Bee 🐝

They make her sad though. She can't ignore what they are, no matter how hard she tries, because the guilt eats her alive; these are people that heard her song and sang along, that saw who she was and what she could do, and yet still didn't laugh - and she betrayed them. Fed them to Gwi-Ma like cattle.

The thought makes the voices start in her head, quieter than normal but still clamouring to be heard. They whisper all the terrible things she's done over the top of one another like they're trying to turn her mad. She still can't escape them or turn them off; she isn't strong enough yet, doesn't understand what she now holds in her chest. Even if she did, would she choose to put an end to the suffering? Or is this just a way to pay her due?

Either way, the voices call. Gwi-Ma calls, because she knows by now how to recognise his voice beneath the layers of her own, and she must answer.

With a slump, she falls through the world and lands on her knees at his feet.

She stands quickly, hanbok swishing around her shins. That is the game; to bow, but never too deeply; to mock but never offend. Appear long enough to amuse him and then disappear to some void beyond his attention and hope he forgets you exist.

She'd wanted him to forget this time, was hoping he'd never call - but of course, he always knows what you least want, and he has never known the kindness of letting it go. 

The demon king has feasted well since the last time she saw him; his flames tower to the height they had once reached when he held dominion over the earth, the heat of them crackling in the air. She has to shield her eyes when first she looks up into that mouth, so full of the light of souls that it burns white-hot with their power.

"I've been looking for you," Gwi-Ma says, flames reaching out to lash at the toe of her boots. "I thought you would be eager to collect your prize. Unless you're still having doubts - Jinu."

—

Rumi wakes with a gasp, sand spraying across the rocks as she bolts upright.

The cave. She is in the cave still, not standing before Gwi-Ma's throne. She is safe.

Jinu is not.

His absence rings in the air like a bell. She struggles to her feet, kicking away the folds of a black hanbok that has been thrown over her, and steps outside - but there is nothing, not anywhere she can see along the ridgeline. There are places you can't see, she has to remind herself before she can panic - but she already knows in her heart where he is. She can feel it tugging her towards him. 

Towards Gwi-Ma, a light in the distance. She has the distinct feeling that this is exactly the place Jinu doesn't want her to go, but...

But she can't be here alone, waiting. Already, the silence rings too loud, the world too big and empty. Her arms are exposed to the air and to any eyes that might be watching, and the single patch of light that falls inside the cav reminds her of a dark stage - of lights going out and the gold fading from view and the first notes of Takedown starting to play under a single spotlight.

And god damn it, she has to save him, even if she hates him. Her heart won't sit here while he faces Gwi-Ma, wondering if he will come back. Her soul can't bear the burden of shame if he doesn't.

She darts back into the cave, stomach churning, to collect the hanbok, pulling it tight around her shoulders like a shroud. It feels better that way, to have the old patterns covered up, it gives her the strength to linger long enough to find his gat sitting on a rock, almost invisible in the dark. She shoves it on her head as she exits, reaching back and tucking the length of her braid down into the hanbok. 

Gwi-Ma's light greets her, flaring and diminishing in uneven patterns. She wonders what it means, that the souls have stopped streaking across the sky, that the light is no longer consistent. Will she know if he destroys Jinu? It feels like she will, down in the pit of her stomach, but she's thought that before about Zoey and Mira too, fancied that they could all be connected through the Honmoon, and yet she'd felt nothing of them when she was surrounded by demons on that stage. And they'd felt nothing of her.

She reaches for her sword rather than the tatters of that tenuous connection, something that she knows is tethered to her soul in a way that can't come undone. It leaps into her hand with an anticipation that surprises her, the power of it jolting through her body so suddenly that it knocks her back a step. Strange. She stares at it, scrutinising the blade; swings it experimentally, the sharp movement reawakening the ache of every part of her body. Nothing seems out of place, not the weight or balance or the rune patterns inscribed upon it. It is just...different in her hand, humming a new tune that her heart isn't used to.

She is a different person now, she supposes, letting it vanish back into the universe. It's enough a part of her to know that - at least it is still here, changing with ehr. At least she can keep hold of one part of her heritage. 

