Chapter Text

Part 1. Linear orbit.

Jin-Woo, atop Namsan Tower.

From high atop the peak of Namsan Tower in the heart of Seoul, Jin-Woo gazed at the glittering sea of lights stretched out above him.  The night was clear and cold, and frigid wind whistled through the narrow metal grating at the top of the radio antenna where Jin-Woo perched.  An ordinary human would have been knocked off his feet by the force of the wind, but Jin-Woo wasn’t a human at the moment.  He wore no flesh.  He was only a shadow in the shape of a man, and so his hair and his clothing lay still, undisturbed by the wind, and his footing was not dependent on anything so frail as gravity.

The stars were spread across the heavens before him in a riotous chaos of celestial light, far denser and more complex than the city lights below.  Humans might have been able to see one or two of the brightest stars at most, against the light pollution of the city, but with Jin-Woo’s senses, he could see not only stars, but galaxies, nebula, and even the steady glow that was the universe’s memory of its birth.  In his eyes, pulsars twinkled, novas burst, alien planets rose and set behind their stars, all in a frenzied and unceasing dance beyond human comprehension.

The sight was beautiful.  Jin-Woo registered that fact clinically, distantly, even as he also registered the fact that his very ability to perceive the sight was also what made him unable to appreciate it on a deeper level.  It wasn’t possible to possess the senses of a god and the heart of a human at the same time.  It would drive any mind mad.  Perhaps it was what had driven the Monarchs mad.  With the ability to perceive all things came the perception of all suffering, and not even the powers of a god could put an end to suffering—not even to the suffering of one single person.

He had tried.  He had failed.  He would not try again.

It had been a camping trip with Mom, Dad, and Jin-Ah, just a couple of hours outside Seoul, when Jin-Woo first saw the stars as they were meant to be seen.  Jin-Woo and Jin-Ah had splashed around in a stream near the campsite while Mom and Dad had tried to fish up some dinner.  Dad had pretended to break a watermelon open with a taekwondo strike, to Mom and Jin-Ah’s cheers and Jin-Woo’s roll of the eyes.  The campsite had been rocky, and Mom and Jin-Ah wound up sleeping in the car, while Dad and Jin-Woo roughed it on the ground.

It was after Dad had finished tucking in the women, when he and Jin-Woo had shared a moment gazing at the stars.  The fire had died back to buried embers, and the electric lanterns were extinguished.  The song of the night had been quiet and drowsy: the bubbling of the stream, the piping of the frogs and the cicadas, the distant notes of the night birds.  That night, Dad had told Jin-Woo about the Milky Way, and how some of the lights in the sky were really galaxies filled with millions of stars—how it was impossible for humans to be alone in the universe, with so many millions and billions of planets out there.

Looking up into the endless depths of space, Jin-Woo had felt connected, for one lingering, shimmering moment, to every life in the universe.  In his mind, an image of himself, connected to every star by lines of light, had seared itself into his mind, fading away only slowly, like an afterimage burned into his retinas.  Some overwhelming feeling had filled his chest and his throat, making it difficult to speak.  Instead of speaking, he had leaned against his Dad, and the man had put his arm around Jin-Woo and kissed the top of his hair.

Standing atop the radio antenna of Namsan Tower, Jin-Woo remembered these things, but it was as if the memory was trapped behind glass.  He could see it, but he couldn’t touch it.  He couldn’t feel it.  Like the stars above, the memory was a million light-years away.  He could see his father in his memory, and those long-ago stars, but he could never again feel the breathless wonder of a child conceiving of the universe for the first time.  And that was what had brought him here, to the Seoul of the past once more.

Jin-Woo had thought that perhaps living through his childhood again would move something inside him, that experiencing the smells and sounds and touches would reach him on a deeper level.  So he had invaded a timeline that was a copy of his first life, during the time when he was a child.  But before stepping in, he had watched and waited for the right timing.

And when he had watched his younger self—splashing in puddles on rainy days with a bright shriek of laughter, helping Jin-Ah sneak the food she didn’t like off her plate at dinner, trying to score a goal during a soccer game and winning nothing but grass stains—when he had seen how effortless it was for that kid to giggle at cartoons and cry at skinned knees and puff up with anger when another kid pulled Jin-Ah’s pigtails—all Jin-Woo had seen was Suho, and he had known that he could never pretend to be a child again.  He’d known that it would shatter whatever was left of him, whatever parts were still recognizable.

Perhaps he should have left for another timeline, after realizing that he couldn’t step in where he had intended to, but instead Jin-Woo had stayed, watching his first life from the shadows.  It had been like dreaming, and the longer he had watched, the faster the years had reeled by, skipping and jumping from scene to scene, showing him the important events that shaped him, as well as mundane things that Jin-Woo couldn’t even remember—a dandelion he had picked and twirled in his hand for a couple of blocks while walking home from school one day; a note that a girl in his gym class had passed him, folded into the shape of a crane; a street muffled with a pristine blanket of snow in the dark of the night, where the only footprints were Jin-Woo’s own, rapidly being erased again behind him by new snow.

