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It's wisteria trees in the spring, it's sweet plums in the summer. It's gardens full of fuschias, meadows full of lilacs, it's a natural rarity that pulls people even further in. Vivid and eye-caching is the purple of Rumi's hair, trailing down the length of her back in an immaculately decorated braid, drawing eyes to her like a bird of paradise in a zoo enclosure. Beautiful is the purple that envelops her, her signature, her brand.

But not all that is beautiful is good. Purple is wickedness , it's venom seeped in veins, poison that kills. And purple are the thorny vines snaking across her whole body, melded into her skin. Not the beauty that would attract crowds, but instead the kind that would threaten them.

Her patterns are snakes and she is the modern day Medusa. Perhaps it wasn't her that lied with a powerful man (she thinks of Mi-Yeong and her nameless father), maybe she didn't personally invoke the wrath of a scorned goddess, but it was her who bore the curse regardless. Marked as such that no one could look at her without turning to stone (After the Idol Awards, backstage. They were frozen, unmoving), without wanting her dead (Mira raised her weapon first, Zoey soon followed).

And those who knew, knew not to look at her at all (Celine, who couldn't look, who couldn't touch,who couldn't love her).

Sometimes she dreams of carving them off with a paring knife, stitching the normal parts back together, painting over the scars, pretending they next existed - the pain endured would be easier to live with then the pain of existing this way - a grotesque wolf in the body of a beloved herder's sheep. A demon posing as the people's princess.

She looks at herself in the mirror again, as she has countless times.