The Doryeong village itself was just some huts made of thatch with muddy paths. It had been hugged by mountains, and the passage of time had forgotten it. Smoke drifted through chimneys, and chickens clucked haplessly among the lanes. Outside the hut, Gwinam - or whatever name she was supposed to have by now - sits astride a stool of wood and brings forth to her hands a coarse piece of barley bread.
She hadn't eaten in days. The bread was hard, burnt on one edge, and crumbling in her grip. But it was warm. And real.
"Eat up, girl," said the old woman—Mistress Hana, as the villagers called her. "You'll need strength if you're to start work with the others."
Gwinam bit into the bread. The taste was bitter, but it grounded her—more than the fraying dress she wore or the calluses that already marred her young palms.
She had tried, at first, to convince herself this was a coma dream, an illusion wrought by trauma. But the blister on her heel, the cold wind at dawn, the tang of river water—all of it was too sharp, too layered.
This world wasn't fake. It was written—but it was real.
And she was *in it*.
"Where exactly am I?" she asked that morning, while helping Hana hang bundles of herbs on a line.
"Where?" Hana laughed. "Girl, we're a week's walk from the city of Gojin. In the Kingdom of Verida, under the Eastern Sky. Don't you remember nothing?"
Gwinam paused. *Verida.* That was the name Jiyun had mentioned once, in passing, with her usual sparkle. This *was* her daughter's world. The one she'd spent years building in silence.
And now... Gwinam was a part of it.
She didn't remember much about the novel's plot—only fragments Jiyun had let slip. A girl who rises. A crumbling kingdom. A truth hidden in the past.
"Then I'm in history," Gwinam muttered as she tied a bundle. "Just... not mine."
Mistress Hana glanced at her. "You say strange things sometimes, girl. Maybe that river did knock your head loose."
*If only you knew,* Gwinam thought.
Later that day, she was sent to work in the fields. The soil was stubborn, and the sun unforgiving. Her hands, once used to turning pages and tapping chalk, now gripped a hoe.
By the time dusk fell, she ached from head to toe.
But she didn't stop watching. Listening.
People talked freely around her—about harvests, the tax men from Gojin, rumors of war in the north. She cataloged every name, every village custom, every tale whispered over cooking fires.
Because if she was truly to live in this world—and survive it—then knowledge would be her weapon.
Just as it always had been.
That night, back in the hut, Hana handed her a chipped bowl of stew. "We should give you a name," she said, voice softening. "Can't keep calling you 'girl'."
Gwinam hesitated. Her old name was a relic now, a secret tied to another life. But she smiled.
"Call me Gwi," she said. "It's short."
Hana nodded approvingly. "Gwi it is."
She ate in silence, watching the fire's flicker on the wall.
A historian reborn in the pages of her daughter's imagiThe Doryeong village itself was just some huts made of thatch with muddy paths. It had been hugged by mountains, and the passage of time had forgotten it. Smoke drifted through chimneys, and chickens clucked haplessly among the lanes. Outside the hut, Gwinam - or whatever name she was supposed to have by now - sits astride a stool of wood and brings forth to her hands a coarse piece of barley bread nation. A stranger in a world she'd once thought fiction.
But now... now she would shape it.
*From the shadows of history,* Gwinam thought, *I rise again.*