Chapter 0
–926–
Year of the Fire Dog
The Day of Balhae's Fall
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Ash and fire descend from the sky.
Heaven's drums sound the upper deep.
The soot and acrid powder sting my vision, blurred and in wane.
The Royal Palace is destroyed, ruins aflame and wreathed in death.
This palace used to be home to 4,000 people. And the Royal City beyond, 200,000.
My King and Queen lie sprawled upon the broken floor, their thrones cleaved in half a stone's throw afar. The young crown prince, only seven, lie under the weight of rubble, far across the now roofless-hall. He still breathes, but only just.
I cough and clutch my chest, blood dripping from my mouth. My white Musha robes are tattered with marks of beastly claws, dyed red from the wounds upon my flesh. The embroidery upon my garb as a warrior-priestess shines gold no more, in its place, blood riddled with soot. My ribs are broken, my shoulder out of place; I am a sorry sight. Yet I try to crawl towards the little crown-prince when a shadow falls upon me.
It was an inauspicious year, the diviners said, for it was the year of the Fire Dog: the Dog that devoured the Sun in the beliefs of old. And true to their proclamation, there was no Sun that rose this morning of today: only an infernal darkness greeted our sights, the black clouds above packed so thick not even an eagle with its discerning eyes could dare escape. Fuligin snow began to fall, weightier than real snow, crushing the tiled roofs of houses, dwellings, palaces, setting the pots and home-fires alight, transforming the city into a sea of fire that reflected as an eerie, blood-red below the bases of the clouds.
The stench of rotten eggs and meteors of flame ambushed the capital from afar, rising out of our great mountain of worship, Taebaek. An endless plume of char and death rose as far as the eye could fathom from the peak of this fire-mountain, arcing the arrows of the lightning-god even into the palaces of stars.
And this malevolent Fire-Dog that had doth swallowed the Sun, unleashed the holy mountain's ire, now stood before me in the humanoid form of our Kingdom's once-trusted advisor. Jinri was his name I once knew.
But his real name was Yaldabaoth, a demon of six-thousand years which only I and my previous incarnations knew.
"What? You're still alive?" Yaldabaoth muses, hands on his knees, pushing his neck and eyes into mine. His pupils are colored differently: his left is deep-red, his right the color of amber. He's so close that my nose pricks with the stench of his diseased being.
From his wrists hang numerous inky claws with rusts of blood, each the length of a saw. He retracts them one by one into his arm, lowering his stance as if addressing a child.
"Aww, don't be so scared, pretty Geumran, our Lady Musha," he croons, motioning his fingers to cup my chin in his grasp. "Though I've gotta say, you certainly look soiled right now. No one in their right mind could call you beautiful."
I grip his wrist and arm to rip their revolting touch away, but it feels like trying to punch away a mountain with a feather. All my senses are honed to a sharp end, but if he decides to kill me now, I have no way to riposte. My mirror – my mirror scythe – lies at the entrance to this hall, nearly 100 ja away, the length of a 10-second run for an ordinary person, and me in my grievous injuries.
I swallow painfully.
Yaldabaoth continues, his lips twisting into a sick smile. "How does it feel to be the only survivor, Lady Musha? Aww, are those tears?" He says, wiping away a drop of tear from my stinging eyes with his free hand.
"Oh my, look!" he enunciates, turning my chin in his grasp towards the vision of my dead King and Queen, cleaved in two at their waists, staring out into the blood-black sky in lamentation. "Who is that? Oh, it's King Inseon! And consort Jin!"
"And would you look there! It's Baram, your fellow Musha-in-tow! So sad he couldn't make it. He was a great fighter, much braver than you," he says, forcing my head against my will. My vision lands upon the figure of Baram, whom I've loved but could never confess out of fear I would be led astray from my duties.
"And last but not least," Yaldabaoth motions, nearly breaking my neck against my resistance, "the little crown prince under the rubble. Aw, look at him! His hands and feet are so tiny! Don't you think it makes for a wonderful decoration? The Kingdom of Balhae, so prosperous and beautiful, now made an artwork in my own image!"
Tears flood from my eyes. Fury and anguish uncoil from my heart.
"You.... bastard..." I mutter.
"Hmm, what's that?"
"You. Guemul."
I am slapped across my face so hard that for a moment, all is black. I tumble several ja from where I had sat, tumbling into a pile of broken stone and torn fabric.
Yaldabaoth advances on me, grinning, taking one step at a time.
He arrives just before me. And squats.
"Lady Musha, if you've got the strength to swear, why didn't you use that strength to save the people you loved, hmm?" He poses, slowly cocking his head, peering at me.
I can find no answer.
"Look at you, so disgraceful. So ripe. So delicious with dejection and despair! I'll be happy for you to become a part of me when I eat you piece by piece. You know what," he pauses, putting a finger on his chin, looking beyond the broken roof but flicking his eyes towards mine, "I will do you the favor of drying your heart into jerky. I will pick on it piecemeal for a thousand years – the greatest favor to anyone I've ever endowed!" he exclaims, stifling a coming cackle. His wavy hair of blood-black flutter about his pale, sickly green skin, his skeletal features racking with laughter under royal maroon robes.
"What do you think?" He asks.
"........."
Yaldabaoth grips my hair by the clump and yanks me forward. "When I say I want an answer, I mean it," he says, threatening. "Look at you. Trying to keep your dignity when you deserve none! Dignity needs power. Dignity needs force. Power and Force. You think. You. Have. Any. Of. Those?" He mutters murderously, yanking me back and forth with my tousled black hair in his iron grip.
"If you're a Musha, you better act like one. You just failed to save your King and Queen and your little crown prince, and your fellow lover, and this palace, and the entire city! You're so weak! You don't even compare to Jinshi Huang, your past incarnation! Do you know how much of a fight he gave me 1,100 years ago?"
He continues yanking me back and forth. Dizziness descends upon my vision. My head swims. Yet I cannot do anything. Not yet.
"If you're a Musha, you should give up every part of your body to fight me. That is the life you swore. That is why you exist," he continues, gazing into my eyes just a hair's width away, "if you wanted the life of a girl that everyone around you had, then all you had to do was to keep quiet and keep growing out this beautiful hair of yours!" He says, ripping clean a fistful of my long, black hair from my scalp.
I stifle my scream.
Blood issues from my head and drips down my eyes as he seizes me by the throat.
"Hey," Yaldabaoth spits, raising himself up with me choking in his grip. "Little Musha, still not gonna do anything?" he shakes. "You waste of air? You utter failure? Unbecoming. Unclean. Ugly. Useless sack of meat!"
My eyes are bloodshot, my head purple against his steely grip.
"You coward, cretin! This is what stands before me? This is the invoker of the four gods? The guardian of Balhae?"
He continues, raising me higher. "Show me what you're gonna do. Show me. Show me what you're gonna do."
I gasp for air, kicking him desperately. He does not budge.
"Come on, try it." He reiterates. "With your feeble, shaky, slender and soiled human body, let alone the body of a woman! Let's see you try to cut off my head. Come on, try it. I've been waiting for a thousand years. Come on, come on, COME ON!"
He roars, throwing me across the hall into a debris of rubble. I roll out just in time for the falling flaming pillars to miss me. I stagger to my feet, and run towards the entrance of the hall.
