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Cursed you were born and cursed will you stay

Abomination . Stuck, alienation, cut off from his own kind. He belongs to no place, to no one, to no element. It is a great irony that he can’t go on land, able to swim in the ocean, his lungs half air, half water, his body nowhere to be found in the elements.

Freak. Unnatural.

He shouldn’t have existed. His mother should’ve wrangled his neck since birth, a union between a witch of the sea and a merchant of the land. He would’ve been better off with wings or a rotting carcass at the bottom of the sea, listless, aimless. Blood clots in great clumps on this part of the sea, even more water-repulsed than oil spills and it is through this blood and the mellowed out maroon spots from his father that he was born. He, the cursed offspring of a hideous she-demon and a weak mortal, cut off from the air and ocean. He, one who is crafted beautifully, appearances shifting from the multitudes of boy to man, demon to merman, fish to the sun’s reflection on aquamarine waters. He, the creature so tragically brought together, nursed by his mother, her claws tender on his cheeks, by his father, voice singing from the shores. He, who would not become one whole of anything, just a thing of a demon and man. He, not one or the other. He, harbinger of doom and despair.

Sea demons do not possess morals. Sea demons simply act. Their judgements are without regard to any preconceived notions of justice or morality or ethics. Their decisions are what are best in the situation, to their own benefits. It is this selfishness intrinsic to his kind, the half of him that resides in the waves, that brought upon the separation of him from his mother and those of her own.

He does not know what to blame or who to blame. He does not feel loss, but that was a home that belonged to him as much as he belonged to it and all that is left are the ruins of the witches’ summoning stones, at the bottom of the sand floors. It was ordained and a vengeance, all bubbling with the steam from volcanic pipes further into the ocean. It was partly his fault and it was partly the clan’s fault and it was in many parts, ordained by karma.

The demons were not kinder to him, but they did not reject his existence. He simply is parts of their own, in his limbs their blood flow through. Many of the demons are not purebloods – a great majority pumps the blood of the sea denizens, the merpeople, through their veins. His tail is a proof of that blood, scales glinting violet and crème green. The merpeople were kin to him, though he was not to them. A wretch as he was would not compare to the pure beginnings of the seafarers. Undeserving of a tail and lungs that let him breathe and contaminate the sanctity of the water around them. They casted him out, rightly so, at his mother’s fervent insistence. Please, he is only a babe. Please, he is of your blood. Your blood is his blood.

He does not have all of ours, she-demon. Your cursed life force flows through him. Only when he drains himself of his own blood and replenish with our own, we will not accept him. Contemptible wretch.

Mermaids are creatures of beauty, of superficial craftsmanship. They were born beautiful and continue to be beautiful, eternally. A thing of beauty is forever, its value never decreases, it will gain and consume its surroundings to sustain the life needed to maintain its beauty. Thus, they are ethereal, effortlessly. Seungmin too is of aesthetics value. He as a babe was indistinct from his kin of similar lifespans outside of the womb. They would not lose on any front if they had accepted, but they had not. It seems that Nature does not allow perfection on any of her denizens, plaguing the merpeople with hubris. Their hubris, their pride of their blood rights, had been infringed by this creature, a sea witch, a diminutive of her fair and distant kin, in a grotesque mockery of their fixed beauty . Thou shalt not linger. Thou shalt not stay.

The demons did not take him in. The demons did not cast him out. He was allowed to be by them, moving from place to place, travelling alongside gruesome sea monsters. The lonely attracts the lonelier. The half-blood attracts the half-blood. Monsters attract monsters.

Demons do not have permanent homes. They migrate, residence that are everchanging, the only constant in their life. The mortals have a saying for this phenomenon. Change is the only constant. It is befitting of the immortals, the ugly, despicable immortals.

They were feared as well as disgusted – sea creatures kept well out of their path, merpeople avoided them, water surrounding them parted ways. Isolation proliferated in the skipping of sunlight near the witches’ coven, the bristles raised by the animals, the cold shoulders and silences held ransom by the merpeople. It was a bleak existence. It was a cold existence.

They were feared, but they were not the true terrors of the depths. Unheard of eldritch abominations resided in the bottomless depths. Unfathomable deities. Gods. Named but not uttered. Known but also erased out of existence, the tapestry of the ocean cloaking and warping them out of its narrative. But they were, they are, and they always will be. There. Present. Indestructible.

They were sentient, or they were not. Nobody knows, nobody spoke the tongue of the Old Gods. They are the bowels of all life and they are the bearers of death. When the Gods wake – the ocean vacillates between destruction and healing, a pharmakon by the waters. Gods awoke in the time where Seungmin was hardly grown, twelve mortal years in living this wretched life. The Gods awoke, and the ocean must appease them. Feed them. Tempt them back into slumber.

The demons were witches and the witches were demons, though quite a few were merpeople, defectors from the clans of ethereal beings, to join the ragtag collection of sea-witches and demons. The demons read in the stars and the moon. They could taste the blood in the waves, the putrid stench of anger in the air. Sacrifices must be made. Six from their clan. Six from the merpeople. Six from the volcanoes. Six from the fishes. Six from the birds.

There were those who could understand the tongues of the Old, the magics no longer practiced. They could spare themselves, offer others in their place. But some demons were old, very old. The Gods were not unkind and being consumed by life and death was befitting of demons who did not belong on air or water. They were without morals, they had claimed. But when parts of the moon were eclipsed by shadow, they knew the time for the end was nearing. The coven was summoned, demons from across the seas and salty stretches on land masses gathered. Five were nominated. One more. They required one more.

Not once did any of the demon, many who had not seen or heard of him before, had encountered him before, mentioned him as a potential offer for sacrifice. There was the unspoken allegiance concocted without him knowing, of the perseverance of the blood bonds. He was tied to them by blood and they would not abandon him. Children are half beings. They have more life in them. They ought to be allowed a future.

The elders volunteered. One more was picked. The selection had complete. Tomorrow, they would be going.

His mother kept him close to her side. Rough scales scratching his newly-formed skin. Claws fierce around an arm, but not too much that it would draw blood. She handled him roughly, perplexed at how fragile he was to other sea demons, but in her rough handling there was overwhelming fascination and love. She held him in her arms, rough skin scathing babe’s skin, but the child need not sustenance – it thrived from nurture.

“Stay by my side. Wander and the current will take you away,” her nails, blunt and serrated, pricked his earlobes. He could not bleed easily – fragile and vulnerable as he was, his skin did not break as much as one expect him to.

“Do you want the current to take you away, little monster?” She murmured onto the skin of his forehead.

He did not want that. Living without the witches and his mother seemed awfully lonely. Miserable.

“Of course you wouldn’t,” she cradled the back of his head. “You are my own after all. Unable to live in solitude.”

Moonlight draped tendrils of incandescent violet and teal across the scales and skins of those who wake and those who never sleep. The coven had disintegrated, many travelling back to their respective homes. On this part of the ocean, he drifted idly by his mother’s side, melodies of the sea snails from sandy floors percolated the space. There were vast empty masses of unseen shadow. He did not meet the heart of the shadows. The witches had warned their young before. Never see into eldritch eyes. Never answer the call. Never bleed before an eldritch. Never give your name to an eldritch.

He did not look, but a silencing scream pierced through the undulating waters of the deep. They all turned their heads and, in the time, that he was yanked aside, breath knocked out of him, he met eye to eye with eyes deeper and darker than the shadows, a slit of silver in the impossibly wide pupils.

They selected six sacrifices that night to tempt the Old Gods back to sleep, but there would be more who would perish.

He could not move, could not utter a stunning spell. The magic in his vein cowered, bowing in submission before its creator. The God bared a mouth full of fangs, spirals of blackened fang protruding from steaming gums.

Inside the mouth lay a limp child. He did not want to call out for her, or question how she had been captured. All around them, the witches lingered, frozen in their stances too.

The God crunched its jaw shut. Stabbed fangs into gums. Grinded flesh into mortar of bones and blood. He had no time to recoil, but the disgust flared in bursts in his eyes, shining bright copper from his irises.

“Yield, before your Creator,” the eldritch croaked. He tucked himself in half, arms crossing his chest, waist bending down to his tail.

The Gods were not to wake by another seven tide changes. Why had one awakened by then, spring of his twelfth year in the sea?

Merpeople have eyes the colours of violet, the shade of his tail. Violet dots flashed in the distance, menacing and snide. Perish, they seemed to croon, be eradicated from our ocean. You are filth and filth belong in the bellies of the Creators.

He bowed his head, tense. They all were. Anticipating. Mouthing spells between their lips, runes flaring bright silver and red along backs and arms. Claws bared. They would defend their young, teeth and claws bared, every single one of them in the coven, until they are bled dry from their cores. All of it for him. All of it. The merpeople had poured sweetened poison into the ears of the Gods, whispering lies and poison against the witches. Many of them felt wronged by the existences of the aimless coven. They sullied the ocean. Brought filth upon the bloodline of the merpeople. They must be eradicated, not by strict blood bonds alone. Many of them were refuted the aid of the witches, their requests deemed too impossible to perform by the magic of the ocean. Often princesses across the seas desire to be rid of their tails, to become humans. Some wanted to become sea foam, to transcend beyond the listless existence of an immortal creature, unknown and unseen by many. No, we cannot be the answer. The impossibility of a magic practitioner could not be comprehended by the seafarers. How could you not? You are in tuned with the arts. Make things so.

No we cannot – the songs of apologies rang on.

Then you have failed us. Therefore, we will rid you of cohabiting this part of the ocean.

“I am Thorion and I have arisen,” the God gnashed their teeth again. “My slumber had been arduous. I am ordained to feed, on blood and life.”

“Oh revered one,” the elder, Tormer, bowed, “allow this old one to-”

But the God were not looking at the coven. The God were looking into him. Beckoned him to grant the black mass his name. The name he dared not utter, in fear of peril. To have another’s true name is to have their soul at one’s beck and call, to unheard and unnamed of power.

“You,” the word dawdled in the water, a light and deadly note to it, “are to be the sacrifice.”

His mother’s lips had formed the silent and devastated ‘No!’ The ripples curled around her, keeping her apart from him. Closer. The mass inched closer, teeth gleaming amidst the darkness. Blunt but able to tear through flesh.

“We volunteer,” the elder persisted, “to take the boy’s place. All of us. For him.”

“So it is,” the God grinned, malicious and mirthful, “you are prudent. I shall feast, on all of you all at once. A painless end. Come to your creator.”

He did not know his name but at that moment his tongue chewed the sounds of it inside his mouth, teeth grinding sounds into bubbles. He who was without direction. He who was ordained to be the sacrifice. He who sullied the sanctity of the ocean.

“I,” he swallowed, grains and sand lodged in his throat, “wish to bargain.”

“Bargain? You, with nothing but your name? You, the half caste?” The sound was the thing of slick and dark oil that oozed from oceanic floors, encroaching, insoluble. The stuff that wring the water out of fishes and turtles.

“I give you my humanity.” Convicted. Assured. He who was without direction. He who were rejected by both factions of man and merpeople. He rejected his humanity and ultimately his life. “If my name is what you desire, I shall give that up too.”

“So easily,” the God mused, “as if you have nothing to lose.”

“I have nothing to lose,” he affirmed. He did not have anything to his name or blood to his veins, everything of him and about him belonged to the ocean and the parents that were separated by land and sea. He did not live nor was he dead, stuck in limbo.

“Interesting. Very,” an oozy substance leaked from the fangs, “interesting.”

He could no longer see the moonlight or hear the frantic murmurs of his people. All the waters and all the surrounding were shrouded in a veil of darkness, darker than the moonless nights. It was as if the night sky collapsed onto the ocean and swallowed him whole, chewing him inside its shadowing cavern.

“I shalt not devour you whole, half caste,” the voice was all around him, through his ears, under his fingertips.

“I shalt eat away what you will become, from the inside. Starting with your blood and those pretty runes on you. I shalt subsume you, from the very tips of your fine hair to your bones, all of it with the stain of the eldritch, of the otherworldly. I shalt strip the humanity from your blood, drop by drop, until you are one with me. You shalt henceforth become I. Thou and I art one and the same by the time of your unravelling.”

There was darkness that entered his lungs, forcing its way in. He could not keep his jaw shut, could not purge out the thing crawling inside of him, torrents of shadows and the unspeakable and the unnamed residing under his skin. Immobilised, fettered, he could only protest in silence and defiance.

A chuckle.

“No use in resisting, little caste. I quite like you. This body of mine is too bulky, too hard to move in. With you I shall be lithe and fast. With I, you shall live for all of time and through all of creation.”

What of my family? He wondered.

“I will allow them to go, the sacrifices that did not become the slaughtered. It is most,” the eyes that were darker than the blackest night blinked, once more, flaring gold, before dissipating into a tendril of bright gold dust before him, dispelling the darkness, “intriguing.”

His coven was around him, but they did not come to him. They gazed at him, runes flaring, the marks of the practice of magic old and in their blood as much as their fearsome features. Nobody wailed in the night. The most silent slaughter happened on black nights and unspoken cry.

“What,” Tormer reached for him, “what did the God do to you?”

“He told me,” he trembled, the darkness coursing through veins, dark streaks under copper skin, “I am to become him.”

“Subsuming the boy. He is inside. Thorion is becoming him. You,” Yidhra, the witch of the moon, breathed with trepidation, “cannot escape this ordainment. You cannot resist.”

“Yidhra, please, my child, my baby,” his mother begged, all desperation. They could not touch him, for the darkness seeping out of his pores had begun turning the waters dark. They could not console him, for his ears could only listen to the whisperings of the Ancient Ones.

“Moira, the God,” Tormer argued.

“He is our own,” she argued. Moira the sea witch, the tormented soul with whom a scholar fell besotted to. Moira who had naught but her son, the fruit of that union, the reminder that one-sided love will slight children in one way and she had let the scholar suffer, thus she must suffer. Suffer, suffer and learn. She readied her runes, to cut into his skin, bar him of the crude invasion from the eldritch, beyond her abilities to. It was love, maternal protection of one’s young, instinctive and raw and fierce. She would trade places with him. She would give up her name and her magic to salvage him, the suicidal half-caste that inevitably wrote his demise in existing.

