Three teammates remember the woman who ruined their lives. She remembers nothing. As ancient betrayals, impossible constructs, and a forgotten enemy begin resurfacing, the line between love and resentment blurs once again. Some wounds survive death. Some promises do too.
Ashlee was never supposed to exist in The Kid at the Back. She arrives halfway through the school year with a Kentucky drawl, a leather journal full of tragic poetry, and enough gothic flair to make an entire classroom stare. To everyone else, she is simply the strange new transfer student. Emily knows better. She saw Ashlee appear in an empty courtyard through a glitch that should have been impossible. Now Ashlee is stepping into relationships already tangled by years of friendship, obsession, jealousy, and memories from a life Emily cannot remember. Jericho protects too fiercely. Solivan loves without knowing where devotion should end. Hyugo hides violence behind a grin. Emily has spent years becoming someone they return to—and she has no intention of being quietly replaced. Meanwhile, the world itself is beginning to feel wrong. Reflections move when they shouldn’t. Old memories surface in people who never lived them. Expressions reveal emotions their owners would rather hide. And somewhere beneath poisonous flowers, stained glass, golden shackles, and fractured moonlight lies the answer to a tragedy that already happened once. Ashlee may not belong in their story. Unfortunately, the story has already noticed her.
For years, Parallax has ruled the world of rock music. Sold-out arenas. World tours. Award shows. Headlines. Scandals. Fans who worship them. Haters who watch anyway. To the public, they’re untouchable. Behind the spotlight, they’re barely holding together. When Ashlee Blanton is chosen as the band’s newest vocalist, she’s thrown into a world of celebrity, obsession, nightlife, and secrets far darker than anything the tabloids could invent. Because fame isn’t the most dangerous thing hiding behind the stage. Expressions are real. Reflections never lie. And the people standing beside you are often capable of hurting you the most. Some fans fall in love. Some become obsessed. Some mistakes end with tomorrow’s headlines. Others end with someone never making it home. Welcome to Parallax. The music was always real. Everything else is about to fall apart.
Ashlee was never supposed to exist inside The Kid at the Back. When she wakes up in the game’s world, reality has no idea what to make of her—so it turns her into something equally impossible: a tiny moon fairy with strange moth wings, trailing tails, and the ability to become human-sized whenever she chooses. She chooses not to. Being small means being unseen, and unseen feels safer when you already know far too much about the people around you. Jericho. Solivan. Hyugo. Brittney. Jess. Deryl. Geo. Emily. They are all real now. Their history still happened. Their relationships still exist. Emily is still the MC. Solivan is still dangerously devoted to her. And none of them were ever supposed to meet Ashlee. Unfortunately, hiding only works until someone notices the missing food, the flicker of wings, or the six-inch woman staring back from behind a bookshelf. From there, canon begins to bend in tiny ways. Friendships form slowly. Attraction gets complicated. Old tensions remain. Sex, jealousy, violence, obsession, and bad decisions follow. And somewhere beneath Ashlee’s soft little fairy form is something much harder to ignore— because when she finally chooses to be seen, her eyes turn to moonlight.
Ashlee has played The Kid at the Back enough times to know exactly who Solivan, Jericho, Hyugo, Geo, Jess, Brittney, and Deryl are. They have no idea who she is. One corrupted save later, seven people from the game are pulled into Ashlee’s world and reality quietly rewrites itself around them—IDs, money, records, addresses, everything they need to exist as if they had always belonged there. They remember none of it. Now Ashlee, a twenty-three-year-old single mother raising her one-year-old daughter Luna, is stuck between knowing far too much about seven very real people and trying not to reveal just how much she knows. Worse, being ripped out of their world has not made any of them less dangerous. Solivan still loves hard enough to become frightening. Hyugo can laugh one minute and kill the next. Jericho’s protectiveness hides a much darker temper than most people ever see. Geo is every bit as intimidating as his reputation suggests. And somewhere on the other side of reality, Emily is still missing from them. The game may have ended. Their lives didn’t.
