Chapter Text
I
When the leaves of the oak trees turn the color of fire, Chanyeol asks Mom if he should be afraid of it.
Mom coos at how fast he’s growing; look at our little Chanyeol, worrying about the big things. A sharp whistle comes from the stove, and she’s filling two mugs on their kitchen counter with hot water.
It’s just them on this special Sunday afternoon, a day of pajamas and variety shows and take-out, because his father is out for business and his sister is out with her friends.
Fire must like him, she says, because their cats go to sleep curled up against him when snow starts to collect on the windowsill of his bedroom, and they go to him when they need protection.
She says animals can sense the elements in people, so Chanyeol must have some small flame to share if they choose him as a buffer against the cold—fire must be Chanyeol’s friend.
Yesterday, there was a fire drill at school. An alarm had sounded, shrill and sharp, and they’d walked, single file, through the designated fire exits. He asks Mom if fire wasn’t anything to worry about, because everyone had looked so calm.
She says fire is dangerous, but only when it cannot be controlled.
Little Chanyeol remembers every single bit of instruction, pushed through the speakers in the hallways. Look for a teacher. Look for your friends. Look for a door. Run if you can, hurry if you can’t. In case of smoke, douse your handkerchief, and try to escape.
They’re all useless, in the end.
Fire visits him that night, and Chanyeol isn’t in a classroom, surrounded by uniforms and adults and fire exits.
Chanyeol is alone, writhing on his bed—this is his first lesson: nightmares are sparks, and his mind is kindling.
When his eyes snap open, it’s to warmth, heat licking pleasantly along his legs, except there are embers swirling with the autumn wind and he’s watching the edges of his favorite blanket get consumed by the second. Somehow, there is no room for doubt; this is no dream. This is real.
His screams reach his sister first, and so she is the first horrified face he sees in the doorway. The shocking cold of water comes next, and then arms, and then a shushing, someone is rocking him back and forth, and his throat is too filled with ash to ask Mom to get away before he ignites again.
“Should I be afraid of fire?” he chokes out, when his chest doesn’t feel like a furnace and Dad is sitting on his study chair with the tightest furrow in his brows that Chanyeol has ever seen. “Mom. Should I be afraid?”
This time, Mom doesn’t laugh. “A little,” she whispers. She sounds like she’s trying to be brave. “Just a little, my love.”
***
The first time they clip a damper on his wrist, Chanyeol is grateful. The flames have their own kind of itch, buried just beneath his skin.
He can breathe around his friends now—can finally laugh and run and play. The bracelet is thin and black, stark against his skin, and he decides that he can handle the half-second stares that come with it.
Chanyeol learns that he is part of a dying breed. Records that have been lost to time but found through sheer human stubbornness tell him about things that didn’t properly exist until only recently, some hundred years ago.
There’s evidence in faded pictures and scientific testimonies. But even further back, there are scrolls that warn of magik burning bright, and then of magik burning out.
They predict that it will not go peacefully—humans are vessels for magik, just like anything else, and they will bear the brunt of its resistance to its eventual decline, just like every other life form that came before them.
There’s a system, even forms and paperwork that Mom has to fill up. A building with dark walls and cold floors. There are names: mage, power level, burnout. There are rules: never use magik to kill, never use magik to threaten. There are assurances: you will be treated just like every other citizen of South Korea.
Chanyeol listens with wide ears and even wider eyes. A child is full of irrationality because they are full of wonder—for every one bit of information, Chanyeol formulates at least five questions.
Two bands come next, and then three.
Chanyeol is twelve years old when the International Registry announces a shift in the hand of magik. December 30, Year of the Metal Rooster: the Registry reports the lowest percentage of fire mages the global population has ever encountered.
Annual tracking has revealed that only 5% of total new applicants showed affinity to flame.
(The investigation results spanning all major countries on non-compliance of registry rule out possibilities of human error.)
Steady decline of flame-related magik has been observed for the past decades, but this recent development has subverted all expectations. Experts are now scrambling to look out for the surge in the powers of young firebearers, as well as formulate new training programs designed to control their heightened abilities.
Who is Park Chanyeol? Sign, warning, confirmation. A child with power that could bring forest fires to their raging heights is an innocent indicator of magik drawing to a close.
Chanyeol is a supernova, a final attempt at something lasting—even magik, it seemed, cared about legacies.