“Is there a way?” Yidhra whispered.

“Perhaps,” they all peered at the moon, “perhaps he can save himself. Not us. We cannot chase the God out of him. That is beyond our magic.”

“What is there that we can do?” Moira quizzed, urgency in her tone. Tornadoes were gathering, whirlpools and riptides under and over the water. By morrow light, there would be no more coven. They would have to rebuild, from sand and mortar.

Tormer and Yidhra invoked the moon and the stars and the water, calling upon nature to absolve the babe of his unasked sins. The witches joined hands, lamenting the unfortunate fate of all their bonds. He was the centre of their grief and songs, throat itching to sing but unable to.

“You are chosen, for you are without fear and empty. Receptive. You welcome the end and those who do are powerful. An Olden Magic shall expunge the eldritch from your soul, but at the cost of something dear to you and your name. To stall this subsumption, you must sacrifice a thing of your essence.”

“My,” he gasped, “my - music. I give up my music.”

Eyes of flickering yellow and red glanced at him in sympathy. Pity. To sing is to live as a seafarer. To give that which is essence to their nature, their blood, was as good as giving up life. But witches did not have anything to their name. He had even less, half-caste, abomination, filthy vessel for the eldritch.

“We ask for protection from the waters and from the sky. We ask for safe passages across the seas and lakes and rivers. We ask for the life to be restored back into his body. We ask the runes to stay within him. We ask for magic to flow through his blood. We ask-”

The roar of the water was near. Schools of fish and crabs fled, rampant. There was no longer silence – the cacophony of pandemonium and of a million living things fleeing drowned out the songs of the witches. They broke their circle, swimming to safety. Whirlpools amassed, growing and growing until it was headed towards him. He, who was still stunned. He, who had given away two things to his name. He, who had only magic, his mother and his name to stay afloat.

“ No! No! Come, come with me!” Moira screamed, hysterical from being separated from him. He stayed, glowing violet and crème green in torpid seas, smiling with resign in his eyes. He could not burden them any longer. Twelve years were enough, to cut off ties. Twelve years were enough, of raising a babe to swim by his tail. Twelve years were more sufficient than anything to separate, isolate, forget.

“Goodbye, mama,” he mouthed, sadness on the roof of his mouth. It tasted like bile.

“You will live. You will live and you will come back to me, do you hear me? You will find me again,” she roared. “I cast upon your name the morality and heart of a human. You are human, my son and you are a sea witch. You are not a monster. You are one of us and you are half of me.”

“My son,” Yidhra seized her wrist, “Seungmin.”

The roaring ceased in his ears. His name, unutterable by anything before. His name, something the eldritch had not taken. His name. Seungmin.

The whirlpools spun again. They sounded closer this time.

It had been many years since. The witches are no place to be found and nowhere to be seen. They have no home and they move to wherever the whirlpools take them. He searches for his coven, days bleeding into night, to no avail. The rocks of their coven are still there, when he passes by, in the faint hope that they would return. Navigation is arduous in the ocean, the witches most likely abided by his wish – abandonment. Left in solitude.

It is not a loss. They had casted protection spells for him, granted him shelter even with the God lurking under his skin. They had been kind, more than kind, but he understood that he would be a threat to their safety and he would not protect them from the abomination that he is playing host to. It is a lie and not a lie from the God. Thorion is his name. He pardoned his clan but brought destruction onto them paradoxically. They would perish, by existing alongside him. They would perish as they had let him be subsumed by the God instead of them being consumed by the God. He must leave. There is no safer choice. Distance will protect his clan. Loneliness will protect him.

Cheating an Old One in this way is unwise. There shall be repercussions. There shall be suffering brought upon him, the vessel of an Old God.

He had given up his humanity. Days passing by days, years passing into years and he does not feel human any longer, more eldritch, more anguish, hatred, disgust. He desired the subsumption of the eldritch, wanting to forget. Wanting to give up his name and his magic and not exist. Pass into non-existence.

Merpeople bypass him by the hundreds every passing year, in their eyes the fear that plague seafarers’ eyes at the utterance of the Old Gods now transpires onto him. He is feared, though he does not express the callings of the God gnawing at his inside. Resistance then desolation. There is naught to wake up to. There is none whom he can sing for and sing to. The witches do not soothe the suffering of others, but he is half human and still himself, his mind and soul the slightest bit tainted with the infestation of the God eating at them, and he craves that fulfilment of saving a human. Of guiding a tormented soul towards salvation. It is too benign, for a sea creature to harbour such thoughts, and perhaps his true nature is to ruin and consume, but dear moonlight from the heaven, these futile hopes chain him back to his name, not the Other’s name, but his own. Seungmin. Seungmin. Seungmin. His father gave him this name. He had seen the man twice. Seungmin , the man was in the bowel of a dingy boat, Seungmin.

He wept and cradled Seungmin’s head. His mother held him from underwater. Oddly enough he felt that both pieces of him had reconciled, in that moment, and he wept. Saltwater to seawater. They were both indistinguishable from each other, pouring freely into the ocean.

He should not have been born, this dread inside his gut inching and crawling into his chest, nestling there. There is no purpose in living. Why be born if half breeds are considered half creatures, their whole life? Why borne him if he would squander away his immortality for a glimpse of ephemerality, of a moment of purpose and living?

He ought to search for his father first. Bide the man goodbye. Thank him for creating him. For gifting him with a name, the name that holds the beast at the tips of his fingers and the bowels of his gut, under falling away rib bones. Fall to a weeping, sobbing mess at his feet and mourn the loss of his family, though he deludes himself every other day that it is not a loss.

Witches are seafarers. They circumvent the truth by half-truths and almost-truths. He too, insists on the almost-truths. He does not miss his family. He wants to live.

The wind howls in mockery as he emerges from the depth, faint sunlight against the bitter wind. It is even colder on land.

He does not know where to swim to. He does not have a place of return.

The killing occurs as he expects it to. He nonetheless wept for the slain, a sickly whale young, before, during and after the killing. Too soft, Thorion coos, all menacing, too weak. You will fall fast this way, little half cast. Fast and hard.

It happens as things do – outside of his jurisdiction, outside of his control. He, the half human, watches the deterioration of his humanity, erode and wear away as his hands and his teeth, fangs now, reminiscent of Thorion’s, tear and rend the colossal beast to meaty chunks. Blood spurts and he sees himself, through his own eyes, tips his head back and gargles the blood down his throat like it is a fine delicacy, worthy of consumption. He had bargained and peddled and waged silent sieges against the oppressor of his flesh and bones. He is without a will, that is certain, but he is not yet void of the scraps of humanity lingering in his ribs, in the same space as the evil lodged inside the bones, thrumming rhythm of the end.

“I thirst for blood,” the God intoned, for seven nights and seven days.

“We will not kill the young or the able-bodied,” he reasoned, “we will only kill the sickly and the old.”

“And if I refuse, disobedient wretch?”

“Then I shall also refuse.”

He carried his hunger for much longer than seven nights and seven days, knowing the blood on his hands will stain his soul a bit darker with the longer and more brutal the killing. He is without morals, as do his fellow heathenish kin, but he is not without compassion and the fleeting hope of recovery, of reversal to the simple and consoled stretches of journeying across the water, will return, if he maintains purity. If he outlives the God. If. What an odd sound. What a multitude of possibility. If he had not offered himself, he would be with them, in life and death. If he had not been born, the witches might have survived the unjustified vengeance wrecked upon their coven by the merpeople. If. If. If.

If he passed then, what would become of him? If he simply embraces the birds overhead, for them to feast on his rotten body, what would become of him?

The eldritch would consume the ocean whole and there would be no ocean left to mourn the loss of an insignificant half cast. Perhaps this is his purgatory. This is how he can atone for the sin of being born, of being born wrong, of being one so despicable, so contemptible, that this is the only redemption he is allowed – suffering for others’ sakes.

He cannot carry this hunger beyond ten passing days. He will waste away and the hunger will consume him from within. His abdominal walls had been laid to ruins. Water, water, there is water, all around him, but he cannot drink it. Shadows danced behind closed lids. The darkness welcomed him, of the nights spent aimlessly drifting atop the waves, moon’s light captured and stored in the enveloping darkness. It was only him, the water and the shadow.

He succumbed to his primal urges. To the God, who is primal epitomised. Succumbed to his creator and one who undid him, scale by scale, hair strand by strand, bone pulled apart one by one. Succumbed to the black, impure and unholy thirst for a taste of flesh and blood. He had caved in and there was no cure, no retrieval of that piece of humanity.

“Please,” he had begged before they approach the pod of whales, “kill the sick and the weakly. Kill with mercy,”

“There is no such thing as mercy in my understanding, weak and pitiable,” Thorion, in his voice, chewed the word, “ thing .”

“Mercy, or I shall ruin this vessel to such a point that your essence and mine cease to no longer exist,” he seethed, a voice and a will inside a rotting body. “Never underestimate me. You told me that I have nothing to lose. I have nothing to lose.”

The gnawing from the shadow silenced. Stunned silence that did not move shadow or burn the stars from the night sky, but percolated, drip by drip, until the ocean drains itself out of the eldritch, until the eldritch becomes mere specks of water droplets and no more.

He watches himself swim away, shedding the skin and fingernails of his human father, for they are his sacrifices, the libations to the God. Tears, acrid and like seawater, stream in rivulets from his eyes, conjoining into a trail of futility and oblivion into the ocean. He is of eldritch now, full of excess lust for blood. He shall slaughter. He shall feast.

“O’ Great One,” the whales bow, “please, do not inflict upon us the pain of death. O’, Merciful One-”

“The sickly one. You,” his finger, Thorion’s now, indicates to a palpitating one, afloat by the barricade of much bigger males, “are to be my sacrifice.”

“No,” the females wail, “she is only young.”

“Is she not sickly? She will suffer in more pain. I shall grant her a reprieve from that. Bring an early end to her suffering,” Thorion speaks in his voice and his eyes and his skin, but those words are his. Those words belong to Seungmin, him, his words.

His body too, but under the God’s control and as the whales bid goodbye to the young whale, they swim off, discarding tears into the ocean, in oblivion and futility. The whale closes her eyes. She wishes for the pain to stop, for herself to rest. For ever and ever.

Thorion crushes the light out of her as quick as breathing. A breath in. No breath out. The killing occurs as he expects it to. He nonetheless wept for the slain, a sickly whale young, before, during and after the killing. But Thorion dares not taunt his of his weakness. Perhaps he is not a weak, frail half cast as he was before

He continues swimming. He is to find his father, at all costs. He is to return the name his father had gifted him with, at all cost. Nameless and shadowless he will dissolve unto futility and oblivion in the ocean, cursing none but himself.

He swims for many days and nights, yet he still has not a clue of the whereabouts of his father. His name he carried, but his residence he did not. Their one and only meeting had been between air and water. There is no star that guide him to the man, no beacon of direction. The desolation is greater than ever. The loneliness is rampant. He wishes for a companion, for someone to fill in the spaces that he would otherwise sing in.

Singing. How dreadful. How utterly appalling it was to find the notes in his throat no longer heal and guide. How absolutely monstrous, the pain from his teeth, serrated by the regular meat consumption, only dulled in comparison to the monstrousness he was struck with when his songs, just before the tornadoes arrived, sweet and calming to all the creatures of the land, his voice, the pride of his name, had been blackened and cursed. Vilified by every sound of music to detriment the suffering souls who chance upon him. It consumed them, from inside to outside. Blood is no longer blood, tar and darkness streaming out, oozes shades of Thorion and the unfathomable depths onto the water, distinct and a tarry reminder of the consequences of his singing. Of the consequences of his being.

Which really is the curse, the loss of his music or the loss of him?

These days are the days where he knows that it is both. That it is himself that is the accursed one and within him these two abominations fester and bloom, casting bloodied and blackened light over the ocean front and floor.

A companion would not curb that burden. The horrible guilt of inflicting pain onto an unsuspecting one will eat him up even faster than the weight of the eldritch within him.

There is shore within the distance. Land. The sun is on the top of his head. Perhaps his sight is impaired and prone to tricks. Perhaps land is only an illusion.

There is land.

It is baffling. Utterly so. But there is land.

He does not speak the tongue of humans nor does he know how to communicate to the inhabitants. The land is just as wide as the ocean. He cannot assume this is the land of his father. His name is all that he has, unearthly ties to the land flimsy and intangible. Where can he search for a human amongst many? Wherefore is he here?

“ Father,” the words are in his tongue, not of the humans, “will I ever see thee before thy passing?”

Bleakness shrouds the stretch of land before his eyes. He cannot reveal himself to the humans, lest they fear him. He is an abomination, under the water and up in the air. He does not need another element to shun and ostracise him – the magnitude of differences between the merpeople and him were vast. He could may very well had been an undecipherable lump of unexplained existence if he chooses to foolishly reveal himself to humans. A monster from the deep. An eldritch abomination, in every sense of the word, emerging, to rend their flesh and bones from their small selves. It is laudable, their pride in their significance, where they are unaware of others outside of their understanding. Laudable, where Thorion would praise their pride, as he lures them into the deep and devour them all.

Many species are inexplicably guilty of hubris. It is their way of life. With the seafarers, it is their beauty – lasting into eternity. With humans, it is the pride in their importance, unaware or forgoing the infinite sky above their heads existing and the earth sinking far below their imagination. He who has no pride, is born without pride and exists without it – pities, very so rarely, those who are prideful. For he had witnessed death and insanity in both sea and air and the in between, his songs lamentations of their fall from grace, the trail of hubris following them to their demise.

They burn and fall like light from the night sky and the dark would remind him with every streak of light that there is a cruel beauty in undoing and in ending. Beautifully tragic. Dazzling demise.