Yaldabaoth cocks his head and closes the gap in an instant, pummeling me with a hideous kick to my back that sends me smashing into the remains of a wall right next to the entrance. I make desperate attempts to pull the air that's been robbed from my breath, but I cannot.
I collapse and make a backwards crawl. Yaldabaoth advances on me through the licking flames and falling debris, taking his time, his chest heaving with laughter. All his figure is shadowed like a form of an inevitable god. I desperately hurl pieces of debris, fabric, broken glass, the remains of a perfume-pot, as I bottom-crawl with Yaldabaoth in my sight.
He kicks me in the groin. I'm lifted up and ragdolled back.
A piercing pain shoots up my insides. I cough blood and wretch out my empty stomach onto the bamboo-matted floor.
He squats down and smiles. "As sorry of a sight you are," he says, "I like anything that struggles to live. The throes of a living being as it claws its way out the water before it drowns. The twitching of a mouse in the maws of a snake. So beautiful, so sublime. I am taking a liking to how you cling to your miserable, anemic life, just like me."
I raise my head towards the blood-dark clouded skies above. Yaldabaoth chuckles.
"Your powerless self gives you despair, doesn't it? The bitterness of existence. The unfairness of it. Why humans are born with no claws nor brute muscle nor sharp teeth, when the creator has given it to every other creature in existence?"
"I've... waited for you... to say that," I stutter, looking into the sky, gripping the handle of my scythe buried underneath the rubble. Just behind me.
"What's that?"
"Because... what we don't have... hah... we make up for it with something else."
"And what can that be?"
"This," I proclaim, pulling the lustrous mirror-blade of my scythe out of the rubble, and in the fraction of a second painting it with drops of my blood thrown from my hand. Yaldabaoth's eyes squeeze open, and attempts to drive his claws into my chest, but he is too late.
"R E W I N D," I command, melding my mind with the mirror's memory of the moments prior to its burial in the rubble.
In an instant, the world re-arranges, re-atomizes around my figure. The pillars that have collapsed rise again; the flames that have licked all ground ascend to the roof. The rubble from when I was smashed into the walls join back to make the structures whole; Yaldabaoth himself is rewound, clocked-back, and moved to a position where he stood before, and before, and even before that, coming in right through the entrance with a vicious kick towards where I once stood; and as the spell almost finishes rewinding the world back to precisely 556 seconds ago, I am positioned just at the heel of Yaldabaoth's coming strike, the last time holding up my scythe in desperate defense.
But I know what to do now.
The world unfreezes.
Swing the scythe from below and to the right. Aim for the roof. My instinct calls.
And as Yaldabaoth's demonic roar makes itself known, and his foot is just an arm's length away, I duck out from under him and swing my scythe-blade up as hard as I can.
SLICE.
Black blood spurts onto my robes as I lob his left arm and sleeve clean off, leaving a gaping stump in its wake. Without sparing a second, I utter the command I know so well.
Sashin Mirror Art:
RAVAGING GALE!
I swing my scythe into a spiral and cleave the winds towards Yaldabaoth. The air around me, moistened with blood, meets the torso of the demon in a fist of gargantuan proportions and rockets him past the hall, careening him into a wall behind the broken throne in an explosion of shrapnel.
I rush to the figure of the little crown-prince, buried under the rubble.
Sashin Mirror Art:
A Thousand Threads.
Hundreds of soft tendrils of air gather and shift the fallen timber, stone, and fabrics away. I pry the crown-prince's body free and bolt out the entrance, letting the wind carry my robes to slow my descent with the unconscious young prince in my arms. I jump past the thick trees of the palace garden, down the stone battlements, and down the flaming ruins of other palatial quarters when I see the figure of our scribe: Insa, with a panicked horse he is barely keeping under control.
I land next to him softly, and shove the little crown-prince into his arms.
"Lady Geumran!"
"Ride until the west gate. Take the ancient road out southwest of Mt. Taebaek, out of the ashes' reach."
"What about you, my La – "
Slice.
Without warning, the scribe's head is removed from his neck and shot across into the flaming city below. All that remains is his stump. The cut is so clean that not even a droplet of blood spurts from his headless neck as I glance upwards, my bloodied hand already upon the edge of the mirror-scythe.
"The Lady Musha will be occupied with me," slithers Yaldabaoth, descending from the sky in a cloud of fuligin smoke and spiraling blood the shapes of whips. The unconscious young prince slips from the scribe's arms.
"R E W I N D!"
And like last time, the world divides, breaks, and rearranges into its memory of just a moment ago; right to where I sighted the lone figure of the scribe arraying his horse.
This time, I skip the pleasantries and grab him by his robes and hurl him atop its back, swing myself on with the crown-prince in my arms, and urge into a full gallop, throwing up a gale of fiery smoke in our wake.
"Take the prince to the young kingdom of Goryeo, ruled by the kin of our forefathers. Take the Southeast road where the fire doesn't reach," I mutter to the scribe, urging the horse on as fast as I can. We make past the gates of the palace grounds and into the flaming city proper.
It's coming. I feel the back of my neck tingle as Yaldabaoth's infuriated gaze from afar fixes upon our backs.
"Thank you, Insa, for everything. I must fulfill my duty. Sashin Mirror Art – "
The blood-lash from Yaldabaoth arrives with the singing air as its herald.
AUTUMN FROST.
I kick the horse away as I jump away from the saddle, somersaulting backwards. I catch the extending blood whip of Yaldabaoth with my scythe, freeze it upon my blade, and pull it hard. The demon is yanked into the fiery rubble of the city proper.
Before I can react, three blades of formless blood slice past and miss my neck, lobbing off locks of my long black hair. It returns past like a boomerang-weapon, and I cleave it with my scythe; they are heavy, forceful, resistant, like tough sinews of a bow. Cutting them feels like cutting linen with a fingernail; I am blown and dragged back several ja, whereupon the blood-blades disintegrate with a screech and a bang.
Yaldabaoth emerges out of the pile of rubble, foot by foot, cracking his neck. He fixes his crimson-and-amber eyes upon me, the shadows falling upon him from the shroud of the fire below and around him.
"Not bad. Not bad, Lady Musha," he gaggles, dragging his voice like nails to stone, extending his claws into the air. They are silver, lustrous. Fire and blood reflect upon their broad blades.
"Not bad at all. You managed to get the crown prince away, and parried my whip to success! Though a worthless act, you do know how to fight, after all! You're not utterly weak!"
"Worthless?" I glower with my right eye; the other under the straight-cut bangs that drape my forehead.
"You have faith in a bumbling child? Tsk, adoration should not blind you from the reality that you face."
I grip the handle of my scythe hard as he continues.
"How's he going to stop me now that I've decapitated your worthless dynasty? How's he going to stop me when I paint the other cities of Balhae with the blood of your people? When I will slaughter every last man, woman, and children until their wails of agony and lamentation create the purest symphony of suffering? When I will descend upon them as the harbinger of death?"
"I will kill you before you lay your hands upon them."
"I will most enjoy you to try," says Yaldabaoth.