At twelve years old, the meters say he’s a solid Level Three, and that means more paperwork, more training, and more eyes on him.
Yoora does her best to make him feel like he still has a childhood.
They go on ice cream and noodle shop dates, and like a good older sister, she teases and embarrasses him in front of his friends when they come over. Mom gets paid a heavy check now, and Dad quits his second job so he can hold Chanyeol’s hand in the monthly assessments.
His magik is growing with him, and when they pass by the shrines, it’s them Chanyeol asks—the gold figures draped in beads and worship.
Should I be afraid of fire?
In the heavy, faith-loaded silence, he finds no answer. His young heart wants to know if he is still human.
***
Red is the color of fire. Red is the color of blood, trickling down a long cut on his forearm.
“Faster!” the trainer barks. He is far above them, in the observation deck, and Chanyeol is on the ground, staining the white floors. “Soft spots, come on, 61!”
Three years and one additional band later, Chanyeol is heaving in a simulation room, fighting against a beast made of plastic and metal. It looks like a lizard today, claws impossibly long, hide impossibly ugly. The scrolls predicted this too, but the systems didn’t think they’d come for another fifty years.
Chanyeol becomes another thing: soldier.
In Korea, they’re called Reapers—grim, mysterious, and straight out of those dramas the foreigners in his school liked to watch. They’re given black coats edged in gold and weapons dipped in a nothingness that snuffs out magik.
Combat is so much more different from summoning a campfire at the beach, but here, there is the constant reminder of one thing: he is human. Chanyeol lets himself bleed.
“Take the flank,” he directs, “I’ll take the front.”
They were in the end times now, the articles say, because magik had a good hundred years left before it shrunk back to wherever it came from. Everything had a cycle, the poetic ones of their generation said. Just as magik boomed when it started, it would rattle everything it could before it ended.
Creatures had risen from the seas and crawled from the caves—twisted champions of magik, not like humans that had control, or trees that had too little sentience to cause harm. Much like Chanyeol, they were chosen to bear magik’s final cause, but unlike Chanyeol, they were the wrong choices.
“Where is it?” Junmyeon shouts, evading a sharp slice to the chest. “Fuck!”
“Behind the kneecaps!” Chanyeol takes off into a run. “Careful, hyung!”
Magik has a frequency, the people in the white coats said. Magik can manifest into sound and sight. New again, just like everything else. Level Twos can sense, Level Threes can feel, and Level Fours—well. Level Fours could see.
In battle, speed is everything.
The creature’s reserves are on its knees, but the center of its magik is on its nape. This one, artificial and lab-born, has a blurred out brightness, like light through frosted windows, two vague pinpoints purposely intended to sharpen Chanyeol’s vision.
In nature, Komodo Dragons are fast, but they aren’t agile, so Chanyeol zigzags, and the simulation pauses. He drops to his knees and grits his teeth as he uses his momentum to slide under its legs, and brings his knives up. There is no blood. Only a robotic screech, and someone pulling his ankles so he doesn’t get crushed under a toppling body.
“Thanks,” he mutters, breathing in the cold of the marble floors below him. He relishes the fatigue going through his bones, the ache of his muscles. Blood drips between his fingers. The numbers on the wall say it’s only two in the afternoon.
“Do you want this one?” Junmyeon asks from somewhere in the room, probably already crouched down beside the monster’s head, staff ready to absorb magik. “Take it, Chanyeol.”
Chanyeol doesn’t care. There’s a point system, and he’s probably at the bottom if Mr. Perfect is offering him a chance to save his standing. He doesn’t know when everything turned into a competition. There was never any ladder Chanyeol had to climb—only a groundless existence he’s had to endure. “It’s yours, hyung.”
“You sure?”
A voice comes from the speakers. Faster, it usually says. Stronger. Go in for the kill. You can’t save people if you hesitate—the creatures have one goal, and you should have your own. This time, it tells him, “You need the points, 61.”
“Fuck you, sir.”
Chanyeol closes his eyes and directs his fire up, up, up, and the microphone catches a yelp of fear. The floor is marble, the monsters are metal, and the window of the observation deck is glass. Chanyeol doesn’t know the trainer’s name, but he knows he’s seen him melt thicker things.