His father he is unable to find. His father he is unable to apologise and beg for forgiveness from.

The sunlight peels the first layer of skin off his back. He submerges under water, the cacophony of the air muted and distorted. Streaks of sunlight woven into the curls of water currents stream in ribbons across the sand floor and his skin, his runes faintly reflecting the light.

How could he had been so ridiculous and so narrow-minded? How could he had been somewhat prideful in his searching abilities without guide, he who could have been a dazzling demise through his own undoing, his own stupidity, his own pride. Even he too cannot escape pride. Even he too can err in the same trajectory others had.

It brought a bleak sense of comfort and unity. A wave passes by him and carries away the bleakness with it. Good. His pride and errors have been forgone. He can now perform what he knows. Magic.

There is a foreign feeling. It arises from the possibility of uniting. He can find his father by magic. By blood, the unbreakable and undeniable bond between them. He can hold the man for the second time, grown now, be taught the human tongue, be forgiven or casted away by his parent, his sire.

He chants the spells for reunion of the lost, the phrases odd but familiar to his tongue. His music is the voice his mother speaks to him with and this magic is the voice the clan protects him by. Every intonation hums with the unspoken voices of countless others, who exist out and within him, occupying crevices that Thorion cannot even fathom approaching.

From his own hands and fingers grow sharpened and twisted claws and chanting still, he makes an incision around his little finger and around all fingers, calling upon the ancestry of that blood within his veins, sustaining life. Beseeching it to guide him to his sire. The cuts did not sting as he anticipated. All pain to him are relative. Dull throbs and nothing more, nothing less.

The runes on him glow bright red and silver, blazing through skin. From the hand away from the heart, faintly beating still, a thin light, borne of the cursed liquid of his life force, the colour of sea algae tainted with blood, drips, extends across the sand floor, running until his eyes cannot track it.

“Are you my guide to salvation, lovely light, shining on all which I cannot see?” He asks, looking naught for an answer or reply. It is a terrible habit, speaking to oneself, but he is without companionship. Loneliness will breed more loneliness if there is inaction. Active engagement with the self is a sure sign of incoming insanity and unravelling minds. There is pain both ways. He cannot escape the undoing of himself – either by the world or by himself, there is pain either way.

He cannot let that impede his progress now. He had made progress. He will submit fully and truly to the eldritch once he paid his dues to his father, his sire of this body.

The thread runs on and on, spanning across reefs and corals, his eyes catching the light of silver and red and bronze, refractions of light bending and unfurling onto sand and the scales of tropical fishes. It is warmer for him, the bright and blinding dots of the fish and tentacled beasts floating by, diaphanous one moment and tangible the next. He lingers, eyes trailing these creatures, content and at peace with their lives. Routine movements, treading the water. Routine lives, treading the water.

The thread tugs his finger forward. He must depart.

For routine to be established, there must be irregularity. For beauty to exist, there must be diabolicality. He is grotesque and diabolical, for beauty and ethereality to exist.

The thread runs for a while, running, endlessly so. The water tastes mellow, insipid, no longer tangible with salt. A river, perhaps, or a delta. The rocks are harsher, more protruding there. His father is not a seafarer sort, mayhap, this treachery in his search evident enough of his preference to not be next to the sea.

But he forgets mortals cannot sustain themselves on seawater as he wriggles his way past roots of mangroves and bits of water-soaked wood. The currents are rapid, and they wash over him in murky river foundation. He had swum in rivers before, travelled to deltas and watched the outcrops of rocks rising from the riverbed. There was an unknown taste of freshness in the water, the drink that sustained mortal life – so rare yet so desired. He heard stories from the tormented few, the ones who accepted salty seawater into their lungs, the ones so thirsty of water that they dived under the sea, gulping and drowning in the depths of the ocean. Their cries and howls of suffering warped and muffled in the deep end, drifting leisurely down and below the sun’s reach, through him, a lonely eldritch who could not weep or present them the proper farewell rites, their torment trapped and lingered in the bowels of the ocean till this day.

Hopefully his father had not undertaken such a route, in insanity, for those who die violent deaths at sea are cursed, just as he is. Those who are tied to the ocean are doomed to die within its embrace or yearn for it until they unravel themselves unto it. The thread tugs him forward more. Faster. Further. Just a while more.

He is almost there. He is near a point of salvation.

There is an establishment, a shelter of sort, by the shallow shore. His eyes, familiar to the unseen depths, shift frantically through colours, to shield his eyes from the glare of the sun’s light. Land animals roam freely, things with wings and birds’ beaks and legs with protruding bones from their earthen legs. It is a leisure and idle scene. His appearance is a stark contrast to the happenings of everything else. He, with his tail, the ocean in his eyes and webbed fingers. He with the ocean in his lungs and the sea in his throat, is not meant to be there.

A shadow arises from the shelter. He is loitering far from shore, but he can be seen. There is nothing out in the sea except for him, a lump of violet and crème green, a tailed monstrosity with changing eye colours, runes swirling bronze and red across shoulders, arms and chest.

The person speaks in the human tongue. He is disadvantaged. He might as well be blind and deaf – unable to understand and unable to respond. He does not back away, for the string on his fingers, dripping magic and blood, shoots forward and wraps around the person’s own appendages. There is no tail – humans do not have tails. They have four limbs instead of three. Those two extra limbs beyond their waist are called…legs. He had heard this information before, from passing dolphins and singing corals and from the fallen sailors thrown off their ships in the midst of storms. They cannot swim well with those…almost-tails. Could-have-been tails. They flounder at first contact with the water and submerge. Most do not emerge. It is a tragic fate. He sang mourning songs for the drowned and the fallen and their names are lost forever, except in his songs unheard by all.

The person advances, out into the sunlight. They may be a male or a female, the dichotomy of gender confusing to him, a creature of the deep. The thread tugs even harder, coiling around his…leg and up around his waist, curling around his torso and nestling on the side of the heart, opposite from him. His eyes, bronze, browner than ships’ hulls, hair, like sunlight slanting through the water to reach algae below. On his lips sits the name he gave to him. Seungmin. Seungmin.

The ocean warns him of never venturing onto an element not of his own. But no element is his own – he treads all the lines of land, sea and air. Fire is not an element known to him. No element is his own yet he can trespass unto all elements. He shoots forward as the man, his sire, his father, sprints to him, long strides into the frolicking seawater hugging the shore.

On his lips the name sings like a prayer of salvation. Seungmin. Seungmin.

He does not fathom how an embrace between his father and him was made possible, yet it did. They clutch and claw at each other, sobbing, neither one speaking a common tongue, yet they speak all the things known and unknown to one another.

His father clutches him dear between his hands. His name falls from his lips and also other things. He closes his eyes, indulging for the first time, signs of altruistic and genuine love. In the fervent whisperings, perhaps he can pretend ‘My dear, my beloved, my son’ was whispered against his hairline.

The new period is always a difficult one. He cannot dwell in the shallows for too long and his father cannot linger too much in the water. There is a creek winding from the bay to the back of the house. He undertakes that roundabout journey, just to reappear in his father’s backyard.

“ Hello,” the man lies a palm on his head of hair, “my dear.”

He understands these words. He hears them. He hears them beyond their sounds. They are also of tenderness and affection, draping him in tropical waters and warmth of the real sun.

Woojin,” his father points to himself. “Woojin,” he repeats.

That must be his name. He cranes his head up, throat hoarse. In the ocean, one either sings or remains in silence. He had no intention to sing, thus silence is his communication. His voice is not in use, rarely ever employed in wailing or verbalising thoughts. Muttering requires no voice, only the desperation for a task for one to speak to oneself. No need for a voice but a need for one now, to form the sounds of his father’s name. Names which are sacred and intimate. Names for seafarers which hold and carry their essence and shadows. Names for land farers which hold naught of the same significance.

Regardless, Woojin speaks his name with the inflections of a parent fond of their offspring. The reciprocation is expected from him, the offspring.

“Ooh-” he exhales.

The man’s eyes enlarge, knees slapping the dirt of the embankment. He had been reserved – he who is not one to initiate gestures of affection, starved of it since he had been deemed strong enough to swim by his own tail.

“Jin,” he gnashes his teeth together.

Woojin beams, bronze eyes disappearing behind lids, teeth all showing.

“ Dear ,” he points to him. Dear is not his name. His name is Seungmin. He supposes he must adopt that identity now. He is Seungmin. That name tastes like home and the warmth of Woojin’s hand as it weaves into his hair.

“D-dear,” he stutters. “Dear,” the sound wobbles, but it is enough of a ghost of Woojin’s sound.

“You are my dear,” Woojin smiles, mouth stretched to extremities. “My son.”

He does not understand the words still, but in them he hears home .

Woojin’s resolve does not corrode or subside – Seungmin’s appearance, stubborn, to the cost of the bruising of his tail in slithering past narrow and sandy shores with shell pieces that carve and cut into skin and scale, merely adds more water into the accumulating lake his father hoarded inside the back of his house. Their greed to extend their time – Woojin falling asleep on the shore, Seungmin persistence on drying up and expiring on the shell-littered sand shore, resting himself half on land and listening to his father recount his days, words not making sense inside of him, but the music behind those words does. He is diligent in his immersion to become a land creature but let himself fall victim to the cadence of his father’s songs – the man sings, as well as speaks, the foggy vagueness on top of water on colder days where the sun does not emerge, hidden behind clouds and rain in his voice and Seungmin, for all he cannot sing, sings in Woojin’s music. He is living, albeit onto another, but he had never felt such fierce yet gentle love, clear and infinite, from another soul. It is convoluted and hard to understand, this relationship and the benefits they reap from one another, so starved of love and being refurbished in one another. Seungmin devours the human tongue as Woojin drinks the clicks and taps of his witchy speeches – to the level of fluency, of interchanging tongues midway through conversations.

“Does your heart desire legs, little one?” Woojin queries, paddling on a boat, suspending on waters, far from his home.

“Like yours? Human ones?” Seungmin gazes at his tail, then Woojin’s legs. They are definitive markers of belonging to the land-dwellers, of bipeds, of walking things. Seungmin is not a walking thing. He is born to the ocean, water in his veins besides the toxic venom of Thorion’s festering parasitism. He does not wish to be human – never had he wished to have that fate of vulnerability. A seafarer, yes, absolutely, most emphatically, but never a human. They are frail, and their lives short. He never wishes to be fully human – fully merman, yes, but fully human, never.

“I do not wish it so,” he bows his head, remorseful that he does not wish to be kin to his father, rejecting his features. “I meant no disrespect, father, it is simply-”

“I know you do not wish it so, my dear,” Woojin threads fingers into his hair, sun-baked, midnight sky now tinting with a hue of twilight. “But I have the magic to make it so. If any times you wish to be on land,” a swallow, a movement of the throat, an Adam’s Apple, as he had learnt, bobbing, “I have the means to provide you with movements.”

“Do you wish it so, father?” Seungmin quizzes. Hears the tentative, unspoken words.

Woojin colours under the baking sun. Gives an inclination of his head.

“Then I shall have legs. To be closer with you, father.”

He had swallowed and kept the whispering and cadence of the human tongue nestled under his breast and inside his throat. Words and songs he can sing and trade in. He treads land once in a fortnight, staggering, unstable, shaking – managing on one or the other leg, then both as Woojin guides him through, arms clasped around Seungmin’s thin shoulders.

Seungmin is half a human with his songs ripped away from his throat but Woojin is the sun come alive on copper-seared beaches with sand grains the fading shades of corals and if the clouds are in the right places then his father sings for him, sings for the sky and the sea.

His time on land is limited. He burns every time he defies his birth form, daring to toy with creation – he and Woojin both. His father salvaged the scorching wood, inextinguishable despite their many attempts at dousing the flame of the hearth into a cooled reprieve. Woojin, foolishly, or perhaps not, reached a hand, grazed fire, and grasped unburning wood in his fingertips, breathing magic onto what once was a tree branch, giggling as golden light washed Seungmin in blinding glow. There were legs and toes and feet and the wood burnt a little, orange tip lighting without flame.

“When the wood completely extinguishes,” Woojin held him, hands wandering to knees and shins and words for body parts that Seungmin did not know yet, grasping at him, checking that everything was in place. In his eyes, there was the blatant fear of losing Seungmin.

“When it extinguishes?” His voice was hoarse, never having to speak out of seawater for as long as this.

“You can never emerge on land again.”

That was not a loss Seungmin particularly mourn about. Woojin, ecstatic that his son was mobile, began taking him to town. To the forest. Into his home. During starless nights where they lay in Woojin’s cot, another one in a different room left vacant, Woojin sang him to dreamless slumber, free from the clawing and hedging of Thorion.

He is faring better than when he first stepped on land – the sensations are alien to him, solid rock under the toes of his magicked toes and feet. He twitches and attempts a great many tricks on the human limbs, amused out of his own mind of the splitting appendages. They do not come together. They tear apart, sinewy tendons from his tail shimmering and define into knees and ankles and thighs, all there, all shivering.

Woojin watches him, a smile playing on the bow of his lips. But his eyes do not smile.

On the thirteenth sunrise, Seungmin asks about his mother.

It seems only natural that he would. His mother is away, infinitely, until he perishes, or she perishes, perhaps to never meet again in the intermission. He had bubbled and brimmed over, spilling the unfortunate events that had spurred his sudden interruption to Woojin’s idyllic life. Thorion was silenced, appeased, perhaps by the torment of Seungmin’s struggle to stand on his two feet and the stuttering of his tongue, unfamiliar with the trilling of the humans.

Woojin was understandably horrified, shocked, the disbelief in his eyes conveying all Seungmin could feel but could not emote. Gasping, his father clutched him, tight and tighter, until the light could not tear them apart as the storms did Seungmin and Moira, and under the pitter patter of summer rain seeping into autumn, Woojin sang a song for him, in the name of someone else.

“Do you remember my mother, Moira?” They had stepped onto safer ground, sands infused with olden magic, the stuff coalescing in his veins.

