerchief.

“I just had a nightmare.”

“What was it about?”

I look to my father. “The time I was locked away in the cellar.” Rolling up my sleeves, I show my unblemished arm. “That man cut me right here.” I point a spot on my forearm. “He gathered my blood in a jar.”

My mother inspects my arm closer. “You were uninjured when we found you. But how come you’re only telling us of this now?”

“He put some sort of spell on me. He said…” I try to remember, but the memory begins slipping away from me. “He said… I wouldn’t remember…” My head begins to hurt, and my mother catches me as I fall over.

“Don’t try too hard to remember, Nova. We will find a solution to this and figure out that man’s objective.” My mother pats my back as she consoles me.

My father goes to open the door. “Your mother’s right. For now, let’s enjoy the scene.”

I glance outside and see the clear blue sky shifting color by the sun reflected on a lake. Stepping outside and forgetting my headache, I run across the expanse of gray pebbles and reach the water. Blooming on the surface of the lake are big, pink flowers each housing a little blue gem. Nightloques.

Said to be the most beautiful flower in the world, nightloques are pink flowers shaped like sakura flowers that float on the surface of a lake. The blue gem, though an illusion, shows it’s most beautiful moment during the sunset. Such a view can only be seen on a day such as this, as any cloud would destroy the illusion.

As the sun kisses the lake, the blue gems shift colors through the rainbow from blue to green, all the way to red, before disappearing altogether.

My mother, standing right next to me, pulls me closer to her and says, “It’s said that the moment when the nightloques go through the rainbow is when the link between our world and the demon world is the strongest.”

I glance at her in shock. Those are the exact words that Nova Allandis in that book says to the protagonist the day she is exiled, and what follows is, “I hope when the day comes for the demons to invade, you will be the last one the demons catch so you can watch your world burn.”

It always struck me as weird that the character would say that in a fantasy romance novel with no sequel. The author foreshadowed that demons would come, but according to the novel, it never happened. I guessed that I was reborn as the villainess of that book, but this just proves my theory. The names of everything are the same, or at least from what I remember, the nightloques are real, the saying is the same. And of course there is a demon world in a fantasy setting.