Time to go. She's lingering too long, even though the thought of Jinu there alone fills her with fear. The thought of facing Gwi-Ma scares her almost as much, beaten out only by her fear of being left alone in this strange and hostile land to become a demon-

Purple smoke envelops her like a cloud, and she steps out on the edge of a crowd of monsters. It is work to still her hand from reaching for the sword again as the close ones turn to look at her - instinct hitches her breath in her throat and grounds her feet to defend herself. She forces a breath out again, loosens her shoulders and looks past them until they turn back to the show they were watching, accepting her as one of many black gat in the crowd.

Jeoseung Saja. She'd figured it out, of course, between her knowledge of the hunter's history and the myths of hell that haunted the world. Messengers of the underworld, couriers of souls - and Jinu said he only delivered the souls, crossed between worlds without belonging completely to the hunger of one or another. 

There are dozens of them here, recogniseable between the ranks of demons by the broad brims and clinking beads of their gat. Their faces still echo their humanity, as same as anyone she would pass on the street in the world above except for the patterns that threaten to consume them. She looks for Jinu's face when first she sees one, the only face she associates with the black hanbok, and then remembers with a start why she is here. Where he is. What he might have risked, in that moment that he spirited her away to the underworld. 

At Gwi-Ma's feet, raised above their heads on a plateau of stone, stands Jinu.

His hands hang at his sides and his shoulders are slouched, the very picture of casual confidence. Fake confidence, she sees almost immediately, because she knows exactly what it looks like. She's seen it in a hundred idols before; the experienced ones, with aching bodies and a sixth sense for the angle of a camera. They learn as they grow, how to angle their bodies just right, how to pose in real time and hold the illusion for hours on end. Even Zoey could do it, her face held in the perfect still of delight even when she was sick to death with the flu.

There's a tension held in Jinu's spine that she can see even from here, a certain quality to the picture he paints to the crowd that makes it so perfect it's unbelievable. It shoots cold fear into her veins. She has never seen Jinu scared before.

"You really don't know where she is?" Gwi-Ma asks, his voice rolling over the empty plain.

"No," Jinu answers, barely audible from where she stands. Her feel propel her closer, ghosting between demons and saja. "I thought she came with the others."

"She doesn't answer when I call," Gwi-Ma says. "You know this, Jinu."

"I forgot."

"That seems unlikely."

Fear catches in her throat as the flames rise higher into the air and the crowd around her gasps and cringes, turning their faces into their hands rather than watch Jinu be consumed. She remembers the heat of it from the dream; feels the edge of it as it washes over the place where she stands, hot, dry air and then the pinprick of cold as it disperses. She doesn't look away, not for a moment, but he does not consume Jinu. Not yet.

"You seemed unhappy, the last time I spoke to you," says Gwi-Ma, his voice softening. "Are you unhappy, Jinu?"

"Last time we spoke, you thought I would betray you," Jinu answers smoothly. "Now, you seem to have forgotten the terms of our deal. Wouldn't you be unhappy too?"

"I would. And you would be dead. Best to remember that, before you lie to me again."

A pause. Jinu lets it run on just long enough for her blood to run cold. "The deal was to defeat the hunters. Not to bring them to you."

"If there is still one out there, then you have not defeated them."

"I have broken her though." Jinu's voice rises with the words, not a shadow of doubt written into its undertones. "She has no voice with the patterns, and no friends that trust her. No Honmoon. If she's not dead yet, then she lives with more shame than any demon. She's not any threat to you."

Rumi stills. 

They are talking about her.

"She's a threat as long as she's alive," Gwi-Ma says over the thunder of her heart in her ears, the ringing echos of Jinu's cruel voice; broken, silent, shamed. "How do you think the Honmoon grows stronger and stronger over several of their lifetimes? More with the voice will be born, and as long as she is there to bring them together, the hunters can be born again. Do none of you know how any of this works?"

All around Rumi, demons twitch and look downward and shuffle their feet, cowering in fear. She could swear she hears one burst out in muffled sobs, not so far away, but her attention is only for the king and the boy, and the whirlwind of thoughts that try to coalesce inside her mind. 