“I could never forget her,” Woojin lets loose a laugh, to his booted feet and the sand grating to the soles. “I am sorry, so so sorry, dear. There are no words in which I can express how utterly crushed I am.”

The apology rings with vacillating regret and gratitude. It seems that Woojin cannot decide on which emotion he would implement inside the syllables of his speech. Seungmin needs not apology or decision. The Elder One is in contentment. There is no uprise, no change, no roar in which he must submit to.

“My birth was of love, father. It is my existence that is not. Some creatures simply cannot accept things as they are. The deviation from what they always knew proved too compromising.” Woojin glances at him, the teasing edge to his lips, curling on the shadow of his closed and flaking lips. Seungmin speaks well, too well, the roundabout and hymnic nature in which he is accustomed to amusing and convoluted to his father’s ears. He is teased by his phrasing and structure, the words tumbling in formality incongruous to his surroundings. The village that Woojin goaded him into visiting – education or formality were not of these people whose eyes and skin belong to the bowels of the ocean and their lungs half full of brimming seawater. There is no need for words here, superficial and lies, where music can speak just as much.

He swallows down his speech, boils and strips the components down to the barest level, lest the shadow of a smile blooms into one.

“They cannot cope with me. That is why I cannot be there,” he decides, dragging the words, can taste the air on his tongue. “Or anywhere for that matter. You are the only home I know.”

Seungmin’s arm promptly ignites and the flame travels down the human skin of his back. There is no need for clothes here where the sun rises high in cloudless expanses where no clouds lie. At best, Woojin goaded him into a pair of trousers in rushed explanations of ‘modesty’ and ‘conservatism’ of the islanders, whom would not pay twig or seashell on whether his privates were on display or not, but for the comfort of his father, he donned on garments, at a distressing speed inside their home after transforming out of the water. Now, with no shirt on and the wood piece burning, they must return to water and douse him thoroughly in the ocean and chat by the sea.

The villagers watch him then, the titular son of the physician who is clueless on land and speaks in tongues and catches on fire under the sun. A boy not of human origins. An impostor, donning the skin of a human.

Eyes watch them as Woojin and Seungmin limp off.

“Mother,” he gasps, delirious at the burns on his back, shoulders and arms. Words pour out of him now, whispers and hymns from a forgotten time. “Mother. Moira.”

“Chan loved that woman,” a sound that was meant to be a laugh fills in the grunts of effort in them both hauling Seungmin into the delta.

“Chan?”

“My beloved. Go under. Come back up when you feel better, I’ll tell you everything then.”

Around Woojin’s neck, there is always a chain of rusting silver. He had never asked, and his father never share, but the introduction of the name points him to the direction of the necklace.

“Who’s Chan?” The sun is setting and half of Woojin is submerged underwater. The man’s eyes are attached to the horizon, not to him. Not for a while now.

“How is love,” Woojin pulls out the rest of the chain, two metal plates clinking onto one another, “in the bowels of the ocean?”

He waits. It seems the question was not rhetorical.

“I cannot recall, but I suppose as long as the parties are consenting and content, they are to form a familial unit away from their forebearers and kin.” His answer is formulated, for he had not witness this ‘love’ that the humans sang odes of – it was a higher magic unimaginable to any sea denizens. They themselves are not delusional sorts – magic is a skill and magic is confined as much as it allows them to and if love does not wish to reveal its crafts to them then they might well let it be. Nothing pleasant arises out of meddling with unknown magic.

“How structured,” Woojin muses.

“Love does not exist where I live, father,” he admits, morose. It seems he had failed to address the underlying question. “This Chan, did you…perhaps…love him?”

“Till the end of time and beyond.”

Woojin is incandescent under rolling waves of orange purple sky, magic percolating from the tips of his hair and he comes to understand that this magic does not appear from the incantation, but from within. Woojin oozes with magic – is magic himself.

“How utterly rare, father. Sea folks go about their long lives unfeeling and yet here you are, with something that many of us would trade our names over.” Turning his eyes to glimpse the disappearing sun.

“You would give away your name?”

“And more, father. Love is an ancient magic. Many would willingly trade listless existence for a glimpse of the sublime.”

A look at Woojin’s faraway eyes, at a point on the horizon, tells him and the wind around them of how that had played out. Subliminal, indeed.

“Is Chan,” he ponders, “away?”

“For a while, at least,” the man shakes his head, “but we’ll see each other again. We’re both firm on what separation means. Figured we will come back to each other at some point after being away. There is no separating us.”

He supposes that is why many bargained away their mortality. To glimpse a picture of a life with purpose, with an anchor and pillar of support, would elevate the common animal to a higher form of existence. They would be…happy.

Happy.

What a strange taste. Lumpy and grating sand.

“I’m glad for you, father,” he hums, not entirely insincere, despite sounding emotionless almost all other times. “It’s rare to be exposed to love such as yours.”

“That sounded almost sincere,” Woojin lets out a laugh, empty, idle, just to fill up the silence. “You are not angered, for I loved Chan and not Moira?”

“Love is magic, father, and magic comes in multitudes. It would be foolish to assume that there would be only one sort of love where quite frankly, magic practitioners aren’t entirely sure of the shades and branches of water bending.” The sun is in his eyes and he evade the jab of warmth, too optimistic and blinding for the end of the day. He catches the light in his father’s eyes, affixed to the horizon, praying for a return of a lover whose transgression is beyond the horizon line.

“Very wise. Don’t you believe then that parents ought to love one another in a family?”

“There is nowhere in my veins that do not believe you love mother. Just because it’s a different kind of love that conceive an offspring does not invalidate its worth. I love you, father, in a different way than I love mother, but it is love all the same. Humans have questionable distinctions for concepts that are not mutually exclusive. You cannot,” he tips his eyes heavenward, “make the abstract into the concrete.”

Woojin unwinds the chain around his neck, the metal plates smooth and unscathed. Bang Chan. Kim Woojin. Scribbles of numbers. Words he could not recognise.

“Ours was a love that cannot speak its name,” he touches a fingertip to the plate with the inscription Bang Chan. “Powerful things must be suppressed, for its reach would be unimaginable for the mortal mind. Ours was forbidden. We could not love and be accepted by society, not with us being men. War was prevalent, little one. Violence haunted the street and in the shadows. The little things can get anyone killed. Fingers pointed and words signed death warrants. If one did not die on the battlefield, then they would die at home, where hysteria ruled.”

Seungmin keeps his words under his throat, little finger humming bright algae green with a thrum of kin and family and beginning.

“He was drafted, into the military.” Woojin’s head dips. “Big, strong guy. Could break wood with his bare hands even though he would get splinters in ‘em. Couldn’t stay, couldn’t make up some excuses about having a sweetheart at home and she really needs him. He gotta go.”

“It made sense then that where he goes, I would follow. Applied, got approved, packed my bags and went into training camps with him. Civil wars were messy stuff – we were just shooting at uniform and when the dust cleared, the ground was blood red. I was about nineteen. Nineteen and I was killing people and that ate me up. I was just a mage from the countryside, why was I out in the field killing others. Cried about it for days, offered up countless prayers for the souls who died. Nameless. The name tags were here and there and they couldn’t exactly put names to half the fools whose faces got blown off by rifle fire. Just…blood and bones. Indiscriminate remains of living boys. It was sickening. I was too upset that the commander moved me to the hospital bay and ordained me to work there. I’ve always been a healer. Makes more sense for me to stab someone to life rather than shoot at a dying corpse.”

“We wanted to give blood, breath and bone to someone,” Woojin tells the sunset. “Before we left for war, we swore by each other. An oath, a binding promise that tied our souls as one.”

“He wanted to have children, but by binding himself to me, he lost that chance at giving life. Some days I’m not quite sure if he regrets shackling himself to a person who could not provide to him what society deems to be the definition of a marriage.”

Seungmin shifts, scales scraped raw by the splintered shells interlacing the sodden sand.

“Father, if you let society overwrite your definition of a family, then you will never have a family of your own. It would only be a unit approved and owned by society. Perhaps society is different on land, but you own autonomy over boundaries in your private happenings and it begins with how you choose to exist as a familial unit. To let others tell you how to live your life would just be them living vicariously through you. Surely,” Seungmin swallows his words, “you elected to ignore that philosophy?”

“Quite extensively,” Woojin hooks his nose heavenward, laughing as Seungmin stutters an offended gasp, the tone of his speech mirrored in his father’s. “Don’t look so baffled. I can get influenced too.”

“I didn’t consider myself to be of influence,” Seungmin admits.

“Because you are a child?”

“Because I am a half caste and a child,” he concedes.

“But you’re my child,” Woojin reminds him, softly, fingers skimming the skin on his knee. “I am not always right, darling. No one ever is. We try our best to correct ourselves every day. You are my betterment, my chance to be more than I am. That is one of the reasons why parents have children. You allow this old fool a chance to be saved. I must thank you, infinitely.”

His heart throbs. It hurts, but it stitches itself open with the blossoming wound. There is so so much unconditionally love that requires nothing in return. He wants to sidle up to Woojin, press his skin to the man, so close that they merge into one, that there is no space for wind or sunlight to pierce through their conjoined forms, so that the love that flows through the man crafted of bronze, eternal flame, singeing clouds would permeate into his flesh.

It is a wonderful fantasy and one he would never live out.

He leans in closer. He has a name. He has branches and he can root. He will stay here where he is wanted. Woojin’s skin warms like sunlight brought on earth.

“That’s lovely, father,” he whispers, “I truly mean it.”

Woojin doesn’t respond, only cards his fingers through Seungmin’s hair.

“Moira was stranded, a few footsteps away from my boyhood home. I nursed her wounds, healed the cuts and abrasions. She returned to the sea and left a promise to repay me for my kindness. I didn’t hold her to it – perhaps I am too used to giving and not receiving. But Chan and I were swimming by the canal and she returned, bearing the magic of conceiving. Water magic. She warned us of the difficulties. Land and water will not quite…combine. We were competent magicians, but conceiving life outside of nature – that was a gamble very few undertook and succeeded. But you were to be our successor, our betterment, our redemption, the manifestation of our love. It was such a gamble because life is always that – a gamble. Chan…Chan was ecstatic. He couldn’t wait to hold you. You’re to be our child and you were this hope, this love we could hold onto.”

Seungmin does not protest when Woojin crushes him closer. There is that fear of loss. That fear of being torn apart. Separation, but this time, twofold.

He holds onto the man tighter. Magic had already bound them in blood. It will not be too much to bind them in flesh, will it?

“But humans – they, we, I’m not quite sure there is a side I belong to anymore – fear…the unknown. Two men conceiving a child with a water demon – that frightened them. There was a plot hatched, designed for our demise. They were bringing fire to our stone foundations, set us ablaze, and everything they couldn’t understand to ember. Ashes and dust, we would become. Cursed, burnt to the ground where we could reunite in the aether. It was monstrous. But Chan, honed from the training from the battleground – he left briefly for resolving a border conflict, before my forms were approved for enlistment and training – got an earful for signing up without him knowing – knew. He knew. He knew something was off, was wrong. Wrote me a message, told me to stay far away from our home. Don’t go into town. Better yet, hide in the water or within the trees. He’ll be right back.” The sun tints purple and Seungmin does not budge from the unrelenting grip Woojin traps him into. Tears soak into his hairline and skin.

“The villagers set the house ablaze. They took him away too. I didn’t know, couldn’t turn back. He went away and all I had left of him was a dog tag and you. Moira kept you submerged and through the cities we travelled to, I never once gave away my name. Always a different identity through every hamlet. I was grieving, monstrously so. But I have you. I still have Moira. My destiny was held tightly in her hand.”

His voice breaks, throat hoarse and clipping away the cry bubbling over onto his tongue. It drenches Seungmin in a pain understood, however not felt.

“Chan let me go, out of his overwhelming love. I was too shaken up, too fragile, prone to break. Your life with me would not have been a life safe or loving. I could not provide for you. I wanted you to have a childhood plagued not by the leering eyes of those who shared half your blood. I wanted you to not know of the horrors of the humans.”

Seungmin is beginning to see the goodbye in Woojin’s words. No. No nononononono don’t let me go please father nononono –

He does not speak. Does not budge. Desperately begs the blood in his veins that his suspicions are not confirmed.

“Father,” the disuse of his voice grates on the corners of his eyes, “the merfolk was not kind to me.” I would have thrived under you, safety or not.

“I gathered, sweetheart, I gathered. Moira sent for me. I am so, so sorry, my dear. I have failed you, on numerous counts-” the horrible realisation dawns upon both their faces – they are saying goodbye, a painful one at that.

“Don’t say it. Please. Don’t say it,” he begs, the name given to him slipping away. Who is he without it? Just a half caste, drifting in the currents.

“I must let you go, sweetheart. I can’t – we, we can’t – it’s not safe for you. You must go, darling. I cannot – I’m too weak, baby. I would not be able to keep you safe with my magic. The whispers have been sparked up again. I should not have paraded you, like a trophy, for all these times. I should have been selfish, caged you only to the confines of my home, but I wanted the world to know of you. My darling.” Hands frame his face but he can’t feel their warmth anymore, the compulsion to fling himself into the water murmuring - heavier and heavier. He wants to cringe away from the touch – it conflicts his insides. Does he want Woojin to reassure him that he is there or does he want to scream, the betrayal rolling in waves, ocean water lapping at his tail, scales serrating Woojin’s skin but he’s hurting, he’s thrashing, diving, lunging into the water, screams stuck in his throat. He is casted away he is casted away heiscastedawayheiscastedawa-

“Seung-!” Woojin’s cry is muffled by the crashing embrace of the water, swallowing Seungmin first by his temples, nose, mouth, neck, shoulders, hips, the base of his spine, tail. There is no sound, nothing, nonononononono if he cannot hear then it must not be – it cannot be – how could it be?

He leaves Woojin, hands outstretched, grasping at air and a slipping tail, too quick, too sharp, fins filleting skin, diluting blood into seawater.

