eyesmilevsbunnysmile
Rain is twenty-two years old, a bookworm with a habit of loving the wrong characters, when he finishes The Crimson Throne - a BL crime novel about the fearsome Theerapanyakul family and the protagonist who destroys them. He closes the book, says you deserved better to the villain on the cover, and falls asleep with a crush on a fictional mafia prince he will never meet.
He wakes up in a crib.
Transmigrated into the novel's world at two and a half years old, in his own body, with his own name and his full memory intact, Rain finds himself adopted by Kim and Porchay Theerapanyakul - and folded, gradually and irrevocably, into the family he once read about from the outside. He grows up knowing how the story ends. He grows up knowing Payu.
What follows is seventeen years of small things adding up.
Of a boy who was never supposed to be in the story becoming the most important person in it. Of a family that was written as villains being loved into something the original narrative never gave them room to be. Of a slow burn that starts on a carpet with a broken rabbit and a piece of tamagoyaki and takes two decades to say what it means.
And of a story that left a door open - on page four fifty-eight, four words, but there was a light - for exactly the right reader to find it.
But There Was a Light is a transmigration slow burn about staying. About the version of a story that exists underneath the one that got written. About what happens when someone reads between the lines and falls all the way in.