Bring them together. Gwi-Ma knows her destiny better than she does - believes she will achieve more than Celine ever could. She hadn't thought about it since they started to see the bands of gold flickering through the Honmoon, since the arenas began to sell out and the money blinded even Zoey to any obstacle that could stand in their way; but of course, that money was never for her. Neither was her inheritance, the far-reaching platform the Sunlight Sisters had built thirty-odd years ago. It all lay in wait for the next group of hunters when she inevitably failed at turning the Honmoon gold, the little girls that Zoey and Mira would one day scout from obscurity, because of course, if the Honmoon never turned gold then she would be-

"She couldn't even bring her own group together," Jinu scoffs, perfectly cold even when standing in the heart of a bonfire. "She won't succeed at raising the next."

"If only you were as old as me," Gwi-Ma sighs on a breath of hot air, "you would know not to underestimate them. If one is alive, she will found more, until the Honmoon traps us again."

"Not this one," Jinu insists. "All the hunters have ever done is bury her in shame and abandon her. She won't rebuild what she doesn't love."

Rumi feels sick. She understands now, that she shouldn't be here, that leaving her to huddle alone on a mountain was a mercy he had afforded her to keep her from hearing this; truths she could not handle, a reality she refused to face. She'd really thought she could save him? Again? There wasn't even enough strength in her to save herself. The only thing she knows how to do is run away.

At the thought, her feet stumble backwards, barely carrying her weight with them. Running. Yes. She wants to go back to the mountain, to the tiger and the bird and the silence that she'd thought would drive her mad. She wants to go home and pretend that nothing has changed. She wants to go to Celine, to ask her to reconsider.

She turns her back and walks away, winding her way through the crowd again. In every rank she passes, she can feel their gazes turn towards her in curiousity, their scrutiny burning at her skin. Run, everything in her says; but when she reaches for the smoke that carried her here, she can't find it, and when her feet get faster, she crashes into a demon, knocking it to the ground as she stumbles past.

"You," Gwi-Ma's voice says, right in her ear, and she flinches, freezing where she stands. "Where are you going?"

When she turns around, she is standing at the foot of his throne, staring up at the steep staircase cut into the stone.

"Don't be shy," Gwi-Ma says, amusement in his voice "Come here and let me look at you, little hunter."

Rumi hesitates. Looks for an escape, as if the demons are just going to open their ranks and let her pass; as if Gwi-Ma would let her get any further than would amuse him. There is no way out. The demons ring around her, jostling the ones at the front together to create a wall. They cower away from her as she turns to look at them all, hands coming up to cover their faces; but their fear of Gwi-Ma is greater than their fear of her. She knows without asking that they will tear her to pieces if she gets too close, just the way she has torn them apart her entire life.

One step at a time, she climbs to the plateau. No sound rings as she walks, not from the crowd or from Gwi-Ma. Not from Jinu. Her footsteps echo an unsteady rhythm, the note of each another beat in the song of her damning. 

He won't look at her when she crests the rise, the boy that tried to save her. She can't see what echoes on his face, what twists in his mouth he tries to hide. She has the urge to tell him that he was right - that she had hated him for no reason, when every misfortune that has ever befallen her is her own fault - but Gwi-Ma stares her down and she is not supposed to know him, and she was never destined to die with all her affairs in order anyway. He is just another in a long list of people she has never told the truth to.

She spares him only a glance. He's very careful not to return the favour, not even out of the corner of his eye. She looks around instead, trying to pick a point in the mass of flames that she can look at.

"Take off that hat," it says, the mouth barely moving even though the words rattle in her chest on their way through her. With mechanical fingers, she does, tossing the poor disguise off to the side. "Ah. It is you. Come to me at last."

"I'm not here for you," she spits, and squints against the light of souls in his mouth when he laughs.

"What are you here for then?" he asks. "For him?"

She pretends not to see Jinu wince in the corner of her eye. "Just to see," she claims. "Sightseeing, you know. Tickets to Hell are hard to get."