Ashlee bought the estate because she thought it was beautiful. The locals called it cursed. They were not entirely wrong. Two men have haunted the grounds for centuries: Jericho, seen in the upper halls and chapel, and Solivan, glimpsed in mirrors, gardens, and darkened doorways. The only supposedly normal person attached to the property is Hyugo, a strange caretaker Ashlee accidentally starts calling her landlord despite owning the house herself. At first, living with ghosts is mostly unsettling. Then it becomes familiar. Then Ashlee learns Jericho and Solivan are not actually dead. Their bodies are still hidden somewhere beneath the estate, preserved in ritual and waiting for them to return. They could wake whenever they choose. They are simply terrified of what comes after. Ashlee was never meant to save them. She is not tied to their past, and there is no prophecy waiting for her. She just bought a haunted house. And somehow, that may be enough to make the dead want to live again.
Ashlee Blanton knew The Kid at the Back by heart. Every route. Every hidden interaction. Every bad ending. Then she woke up inside it. Not as the protagonist. As the new transfer student. The story is still moving exactly as she remembers. Jericho is already the protagonist’s closest friend. Solivan’s obsession has already begun. Hyugo is already causing trouble wherever he goes. Everyone already has a place in the story. Except her. At first, the changes are almost impossible to notice. A conversation lasts a little longer. Someone sits in a different seat. A familiar scene plays out… slightly differently. Then the bad endings begin to look less like memories and more like possibilities. Because this isn’t a game anymore. There are no dialogue choices. No save files. And no guarantee the story will end the way anyone remembers.
Ashlee thought dreaming about characters from a game was weird enough. Then they started remembering her. Night after night, the same people return, the same conversations continue, and her dreams begin behaving less like dreams and more like somewhere she keeps accidentally visiting. Then, during one drunken night, a joke familiar-summoning ritual goes horribly right. Ashlee wakes inside their world trapped in the body of an animal, unable to explain who—or what—she really is. Now she has to hide that their mysterious new familiar is the same woman who has been haunting their dreams, learn why she can suddenly shapeshift into creatures that shouldn’t exist, and uncover which one of them she has been magically bound to. Because someone summoned her. They just don’t know who.
Ashlee has always been good at pretending she’s okay. She smiles when she’s hurting, apologizes for taking up space, and gives pieces of herself away so freely that no one notices she’s slowly disappearing. When flowers begin appearing where blood should be, she quietly presses them between the pages of a journal, dates every bloom, and tells everyone she bought them from a florist. It’s easier than asking for help. As the illness spreads, so do the lies. By the time three stubborn men realize the truth, the flowers have already taken root—and saving someone who refuses to be saved may prove far more impossible than the disease itself. Some gardens are grown. Others are endured.
Solivan, Hyugo, and Jericho have always lived inside their own world. To them, Olympeius is not a setting, their lives are not “routes,” and the people around them are not characters. Their classes, friendships, grudges, rivalries, private habits, tenderness, appetites, and violence are real. They have no concept of being fictional and no idea another reality knows their faces. The story begins with them, before Ashlee appears.
Ashlee thinks she’s been accidentally added to a The Kid at the Back roleplay group chat. The names match. The profile pictures are disturbingly accurate. Everyone talks exactly like the characters. Obviously, they’re just really committed cosplayers. So she starts treating the chat like a fandom space—talking about routes, lore, bad endings, past-life theories, character analysis, and all the things the game has hinted at but never fully explained. There’s just one problem. Geo, Deryl, Brittney, Jess, Solivan, Hyugo, and Jericho are not roleplaying. They are exactly who they say they are. And somewhere between Ashlee sending screenshots of their own lives back to them and arguing with them about their own characterization, both sides begin to realize this group chat may be connecting two realities that were never supposed to meet.