He stays in the water, sulking.

Grieving.

Denying.

Raging.

Thrashing his tail about. There is no sound or sight of the water. He is in the deep end – and not, all in a maddening swirl. Keep still. Keep in motion. Breathe. Stop.

Did you think, foolish thing, that there is a place for you, land or water? That voice murmurs in his own voice, the voice that does not quite belong to him, anymore than it has the right to, someone else.

By the stars, he wants to tear free from this skin, from the heart that evidently, can be rent apart. The place where blood meets feelings – that accursed atrium with its valves and chambers – all of it, take them away. No need – that had been the way it always had been – no love, no want, no place.

Oh love, it drove you away. Taints you with its sweet tendrils of poison. How was it, little half caste? Enough for your blood to turn vile yet?

He swims further and further down. Away. Away from everything. Nothing can subsist in the bowels of darkness. Nothing but the Old Gods, and him.

He returns, because his sustenance derives from continuous pain inflicted onto his body and the soul he bargained away, to store the hideousness of the unseen depths in his very skin. He subsists on pain – others and his own – in an act of self-cannibalism – the shredding and the inhalation of his own blood and flesh – he winds himself up, crooked spine and tail folding and shooting towards the waterline. His hope, little as it is dwindling, hovers in the spaces of clenched teeth, hesitant of anywhere else to manifest.

His eyes open in the air and his blood sings of imminent danger. Not to him – none can be a danger to him, just himself.

Father.

He calls on the power of the wind, almost soaring on the crashing waves, washing him ashore. No. Gods alive and slumbering. Nonono –

He throws himself, tail and all, onto coarse sand, littered with splintered shells that slice into his scales and under his nails. His blood, a darkening liquid, pours from under his scales. It is no longer red, or tinted with gold. No no no no please no -

Woojin coughs out another bout of golden blood, ichor of the gods residing in the air, body bowing from the bed. Dry air and the slanting light crisscross, and in their intersections, he sees.

His father wears the illusion of a merfolk, human legs flickering from concrete and defined appendages to shimmering scales, bronze and emerald, his colouring.

The fool. The absolute fool. A martyr, all three of his parents are. All of them, sharing the same tendencies to offer themselves as sacrifices before danger, to preserve him, the cursed wretch that dares to delude himself into visions of value and capability of being loved by those whose blood is not tainted with the stench of a murderer.

He had exhausted all capacity of a merfolk on land – he is stranded, stuck before the small path winding into the always open home. Footsteps retreat from the open doorway – a stampede of an aggravated and aggressive crowd, incited by their inability to understand and accept the existence of others. Scorch marks on the wall, flames flicking across the flooring and wardrobes, candles knocked onto the flaming ground. It is utter and pure chaos, and he can only watch as Woojin curls further into himself, mouth dropping agape in silent pain.

It is pain that he empathise with, and he curses his existence as the thing that he is – half land and half water and cursed either way, unable to advance forth to save the one who had sheltered and drew the unjust fear of the mob onto his own shoulders, letting that fear rip him apart. Torn apart, chewed on, trampled over and cut apart - all for this foolish love, all for a gateway that obscures the inevitable demise that would befall him.

The cry he wants to give, the least he could do, is stuck inside his accursed throat. His father twists and turns, life falling from his limbs and under his skin, staining the floor red and gold - drip drop drip drop drip...drop.

It would fall and fall and fall, until there is no more. All the ocean that is in him will fall and fall away from his skin and bones, for the impersonation of its own, for the sacrilegious crime that a father first and magician last dared to commit - to love a thing that is unsalvageable, even to the degree of bargaining his life in protection of this wretch from the deep.

“Sweetheart,” his father croaks, for a father understands that the name of a child is obsolete in the place of intimate pet names. A breath gulped greedily inside his lungs. Another.

“Will you not sing for me, my darling?”

Could he deny the request of a dying man, delirious in his pain and suffering? The song he yearned to sing, the want and need curling and churning under his skin in a whirlpool of insistence, never leaving, never quiet in its roar, advocating and screaming to break free from under his skin.

Could he deny the one he loves the parting gift of a swift and decisive snip at the teetering, wizened tree branch, a second or five away from gasping in the final gulp of air - then perishes.

Oh sing, ye of the cursed bloodline, the malice in him trills, ecstatic, derived entirely from cruelty, at his resignation, the cornering of the prey, at long last, succumbing, deep below, to the primal and instinctive, to his true calling.

A killer.

A gateway to death. A transitory point, teetering at the cusp of death and the dying throes of life.

(A vessel for a thousand and one songs waiting to be released into the infinite waters of the sea and landscape. A child. An orphan.)

He sings. And weeps.

The treelines greening the house droop and dwindle and fall as his songs croon of a safe passage of a bright soul unto the other world.

He is of a bleeding heart and he is of open wounds, the blackness of shadows leaking out of his pores. The weight he carries from his father’s passing is heavy, persisting, and even though it is for his safety, his protection, he who is a child forever in the man’s heart, he sulks and throws tantrums from the house by the ocean to this pier in the middle of nowhere.

He did not stay for very long after freeing the animals. Nor did he linger enough to gaze upon the already departed visage of his father, at peace, after tracing the names of three people he held dear on his lips. Seungmin. Moira. Bang Chan.

His heart bleeds, evidently, but he swallows the bile arising from isolation, from grief, to be reassured of the fact that in the realm of the rested, Woojin’s soul is reunited with Bang Chan’s. It is a transition from one realm to another, this one to the one next to it, him lingering before he must return to his creator. He as Woojin’s son barely had time to cover the man’s eyes, golden like the bronze he dearly loved, before the shudders of withdrawal emerged from the dying flame. They wanted to extend his stay, but they knew the spell of the human legs can only sustain for so long before the fire expires, and he loses the pretence of humanity, of wholeness. He had staggered, stumbled, fell, grief settling into the very bowels of his being, rending him apart. He was alone, once more, accursed immortality prolonging his existence where all he desires to have, to be, was to lie next to his father in that house by the ocean. Even that seems a far-fetched dream - a wish for death, for the end. The wood of humanity was wrenched from his hands and the fire of kind death falling upon Woojin’s string of fate, not his own. The house had gone up in flames and with it, everything of his humanity. All of it, gone, up and above in flames.

It is however many days since the passing or years – truthfully, he cannot distinguish the passages of time filtering through the horizon, he who is numbed with grief and denial. He had forgotten the way back to the house – it is no longer there for him to return to, with only the memories of living there lingering and tormenting him. He wailed and lamented, songs of mourning bleaching innocent animals black, impure and unholy, death grazing them and stripping their life out feather by feather, stomach by stomach, eye by eye.

He emits a dissonant sob, eyes swollen by tears not fallen. staining his face with the colours of dying corals – orange pink of animal flesh. His grief seems reasonable yet invalid in the same vein – him sobbing to no avail over an inevitable occurrence. Mortality winds to a close everywhere and all the while – yet he continues to carry out his lament. The tears cascade in rivulets of oblivion and futility into the ocean, salt water unto salt water, where he is not quite sure if he is not of the ocean and the rain, pouring in torrents.

By the seventh windfall, a creature emerges from the gulf. It is a dark, hideously haired thing, eyes peppered with unseen depths, all the secrets stashed away in the volcanic vents under sand floors. Its mouth never stays in a resting place -rather twisting and bending in contemplation and judgement of its ambience.

“Cease this racket.” The eyes never quite meet his, but they sear deep into his trachea. Oesophagus. Lungs. He remembers the terms, the respiratory system that Woojin was insistent on him memorising. It would be of help. You may find yourself granting breath to another one day.

His eyes brim once more. Dreadful. A wretch.

“Do ye not hear what I just said or are ye hard of hearing?” The dreadful creature repeats, impatient. It does not possess a tail, tentacles for its lower body, webbing covering its phalanges.

“I heard ye,” he hiccups. “But I cannot cease. It hurts.”

“Where, you wretch? I sense no pain.”

“Pain not seen,” he growls, gnashes his teeth. There is no name that ties him down – that name died with the torching of Woojin’s home. He is nameless, yet again – one who gave him name had departed and he has no one, yet again.

“That must be devastating, except there is no ground for this hideous one to empathise with you and I beg you, cease the racket. Live, die, suffer, scream – it is of no matter to me. Do it elsewhere – you are disrupting the tides and the crabs are revolting outside my home. Cry in the thunderstorm and rain, you piteous thing. Do not cry at the open water. There is no mercy or comfort there.” The creature casts unsympathetic eyes upon him. He is pitiful, yes, but rightfully so. He cannot cease to exist – he cannot simply exist either – there is entrapment, all around him. Barriers upon barriers. Tear one down, another crops up. Climb where there is no place to climb. It snuffs the breath out of him. He is furious, his anger fusing with the infinite rage that the Elder harbours. He glows, takes away all the darkness around him, tail coalescing in nightmarish dancing underwater.

“What do you know of loss,” he cries, voice unbidden, “to dictate my movements? What of loss do you understand, to blame my mourning?”

“Enough,” the creature returns, clipped. “Enough to conclude that your grief had been excessive. Whatever loss you had suffered had already been mourned past its due. You are simply spiralling on your unbidden grief. You are inconveniencing yourself as a sort of self-flagellation, to restore goodwill to the what had left. But that is futile, you mewling cur. You are troubling not only others, yourself, but creating wreckage on a past and buried issue. Did you lose someone? Would they then not be burdened if you grieve their passing to the point of destruction?”

He ceases his wailing, bewildered. Indeed, there is an excess of grief. It is as if all grief bubbled and boiled over, with the death of his father as a catalyst. Why had he reduced himself to a blubbering mess, a pathetic diminutive in the eyes of the heaven, water and a beast more monstrous than him from the depths? For certainly, his life is plagued with losses. He is no stranger to them, each loss a tear in his soul, quickly numbing, until the wounds are cauterised and numbed down, a vague phantom pain of trauma passed.

Where then, is this pain that he is insistent upon for the indeterminate passing of days, excessively mourning for a decision he had foresight toward? He knew the risks, accepted the risks. Came to terms with it, both by Woojin’s side and in his respite in the deep. All things come and pass – human lives an integral unit of that ever moving cycle of life, in which he himself cannot play god and reverse or pause the flow. It goes as it does. Nothing stays living for a long time, and remain the soul that it was born with.

“I – he’s gone, and I don’t know how to breathe, to walk, to think, without him -”

The creature casts him one last look, before dipping under the sheen of saltwater.

“I do believe that when somebody’s father passes, they cry.”

(So he does. Cry, without howling. Grieve, without knowledge of anything else.)

He commits the sight of his little haven, alive in his memories, once, twice more – and swims away.

He does not remember the way back.

The little beach with a near burnt charcoal remains buried under the sand.

Years or months or however long passed. He had long since grew jaded, starving through the days and periodically feeding, just enough to proceed on his long pilgrimage, until hunger and exhaustion tug at his flesh and demand him feed.

Time had passed, and newer humans replace the old ones of the past. They look stranger now, different to what he was used to, but he had no desire to step foot on land and associate with the murderers of his fathers and the pursuers of his mother. He had grown adverse to them, not intolerant, but unable to coexist as he had, in the same realm as they walk. His presence remains an enigma to them, golden green eyes tracing the shapes bounding by the waters, never emerging.

He lives – not quite. He comes to perish – not quite.

He wakes and the sea churns, water jostling his irritated limbs.

There is the sound of a troublesome human above the water and he is insistent upon not emerging. But he had not seen the sun for a quarter of a moon’s cycle, his sulking infringing upon his health where the scales on his back threaten to flake off in clumps of flesh and dried blood, not ideal for either the fish or him. The sun, cursed orb, draws him up and above from the aquamarine blue and he hears the gasp from the human boy, bouncing on his heels from the outcrop of rocks leaning into turbulent seas.

“Hey! Hey! Hi!” The chit squeaks, nonplussed by the crashing sea foam. “Shall I join you?”

“No,” he denies curtly, nose and mouth bobbing in and out of churning waves. “I am to be gone from here. You are too, little chit.”

“You have a tail!” The boy begins to skid into the rock pools. There is a drop from the rocks, already raised much higher than what a human would imagine, the drop reaching to the dead corals below. The water fills and fills the gap, coagulating, before it spits out a colossal wave of saltwater, gargling in shells and weed and human bones. The little fool’s life will expire before he can reach adulthood.

“Yes,” he approaches the outcrop tentatively, swimming much closer to land than he ever allowed himself since Woojin , the waves tossing and pushing against his tail, “and the sea is dangerous. Go back.”

“But you wouldn’t let me see your tail!” The child insists.

“If you come back tomorrow, by the pier, I will,” he promises, earnestness dripping from his words. “I will be there.”

“Promise?”

“Yes. Yes, I promise, you monstrously impossible thing, be off,” he snarls and exhales when the boy retreats onto a higher raise of rocks.

“Come, come! Let's talk more!” The brat beckons, giving him no room for refusal. The whistling sea sounds like the jeer of the dormant element, mocking his inability to refuse a human child.

He suspends at the junction of the drop, sighing. Children. Of any creature. They are such bother. Must he return by morrow day?

Words ought to never be given without the belief of fulfillment. It makes one a liar. A dirty one at that . His father’s words nag. Even in death the man’s philosophies live on. In a monster of the deep, no less.

Very well. He shall return, for he despises disappointing his father’s name and tearing hope away from small brats. How to keep him on land and not vaulting into the water at first sight? Trinkets? That ought to detain the bratty ones at bay, so he can obliviate into the algae-filled water. Trinkets. Ones that sparkle and glisten.

There was a shipwreck, a few flicks of his tail to the west of the rocks. A cargo ship, with many sunken valuables. There ought to be trinkets there, jewels of value. Gawdy trinkets that glisten and distract, a momentary slip of mind for him to swim off into obscurity. He manoeuvres around broken beams, rotting chests, barnacled masts. Sunlight is muted from the thick algae cover over the wreck, but jewels, infused with a magic of their own, glisten even without light shining upon them. They give off light by merely existing.