“Take them,” he says again, sitting up. “I got better things to do than worry about a list.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Kim Junmyeon is two years older than he is. He’s got this perfect smile and polished laugh, and sometimes, when he stubbornly latches onto Chanyeol in an attempt to get to know him, it sounds rehearsed. His hair is always done up when he comes for training, and Chanyeol’s eyes follow his handsome figure more times that he will ever admit.
“There’s a birthday party I have to catch in a few hours.” Chanyeol strides over and presses Junmyeon’s staff into the dragon’s neck. The magik flows, and the weapon pulses, greedy for something to keep. “I have to hurry home.”
Junmyeon looks like he wants to protest. Instead, he asks him when they’re in the locker rooms and Chanyeol is clipping on his dampers, “Whose? Whose birthday is it?”
“Mine.”
“What?”
Chanyeol hefts his bag, offering a tight smile. “See you, hyung.”
“Wait.” Junmyeon has a hand curled around his wrist, for some reason. “Happy birthday, Chanyeol. Do you have to go now, as in right now? Let me buy you something you like.”
Chanyeol stares.
The gold figures in the old shrines have doctrines, special words of the wise. Harm nothing that breathes, and enjoy the little things.
Being human is already a question that gets answered the same way too much—always written in pain and exhaustion, and Chanyeol has long gotten tired of it.
Everything bleeds, everything suffers.
Youth is the time for discovery, the self-development classes say, the time to fill his eyes with the rich pinks of sunsets and his veins with the exhilaration of a prank about to go very wrong.
He’s still in high school, and his friends believe that he goes to the countryside every weekend to visit his grandmother.
The system wants them to think they’re part of this bigger world, full of magik and danger. They are stars hidden behind clouds on a clear night. Unknown, untouchable. You are human, which means you can die, but you have magik with you, which means you’re immortal until you’re bleeding the last of it onto the pavement.
“I have to be in Seoul in five hours,” Chanyeol says, and the older boy brightens up. “The drive usually takes just one, though.”
Chanyeol’s never gone on a serious date before. He knows Junmyeon’s probably just being friendly, but his warm smile and insistent grip on Chanyeol’s hand is enough space for the benefit of doubt. His face heats up—so this must be what it feels to blush.
“That’s great. You should rest first before heading out, anyway. We could even hang out a bit…you’re eighteen now, then?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, my gift should be expensive.”
***
Chanyeol will say he doesn’t remember what went wrong the day he turned twenty years old. He’ll shrug it off with a terrified beat to his heart, and press record.
The title of the recording will be something in English, because they are a modern society and the occurrence of a Level Five in his country has only happened exactly forty-nine times, and Chanyeol is number fifty.
There’s no Korean term for it because their language hasn’t had a chance to wrap itself around mages like him, so it means he is unexplored, unchristened, even more unknown. It’s supposed to be new—like the monsters, like the surges in power.
The Undoing, that’s what they called it. Eun-du-wing. The syllables do not belong on his tongue.
The system, ever so efficient, will take it all in stride. There have been five others before him in the past ten years, and so his name will go beside theirs.
The face on his profile has started to look handsome, you were always a beautiful child, it must be the magik, but in that moment, Chanyeol will think he looks jaded.
A piece of jewelry forever cracked, and he doesn’t know why he expected to expose anything else other than pure fire, but maybe it’s because he’s tried so hard to be different.
Fingerprint scans and interview questions will come next. What did it feel like? What triggered it? Why are you shaking? Do you need water? We can do this another day, if you want. No? Oh, okay then, Mr. Park. Take your time.
He’ll make something up, stutter out something half-eloquent, and go back to his apartment.
He won’t come out until Junmyeon bangs on his door and drags him out to shower. He’ll put on a fake smile when a steaming bowl of noodles gets placed in front of him, and blink when he realizes he hasn’t put anything in his mouth for five days.
He’ll shrug on the clothes Junmyeon laid out, and talk about how he doesn’t know himself anymore in the middle of couples kissing and dogs running around his ankles.
He will see everything in order, the last of the leaves falling, the cold of the seasons, the hot potato stand having an influx of customers, and then he will see himself, bright, messy. Too fucking big.
But for now, Chanyeol is dying.
Chanyeol is staining the sea red, there and gone with the waves. This, he tries to think, is the color of humanity—this is proof that he is mortal, in the end. A voice tells him that this is a color he shouldn’t see, not right now, not when he’s knelt waist-deep in ocean-water, night endlessly black—but he remembers there is fire, so much of it, raging and burning and angry.