He vanishes in an instant. And in the fraction of a blink, before my eye registers, the landscape around me seems to fracture in two; a flurry of wind, a gale like that of a typhoon, and I feel something has passed through my body.
Yaldabaoth's footsteps sound behind me as my body is cleaved in two at the waist. Blood spurts from my breath.
But I grasp my scythe and drive the flesh of my hand upon its mirror-edge.
"R E W I N D."
In an instant, the world dials back. I see the blurry motion of Yaldabaoth as his slash rewinds, his claws entering my back, and exiting out front. And as it does, my flesh is knit; my arteries rejoin, my spine fuses back, and my entrails retreat back inside my skin. My robes are starched clean of blood as my body becomes whole again, and Yaldabaoth returns to his spot atop the rubble-pile. Flames and gale issue back from where they blew to still air.
The rules of rewind were simple. I could rewind back to a maximum length not exceeding 600 seconds, or 10 minutes for short. Despite its power, there was a limited number of times I could issue a rewind, for the ability was intrinsically tied to my mirror-scythe, the "Dongmyeong Sashin" – The Four Gods of the Dawning East. Every passing year that the mirror was under my care granted me one single use of this ability to rewind time. I had received my mirror from my master at 15 years of age; at 26, I had carefully built up 11 such rewinds.
But I was running out of them at an alarming pace, and for too frivolous a use compared to the task ahead of me of vanquishing this ancient demon. Already once I've used rewind for training; another several years back to save a village. This left me with 9 uses at the start of the battle, reduced by one when I've used it to escape Yaldabaoth in the ruins of the throne, and reduced by another to safely send the crown-prince and the scribe towards escape.
And now, I've expended another, leaving me with just 6 uses.
The world returns to rhythm.
I duck as Yaldabaoth charges at me with a force unseen; but this time, I hold my scythe out on the side, uttering my command in a mora of a second.
Sashin Mirror Art:
A COMING DAWN!
My scythe mirror-blade ignites with a sunlike-red as Yaldabaoth misjudges my position, and in his speed to cut me in two, is cut himself instead. His left forearm and leg below the thigh slice off cleanly, coming to rest with a hideous squelch.
"Huh?" Yaldabaoth muses, puzzled, skidding to a halt with just a single foot. He scratches his head, a devious grin materializing upon his lips, stretching from ear to ear with serrated teeth in full view. Black blood drips from the stump of his arm and his thigh.
"Oh, I see, I see..." he says, scratching his head with his claws.
Fresh flesh wriggles and grows back in an explosive jumble as his arm and leg is made whole again in a second.
"I see, Lady Musha. You have a trick up your sleeve. A trick that allows you to foresee my moves. Because as far as I know, that strike of mine is undodgeable."
"As far as you know?" I chuckle, hurling a globule of spit towards his direction. I look him in the eye, holding up my scythe. "Bold of you to admit that you're not as good as you say."
Yaldabaoth's vein bulges. "Not bad, woman, not bad at all!" He rears, stretching his arms, lunging at me with a tornado of strikes.
The air rushes on my face as his claws rend space with a bloody trail, tearing the road clean of cobblestone, ripping the timber pillars off of their roots, twisting the earth like an unfurling carpet.
But this time, I'm ready for his assault.
I grip the long handle of my scythe hard and lower my stance that was drilled into me ten-thousand times since childhood.
Sashin Mirror Art:
WINDS OF AUTUMN NIGHT!
My swirling scythe conjures up a shield of gales so thick that it can deflect an avalanche. The rubble meets my thousand-struck barrier, flattens against it like dough flattens against a table, but –
Yaldabaoth's fists cleave clean through the invisible wall. I dodge just in time before his claws rend my throat. His entire body smashes into mine; we are both thrown several hundred ja into the flaming ruins and into a building, out the other wall, through the streets, into yet another house and out its wall, where Yaldabaoth hurls a bellow and a kick that pummels me through a burning bridge atop the city-stream, whose totality of force I manage to avoid with my scythe. Even then, the gunk and ash-clogged waters of the small canal barely catch me as I ragdoll through them, nearly breaking my neck, skidding me to a halt just where the pipes emerge from under the roads.
For a second, all is black. When I come to, Yaldabaoth is right in front of me. He drives one fist into my ribs, but I manage to dodge out of its path with the skin of my teeth; the raw might of his strike imparts the surrounding air with shockwaves that blow the flames away and clap across the ruins. If the strike had met, I would've been as good as dead. I could not let him damage any part of my body essential to speech, because then I wouldn’t be able to utter to my mirror to rewind; without sparing a second, Yaldabaoth drives a whirlwind kick into my hips, which I block with the handle of my scythe. The long end of the handle fractures and breaks in half as I am yet again rocketed into a flaming quarter nearby; I'm pummeled through a wall and out onto a street and onto a next building and even through that, coming to a screeching halt with my scythe ploughing the ash-laden street.
The force of his deliveries were unlike anything I've ever known. Stronger than an avalanche; more immovable than a mountain; a strength not of the mortal world or any of its imaginations. It rightfully befitted a demon that had walked this earth for six thousand years since the dawn of civilization. They were just two kicks and a single punch, but the three alone could practically annihilate any army that existed in this world.
I tug my half-handle scythe out of the hot earth as Yaldabaoth marches upon me through the flames.
Sashin Mirror Art:
Cleaving Fros –
But Yaldabaoth's face is right in front of mine. I desperately hold down my scythe as his uppercut connects to the blade; I hear minute cracks as I am catapulted a hundred ja into the air, whereupon Yaldabaoth materializes above me and drives a downwards kick that pummels me into the earth below, leaving a crater in my wake.
I cannot feel my bones nor my blood. All that seizes my body is searing pain. My right eye has been blown out, leaving only my bloodshot left. My robes are tattered and ripped like those of an exhumed corpse. It was a miracle that I could still manage to stand.
Yaldabaoth lands like a meteor in front of me, and raises himself to full height of more than two ja.
"Come on," he remarks, cracking his knuckles simply by way of clenching them tight. "Fight. Let's duel. I want to see that trick of yours again."
Sashin Mirror Art:
BLAZING SPRING!
I holler, bringing the scythe down with its amber-hot blade upon his flesh.
But it lodges in his wrist.
I try my hardest to push the blade though, but it feels like going against a boulder.
"Hmm? What's this?" He comments, pinching my blade and fishing my scythe out of his barely-cut wrist, issuing a standing kick which I barely block with the winds.
I am rocketed through several trees and a burning garden, and come to an abrupt rest on a piece of open rock three hundred ja from where I stood. A hideous crack sounds from my back as it stops me in my ragdolled path. I cough only to feel the pain skewer my insides. Every breath is laborious.
Yaldabaoth casually advances on me through the entrance of the garden, coming to a stop a hundred ja away, his red-and-amber eyes piercing the dark and haze, resting upon me.
Shit.
Aside from the three times I had used my rewind command, the techniques I've honed for tens of thousands of times had no effect on the six-thousand year old demon. Those were techniques which I practiced so much that they were drilled into my muscles to act by instinct as naturally as I breathed. Those were the techniques which had exorcised thousands of guemuls on my own through the Kingdom of Balhae and the surrounding Georan lands, and laid waste to guemuls that devoured children and preyed upon the innocent. Those were the techniques that stood at the epitome of what mortals could learn without perishing.