A spark catches his eye. He slinks past a vine, curls talons around a small chest. Abundance of colours erupt and escape, with a loop catching onto a talon of his. The jewels float into the empty space just under the veil of separation between water and air, lingering, tasting in the bob of the ocean, and quickly starts to descend to the unseen ocean depths in their collective bronze sparks.

A little round thing caught his eye and he reaches out, long claws catching onto a loop. He pulls, fingers and nails wrapped around a necklace, snagging along a ring.

The child is knees deep in water, attempting to wade in, past the rock pools, down further into the open roaring sea. Brats. They never listen.

Calling upon magic that gives rise to winds and tides, he blows a breath and the ornament floats with the crashing wave, catching on the sunlight as it drifts to the child.

As expected, the brat scoops the garish and glistening  trinket up and crashes onto drier rocks in a flurry of child feet and premature enthusiasm. He will not bother him for long after, as he senses the trickle of storm brewing in the water that churns at his chest.

The chit turns his head back into the ocean and he is justified in summoning the wind from the horizon to keep him grounded, rooted to the rocks he calls home. A land dweller on his earth. It is almost too befitting.

“A storm is coming. Get thee to thy home,” he bids adieu, sinking lower and lower into the water. “Keep the trinket. I have no need for loose accessories. They will be bound to the ocean floor if I were to place them around my finger.”

“Thank you for your gift. Will you return?” The boy shrieks from the rocks, clutching the necklace with the sole ring on it.

“I shall not promise. I will be here, waiting for the sun to rise, before leaving. You shall see me if it is what you desire.” His back is facing the ocean. A bold yet stupid choice. Seafarers never turn their backs to the ocean. The surf will swallow them whole, tail and hair, until they are mere foam.

“I believe you,” the child makes a fist with his right hand and slams it over his chest.

“I would advise you not to,” he hears the roar, “those who meet me twice are thralled to Death. You are very young. Do not place a yoke of death upon your neck. She will not be kind, to those destined to meet her, whether young or old. Death does not care, nor distinguish.”

“I will pass at my own accord, seafarer, and not of yours. And we shall meet, countless times over, until the earth calls me to her hold. Do not ordain my fate. The yoke is mine to put on, not yours.” He stomps the rocks, twice over. Canvas knocking futilely on hardened volcanic earth.

"Then pray to your gods that we are never to meet again, little one, for the next time we meet, there will be the smell of death upon you,” he promises, sincerely, not placing a curse on the human, but simply stating fate, the way of knife, gnarled and serrated, seeping into skin. His tail grows coarser by the days. A manifestation of the growing eldritch.

Lightning darts across the purple clouds gathering at the horizon. He must retreat. The eldritch grows gleeful. Any darker and he would pounce, tear the young one apart. He cannot linger, cannot give hope.

“We will meet again, if not by the morrow, by another time. You are not a creature of death, pretty one,” the boy claims.

“What then, if not that?”

Thunder rolls. He dives under, the answer given muted by the bubbling water.

“A protector. A carer,” a boy called Hyunjin speaks to the sea foam left behind. “A thing of beauty. Never death.”

The boy does not see the sea creature again the next morning. Perhaps they have both forgotten about each other, somewhere within the stormy night.

(The thing of the deep expects nothing less.)

He travels. Falls into deep sleep. Waves, searches for corals to revive, fish to heal, lost folks to console. He feeds when the weak and weary are a sleep's away from death’s clutches and he mourns in his hymns, the loss of a life.

He crosses paths with the twisted creature from the deep - strings of destiny weave thick and potent in the bowels of the ocean, and he is fated to meet this one again, and again, and again.

“Wretch,” the creature intones, with a curve of its lips. “You have ceased that raucous grieving.”

“Indeed I have,” he bows, “I extend my apologies, for my inappropriate cacophony.”

“No need,” it waves away, yellow and purple eyes luminescent in the aquamarine waters, “grief unmakes even the most stable of beings.”

What a convoluted forgiveness; the most he had ever heard.

“Do you have a name, or shall we ever converse in polite society with vague gestures pertaining to our identities?”

He starts. For as long as his songs had been locked away, he had never been regarded as a being worthy of address. A natural spirit not worthy of a name, of remembrance.

“I,” he swallows in mouthful of saltwater, “do not have a name.”

“Did ye give it away?” A note of irritation rises in the creature's voice. “Or did ye refuse to be known by that name?”

“A thing such as me does not deserve -”

“What a yard of shipwreck,” it waves him away, “what does your sire call you?”

There is no obligation. He simply can swim away, he simply can disappear, call upon illusions to mask his presence -

“Make a family of your own, why don't you, baby?” Woojin croons from his memory, eyes glassy and golden. He can almost feel the warmth of his palm atop his unruly hair.

His name is not anyone's. Not even his. He can give it away, at no cost to himself.

“Seungmin."

“Changbin,” Changbin the shadowed entity speaks. “A kraken spirit.”

“A,” he does not take the proffered hand, “spawn of magic.”

“I will see you when all of this,” Changbin draws a broad circle, encompassing his chest, “is gone. My home is for strays and the healing. I will see you there, Seungmin, singer of songs, heart of giving.”

He does not believe in the names Changbin christened him, nor does he waste time to rely on the promise of third meetings. In a jolt of the sea, they are only remnants of words to each other's minds, separated and unreal to their memories.

When he wakes from his slumber, when his eyes meet land again - he had woken to veer away from wooden pillars in the water, the sandy floor coarse against his scales. He had not anchored himself in the long slumber, directionless in his drifting, but the winds had been more than violent these couple of moons and he is adrift, churning along with the coming tide, near land, a destination unwanted and unappreciated.

“What an inconvenience,” he mutters, and pushes himself to swim against the gruelling tide. Equitorial and polar waters converge near this point and the force of them crashing creates this terribly inconvenient aftershock that is a chore to swim against.

He is tossed against one pillar where he hears a call from above the water. Humans. Gosh - his mind keeps on persisting on the terribly selfish view that there are no humans where he steps foot and he is quite stranded where he is.

Maybe if he hides and calls upon the sand to camouflage his scales, he could remain unseen -

“I can see you,” the human speaks to the water.

He emerges, frankly frazzled because of being detected at his deceit, and somewhat mortified. A thing of half moon and half night leans into the water, eyes as dark as sun-burnt grass foolishly reaching out into the light. The sea is an ever present force, twisting and tossing with the speeding wind, curling around stationary things and spiriting them out to the dark dark deep.

“Were you here before?” The human hollers from the shore, the winds tossing his voice into the shadows of the trees. Unheard. Not delivered. Lost to the roaring of storms. Unfounded. Untoward.

“Mayhap. I do not possess the memory of our prior meeting.”

“When I was younger, I remembered. I never forgot you.”

“I am charmed, little one, but frankly,” he rises with the crashing ocean waves, one after the other, swallowing whole all the same, “the weather is not in your favour this afternoon.”

And frankly my dear, I did not give a damn regarding you as to stash a memory of you away in my heart.

It is howling and darkening weather. He is delusional, out of his mind, but even he does not venture onto the shallow waters. Seafarers sing of sirens bewitching humans onto the deep ends, but they had not heard the wind’s laments of Hyunjin luring the half cast in. The half breed that wants to meet the human boy, without them both perishing in the union.

“Later! Later when there is sunlight!” The human swears, to the wind. “I shall return!”

He swims away, forgoing all words.

Again, he sleeps. And again, the same voice.

“Do your kind not sing?” Only his eyes are seen above the waterline, melted copper orbs floating in the air. The man-child’s figure is indiscernible from the shadow that collapses with the moon’s arrival on the night sky. He is all inky silhouette and wind-tossed hair that never quite stays still on the top of that overgrown head of his. In the ocean, he would have been magnificent, human legs and lungs or not.

Alas, this is land and on land, the rules are different. On land, he is hideous. One cannot assume beauty transcends the elements and the species. His words however, would have been a disrespect on the language of the water. One does not overshare. Be candid. Divulge names. The depths prosper on the lies and half-truths of its denizens. One who is truthful from the ocean, well, they do not last very long.

“Well? I can see you. You are here, listening, are you not? Will you not answer my question?” The boy calls out to a monster who can only answer in circles.</p>

“Monsters do not sing.” It is not a lie, but it is not a truth. “And that is my kind.”

“Nonsense.” Waves spill in ephemeral foam and bubbles, gurgled out by sleeping beasts in the bowels of the depths. The roar of the waves takes the sound out of the boy’s throat and swallows it whole in crashing onto the sand. He cannot be heard in this distance between them.

He ought to quit, but it is entertaining to witness the realisation dawning upon his lovely face. It is a pity Seungmin upholds long-ago morals of a child, morals that forbid him from luring the mortal to the depths and rending him. His craving for blood subsides and dwindles, ever since he had cut that girl open.

Mindless slaughter to others no longer pertains to his being. The eldritch in his veins had been expunged or else satiated from the countless slaughters, dying the waters saffron and dwindling away to flecks and tendrils of pink. Coral pink, an image of life, affixed to the colour of death. Violent and cruel death. He must embrace the eldritch in him, the repressed and chthonic urges. Kill. Feast. Kill more.

Sing.

But he must not sing. He should not. Impure and murderous and insane, he would never inflict that pain onto any feeling beings. The notes of his song, beautifully unravelling, in every aspect of that word, taints the blood black, poisoning the wretched from the inside, to the outside, from the veins, to the skin. It eats away slowly, soul and marrow and nails, until there is nothing left. Unravels and consumes from the very pore.

He, he would not sing. He would keep the notes, ardent as they have always been, sitting in the base of his throat, to his own ears.

The mortal was persistent, but not enough to be tortured by the flesh-rending horror of hearing his voice. He waits, tasting the taunt on the tip of his tongue.

“Go back, human. This is no time or place for a discussion about my singing abilities.” The silhouette of a man-boy stutters in the choice of leaving or staying, steps disarrayed.

He rarely dwells on the pretences of promises, but it seems necessary for this one.

“Go home. I shall be here at sunrise. This very spot.”

The silhouette stills. The very air stills, breaths palpitating, lying in wait of the movements of the human. The magic he ascribes the boy will wear and he will collapse there on the sand. It is an intriguing contradiction, he who belongs in the vast unseen of the watery depths wields the magic of the sunlight. He with his dark blood relies on the light of the sun to renew his runes. The healing runes casted upon the man-child steal time that he does not have, time that Seungmin has in bountiful. But the night roars with the oncoming tide and the shadows that swallow moonlight whole. The eldritch stirs from the deep.

“Hyunjin.”

Everything pauses, waiting on his words.

“Go. You shall have my word. I will be here.”

The deep murmurs, calling for blood. Leave, human boy.  The man-child steps back onto the sand and turns. Runs back, until his footsteps and silhouette too are consumed by the darkness.

Out in the ocean, two orbs of melted copper blink. Blink. Blink. Blink and dive under. Swallowed by the crashing wave.

He wakes with the first ray of sunlight. The currents had calmed down since the night passed, idly washing him back and forth where he is, suspending in the middle of the sea. The runes on his arms glint faint silver, marks of a growing day. He breaks surface, gasping in the air, light and free from the top of his head to the skin on his shoulders, chill prickling on skin. No living thing is awake from slumber. No one will be able to hear him.

He tips his head to the sun’s domain. Lets the suppressed sounds escape the column of his throat.

Depth of a lily pond that resides deep in one's stomach, that leaves brush water and tread on spiderwebs on deliquescent footing, that water flows and ebbs, but the depth will remain the same.

The songs he nurtures within his body take a toll on him. His blood turns browner and darker by the passing days. He would perish soon, the curse of the Gods cruel and tainted with the amorality so common with the chaos of creation. An eye for an eye. Many lives for a life. They were generous with him. They accepted the eldritch in him, otherworldly as they were and bestowed upon him a curse. Cursed he would continue to be and cursed he would make others. For those who heed his songs would shrivel and perish in a subsuming spiral, a fate worse than death. The Old Gods enjoyed, gained sustenance from the in-between phases and paradoxes – living death, mortal and eldritch, unsinging merman, sea witches with empathy and pity. They forced him to swallow their blood, even as he screamed and his mother screamed for them to let go.  You are our own, little half cast.

The sun struggles to push past the night clouds lingering high above the waterline. The notes of his song ring hollow and sorrowful, water ripples staining black then washed away by the moving wind. Even the inanimate is affected by the damning curse. He drifts, floating closer to the shoddily constructed pier, too close to the water. Perhaps it is only high now because of the obstinate tide. He traces fingers under the pier and hoists himself half up on the plankway, forearms slamming onto the wood.

He is still singing all the while, the notes louder and clearer. There is an inexplicable joy in being able to narrate the unsung songs, rooted in his lungs and marrow. The tremors in his fingers cease, just for a while, as he sings to the sturdy plankway of the burning youth.

Love, speak to me, I do not know where to put my heart. For I gave it all to you.

A shape becomes distinct from the blur of trees. Him, the fool, the recurring fool, too stubborn. The runes of magic glow violet and crème green from the shadows of the trees, cloak flying in wild abandon as the boy shoots along the beach, onto the pier.

He bites his tongue and dives under, lingering in one spot. Hyunjin stops before the plankway ends, calling for him.

“I heard music. Was it yours? Were you singing?” He speaks to the water, limbs flailing, squinting into ripples that hide him. “I saw you here. Hiding is redundant.”

“How was your sleep? Did the tide wash you far from here?” The man-child persists, even with a creature in the water that does not wish to answer. He is livid, from beneath the turquoise water. He had warned, countless times, of the danger of listening to those notes. They are of no effect to him but to this frail mortal? Life-ending. It would be worse than the ailment he carries in his lungs.

He sinks further and swims away, not heeding Hyunjin’s call for him to return.

“I apologise!” The boy professes. “Please, come back.”

He is lonely. He craves companionship. That, is his unmaking.