The monster was something with claws. The team didn’t see it, and neither did Chanyeol, but one second he was melting sand into glass shards, and the next, he was gasping at something barbed entering his body, in through his back and out through his gut.
The screams had been a blur after that; there was water, and then there was magik, and there was a breaking. He’d felt ocean salt stinging at his skin. The mind-numbing pain of near-death. An undoing. A coil had snapped inside of him.
(“A legacy had sensed its end, I suppose,” Chanyeol will say, mouth dry and throat fighting not to vomit in the spotless white interrogation room, “and rebelled.”)
Chanyeol had been shoved into his consciousness, forced to watch as he held his palm against the monster’s leg. There was hell, and then there was ash, and then there should have been nothing.
But Chanyeol’s blood is still leaking by the bucket, the fire is turning to his soul, because fire needs something to burn to survive, and Chanyeol is dying, and all he’s really hoping for is for it to end.
“Chanyeol-ssi,” a voice says. Amidst all the chaos, a weight makes itself known. There’s a hand on his cheek. “Chanyeol-ssi, my name is Do Kyungsoo. Can you stand? Can you hear me?”
“Get away,” he breathes, because the fire is surging up even stronger. “Get—fuck—get away!”
The fire lashes out, teeth ready to turn everything into kindling. It curls Chanyeol’s hand into a fist and—
There are fingers enveloped around his. Guiding his arm down. His vision is still too bright, but there’s a shape, at least. There’s a boy, just like him.
“Chanyeol-ssi,” the voice says again. It’s deep. Solid. In the middle of an ocean, Chanyeol finds an anchor. “Chanyeol-ssi. Breathe for me, that’s right. Like that. I’ve got you.”
What was its name? His memory is nothing, now. Reduced to ashes like the monster that’s still killing him. Arms cage his, and with them, a wall comes around his core—the resistance turns into force, pushing his magik back inside, far from the reaches of Chanyeol’s mind.
One beat, two. A ring comes around one of his fingers. It feels like sweet nothingness, and all at once, his fire is extinguished. The night becomes night again, instead of hell.
“Chanyeol-ssi, aren’t you cold?”
No, Chanyeol wants to say. I’m burning from the inside out. Who are you?
“I’m taking you to a healer. Try not to panic, alright?”
Oh. He’s still dying, but slower. Maybe he can convince the voice to lay him down and let the waves wash away the terrible ache coming from everywhere.
The testimonies say you should feel at peace, because the body knows when it’s about to give up. He doesn’t want to die yet, though. Just for the pain to end.
“I get it.” Oh, he’s in someone’s arms. “I get it, man. Just hold on for a minute.”
Holding on sounds like too much work.
“Well, I came all this way, so it would be really rude of you not to try.”
Chanyeol is dying, and some asshole wants him to work on his manners.
The voice laughs. “Fair point.”
Secondsminuteshours blur together. Chanyeol remembers screaming at blades being poured down his back, the astringent scent of disinfectant in the air. Just kill me now, he thinks, crushing someone’s hand in his.
His eyes are guided closed from the sight of Junmyeon’s tear-stained face, and he falls into oblivion with the same voice saying just a little more.
***
The woman behind the desk gives him three folders.
His master file, paper already soft with years of handling, is thrown to the side of the bed. Chanyeol is now officially recognized as a Level Five mage.
Another is labeled EXO, encased in a metal envelope, and requires his fingerprint to open. He does a quick skim—there is Junmyeon with the word leader typed below his picture, and another older trainee he’s seen around SM, along with five other profiles. Team transfers aren’t new to him, but it’s the first time one has a cohesive name. That goes to his desk, for future perusal.
The third one is a special case, requested the day he did the interview on how his magik almost ripped him apart. It contains a written transcript of how he describes his Undoing, and the people involved in putting him back together again.
Kim Junmyeon; assistance.
Do Kyungsoo; neutralizer. Special transfer.
Chanyeol had asked for everything the world had on what he just went through, and the results are a sad pile that only makes the folder look half-bloated. Not enough have gone through it, not enough have survived.
All they know is that it takes a twin force of magik for it to stop. It would kill anyone else that tried.
Do Kyungsoo is a Level Five mage, just like him, fresh from his training in Japan.
Just hold on a little longer.
Chanyeol looks through what flimsy information they have. He sees an agent, an address, a number.
He goes to get his coat.