But they had no effect.
It made sense. Nothing was out of logic. Yaldabaoth had brought forth the eruption from Mount Taebaek with his arts, perhaps cleaving open the fiery domain below the earth with just a single strike of his fist. With my own arts, I could seal the path of ash and fire that arose from under the earth, and I had planned to do so, until Yaldabaoth himself descended upon the city and the palace and slaughtered everyone that stood. I hoped to stop the eruption early to spare the rest of the kingdom from the fate that befell the capital, but it meant nothing if Yaldabaoth was allowed to roam free. He could easily unseal the earth again, not to mention descending upon each city to kill an untold number of innocent inhabitants. That was the fate that befell every civilization that vanished to dust in the days of yore. That was what happened to Hellas and Assyria 2,200 years ago. That was what happened five hundred years ago to the prosperous Empire of Daqin to the far west – Imperium Romanum in their native tongue, revealed to me by my incarnations.
And now, my beloved people of the Kingdom of Balhae were to suffer the same fate.
A dead boy and girl gaze upon me with empty eyes to my left, their bodies crushed by a fiery boulder that came from the heavens. Their fingers are entwined in the moment of escape.
A brother and sister, or perhaps two young doves.
I close their eyes with a brush of my hand.
Grief and sorrow descend upon my heart. The crushing weight of promising to be their guardian, yet failing them all the same. I do not know why this ancient demon haunts us, hunts us. I do not know why this ancient demon revels in our suffering. I do not know why this demon devours our promise of momentary mirth, crueler than any fate or force of nature.
But I do know one thing: I must kill him.
That for all those who live after me to live free, I must kill Yaldabaoth once and for all, right here, right now.
No matter how my bones break or my body bleeds, I will fulfill my duty.
Yaldabaoth was almost upon me. It was time.
"Four Gods of the East, hear my speech," I command.
My mirror awakes in an iridescent display of colors, knocking back the air with a strength from beyond.
"DDEUTNEUNIRA. MU-UHTSEUL JAEMULO BACHIGETNEUNGA?"
("I HEAR YOUR IMPLORATION. WHAT DO YOU OFFER AS SACRIFICE?")
"I offer up my heart and soul, and mind and body to the blessings of your strength. As I do, gift me also everything in return. Should I fail to defeat Yaldabaoth, take my life and blood as recompense, and render me to be devoured by you. Should I win, I will offer up to you the flesh of the vanquished demon."
"UHMHAGYE BATNEUNIRA."
("WE ACCEPT YOUR SOLEMNITY.")
I hold my scythe out into the air.
"Dongmyeong Sashinio, nuneul buruptuko iluhnasio!" ("Dongmyeong Sashin, awaken your eyes once more!")
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With the spell, the blazing eyes of the Four Gods awaken in the mirror-blade of my scythe, shining out in orbs of green, blue, red, and lustrous black, sizzling the atmosphere. Reflections of an emerald tiger, azure dragon, vermillion archaeopteryx, and black-shelled serpent-tortoise materialize into being upon the surface of the mirror, quaking the world under my feet and Yaldabaoth's.
The ancient demon hollers, saliva dripping from his teeth, eyes widening with astonishment. "Such resolve. Such determination! Offering up your body and life in pursuit of a transcendental ideal! YOU ARE A TRUE SUCCESSOR TO YOUR FOREBEARERS AFTER ALL!"
SASHIN MIRROR ART, I bellow.
"The Four Gods of the Shining East!" Yaldabaoth exclaims. "Versus me, the Lord of all Demiurges! This shall be a battle to resound for millennia to come!"
THE LAST OATH OF THE MUSHA.
With lightning and thunder my half-handled scythe blade explodes into opalescent color, drumming the world with a beat divine. I feel my muscles afresh, its fibers regrow, my broken bones become whole and strengthened with the might of diamond and steel, my sight restored to my lost right eye.
Warmth invigorates my heart. It pumps fire in my blood and ice in my veins; they bulge upon my hand, wrists, arms, stomach, chest, head, and face. I feel all my senses honing to feel the totality of existence in and around me from a single grain of dust to the licking of a flame a thousand ja away. The world splashes into life in my single, absolute vision.
Life-giving air rushes into my lungs and to my legs like an elixir of the heavens as I lower my stance to that of a sprint, holding out my scythe to my right, ready to harvest.
Yaldabaoth flexes his arms and clenches his fists, the blood and flames of the ruined city gathering upon him in a spiraling vortex that singes the air, forming into giant quills and shells that protrude from his body, materializing into two scimitars of lustrous blood in his hands.
It's all or nothing.
The earth cleaves and detonates under our heels as we rocket towards each other in explosive sprints, a typhoon of rubble and blood roaring in the wake of our paths.
Demiurge Art, Destructive Type:
BLOODSTORM REVERIE!
Yaldabaoth wails, his blood scimitars becoming a tornado of crimson, setting the air alight with their friction, removing the earth like a carpet in its wake, sweeping away the houses and rubble like paper.
Poongbaek (Windgod) Art:
WORLDREAVING CLAW!
Six of my fingernails rip and vanish into the devouring mirror as the form of the tiger-god Poongbaek bursts forth from the mirror-blade, crackling and sparking the air into a blazing green, materializing into the size of an ancient beast that dwarfs the trees. Carried by the motion of my wake, the tiger-god makes an earsplitting roar that shakes the foundations of the world and rends the winds with his claws the size of bodies, tearing space in its path to bleed the starlit cosmos beyond.
The grand void emptiness shreds the world into six gashes side-by-side, which careens towards Yaldabaoth's raging blades and ruptures, throwing out a shattering blast of blood and shrapnel that screeches and batters each of us several hundred ja away from each other.
Yaldabaoth leaves a crater in the atmosphere as he jumps and careens at me with a cometary force, piercing the air with his fist glowing white-hot.
Demiurge Art, Melee Type:
TITANBREAKER!
Wunsa (Cloudgod) Art:
THUNDERING TORRENT!
I dodge just out of the way for Yaldabaoth's strike to connect to the earth and divide it into chunks the size of districts, as my right ring finger slices off into the mirror and the form of the dragon-god Wunsa barrages forth from the mirror-blade, condensing and rupturing the air into a muted turquoise, the long-serpentine length of his body bristling with azure scales. Converging and diverging his form into the shape of infinities the dragon-god descends upon Yaldabaoth from above with the force of all the clouds in the world releasing rain at once, condensed to a fine point that whistles and divides the images of the world in the air before its strike; it connects to Yaldabaoth's fist and vaporizes it into a blood of black mist, and bodies the ancient demon thousands of ja away with his serpentine body spiraling in loops, with me skipping across the air with the force of my kicks towards the demon and the dragon.
Yaldabaoth breaks the Southern district of the city upon landing and smashes his hands to raise them together, as if raising the dead out of the –
Demiurge Art, Invoker Type:
WALTZ OF THE STARVED!
The sound of hundreds of thousands of skeletons ring off under the black clouds as the charred remains of the city's inhabitants are split and twisted open to compel their bones to knock upon each other; they rearrange into a dozen bone-beasts of gargantuan size, scraping the sky.