And then there had come a moment, a moment that finally woke him from that drifting dream.  Something beautiful, something he had never seen during his first life, but which must have been there all along, hidden from his eyes.

A galaxy of secret stars, hidden in the heart of Seoul, hidden in the heart of a man.  And that was the first thing that had stirred Jin-Woo, that had moved him to reach out with his shadows and touch.  For the first time in a very long time, Jin-Woo wanted.  He wanted to be the darkness in which those shining stars were hung.

In that moment after waking, he had realized more—realized that if he once more let himself be hypnotized by his memories, that he might never wake again.  A river cannot end, but it can become one with the sea, and lose its name.  Jin-Woo had seen other Rulers come to an end, that way.  And so now, Jin-Woo was on Earth again, and he intended to enter the body of his 23-year-old self—to become a river that had looped back and swallowed its own tail rather than be dissolved into a sea of nameless dreaming.

Across the velvety dark sky above Seoul, the Milky Way, too, cascaded like a vast and roiling river.  It was a river of light, and in the center of that light pulsed a heart of darkness that ensnared stars in its orbit, that hungrily gobbled space itself, and would someday consume all things, even the sun, which by then would have swallowed the Earth and the moon.

Ashborn had meant to swallow Jin-Woo, but Jin-Woo had swallowed him instead, because Jin-Woo’s story of himself was stronger than Ashborn’s half-remembered fable.  And now, though Ashborn’s memories belonged to Jin-Woo, Ashborn was gone.  There was nothing left that called itself Ashborn.  The dream had outlived the dreamer.  Every particle that was him was only a particle of Jin-Woo, now, and someday, perhaps, Jin-Woo would also be swallowed by another.  Then that memory, the night by the stream, under the stars, with the taste of watermelon in his mouth and his father’s arm around his shoulders—it would belong to someone else.

But not just yet.  First, he would see whether he could still touch something delicate without crushing it in his gravity.  He would see whether his story was still his own to tell, whether the river could still carve its own banks.

Jin-Woo, watching himself die.

“Should have bought more fucking life insurance,” Jin-Woo muttered to himself, giggling around a mouthful of blood as the statues advanced.  The floor shook under their weight as they lumbered towards him.  In the flickering firelight, the light dancing on their metal faces made their features seem to contort, as if they were leering at him, grinning and snickering at his pathetic end.  He laughed with them.  How stupid this all was.  How miserable.  How fitting.

Only as the sword raised above him, and lingered for a moment at its apex, did the hysterical humor fade from Jin-Woo’s face, replaced by hatred.  In that moment, he hated every other hunter, not only the ones who had left him behind, but all the hunters who had ever existed, his father included.  Himself included.  He hated them for being strong.  And he hated himself for being weak.  For not becoming the person he had wanted to be, for always bowing to what was expected of him, instead of seizing what he really wanted.

And then the shadows came.  They surged out of the darkness and into the light, and dragged the statues down into black depths, swallowing them.  Jin-Woo watched, through eyes blurry with tears, as he remembered that time, the first time that he had wanted to die, when the others had left him behind and he had almost starved to death in that labyrinth of a dungeon.  He had taken refuge in shadows, then.  He had hidden for so long in the darkness that his mind had come apart, and he had seen…things.  He’d always been a little different, after that.  He’d been prone to disappearing, whenever he forgot where he was.  Were these the same shadows, now?  Was he still there?  Had he ever really left that labyrinth?

“Do you want to live?” something asked, a voice devoid of all emotion and humanity.  It was the voice of a monster, surely.  And yet, somehow, Jin-Woo knew that voice.  Because it was his voice.  And he understood, somehow, instinctively, who had saved him.

For a long moment, Jin-Woo didn’t answer.  He peered into the darkness, and saw his own eyes, shining with violet mana-light, staring back at him.  “I don’t know,” he said after a while.  “Do I?  Is it worth it?”

“I don’t know either,” the creature with Jin-Woo’s own eyes answered him.  “I’m still trying to answer that question myself.”

“It must have gone wrong, if you came back,” Jin-Woo observed, trying to make out more of the shadow-wreathed shape in the flickering torchlight.

It flowed closer to him, moving like water, and one by one, the torchlights went out, and the room was saturated with inky darkness.  Jin-Woo felt hands, cold and smooth, touching his face, stroking his cheeks, and soft lips kissing his own chapped and bloody ones.

“I’m searching for something,” the voice whispered, as strong arms wrapped around Jin-Woo’s body and pulled him close.

“Me too,” Jin-Woo murmured, sinking into the shadows’ embrace.  Tendrils of clinging darkness encircled his body, holding him tightly.  Why had the statues fought this?  It felt so good.  It felt like coming home.

“Should we search together?” the stranger asked.

“Yes,” Jin-Woo agreed, just before the shadows that were swallowing him reached his lips.  He let go, then, and became…more.