He swims back, submerged still underwater, listening to the endless chatter from the human boy. Something mundane. Redundancy through small talks. The mortals place too much emphasis on connecting through words.

He stays, hopeful, a foreign concept, of bypassing the taboo topic.

“Are you still mad?”

“No. I was never mad,” he sighs, not bothered, yet faintly irked by the barrage of queries, “I rarely ever get mad.”

“Oh good,” there is a visible exhale from the boy’s chest, “will you speak in shorthand ever?”

“That is when I am ‘mad’, human,” he mutters. “I will engage in your detestable vermin tongue when my anger cannot be held in check.”

“Interesting. Why can I not hear-?”

He dives under and swims away, exasperated

“I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'll stop!” The chit begs again.

Again and again, he is unmaking himself. He lets the tide pulls him in to the rockpools.

“If you burn with the desire to sing, you ought to,” the man-boy, lanky speaks to the water. He bristles. How dare he, begging him to return to ardently, only to nag at him of the unapproachable topic between them again?

“Curse. I carry a curse in my songs.” Bubbles burst from underwater. Hyunjin had since learnt the tongue of the sea, able to interpret the sounds as if he converses in such tongue in his daily life.

“How bad is it?” Hyunjin hangs half of himself, almost meeting the water surface. Seungmin breaks from the waterline, inundating the man-boy with a torrent of salted liquid. Unperturbed, too used to it, Hyunjin blinks some droplets out, the corners of his eyes red, staring at him.

When he does that, Seungmin thinks that he can see how empty the cavity of his chest is. Of how lonely he is. Of how much his bowels do burn with the desire to sing. Of how he wishes his mother’s ruthlessness had passed onto him, so that he can sing freely, at the demise of others. But cursed he is again, with this kindness that kills him slowly from the marrow of his bones to the scales on his back. It had endangered the few that committed an offence against him, but no more. He does not want to harm anyone anymore.

“Inexplicable agony. I have put one out of their misery, because they had begged to hear my voice. Their blood turned black. Do not ask for suffering from me, man-boy, I have seen enough.” In his voice there is too much weight to carry for a young immortal, unkillable because his blood is brown, of bile and filth. His bones cannot be chewed – they splinter and crack other bones. He is lonely and he would be lonely forever. Such is the price of being born.

“But it makes you happy,” Hyunjin insists. Furrows his brows. Juts out his lips. “You need not think about my wellbeing.”

“Human life is short, mortal, but it is nonetheless life. Consulting the unnatural for your unearthly demise at any time…is rather redundant. I doubt I could put you to death that easily like I had with many others. It is harder, when they are younger.” He lies and he does not lie. He is barely older than Hyunjin, perhaps a century at most. He claims to know more about life while they both know wisdom is not a scale nor is it anything quantifiable. Between them exists wisdom of different kinds, Hyunjin’s of escape from being and Seungmin’s of treading the lines between everything. He knows that this is a way for Hyunjin to declare his affection to Seungmin in his convoluted human ways, endearing as they are, but deeper than that he hears the quiet, the feeble, the weak, the defeatist. Put me out of my misery. I want to become one with the air.

Perhaps Seungmin is too fond of him. Or he is too stubborn. But he wants this to continue. Wants it to linger. Just for another day, at the peril of Hyunjin. Perhaps he is cruel after all, extending their mutual suffering so that they could meet like this, snatches of moments throughout the sun’s reign on the sky, to alleviate the aching in their souls. Loneliness attracts loneliness. There is no love, not with demons or man-children who construe this notion of physical proofs where there are none. He does not know what love is, too young to know, too old to find out. They do not speak of it, of anything pertaining to ‘love’. It has a magic too strong in the old tales, of devotion spanning the elements and hearts and souls. Terrifying and powerful old magic.

In his meagre hands and brown blood, Seungmin cannot fathom how that magic would exist. It does not. There is no proof.

But once again, he is not supposed to exist, but he is living, despite the doubts of everyone else. He practices cynicism too much, lets no room for ignorance of acceptance. He ought to.

“Does it get easier, when they are older?” Hyunjin closes his eyes. Seungmin cannot read his soul this way, the windows barred, but he hears the unspoken. Shall I carry on?

He is too selfish and Hyunjin is too selfless.

“Perhaps,” the half-lie slips out of him. He ought to not hurt them two in lying and telling truths this way – there is a whole construct of lies between them and he had gotten stuck on many layers of lies that he cannot distinguish where is it that a truth lies. There is perhaps, no truth about this situation. There are perhaps, only the lies. Yo u will be alright. You will live for longer. I am here always. We belong to each other.

I love you. I love you so much.  He does not have the wisdom or the experience in him to know if those two things are lies.

In his soul he knows pain does not subside. Pain is not selective of age. It comes and stays.

Seungmin is a sinner. A breaker of moral codes. One who craves companionship so dearly he would sacrifice his companion’s time on earth for his happiness, at the karmic ending of them two lingering on suffering and salvation.

"Can you promise me something?” Hyunjin opens his eyes again.

“I cannot speak for all promises, mortal, but do entertain this old one.”

“When it’s time for me to die, will you sing for me?”

“To make it worse?”

“To make it better.”

This conversation is riddled with things said and unsaid. Hyunjin’s dying act, one of valour and selflessness, amounts volume to agape. Selfless love. The truest and oldest love.

“I cannot promise,” he admits, all truths. <i> For seeing you in pain pains me tenfold</i>. “It will be for me to decide.”

“For your benefit or mine?”

“Perhaps both. Perhaps one.”

The songs of his seafaring kin sing of the circles, sing of how they could never tell a truth, for they are creatures of lies. He could not blurt the truth, could not give Hyunjin false hope or any hope. It’s cruel, torturing for both, drawing out this notion of suffering for happiness. There is uncertainty out there that they must embrace. There is the gut feeling that Seungmin follows, the one that whispers to him to follow the shadows. For there he would be able to be whole again, despite the suffering he endured in getting there.

“Okay. Will you tell me something, before I die?”

They can see into each other’s souls now, glowing bright copper in Hyunjin’s eyes and sea-green in Seungmin. He leans in closer, inviting the request. 

“Will you tell me your name? Will you call me by your name? Remember that in me, there is you?”

Seungmin is a sufferer. Pain does not cease when he dares to take another breath.

“I shall.”

It is one amongst his truths.

He is floating, idle, side by side with Hyunjin, hand toying with the band of metal the mortal had bestowed upon his finger. A gift, a pretty trinket, one similar to the one he dug from the palace of ruins. Intricate designs and magic of lost kingdoms.

Inscriptions of You are my soul type of sentiments.

“What is the significance,” he raises his arm, ramrod, pointing to the idle clouds above, “of the little circle?”

“It’s a marriage ring,” the boy explains.

“Explain that to me. This concept of marriage .”

Hyunjin kicks his feet, water splashing atop of him. The water is blasphemously cold, enough that Hyunjin who has a penchant for ridiculous decisions that harm his health, did not venture into the water. Winter is encroaching upon the horizon of the ocean and in its promise of desolation, withholds the sun a little bit longer every morning. The air itself is cold, bitterly so, and Hyunjin wilts, his skin paler with the blithe weather on its way to crashing onto the shore and the forest of his home.

He will not see the next summer. They both know this. There is very little time. Enough to do something, but not enough to spend time together.

“Union. You vow an oath to be another’s equal and to love them through adversity.”

“Love,” the word tastes foreign on his tongue, “do you know what it is?”

“No. Perhaps I never will. Perhaps I am experiencing love. Perhaps everything I say is a lie to perpetuate this,” the man-boy swings a fist, breathing ragged, to the horizon, “this futile hope.”

“In every lie, there is truth,” he dips his tail under water, the scales flaking from the air gnawing at them, “it may be an excellent lie, as well as a half-truth. There is perhaps, love out there. But I do not know it and I cannot affirm most emphatically on the existence or the purpose of it.”

“Will it ever happen to me, do you think?” The boy wonders.

There is no hope on the skin and the ghost of the boy sitting on the pier, toes and ankles in and out of lapping seawater. Seungmin had drawn the life and flesh out of him, prolonging his own humanity at the detriment of the human boy. Any moment that they are by each other’s side, he shall live for longer while Hyunjin shall die earlier. The eldritch is not an altruistic sort – it is selfish in every stretch of darkness it inhabits. It will consume and deplete Hyunjin of life, sucks the marrow from his bones, until there is nothing left of him, while Seungmin teethers between weeping in crazed ecstasy of fulfilling his lust for blood and weeping in inexplicable agony at the undoing of his companion.

How odd.

Why would he weep? What would he weep for? He is without morals and without feelings. He who has no tie to Hyunjin of the clan Hwang, a boy who treads lines between extremities, of land and water, boy and man, dying and living, being and flourishing. He who is cruel and ruthless and full of insatiable bloodlust. He who is more eldritch than human or witch, he who the sea fears and the air poisons, he who is despised in all the places that he tainted.

But he would rather dissolve unto the sea in oblivion before letting Thorion even graze the skin of that boy’s arm. He would give up his name willingly, he would give up and sacrifice himself as libations to the Gods for a chance to salvage Hyunjin. Hyunjin. Hyunjin. His Hyunjin. His brat. His soul. His name. His heart.

Ah.

That must be that. Sacrifice. Insurmountable suffering for an ephemeral glimpse of joy. Sacrifices unto each other for the greater glory. There is to be no happiness until there had been twofold of suffering. Theirs and one of them. His lies and truth will be pain both ways. Either way, there will be hurting.

Why not be selfish? For himself and for Hyunjin?

“Yes,” he swims closer.

“How?”

The question is not intended for him. The question is for the uncertainties that rule their lives, put yokes on their necks and pull until there is no air left to breathe in.

“I am a bastard of the unknown. I find it quite easy to place my faith in what I do not know rather than what I know,” an arm and another clasp themselves over the pier, water seeping through the cracks of wooden planks.

“Are you suggesting I place my trust and love in you, sea witch?”

They meet eyes. They are Seungmin and Hyunjin and each other and one merging entity. He places his head onto his clasped arms, the view of Hyunjin titillated, not upright.

“Perhaps.”

Perhaps he gives a smile in exchange for Hyunjin’s laugh, scrunched-up eyes falling onto bottomless brown, lids falling shut, mark under his eye alive, stubbornly so.

Perhaps that is as close as love will manifest for him, him the cursed one and his beloved, the one embraced in death.

“We have these vows, us humans,” Hyunjin coughs, covering his mouth with his hand and Seungmin’s, “marriage vows.” Crimson dyes their fingers in its darkened intensity, dripping onto his flaking skin.

The sun is relentless, peeling strip and strip of the death of his humanity, unto the sea breeze.

They do not have very long. They must steal time, at the expense of their demise.

“And what do you swear by, with these vows?” He blows a breath of healing, of the pearls of water on one’s lash upon emerging to air, a blessing of futility.

“Each other and our love. It is ridiculously faithful and fruitless.” The boy tosses his head back in a mirthless laugh, sounds echoing the groans of pain in his chest. He is not of blood, yet he reeks of it, virulent and rupturing, blood under skin

“An oath. You swear by an oath by this union,” he echoes, “an oath is an ancient and binding spell, Hyunjin.”

“It is an ancient and binding act,” Hyunjin argues, clasping Seungmin’s palm beside his cheek, “others made certain of their mutual devotion before swearing it.”

“How possessive.”

“Is that not what love is? To possess one another?”

He disagrees, cupping his hand around the more prominent cheekbone of the boy. He is wasting more and more away.

“You are undoing yourself, by indulging in this,” he brushes his thumb over the mark under Hyunjin’s eyes, infusing magic, good health, an absurd and pointless spell for one who is quick to decay, the deconstruction clear before his eyes. Drip by drip the blood exits Hyunjin, until there is nothing left. Until he is no more.

He chose to forgo his humanity once. It had seemed that Thorion failed in seizing all aspects of his self and essence. He however and others, had not anticipated the existence of a heart. Selfless sacrifices are the highest forms of love, he understands that, his father’s sacrifice understandable yet unforgiveable, the wounds fresh and open still. He wonders how well Hyunjin will accept his bleeding heart, all gaping in detestation of himself and patches of offering love to the dying human before him.

He would forgo all of what he is and what he could be for the life to be restored in this quickly deteriorating human frame, to all the costs that are inflicted against him.

Perhaps he did swear an unspoken oath of fathomless devotion and sacrifice unto this other. Perhaps they are bound without spoken oaths. Their hearts swore it true.

“Are you not doing the same with your magic?”

Hyunjin challenges him, eyes alive and fierce.

“We must be sufferers to be lovers, my dear,” he closes his eyes, trapping the way light enters and lingers in Hyunjin’s eyes.

“Martyrs are the bravest lovers, it is true,” there is the mumbling. He opens his eyes. Waits. Hears the unspoken wish, but he will not approach, not before Hyunjin articulates all the words. Words that are in limbo between truth and lie, words that in this one instance, will liberate and doom because it is a truth.

“Would you like to swear an oath of marriage with me, Hyunjin of the family Hwang, you sea witch from the fathomless depths?”

“My father’s name is Kim. One of them. The other, I carry no ownership of. I have many parents. I am Seungmin, son of Woojin. Moira. Bang Chan.” He opens his eyes, blazing algae green and benevolent sea water. Calm sea for the safe voyages of sailors, returning to their loved ones on land. “I accept your proposal. Let us construct our own oath.”

Hyunjin’s lips curl. He seems infinite - forever - under the rolling clouds.

“Gladly.”

“How would our vows be?” Hyunjin quizzes.

“Let us not possess one another, for we belong to ourselves. If we both shall wish it, what is mine belongs to you,” the bleeding from his heart ceases flowing – there is a layer there, busying itself with keeping blood from escaping.

“I wish to share your grievances as if they are mine, your sorrow and your darkness will thus be shared,” Hyunjin continues.

He waits. It seems there is more.

“I pledge to you my living and my dying, equally in your care.”