A bone spider the height of thirty ja strikes me with four of its eight legs from above, crushing the rubble into a fine mist and catching and crushing my foot, while a skeletal centipede and serpent smash me through where I stand and through five houses.
Blood rushes from my wounds, but I ignore it, channeling the force of the Four Gods into my foot to restore it entire, forming its blood vessels again; gripping the bones of the deceased with my hand so hard they crumble under my strength.
A bone-rhinoceros-beetle shovels the house under my feet and into the air, whereupon a hollow bone-vulture of colossal size now descends, ready to crush me whole with its talons –
Yeomjak (Firegod) Art:
IMMOLATION!
As I utter the command from my lips, careening through the sky and almost in the talons of the bone-vulture, I feel a skewering pain seize my insides and witness my liver disappear into the mirror-blade. The form of the archaeopteryx-god Yeomjak rockets forth from my scythe, spreading her wings to set the sky on fire. She catches the bone-vulture's feet with its monstrous beak and, crushing it, drives a plume of iridescent fire into its hollow head and torso, vaporizing it with such fury that not even ashes remain. Her mere presence on the battlefield makes known to my robes and skin as if the Sun had come to Earth.
But not even a second before I can utter the other commands, a bone-scorpion skewers me with its sting, shoving me upwards; and before I know it, I am face to face with the demon-image of Yaldabaoth with his crimson and amber eyes.
Demiurge Art, Melee Type:
THE HAND OF LELANTOS!
A single finger from his hand, fuligin and crackling with the light of a thousand stars, reaches for my heart underneath my tattered robes, intending to destroy it entire.
Woosa (Raingod) Art:
THOUSAND WEBS OF RAIN!
A long length of my hair is cut from my waist up to the shoulders, eaten by the mirror. And in an instant, black lines ascend from the earth and descend from the sky as a pattern of strings, cutting and lodging into the bones of the bone-beasts that the demon had conjured; one of them also skewers through Yaldabaoth's wrist and hand that is reaching for my heart. The black string then thickens and explodes in a mist of violet lightning and rain, expanding so fast that the surrounding air seems to turn and twist before being blown away into the sounds of thunder; it blows the demon's hand and careens him away, with me in the opposite direction, cleaving the joints and femurs of the gigantic bone beasts, peppering them into rubble and ruin to return the dead to their rightful rest. The form of the tortoise-god Woosa materializes in the middle of the battlefield next to my figure, with its companion serpent entangling his shell and pointing its snout towards Yaldabaoth.
Yaldabaoth ascends from the rubble like a meteor and prepares his arm as if to throw a spear towards me. For the first time on his face, I sight not the reverie of battle, but an infuriation.
Demiurge Art, Metaphysical Type:
SPEAR OF APOLLYON.
He hurls something, nothing visible, quite invisible, but I can feel the air bristle with its arrival. Whatever it is, it is definitely not healthy.
Woosa (Raingod) Art:
SHADOW COUNTER!
My left ear slices off and careens into my scythe blade as the tortoise-god explodes his fuligin shell outwards, its pentagonal pieces shooting out and turning invisible against the air to meet the arrival of the unseen spear from the ancient demon.
A spark of light, a sound like the world ending, but I spy with my eyes the minute tendrils in the air as the shell breaks; and the spear, hurtling towards me, rips my legs clean off and issues behind me into a mountain several thousands of ja away in the horizon. The mountain explodes in a firelight of smoke that quakes the earth and causes Mount Taebaek to the southeast to roar in agony; I glance backwards to see not an avalanche, not a landslide, but a gigantic hole through a nameless mountain. The peak of the mountain teeters as if to decide its fate and, not finding support, collapses to the bottom, the sounds arriving late.
The tortoise-god Woosa makes a mighty and pained roar as his shell breaks and blood issues forth, wherefore the shells that must have returned have been broken; its companion-serpent coils up in the hole of the shell that the god had sent out for my aid, guarding it against Yaldabaoth.
That spear of Yaldabaoth put a hole through a mountain; it is a surprise and admiration that the tortoise god managed to survive against such a hideous force of cosmic power.
But even then, Yaldabaoth had shown the true extent of his powers; a world-shattering one. The tortoise-god Woosa survived because only a part of his shell had broken, and he was the mightiest in defense; I had no guarantee that the other three gods could similarly survive a direct blow from his attacks. I could not afford to wait for Yaldabaoth's strike and then counter them blow-for-blow; I was running out of parts of my body to sacrifice so my mirror-blade could devour it. Already my liver, nails, and finger had been given to invoke the gods; they and the sacrificed parts would not return even if other parts of my body regrew in the midst of battle. I would soon have to sacrifice my vital organs for stronger attacks. But beyond that with my tongue and teeth I could not afford, for it would prevent me from uttering the commands of my mirror arts: I have to go for Yaldabaoth's jugular right here, right now, and cut off his head directly amidst the gods' attacks. If I miss a strike, I can use my six remaining rewinds to do it again and again until my scythe meets true.
No time to waste. My torn legs grow back in a fraction of a second.
Poongbaek (Windgod) Art:
JUGULAR ANNIHILATION!
My nail-less digits are crushed and devoured by the mirror-blade as the mighty tiger form of the wind-god Poongbaek gallops across the air with me in tow towards Yaldabaoth, sizzling the air in green flames. The demon prepares to chant another spell, but the wind-god dives face-first into the flesh of the demon, clamping down on the demon's head and neck with its mighty jaws, cracking it, drawing black blood with such force that stars begin to appear in the cracks of space made by the wind-god's teeth and claws.
Demiurge Art, Metaphysical Type:
RETURN TO SHADOW!
The demon hollers, as he melts into a shadow that instantly slips him through the tiger-god's unassailable grip.
Yeomjak (Firegod) Art:
TO DAWN'S FIRST LIGHT!
My right eye punctures into a web of blood as my scythe offers it as sacrifice, the pain immediate. The vermillion fire-god illuminates the darkened world with a light so bright that I can see my bones through my fingers. The sunlike radiance douses everything from the roaring flames to the shadows in the corners of buildings and in the crevices of streets, reflecting off each other so brightly that it rips off any tenebris.
Yaldabaoth, slipping to deliver an unseen blow from somewhere, is unceremoniously forced out from the shadowed veils upon the ground and into his material form, sizzling him, dazzling him even if just an instant.
Now is my moment.
I launch myself off of the ruins of the city walls, breaking whatever remains with the force of my cleft, careening towards the demon with a speed so fast that the air sings with my scythe-blade in tow.
Wunsa (Cloudgod) Art:
TEMPEST SURGE!
My left ring finger disappears into the mirror as the dragon-god rendezvous with my assaulting form in a viperine layer of turquoise mist, giving me force. We spiral around to strike out at the demon below with millions of vapor and hail sharpened to razorlike blades, together thrumming and swelling and troughing like a tidal wave breaking upon shore, a force twice over enough to disintegrate the body of the demon, or at least allow me an opening to slice off its head. The dragon-god and I are mere hundredths of ja away –
Demiurge Art, Distortion Type:
DAMAGE REFLECTION.