"Hm." Gwi-Ma is thoughtful. Jinu winces again. "And what do you see?"

Rumi shrugs. "A lot of rocks, and a big, ugly ball of flame."

A collective gasp rocks the crowd down below; she glances back to find them standing stock-still, mouths hanging open. It would be kind of comical if it weren't a crowd of soul-sucking demons and their king who wants her dead. For several seconds, nothing moves, and then-

Gwi-Ma laughs, flame shooting up high enough to touch the Honmoon, if the Honmoon still existed. 

"Like you are so beautiful," he replies, and she wonders if he knows how easily he crushes her, like a flower held in the palm of his hand. "You are brave though. I like that in a servant."

"I'm not your servant," she says. It comes out weaker than before, all her bravado wasted on nothing. 

"You bear my mark," Gwi-Ma responds. "You stand in my court. Soon, you'll beg me for you life and your voice. But you tell me, daughter, why I should bow before you."

Daughter? The word rushes through her like an electric shock, entirely foreign to her orphaned ears - and how she has dreamt so many times in the dark of hearing that one word, but not like this. The moment it leaves his mouth, borne upon the power of burning souls the dream dies inside her chest, its body churning like poison in her gut.

"W-what?" she stutters, her voice lost in the rush of thoughts that constrict her hest. She feels sick to the stomach and weak at the knees, the fragile pieces of her world that she's been scrambling to pick up shattering once again. "You can't be-"

"Your father?" Gwi-Ma guesses. She could swear the mouth smiles at her, capricious and cruel. "Not in the way humans think of things, no. But your soul - the is as much mine as any of these idiots that stand around and do nothing all day. Look."

She doesn't want to look, doesn't want any part of this at all, but she does; as all around her, smoke bursts from his mouth and billows across the ground. Figures rise from within the smog, black and formless and yet taking shape as they unfold. They are as hideous as any demons she has seen, born with fangs and claws and hissing tongues that spit at her as they emerge. Her fingers twitch again, feeling for the hilt of her sword in the air. 

"You are not my father," she says, more of a mantra to herself than a truth to him.

"In every way that matters, I am," Gwi-Ma tells her. "The Saja your mother loved so much...no. I won't say."

"Tell me," she demands through gritted teeth.

The new-born demons around her snarl. "How badly do you want to know?" Gwi-Ma asks, the air crackling as the heat rises. 

"How much do you know?" she throws back, ignoring the sweat beading on her brow, the look that Jinu gives her from under his lashes. 

"Hmph," Gwi-Ma huffs, amused. "I knew your soul before your mother imagined you in her arms. I know everything."

"Tell me."

There is a pause where the fire just crackles, unseen eyes examining her up and down, and then, "Negotiations usually start on your knees."

"This isn't a negotiation," she says, her sword tickling the inside of her palm.

"Begging, then."

"I'm not begging."

"So I ask again," the demon king says, as calm as ever, "what gives you the power to demand things of me?"

Rage engulfs her in one breath; dark, old rage from the second in which she was born, coiling inside her like a snake. It strikes hard and fast, fangs reaching for the demons that surrounded her. The sword has no choice but to follow its path, her feet grounding and then dancing as she wreaks her arc of death. The fire does not matter to her, the heat or the exhaustion, the sharp pain that ripples through her in protest. To her touch, they all die, born just to disperse back into the smoke that clouds the sky.

When she is done, she faces the king, her chest heaving and hair in her eyes. 

"Well, that was dramatic," Gwi-Ma says, smoke leaking between his flickering teeth. 

More demons crawl from the cloud. Her blade goes to the first one's throat, pressing to the skin until its eyes bulge in alarm. "Tell me, she says again. Slashes through its throat when he refuses to speak. 

Gwi-Ma laughs. 

She cuts them down again, and then a third time, ripping them apart even as her body screams for release. She's going to pass out again, stars dance in her eyes, her form turning sloppy. Every beat of her heart is in agony, tearing at her chest as it strains to keep up. 

She won't stop. Even when they turn to formless beasts that writhe over the top of each other in waves. Even when some corner of her remembers Jinu's voice saying, if hatred could be Gwi-Ma, I would have done it a long time ago.