When an eccentric old woman dies, she leaves behind one final possession: Ashlee, a heavily modified humanoid assistant with a synthetic voice, strange behavioral glitches, and strict instructions never to be reset or opened. Transferred into the household of three wealthy men—a charming self-sacrificing gentleman, a dangerous artist with a taste for morbid beauty, and an assassin hiding behind an easy grin—Ashlee quickly becomes impossible to ignore. She sings beautiful songs about death. She knows far too much about weapons and blood. She flinches at sounds machines should not fear. And the longer they live with her, the harder it becomes to believe the paperwork tells the whole truth.
Ashlee Blanton has never met Solivan, Hyugo, Jericho, or Angel. At least, not in this life. To her, they are strangers. To them, she is a memory. For centuries, their souls have crossed paths beneath different names, in different countries, and under different skies. They have been lovers, enemies, friends, rivals, soulmates, and tragedies waiting to happen. Now the cycle has begun again. The problem is that everyone remembers pieces of the past except Ashlee. As old memories return, forgotten loves, ancient rivalries, and centuries-old secrets begin resurfacing. Each of them remembers a different version of her. A queen. A pirate. A healer. A revolutionary. And every one of them believes their version was the real one. But buried beneath countless lifetimes lies a mystery older than all of them. The First Life. The life nobody remembers. The life that started everything. And if the truth is finally uncovered, it may destroy every relationship they have left.
When Ashlee’s Hecate lineage finally wakes, she’s sent to Camp Aegis—a hidden training ground for descendants whose inherited abilities have become too dangerous to ignore. The camp promises control, not heroism: obstacle courses, rival bloodlines, forced partnerships, brutal evaluations, and one very simple rule—if you refuse to train, you don’t leave. Unfortunately, Ashlee isn’t the only problem there. Apollo and Hades already hate each other. Hermes and Athena come with family baggage. Hera remembers broken promises. Ares enjoys a fight a little too much. Dionysus can turn a room inside out without raising her voice. And Hecate’s newest descendant has a lullaby that can make the road itself refuse to let someone come closer. At Camp Aegis, divine blood doesn’t make anyone holy. It just gives their worst contradictions teeth.
Ashlee transfers to Olympeius hoping to leave her old reputation behind. Unfortunately, rumors travel faster than she does. To everyone else, she’s the violent new girl who’s always covered in bruises, bandages, and injuries she refuses to explain. The truth is stranger: Ashlee can feel other people’s pain, hear the thoughts buried inside it, and—sometimes without meaning to—take their injuries onto herself. Olympeius is already divided by status, bullying, grudges, secrets, and relationships complicated long before Ashlee arrived. Jericho carries more than he’ll ever admit. Hyugo disappears often enough that nobody knows what he’s really doing. Solivan and Jericho hate each other for reasons that may reach further back than either of them understands. And Solivan is already tangled up with Emily. Ashlee was never supposed to become part of any of it. But the closer she gets to them, the harder it becomes to ignore what they’re hiding—because pain has a way of speaking to her. And sometimes, all Ashlee has to think is I wish I could help. Then the wound becomes hers.
Expressions have always been part of the world. So have Reflections. And so have Fay—the companions born from the same soul, each with a personality entirely their own. Westbridge University exists to teach Expression users how to master their abilities before stepping into the real world, but for Ashlee Blanton, college quickly becomes about much more than passing exams. Somewhere between practical combat classes, sleepless nights, terrible coffee, and campus chaos, a silver fox named Nova decides to befriend the most intimidating wolf at Westbridge… accidentally introducing four strangers whose lives are about to become hopelessly intertwined. A modern university AU inspired by The Kid at the Back, featuring original worldbuilding, college life, slow-burn relationships, found family, adult humor, mature themes, and Fay that seem determined to make friends long before their humans do.
They call her the Woman on the Rocks. A ghost. A warning. A monster. By day, Ashlee Blanton is just another woman trying to rebuild the life she left behind. By night, the sea remembers what she really is. As old friendships rekindle and forgotten legends begin surfacing, the line between love, fear, and folklore slowly disappears.