The dragon-god's eyes open wide and so does mine as we shield against the ancient demon's reality-bending command; at once, the force that would have been imparted to Yaldabaoth immediately returns towards us, the tidal wave of vapor and hail ripping the scales and skewering the flesh of even the dragon-god away, blasted off into the heavens with a force that he himself had conjured with me in his guarding coil. If I had been exposed to the reflection of our attack, I would have been atomized on the spot.
We land body-first onto the flaming ruins of the Royal Palace, in the midst of the throne room. Yaldabaoth's command had thrown us all the way the length of 2,000 ja from the South. The dragon-god makes a rattling rasp that splatters blood everywhere into the fire; the midsection of his serpentine body has been ripped clean of his scales and rended to show the marred flesh underneath, including his divine insides.
Yaldabaoth appears in a flash with a crackling of the air, reforming his scimitar blades into shears – scissors – of horrific length, preparing to strike.
But I utter before him.
Poongbaek (Windgod) Art:
ADAMANT TORNADO!
All my toenails rip off in cacophony and dive into the mirror, droplets of blood condensing upon exposed flesh. At once the flaming-chartreuse of the tiger-god's form materializes next to me, dwarfing my figure. The tiger's diamond-hardened hide bristles into a thousand protruding knives the size of my arms, each harder than the scales of Wunsa, and with a cacophony of screeching air the tiger-god launches himself into the sky towards Yaldabaoth, turning his body into a tornado of verdure that even the atmosphere itself seems to split open like wounds, opening the starlit cosmos beyond to let miasma through. It nearly catches Yaldabaoth, turns him into an image of yesterday, but –
Demiurge Art, Metaphysical Type:
THE TEETH OF SETEKH!
The world around him shrouds in shadow, and giant arrays of side-glancing eyes open up in their fuligin paths, growing sets of triangular, serrated teeth. The numerous jaws of this eldritch, unholy creature summoned from beyond the void take their teeth upon the swirling viridian figure of the tiger-god; with a sound like nails to wetted stone the teeth clamp shut, tearing away the knifelike quills of the tiger-god's carapace in his rotation, atomizing them entire, like peeling an apple. Yaldabaoth himself reaches through and delivers a ferocious kick to the tiger-god that sends him flying down below, but not before the tiger-god reaves the mouth and head of Yaldabaoth with gigantic claws ripping his tongue and teeth off so he cannot pronounce. The tiger-god Poongbaek falls to the throne room in which it all began, pulverizing the floorboards.
Yaldabaoth regathers strength. There is no time to lose.
Yeomjak (Firegod) Art:
DAYBREAK OF THE IDOLS!
I feel my intestines reave and wretch as they are wrested from my insides and thrust into the blade of my scythe. Without sparing a second the fiery form of the archaeopteryx-god Yeomjak grips Yaldabaoth in her talons, setting the sky ablaze, melting and shedding its feathers with a heat to vaporize stone itself. I shield myself with my scythe, the dragon-god's mist, and the tiger-god's space-reaving claw as the archaeopteryx-god immolates herself into a second Sun on earth, beginning to evaporate away Yaldabaoth's flesh.
For the first time I spy on the ancient demon's expression not of haughty pride or infuriated glare but a stroke of disbelief. The ancient demon's skin chars and flies off, and so does the flesh underneath, finally revealing the gross skeletal form underneath, and in it – three, no, four hearts each separate and beating in tandem in his chest. His throat begins to burn away, and so does his hair and mouth open wide as if to scream in agony and anger, almost leaving behind a mummy-like visage as he is about to be destroyed, but that's when I notice that one of his hearts has a mouth still, with serrated teeth just like what he conjured immediately before.
It grins.
And speaks.
Demiurge Art, Metaphysical Type:
COME, APOPHIS, DEVOUR THE SUN!
His spoken heart bursts with a firelight of blood, and from it, a deep, wanton darkness of reviling proportions begins crawling out of whichever abyss it finds its abode. It enlarges, it expands, growing chitinous layers that clacker against each other like the segmented belly of a cockroach, and lengthens in size to that larger than the form of the dragon-god in an instant; growing a head befitting a snake – no, not the snakes of our Kingdom but down far south in the Land of Cheonchuk – Indus – a cobra more like, it opens its mouth and devours the second Sun of the fire-god Yeomjak, and her vermillion form entire, with a single chomp.
The second Sun vanishes; mighty shadows drape over the flaming land once again as muscles retwine amidst Yaldabaoth's bones, his skin recarpets his muscles, his broken teeth emerge out again like those of an infernal shark, his mighty hair explodes out from his scalp longer than before, black with tips of maroon red, the abyssal serpent that is Apophis coiling around his regenerating form, feeding him the power once held by the god.
How. Dare. He!
Woosa (Raingod) Art:
THE CHAINS OF HEAVEN!
I feel a searing torment through my thighs as my veins are ripped out and consumed by the mirror-blade. A thousand chains of metal and obsidian descend from the fuligin sky, hooking their harpoon-tips into the earth with massive clunks. Three dozen pierce and impale the cobra-like head of Apophis the serpent, and five impale Yaldabaoth himself in his regenerating form, coiling around his neck, arms, legs, and torso, leaving impressions deep in his skin from the struggle to get free.
It was now or never.
Poongbaek (Windgod), Wunsa (Cloudgod), Fusion Art:
SPIRALING TYPHOON!
My two kidneys are twisted and pulled into the mirror blade as the mighty dragon-god uncoils from his recovery and takes to the sky, the blazing tiger-god pouncing up the considerable length of his dragon ally's body, together spiraling into a lance that pierces the heavens with cyan and green. The images of the sky and the mountains beyond seem to shimmer and split with the incoming torsion of their combined strike, pulling up the remains of palaces and trees far below into a tornado that only the divine can muster.
Yaldabaoth begins to roar in his immutable chains, growing louder by each second; his arm bulges and flexes as he breaks free of two chains that bind his biceps and forearm, and with it, rips the remaining three chains into pieces.
The typhoon of the dragon and wind-god are approaching fast, just dozens of ja away, but as Yaldabaoth tries to take to the sky, he is yanked by the cord that attaches him to Apophis, still in the midst of digesting Yeomsa, the fire-god. Without a moment of hesitation, the ancient demon swipes his hand across that disintegrates the gargantuan serpent to dust from the tail up, freeing the archaeopteryx fire-god from the clutches of its maws.
The fire-god spreads her wings again, veritably enraged; she bites the legs of Yaldabaoth clean off, who was attempting to climb to the skies above to dodge the typhoon of the other two gods.
Weakened for a moment and attempting to flee, it's now-or-never for me to attempt the final step.
I crouch and kick the palatial steps, rocketing to the sky towards Yaldabaoth with my scythe ready to reap, collapsing and crumbling the foundations of the palace below me. I holler with all the strength I can muster.
Yeomjak (Firegod), Woosa (Raingod), Fusion Art:
CELESTIAL STORM!
I've noticed just now what my previous incarnations haven't been able to do so for six thousand years, since they were never this close to victory, which even now was uncertain: cutting off Yaldabaoth's head alone cannot kill him. I must also destroy all of his hearts. But destroying them all and simultaneously beheading him while dodging his blows one for one bordered on the nigh-impossible, for his hearts could most likely call upon an ancient evil which I haven't yet witnessed.