"ENOUGH."

From within the swarm, some great bludgeon slams her to the ground. There is no way to see it coming, no room to avoid it. There is only the crackle of her ribs and the crunch as her shoulder breaks. Her sword clatters as it skips across the ground and out of reach. There's a harsh keening in the air as she falls. She doesn't realise it is coming from her until her knees split open on the rocks.

There, on one hand, she bows. Right where he said she belonged.

"Savage thing," Gwi-Ma says when she has taken enough breaths to understand that she should not get back up. "Just like your mother."

She can't be goaded this time, not through the pain and the humiliation that ties her to the ground. He signs when he senses it, the heat in the air around her easing. It doesn't make it any easier to breathe.

"It seems such a shame to kill you now," he says between each rasping effort she makes. "That was so...entertaining."

I hate you, she says, but all that comes out of her mouth is a sound like sandpaper in her throat, her tongue too slow to make the sounds. The words ring hollow anyway. She's said them to Jinu too many times for them to have any real meaning anymore. Just kill me, she replaces it with, inside her head, but it doesn't feel any more powerful. Just...sad.

"I think you owe me a hundred souls for those demons," he continues, her input unneeded. "Or perhaps two hundred is a fair deal." She can't speak, only spit blood onto the rocks at the thought of harvesting souls. "How many do you think the memory of your father is worth?" 

In the absence of her voice, others shout from down below, a raucous chorus of figures that get more and more obscene the longer Gwi-Ma tolerates them. She cringes at a thousand; at two, ten, several hundred thousand. A million. More souls than people she has ever looked in the eye, more than the entire population of Seoul. More than she could ever collect before her mind broke under the weight of everything she has become.

"Tell me, Jinu," Gwi-Ma says over the noise. "How many souls once powered the Honmoon?"

Jinu steps are whisper-soft, only his feet visible as he comes to stand by her side. "Seventy two million," comes the answer. It rings familiar, even as it takes her breath away; seventy two. The last estimate Bobby had given her of their fanbase, a number to call the staggering extent of her reach across the globe.

"And how many are left now?" Gwi-Ma asks.

It takes Jinu a moment to answer. "I don't know," he says eventually, like an admittance of guilt. "Maybe thousands. Maybe five. Maybe none."

"You underestimate, I think," Gwi-Ma growls. 

"I won't collect souls," Rumi rasps with everything she has. "Kill me."

"Their fans started turning on them before that last day," Jinu says, as if she hadn't spoken. "By the time the Honmoon broke, there were none left."

"Ten thousand then, I think," Gwi-Ma says. "Ten thousand, for the ones she wasted and for the insolence. And then we will see if I am still hungry."

"I won't," Rumi says again, before Jinu can sell away her life in his fear. "I'll die first."

Heat washes in again, like the opening of an oven. Her lungs constrict around the boiling air, her lips cracking. Jumping into a bonfire would offer more relief. 

"Then they will take your place!" he thunders, and her head turns of its own volition, her eyes helpless to see anything but Mira and Zoey stepping out from between the broken columns. 

She wants to scream. She wants to jump up and throttle the king, wants to tell him she knows it's a trick and she won't fall for it again, and they hate her anyway so why would she care, and - and nothing will come out of her mouth. None of her limbs will move.

Zoey and Mira look so real. 

"I don't like the taste of hunters," Gwi-Ma says. "Obscene creatures, ripping out the tastiest parts of your souls and carving them into weapons. You do make lovely toys though."

Not real. She squeezes her eyes shut, wrests her head from his control and hangs it low. Not real.

"Nothing," Gwi-Ma huffs. "Take her away from me, Jinu. She has until I grow bored to deliver her first soul."

She can hear the whisper of Jinu's hanbok as he bows. His hand wraps around her arm as he speaks, murmuring assent to the kind he bends the knee to. He doesn't force her broken body to stand like he had the day before, but summons the smoke to spin them away just like that, his body curling protectively over her as it carries them off to places unknown. 

She hopes that wherever that is, they never find it.

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