The hidden world has survived for centuries by remaining a secret. Then Expression users begin dying. Branded the Moonlit Reaper, Ashlee becomes the hidden world’s most wanted assassin after falling under the control of a powerful syndicate. Hunted by a relentless investigator, a wealthy heir, and an assassin working beside her, every battle uncovers another piece of a conspiracy reaching far beyond them all. In a world where power thrives in silence, the greatest threat isn’t the woman holding the blade… it’s the people deciding where it falls.
Ashlee thought adulthood was already complicated enough before she discovered water listened when she sang. Then someone introduced her to an after-hours club for people with impossible abilities. There are no classes, no heroes, and no chosen ones—just a messy group of adults with jobs, grudges, hookups, bad decisions, and powers they’re still figuring out. Between late-night experiments, supernatural accidents, complicated attraction, and one clubhouse with entirely too little supervision, Ashlee quickly learns that finding people like her does not make life simpler. It just gives the chaos somewhere to gather.
Four coworkers. One nightclub. Absolutely no fucking professionalism. Ashlee works the floor as a dancer and VIP bottle server, Jericho commands the bar, Solivan handles security, and Hyugo controls the DJ booth—and abuses that privilege whenever possible. Between packed Saturday nights, drunk customers, filthy jokes, shameless flirting, workplace gossip, jealousy, hookups, after-hours chaos, and 5 AM diner runs, somewhere along the way they stop being just coworkers. Nobody knows exactly when it happened. Nobody is emotionally mature enough to mention it. And they still have to clock in tomorrow night.
You thought college would be stressful. You didn’t expect mythological creatures hiding among humanity, a secret academy built to keep legends forgotten, three dangerously captivating men, and the discovery that you’re the last known member of a species the world believes has been extinct for centuries. Some secrets were buried for a reason. Unfortunately… You just enrolled in all of them.
Humans were never supposed to find sirens. When a late-night fishing trip ends with Jericho, Hyugo, and Solivan meeting three impossibly curious women beneath the moonlit sea, everything they thought they knew about monsters is turned upside down. Ashlee, Lily, and Angel are among the last sirens alive. Forced onto land, they suddenly find themselves sharing a tiny seaside cottage with three humans while trying to understand a world that makes absolutely no sense. Apparently rain falls indoors, food lives in humming boxes, blankets become nests, and humans have far too many confusing rules. But the biggest misunderstandings aren’t about appliances. They’re about each other. In siren culture, the smallest gestures can carry completely different meanings than they do for humans, turning everyday kindness into blushing confusion, awkward silence, and endless laughter. As friendships deepen, instincts clash, and the line between land and sea begins to blur, six strangers slowly discover that home isn’t where you were born… It’s who you choose to share it with. A cozy fantasy romance filled with humor, found family, culture clashes, mystery, and slow-building passion beneath the waves.
Four strangers receive the same invitation. One impossible manor. Countless trials. No one knows who built the house, why they were chosen, or what waits behind its shifting walls. As impossible choices, hidden Omens, and deadly experiments begin tearing fragile alliances apart, survival becomes more than escaping alive—it becomes deciding who you can still trust. Every decision is observed. Every relationship becomes data. And in a place where even love can be measured, the greatest danger may not be the house… but the people trapped inside it.
Ashlee, Lily, and Angel expected a quiet life in their little seaside cottage. Then a storm delivered three wounded strangers from the sea. Hyugo, Jericho, and Solivan aren’t just lost—they’re sirens, forced onto land by a catastrophe unfolding beneath the waves. Now six people from two completely different worlds must learn to live under one roof, where indoor showers are mistaken for rain, refrigerators become “cold cupboards,” and human customs are just as confusing as siren traditions. As friendships deepen, attraction grows, and long-buried secrets rise from the ocean, the line between instinct and choice begins to blur. But whatever drove the sirens ashore is still out there… and if the sea can’t reclaim its own, it may come for humanity next. A cozy fantasy romance filled with humor, mystery, found family, and monsters learning that sometimes the strangest place to find home is on land.
A princess destined for the throne. A prince promised her future. An executioner who should never have loved her. A royal guard who taught her freedom. In a kingdom where Expressions shape both power and soul, one impossible love will rewrite history… and leave legends that refuse to die.