Yet impossible is just a word. If I overcome the impossible here, I can secure a world free of this infernal evil once and for all, this originator of all demons.
My spleen is fed wholesale into the mirror along with my stomach. The shells of the tortoise god Woosa fire off high into the sky like cannons, latching onto Yaldabaoth that momentarily slow his stride across the sky.
It's just enough.
The archaeopteryx god Yeomjak clamps her beak onto Yaldabaoth, and without sparing even a second, unleashes a plume of iridescent fire that begins melting away his flesh. Yaldabaoth opens his mouth to speak, but the tortoise-god's shells which have latched onto the ancient demon begin to glow on their own accord, and burst forth into radiant purple lightning that split the sky and vaporizes the teeth and tongue off of the ancient demon; in just a moment, the approaching typhoon of the cloud-god and wind-god rams into Yaldabaoth and shred-kicks him through to the fuligin clouds above into the soot and ash. Lightning and thunder crackles across us.
On their trail, blazing like a rising comet, rises me, myself, and I – careening through the mighty forms of the Four Gods, sighting Yaldabaoth in their relentless talons and grips and barrages, who are destroying his regenerated flesh an instant they come into being. The speed of their destruction is so fast that it begins unraveling Yaldabaoth's flesh little by little like the peels of an orange, until his musculature evaporates away, and below it, his skeletal ribcage, and below it, his remaining three hearts.
And as the Four Gods and I sight the image of those hearts, the rightmost one grins to open its mouth.
Demiurge Art, Metaphysical Type:
ARISE, MOLOCH! UNLEASH THINE –
REWIND!
5 uses left.
I utter to a mere 3 seconds back, right before his peeling flesh reveals his hearts underneath. And this time, without waiting for its inevitable speech, I swing my scythe down and fast, catching the rightmost heart in my blade. But it feels like a stone's been lodged in my strike, and I cannot yet -
It grows its mouth to speak again, grinning once more –
Demiurge Art, Metaphysical –
REWIND!
4 uses left.
I utter to four seconds back, leaving me just enough time to utter my own command as I strike down upon the rightmost heart with all my might.
Sashin Mirror Art:
HOWLING SHEAR!
The scythe connects, and like tearing through stalks of grain, it cleaves the just-grinning heart in two, exploding it away in thunderous cadence of red lightning.
Yaldabaoth bellows in anger, and with one sinew still remaining upon his leg kicks me directly, impaling me in my empty belly right through, extending out my back.
A mere scratch, I think, but the leftmost heart in his ribcage opens the slit it calls a mouth and begins its spell.
Demiurge Art –
REWIND!
3 uses left.
Just three-and-a-half seconds back from just now. I dodge Yaldabaoth's incensed kick.
Sashin Mirror Art:
CRESCENDO LANCE!
The scythe tip connects to the leftmost heart, and like firing a cannon right through, bursts iridescent fire that impales the heart.
But it's not the one that speaks.
Demiurge Art, Origin Type:
PERVERSION OF GENESIS.
The central heart grins as it utters its command, having abandoned the leftmost heart to its fate. As the error of my miscalculation – or foresight on the part of this ancient demon – hits me, the Four Gods are blasted away each by a mirror image of their own inverted in reality, Yaldabaoth instantly beginning to regenerate – the fire-god meeting an azure water-god, the wind-god meeting a golden earth-god, the cloud-god meeting a –
REWIND!
2 uses left.
Just five seconds back. Right before I destroyed the leftmost heart. But it was the central heart that uttered the words – I must take both of them out at once.
Sashin Mirror Art:
WHITTLING CYCLONE!
I bellow the commands, taking the two hearts in my long scythe blade, but I am too late.
Demiurge Art, Origin Type:
PERVERSION OF –
REWIND!
Just 1 use left.
My eyes are shot with blood as I issue forth an utterance of a command so loud that it rocks the skies and the clouds and reflects the violet lightning.
Sashin Mirror Art:
DAWN BEYOND THE PARTING CLOUDS!
My scythe-blade explodes in a color of cyan and green as I swing it down with a force to fell a thousand trees. And this time, the blade cleanly bisects the hearts like clouds parted by a wind divine.
Just the head left. Just the head!
As his last heart disappears, Yaldabaoth bellows forth an otherworldly scream. Black soot and wailing souls begin to flood out from his destroyed two hearts, enveloping the Four Gods and I in caustic miasma, burning off my skin, my remaining robes, my face, everywhere exposed to his flesh.
But I'm not done.
With an utterance of command that carries the wills of hundreds of millions felled to his blades and whims, I swing my opalescent scythe into his neck as hard as I can, with a totality of strength from the tips of my toes to the crown of my head.
Sashin Mirror Art, Final Form:
RETURN. TO. DHARMA!
The blade makes contact with the right side of his neck, held afresh by an absolute force from Yaldabaoth to keep it regenerating despite an almost infinitude of barrages from the Four Gods to which I was immune by nature of blessing. The blade breaks his skin and begins to enter. It inches bit by bit, hair's width by hair's width, and is a quarter of a point in when –
DEMIURGE... ART... INFINITY... TYPE:
FROM DUST... TO DUST –
REWIND!
I holler, as the world rearranges for the final time to mere seconds before, the blade beginning to break and enter his skin. And this time, I drive my fist into Yaldabaoth's mouth.
He begins crushing my knuckles with his serrated teeth, its tips piercing and breaking my skin. I feel the bones of my clenched fist move against each other, the skin shred and rip, the flesh explode forth like paste as he clamps down on it harder in an effort for me to remove my hand.
But I'm not letting it out.
I drive my scythe deeper past the quarter-way point. I drive it deeper, my voice growing louder, my bellow and scream seeming to rattle the sky, matching the volume of Yaldabaoth's own, his throat vibrating with such exertion that it seems to phase in and out of existence.
We scream.
I drive the scythe deeper.
The blade crawls past the halfway point.
We scream.
I drive the scythe even deeper.
It crawls past the three-quarters, the Four Gods draining the totality of their efforts to rend and vaporize Yaldabaoth's flesh away to hamper his continuous attempts at recovery.
My left palm bleeds and my knuckles purple-white as I drive the scythe deeper. We bellow and scream and holler and screech, Yaldabaoth crushing my fist harder with his teeth and bite, the forms of my knuckles being only maintained by my own regeneration, given by the Four Gods.
But the blade becomes lodged. I summon all the last ounce of my effort and will, the totality from my birth to now, the strength of all my past incarnations and all the people that have lived, and impress my left palm across the broken handle again, ploughing Yaldabaoth's flesh a hair's width at a time, laborious, painstaking, my body sizzling with such effort that it feels it will explode.
The blade moves again, and past the nine-tenths.
And just as it slips past, Yaldabaoth manages to crush my knuckles and swallow its blood; as my blood nourishes his throat and neck, he swings open his mouth and roars as deafeningly as he can, vibrating the heaven and earth, bursting my eardrums, blasting the Four Gods away for an instant.
His roar is so loud that my scythe-blade lodged in his throat begins to judder and sing –
Cracks appear in the mirror-blade like lightning –
And it shatters into a hundred pieces.