Ah.

There is silence. It hangs heavy like a sickle.

“I pledge to you my name and my soul, my past and my future, for my present is yours. This,” his claws, rough and elongated, grotesque and witch-like, tap upon Hyunjin’s left hand. There is a finger, pulsing with a vein to the heart. He flexes his own, twitching the finger. “Is a marriage of equals. I pledge myself to you.”

“And I, you,” Hyunjin turns to him, their eyes meeting. There is green light in Hyunjin’s eyes. No doubt there is brown light in his own.

“Seungmin,” he utters.

“Hyunjin,” the other reciprocates. There are no holes in his heart left to fill.

They make a mutual mark on each other’s fingers, the one Hyunjin insists is the ring usually preferred by humans to adorn their jewellery upon. Just a cut, barely skin deep, on the rough skin around the palm. There is no blood, he guaranteed that, just a teeming scar glowing blood-coloured, matching on both their fingers.

“Are we to say ‘I love you’?” Hyunjin stands, unsteady, but he glows with vivacity and for a moment they can both pretend there is no death between them and they can embrace just as easily as they wish.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he scoffs, “that will not be enough.”

There is strength and life in the steps that shadow Hyunjin as he lets out a joyful bellow, teeth all showing, footsteps light and in the air back to the forest and disappearing into the embrace of trees.

Goodbyes are always difficult. Woojin himself did not expire before his own eyes. He reached shore, water half in his lungs, air in the rest, gasping. Reaching, only for dirt to trickle past fingertips.

He could not say goodbye. Had never got the opportunity to.

Ironic that he is depriving Hyunjin, his beloved, of that exact experience. Would it hurt less, or more, if he had time with Woojin and watch helplessly as the soul slip away from its earthen shell? Regret. What a familiar taste on his sunken lips.

He traced a singular word on Woojin’s lips, wide-eyed smile. Contentment. Again, the shape of his lips read. We will see each other again. You and I, again and again and again and again …-

“Again,” he promises the shore, Hyunjin, the life they would never get to share in this time. “Again.” He presses on the mark on his finger, the one tracing back to his heart, vein pulsing lightly, there. “Again,” he lets out a little sob.

It seems that he is leaving Hyunjin with regret, after all. “Forgive me, darling. I am yours, my soul yours, my everything yours. It is this time and this body that I cannot rend you, for I am fettered by my oppressor. Again, we will meet.” Tears brim him, blood roaring in his ears. “Again, I will hold you. Again. It is not goodbye. I will see you again.”

He chokes and spits out a blackened lump of bile. Payment must be offered. He does not possess autonomy, Thorion does. He cannot offer possession to others, safekeep away aspects of him that will not allow the eldritch to subsume him successfully. It is this bothersome magic that will hinder his progress. Love and magic. How ridiculous.

No matter, Thorion hisses, I shall consume you in a short while. The human boy will not live for long. Thence I shall feast. On your deteriorating soul and your grief. It will be sumptuous for me, wretch.

“That is where you will be wrong, Old One,” he gasps, Hyunjin’s name within the mark on his finger, the breath on his lips, “that is where you will be deathly wrong.”

This love made him reckless. This love gave him a name that is his and someone else’s to hold. With the bray of his thundering heart, he repeats. Hwang Hyunjin. Hwang Hyunjin. Hwang Hyunjin.

Oh he would burn the heavens and earth, separate wood from stone, steal the stars from the sky – all of that and more – just for another breath to be restored to Hyunjin’s lungs. His chest rattles when he breathes – he aches for a sunnier sky and thinner air for his beloved – and would procure such arrangements. Dying in Hyunjin’s stead is not a risk, or a possibility, or a consideration – it is a matter of fact. He will and he shall sacrifice all that is left of him for Hyunjin, undoubtedly and unthinkingly. All of him belongs to Hyunjin, son of the house of Hwang and Hyunjin belongs to Seungmin, son of Kim Woojin, Moira, Bang Chan.

A familiar fire burns inside his chest and his heels. Ah, the spells must be settling in. He curls within himself, hearing the familiar howl of the ocean. They come and go, an infinite loop. Ouroboros. A serpent consuming its own tail. He is consuming, burning the dregs off himself.

He opens his mouth and sings. Unabashedly lets loose the music from deep inside his lungs, for the lyrics to overwhelm and subsume his whole being, for he is music from hair to tail and he would perish in notes. All his love and devotion, he had given away to Hyunjin. His heart - his name - all the meagre possessions he lay claim to - belong to a perishing soul bound to the protruding rocks on the seaside of a rural town. The man who is still child with a voice that is serrated with premature death in his coughs. A life who is death in a rattling frame of skin stretching over a loudly drumming heart, teetering rhythm four beats away from everlasting silence.

He burns, magnificently. The stub of wood buried under a sandy beach on a remote island flares up in ironic vivacity and fire licks at his marrow, melting down the foundation, melting down the skin, flesh, everything that isn't his.

He is laying waste to this body that belongs to an ancient one and his parents and nothing in this world - all in the same confounding crackling of the flame starting up smoke.

The Old One groans and thrashes, scream silent in his throat. He does not expect this magic he had subsumed to overrule his existence, to burn him as well inside a much emptier shell than he has space to knock around in.

The essences of what was once a Seungmin, cursed half caste, spawn of a sea witch and a land witch and a soldier of hearts, conglomerate and meld and burn in a brilliant flame.

The fire eats away at the stub of wood, of livelihood under the bark encasing the vein pulsing faintly...faintly...faintly...until it all ceases.

The magic that gives warmth to a frozen soul, the antithesis of everything the two souls residing in the same skin belong and are - they are aflame. Brilliant, scorching, orange flicker of destruction and creation. It hurts and it heals, though he does not possess the knowledge of what exactly the heat heals, he croaks the dying notes of a fish stranded on land, gulping the vestiges of his last breath before the air shuts in his lungs and all he can breathe in is death death death.

A nightingale song echoes in the bubbling sea and two gold orbs taper off.

In a carriage taking away the man that carries the name Hyunjin and Seungmin all in his soul and the mark on his left ring finger, a searing thing, of white and burning jolt, courses through his bones and traces of days and fragments of faces fall from his mind. He forgets and forgets and cannot search the exact shade of the sea on the fortnight before this or the way the rocks cut into his heels. He forgets and forgets the songs first and last that he stole from the shadows and the gold at the bottom of the sea.

All that is and all that are taper off into rocks and dust and sea foam flickering on the water surface.

“Young master, you are crying?” His butler, Lee Minho, reaches forward with a handkerchief.

He accepts the felt fabric with eyes blurring at the scar on the finger with the vein leading to his heart.

“I quite don’t understand why, but my heart is grieving and my soul is lamenting. Perhaps it is simply the weather.”

“Perhaps,” the butler frowns. “Shall we take a detour to the ocean, for some fresh air, my Lord?”

“No,” Hyunjin closes his eyes. “Better not. Let us continue.”

“As you wish, my lord.”

“Will he wake?”

“He will. There is life yet in his heart.”

He founders, vastness of dark air spiralling to a point of wakefulness and jolts.

“Where -?”

“Calm, young one,” a timbre of creaking wood murmurs in the titillating sea. “Your nerves have not settled and the herbs have yet to work their magic. Rest.”

“I -” he paws at his chest, heartbeat faint yet there. “I burnt myself. I...rid the God from me. I should not be alive. I -”

- had forsaken myself and another, his memories with me died within these bones. I have renounced the throbbing heartbeat of love, everything, to protect this one. How - was it all futility?

Amber eyes watch him, along with a shine in a pair of familiar beady eyes.

“Force him to rest, will you?” The stranger flutters a dismissive hand, burnt gnarly skin wrapped by strings of jewels, pearls and diamonds glistening under the tranquil waves.

“Urchin,” Changbin sighs, “do as the healer said.”

“What? No,” he flounders, tail and scales shifting and fluttering. “How am I alive? What did you do? Where’s -”

“Breathe,” the hand of jewels seizes his arm. “And those questions, we cannot answer. We simply found you adrift over by the vortex. Whichever God it is you carried with you, he had deserted by the mouth of the gaping ocean. You are burnt and washed anew, my little sea demon, and I suggest you rest, before all your innards unravel and you will, indeed, be very much not alive.”

“Perhaps, that is my goal -” he protests and all words are shut off with a closing fist, gathering all bubbles from his words into a scarred palm laced with emeralds.

“You will rest,” the healer pronounces. “And you will not die, in my infirmary. Do not be difficult. Rest.”

And that was that.

He asks again, and Changbin does not have an answer. He does not know why he continues to pester the being with the barrage of repeated questions.

“I understand you are frustrated -”

“Do you? Do you really?” He swivels to his saviour. Changbin’s gaze is even, barely phased in a repeat of his unreasonable tantrums.

“Yes. I too woke up at the bottom of this blue hole and at the mouth of the storm. I too had lost many things. I do not have answers of my desertion, even at this age and time. The sea is vast, lost one, and many of its inhabitants do not belong. Monsters like me wander by choice and circumstance. Monsters like you are lost and searching. It is simply a matter of how things are. You may leave, as soon as you are well, but I urge you to consider how you have been brought to us, the two strays who have found family in each other. You have lost but also gained. How will you proceed from here on?”

Jisung, the healer, the scarred being with his protruding bones emerging along with the shift of waves, only peers at him with the barest flicker of lashes.

“Frankly, I think you are behaving terribly. The least you could do is be grateful you are not dead and that you are brought here with us. The ocean knows what’s best for her own.”

“I wanted to die,” he argues stubbornly. Nothing is worth living, not when - not when it had all been forgotten.

“And you are not supposed to. I too, thought that way, but here I am, scarred but living, healing others. Do not be difficult. We each of us have our own reasons to set ourselves aflame and I would suggest you pay mind and time as to why you are still here.”

He finds Moira by the fifth shift of the tides. The pack is not with her. She is alone, adrift.

“You live,” she marvels, at his worn but nonetheless living body. “You are alive.”

“Hello mother,” he greets, the pain of missing seizing him whole. “I have missed you.”

In his words and her eyes, they understand that they had not searched for each other, and that is forgivable.

“Will you come with me, once more?” She asks. Does not reach out a hand.

“I,” he thinks of how the ocean brought him to Jisung and Changbin, strays with scars in their hearts and on their skin. “I am where I need to be, mother. I will pay occasional visits, when the convent reconvenes under the blood moon. Otherwise I will stay with my new family.”

“You have met your sires,” Moira notes. “And made a pack of your own.”

“I have met one of my sires,” he corrects, “and that is correct, I am where my pack is. Thank you, mother, for I have brought you pain, but it is more than enough where I am, mother.”

“You have never brought me pain. Not before the God and after him,” her eyes tell him more than what words may. “You have rid yourself of that terrible fate, I gathered. How reckless, and how terribly Chan-esque of you.”

“I don’t - mother, I have no recollections of ever expunging the God from within the essence of who I am - where had he gone, what did I do?”

She laughs, carrying the words with her as she swims to him, scales scraping across his human cheeks.

“Just as you gave him all of you, you have destroyed all of you and rid yourself of the original contract binding you to him. Your songs absolved his rage and gave the ocean an easy prey to gnaw on. He is no more, just as the old you is no more. Your firewood had burnt, little one, and hence, you are free to roam the sea and never the land, ever again.”

He thinks of Hyunjin, and how he had deserted that life so easily. The promises they made would be made redundant and temporary as sea foam, bubbling into form one moment and disappearing with the winds. He had traded the short life of bliss that he could have had with this everlasting life of simply existing.

He sings a parting song for Moira and Hyunjin. He had traded mortality for forever. He had traded living for simply...this. In all manner of speaking, he had blemished and caused sacrilege to the vows they exchanged, the magic they upheld, the sheer trust and devotion that transpired. He wondered, time and time again, when the sea attempts to soothe him, if his curse had never truly left him, and the real curse, the punishment of tarnishing a vow made in earnest and in the protection and witness of the water and air, is this. To live, when others are passed, and to keep on living and living and never ceasing, replaying every and all deaths inside his head until it unravels itself.

He sings and the notes that once burnt his throat return in intensity. They scorch and claw at the lining of his voice, scratch out his lungs until he can feel shards of glass pressing into bones.

“Well?” Jisung is carrying a cart of glistening shells, an eyebrow lifted. “Will you stay, or will you leave? The tides are in motion. If you have plans to leave, better swim fast tonight or -”

“Will this place be open for me, when I wish to return?”

Jisung presses a ring, blood red, onto the back of his hand, huffing. “This home is always a welcoming port for those who stray. The sea will bring you home to us, you stubborn fool. Now scram.”

“Thank you,” he wishes, and swims to where the sea takes him.

He quizzes, peering into the harsh reflection of the sea. There is no sight to behold. The young master is simply peering.

“At which point are you gazing beyond, young master?”

In a split whisper of the ocean, he hears the water’s lamentations. Mother always sings that there are sorrows that the blue water carries and that occasionally, it sings of these laments. Humans are never, ever, permitted to listen to these songs, for they could kill a man with their sadness.

Well. He’s not one for dying, but the look on the young master’s face calls upon a thought that details a man with many losses, innumerable, that he can sympathise with the ocean’s losses.

“Just,” Hyunjin’s eyes lose their focus, “somewhere.”

Minho lets him. The wedding is not until noon’s rise. There is enough time, to listen to the ocean’s laments.

Seungmin, for that is his name, emerges from the deep. From afar, he peers into a pair of earth-bound eyes and a mouth that promised an eternity in the breath of a kiss, a ghost of a promise. It is high sun, and he cannot distinguish the shadow from sight, everything too blinding and too much, that he shields his eyes.

When he opens his eyes, there is a splash, and a human swims out to sea. He backs away, tail and arms flailing, because not this human, not the one he had abandoned, not -

Hands are outstretched, fingers flung out to grasp only bubbling sea and empty air.

A resounding cry pierces the shore. He is unsure if the cry is his or the human.