Chapter Text
Time Period: 400 years ago (When Jinu became a demon)
I do not know who I am. My life has been less of a narrative than a procession of hours, stitched together with survival and little else.
My name is Hong Gil-dog, eldest son of a widowed mother.
My mother bore me alone. My father, as fleeting as cigarette smoke in the summer air, vanished at the very whisper of my birth. He was afraid, that I would arrive not as a son but as a daughter, as if a child's gender
might matter to a man who’d already made up his mind to disappear.
Thirteen years later, my brother, Myung, was born of another man, another brief flicker in my mother’s life, died a month into Ma’s pregnancy. She was left with one child toddling on the edge of manhood, and another yet unborn.
We were poor. Dirt poor. Hunger was less a visitor in our house than a roommate. The water was seldom clean. The rice—when we had it—seldom enough. Still, I never blamed her. Her hands, always chapped from scrubbing strangers' homes, had done more than enough. So I helped. I toiled in the hot fields beneath a sky that seemed far too large for boys like me. And when the days were too long, I sang the lullabies she once whispered to me beneath the shroud of sleep.
Those melodies were my escape. My prized gift. My secret fortune.
One day, the farmer who paid me in coins too light to feed a rat asked me to sing for his pregnant wife. He said something about good luck—some belief, perhaps, that a child might come into this world more kindly if cradled by song. I hardly listened. I only knew he would pay me more, and in this world, that was enough.
My favorite melody to sing was a ballad about the Sun goddess. With her skin that glows in the radiance of the suns rays, adorned in a gown that compliments her complexion with divinity.
The ballad spoke of her punishment: condemned to rise and fall with the turning Earth, cursed for once refusing to shine. The moon stood in for her then, humble and pale in her place. But she was clever, the
Goddess for she knows that the world literally revolves around her.
“Hong.”
A voice like sugar on the edge of shattering glass pulled me back. My mother. There was fear in her tone, though she masked it with her usual tenderness. She placed five-year-old Myung into my arms, and something in me folded.
“What is it, Ma?” I asked, my voice cracked with sleep and dread.
“They’re here,” she said. Her eyes, always heavy with something unspoken, now brimmed with panic. “You have to go.”
They.
Two summers ago, during the jangma, the flood took everything we owned—every memory soaked and swept away. With no money, Ma borrowed from the sort of men who never ask nicely twice. They had been chasing her ever since, dogs starved long past reason. Tonight, it seems, they were ready to feast.
“I’m not a boy anymore,” I said. “I’ll pay them. I’ll fight them if I have to.”
“Don’t be foolish, Gil-dog.” She was already pushing a bundle of necessities into my hands. “Go north. Don’t stop until you see snow.”
“No.” I gripped her wrist—half defiance, half plea. “We’ll all run. We’ll be faster together.”
“You’ll only lose me faster,” she said. Her voice—gentle, final—cut me more than any blade could.
Shadows fell against the paper door like ghosts come to collect a debt.
She pressed the pouch of money to my chest. I knew then, this was goodbye.
I wanted to turn back. To say something worthy of the moment. But there was nothing. I hoisted Myung onto my hip, fastened the money to my wrist like a lifeline, and fled.
The night was a new moon night—black as grief, cold as truth. The wind whispered urgency through the leaves, urging me forward, step after weary step, until my legs gave way beneath the pink hush of morning.
Myung slept on, and I clutched the pouch against my heart before sleep pulled me under.
“Hyeong.”
I woke to hands dragging me through the underbrush. My eyes flew open.
“Myung?” I called, frantic. “Myung!”
Then—arms around me, desperate and familiar. Myung. Tears on his face.
“Hyeong... where’s Ma?”
“She’s...” I could not finish. Instead, my gaze caught a stranger’s.
He was close to my age, I thought, though the sun and wind had aged him strangely. His dark hair fell like shadows across his brow. There was something kind in his eyes—and something tired, like he too had fled something behind him.
“She’s away,” I said at last. “She’ll be back soon.”
I smoothed Myung’s hair, more lie than comfort.
The boy stepped closer. “I’m Jinu Kim. You passed out in the fields I work in.”
“I’m Hong Gil-dog,” I said. “This is my brother, Myung. We are alone.”
He nodded, a solemn echo of my bow. “Are you well?”
I didn’t answer.
Because how do you answer that when all the gods are gone, and all the ghosts remain?