The light of the Four Gods goes out, extinguishes;
And we fall towards the Earth, hugging each other in murderous fury towards oblivion.
***
...The black sky above is a blur as I open my eyes.
...Black rain descends from the murmuring clouds, painting the canvas of my face in ink.
I wriggle my toes and legs, but find them utterly broken. I am shattered by the earth that has greeted me in my fall, a pool of blood seeping into the remains of my tattered robes flying off like burnt paper in the wind.
Caustic drops fall into my open mouth. I cannot muster a single swallow of the rain. If I breathe like this, I drown.
From away, shuffles of footsteps.
I creak my head towards the sound, turning my head to the side, pouring out the gathered rain in between my broken teeth.
The scene gives me pause.
I witness Yaldabaoth bent over, coughing up bile and black blood, painting the ashen grass in poison. His body is half destroyed like mine: rended with holes, missing flesh. The bottom of his left ribcage is exposed, the bones jutting out like a half-chewed piece of roast, his legs equivalently skeletal with only a few sinews holding the joints together.
He stumbles step by step away, hunched over, making gargling coughs.
He wasn't dead. I had failed.
I can only muster a tiny interjection as I attempt to reach for him, but find no strength to muster any movement.
"...You.... guemul...." I cough, spitting blood.
Yaldabaoth halts.
With enormous effort he cranes his head back, incredulous.
"You... you still breathe?"
"Fight... me... you accursed... cur...." I trail off, clawing my way through the grass, dragging my body little by little with my remaining embers, driven by the extinguishing fires of my effort moments prior.
"...Leave me.... you witch," Yaldabaoth stumbles, falling to his knees, struggling up again. He mutters under his breath, getting further and further away, clutching the empty cavity of his chest where his four hearts once were. Doubtless it took him countless years since he walked on this earth to cultivate them, and in a single night, lost them all at my hand.
But even with my utmost efforts, I could not behead him.
I could not behead him.
So close.
I was so close!
I was so, so close!
Anguish wells up like a tempest in my chest. I let loose a ghastly, whooping scream from my sigh, echoing across the broken plains and the city ruins far, far, away.
Yaldabaoth chuckles amidst his hiccupping coughs, stumbling into the red, featureless horizon under a sky of fuligin and black, mouthing words which I cannot hear.
His form vanishes little by little beyond the rolling of hills, until at last, I am made alone.
Utterly alone.
I roll to my back towards the uncaring black sky. Graceful it would have been for me to see stars upon death, but all I see is the fall of my beloved kingdom reflected in the clouds.
But had I really loved it?
Or was I made to love it on account of my birth?
From my origin as a peasant girl abandoned by her parents to rising as the guardian of Balhae, all I've known was battle. I've aided the King and his generals in repelling the Georan invaders from the steppes. I've traveled hundreds of thousand of li, from city to city, village to village, hamlet to hamlet, beheading and skewering the hearts of guemuls that rose and rose again with no relent, with only me and my small order of Musha as defense. Everywhere I went, I composed a litany of blood in defense of my people. Guemul blood, human blood, it did not matter, so long as I was comforted in the fact that I could be loved by the people whom I've fought for.
But they never did.
My earliest memories were the screams and curses of my parents, their pointed fingers.
"You are an accursed child, a monster. A guemul!" they said, for the first words I pronounced as a little girl were not blabbers of 'umma' and 'appa' but fully formed words of gods and spirits. I was inhabited by memories that weren't mine; when I was sick with fever, I would utter words of my incarnations and move as if other spirits were inhabiting me.
A passing fortune-teller once took one look at me and fell backwards, and crawled away shivering. His incoherent mumbles gave away that I would bring untold disaster to my family and to anyone whom I've entwined a relation. And so, I was thrown out, left to wander the streets to become someone else's burden to bear.
But one day – a traveling warrior-monk by the name of Seokga – found my orphaned self wandering the streets living off scraps of pig slop and discarded bones. He took me in his various travels, taught me to read, tidy myself, how to fight, how to care for others, and above all, what it felt to be treated and respected and loved as a fellow human being, an affirmation that I was not a monster. Though adoptive, he was in all sense of the word, my true father; my only ally, the only person to allay the cruelty of the world beaten into my bones.
But he was brutally murdered by a guemul in our night journey across a mountain pass. I managed to survive by fighting tooth and nail to defeat that guemul into the morning, skewering its heart with nothing but a cooking knife. But the prophecy had rung true. I was indeed a cursed child.
When I stumbled, bleeding, half-dead into a nearby village with the corpse of my father to bury and the corpse of the demon as bounty, the news of a little girl that had killed a demon spread like wildfire across the hamlets. I was approached by Injeon, a warrior from an order called the Musha of Balhae. Should I want, I could become one of them, he said, and use mirrors imbued with spirits to fight with the strength of many warriors in one; that with this power, I could exact my revenge upon those other guemuls that roamed the lands free and unbound.
And so, driven by a smoldering fire in my heart to avenge Seokga, and all the good people like him, I accepted, trained, climbed the ranks, was entrusted the legendary mirror of Dongmyeong Sashin, whereupon I would become a scion of the Four Gods of myth, become their voice; driven by the mistaken belief that if I was really indeed a cursed child, then I would die as one and take as many of those guemuls with me to liberate this world of their evil. Yet a corner of my heart always wished that I could be loved.
But in the end, there remained no one to sing or hold my name. And now, lying still, broken upon the ruins of my kingdom, the brutality of my error dawns upon me: I had always been free to choose what I wished to be. I became a Musha because I wished to love and be loved like everyone else, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I clench my broken fists, but let them go.
Perhaps it was that I had not lived that robbed me of meaning at all to vanquish Yaldabaoth: for I was one and the same. For if you strip everything away, how am I different from him in his want of blood and kill-thirst? I am just as hollow, driven by wanton hate, oblivious to the transitory blessings that the human soul wants to cherish and protect.
The fragrance of blooming flowers upon spring. The teeming chorus of sparrows in the summer haze. The gentle caress of autumn maple upon my hair. The crisp chill of winter frost upon my hands. The taste of the first strawberries, hauled in a straw basket teeming with dew. The aroma of honeyed tea by a lone room, huddled in a blanket of a companion. The taste of a fine roast shared around a campfire with laughing friends. The grasp and warmth of our entwined fingers, sharing a stroll down streets of falling leaves. The pricking of my ears at words of affection, a blush which I am too shy to admit nor hide away. The fluttering sweetness of a first kiss, the nourishment of a gentle hug. All those things which could have been, all those things which I could have sought and experienced and lived as a human being, which I forsook so easily without knowing their meaning.
Yes, I wanted those things. But I had not known how; realized too late how precious they are.
The sky darkens. I hear the sound of crumbling rocks. The volcanic plume from Mount Taebaek collapses at last.
The pyroclast descends the slopes of the mountain far away, enveloping the world below in roiling, black heat.
It races and smothers the trees, hills, grass, the city ruins, past its walls, towards my rest.
Now upon my realization that I want those things, that I want to live, my oblivion approaches.
A single teardrop crosses down my eye and sizzles away.
My time is now at an end, the curtains close, but yours will begin.
To my incarnation, a thousand years from now:
Remember me.
Remember you.
Remember my wish;
And yours to be told.