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Just on the outskirts of the village where they had all lived was a mountain. No—perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that just on the outskirts of the mountain was the village in which they had all lived. The easternmost part of the town rose gently on the beginnings of the slopes, and its outermost fences seemed to just barely brush the edges of a sparse treeline. In the summer, it was pleasantly warm, though it never quite reached sweltering. In the winter, the snow piled up inches high. One had to be careful when closing doors, lest a sleeve of snow slide from the roof directly into the face of an unsuspecting passer-by.
In the spring, the flowers that bloomed at the foothills of the mountain were resplendent. Yellow—not golden, but a yellow that rivaled the sun—spicebush blooms, often the first after the camellias to peek through the winter gloom. When they bloomed, the village seemed almost to come alive, as if an animal waking from a season-long sleep—as if the scent, sharp and stinging and sweet, was drawing it forth.
Dongbaek loved those flowers, Yi Sang remembers. When they had still been young—it must have been years before Dongrang had suggested that they leave—she had called him one day. He had always had trouble reading the tone of her voice, just as she had trouble with his own. It mattered not: she was teasing, or she was mischievous, or a rare day of good humor had seized her and she was merely excited. That spring day, too, he had been unable to discern the reason behind her smile.
“Come here,” she had told him, almost tugging on his sleeve to beckon him closer. She was typically beyond that sort of childish behavior—or, rather, she had chided herself out of it. Yi Sang had never been particularly expressive, and had never felt any need to do so. He had followed her at a mild pace, moving more quickly only when the distance between them grew too great—mindful, that was, of her hand on his shirt.
She had taken him up a mountain path, past the chicken coops and the pastures, past the fence, mended with wire, where a cow had tried to make an escape earlier that year. The piquant scent of the spicebush had grown stronger as they had walked, until it filled the air—so acutely, so powerfully, Yi Sang remembers, that it made one’s head spin. They walked until they reached a clearing in the sun, lit up as though the trees overhead had leaned away in service of allowing the light to reach to the blanket of yellow flowers upon the ground.
The spicebush, Yi Sang knows now, is a shrub that grows best in slightly acidic soil, endemic to several different environs but partial to mountains. It grows in all soil types, as long as it receives plenty of sun. And here, perhaps it was that very abundance of light that made these shrubs flower and shed so prodigiously. Blooms adorned each inch of the slender, pale branches; the flowers that had already fallen made no sound underfoot as Dongbaek and Yi Sang stepped into the clearing proper. The fact that they would soon begin to wither did nothing to compromise their splendor, the magnificence of each petal—a color so warm, so lovely, that he would almost long for it, in later days.
“Well?” said Dongbaek, still wearing that smile.
“Exquisite,” replied Yi Sang simply.
She had been the one to pull him down with her. Lying in that clearing, staring up at the bright blue sky, it seemed almost as though the blooms’ expanse lasted forever—to the end of Yi Sang’s sight, to the end of the horizon, and very nearly to the end of the world.
It was during the summer, years later, when he saw her outside, her back to him. Yi Sang had never been the type to call out in greeting, nor disrupt someone’s solitary meditation—so this night, too, he had merely watched.
Speaking to the rest of the Nine, in those days, had been less collaboration and more negotiation. Less wonder, and more resentment. More and more often, they had been called out to other Wings—Brother Young-ji, in particular. They had all spent longer and longer hours shut away—each in his own room, or outside of the residence entirely. Tonight, he had found Dongbaek on the walkway tracing over one of the canals near their home, leaning over the railing.
As he watched, she had lit a match and held it to something in her other hand. After a moment, it caught. A sparkler, throwing off colorless light and efflorescent particles. Some landed on the ground at Dongbaek’s feet; many fell a longer distance, into the shallow stream below. One seemed to catch the back of Dongbaek’s hand before she could withdraw it, but she made no move to brush off the carbonized speck.
Yi Sang had stayed silent.
In the deepness of the nighttime, the sparks took shape. It could have been a delusion, he had thought even at the time, but still—the sparks, at the apex of their starbursts, took on for a singular, still moment the forms of those spicebush flowers in the spring. As they fell away from their origin, winking out one by one, Yi Sang had blinked away their bright remnants in his eyes, and with them banished the memory of that lovely bright yellow.
He knew that she was doing the same. He had never been able to understand her before, but at that moment, he was certain.
Dongbaek stayed on the bridge until the last of the sparkler burnt down, then dropped the thin, charred stick to the ground. Yi Sang waited until she had gone, waited until he heard the door to their residence open and close, and then crossed the pathway to where she had been standing. When he picked it up, the stick left a dark, chalky smear on his fingers.
As she falls, the weight in his arms is almost nothing—it is almost as though a passing breeze has taken her shape. Before Yi Sang can comprehend why, yellow overwhelms him. The spicebush blossoms are so bright among the empty fabric of her clothing that he is suddenly standing in a sunbeam in the spring once more, in a mountain clearing filled with flowers. He is years younger. The breeze is warm, and carries with it that piquant scent, so strong that it makes one’s head spin. The sky is blue, and the flowers seem to go on forever. He feels the warmth of Dongbaek’s hand on his, one pinky brushing against his own.
The blooms scatter, one last time.
Yi Sang does not chase after them.