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We are hunters, voices strong;
slaying demons with our song.
Fix the world and make it right,
when darkness finally meets the light.
…
“Celine? Do hunters kill all demons?
“Yes.”
The softness with which it is spoken does not hide the heavy sense of finality it is meant to carry. As it falls like an axe, silence swells up like distrubed dust and creates a lull in the paltry attempt at conversation. Somehow, despite the weight, Rumi manages to raise her gaze to the simple headstone engraved with the name of her mother.
The characters are equal parts familiar and foreign to her, just like the small photo of her that stares back. Much like her name, it is one of the few remaining pieces of her mother she has; small, faded, and cut away from a larger picture that Celine swears has been lost to time now. Through the grain and frayed edges, the lady that smiles back at her radiates a warmth that Rumi can see but never feel. Just like grief. True grief.
How does she mourn the loss of someone she never got to know?
Then her gaze turns to her upper arm. Sharp, prismatic lines shift in the sunlight, spidering out like angular veins beneath her skin, shimmering with a kind of supernatural glow reserved only for the beings whose very existence she has been taught to despise. She swallows. It's difficult.
“So, everything that has patterns?”
The axe rises once more.
Celine’s voice sharpens, putting her blade to shame.
“Cover those up.” A hiss, and her little fingers are quickly pried away from her sleeve as Celine tugs it down with just a bit more force than necessary. For a moment, Rumi can swear she sees a tremble to her wrists before she recollects herself and returns to braiding her hair. “You only have those because-“
“My dad was a demon?”
Another brief pause. This time, the axe doesn't fall. It lingers, hovering in the air as though unsure whether or not to cut lest it break something irreparable: a truth neither quite wants to acknowledge or confront, though it’s as plain as the marks on her arms.
“You’re not one of them, Rumi." Celine insists. "You’re a Hunter, just like your mother was.”
She knows the words are meant to be comforting. But they aren't. Maybe it's the hint of desperation that tinges the edges of the words like a stain bleeding in from the edges of a cloth. Or maybe it's because, even at her young age, Rumi knows that it is not that simple. It can never be. Her very existence is a conflict, a contradiction. But she hasn't quite come to grasp the gravity of what that truly means. Just that it's a truth. A heavy truth. And the weight of it settles in her chest like a heavy burden. Heavier than she should know at her age.
Heavy like an axe she's still too small to properly hold.
Her mother watches with warm, lifeless eyes through a grainy, faded window, offering no comfort and no guidance.
How can she be anything like her mother? She never even knew her.
All the warm and wonderful memories shared with her by her aunts is hardly the lighthouse in a storm they hope it will be for her. If anything, they do little more than highlight the fact that she is being swallowed up by the shadow of her mother’s ghost. The spirit of someone loved, cherished, and lost creates an ocean of grief she can't understand enough to navigate; the memory which keeps so many others grounded does little more than serve as a weighted chain around her neck. Her mother is a person which Rumi has no recollections of save for the flashes of expectation she catches in people's eyes when they look at her, reminding her that her mother set a bar somewhere high above her head— one that she now has to find a way to clear without ever actually seeing.
Some days, she feels like she's just barely keeping her head above water to begin with.
“When the Honmoon is sealed, all the demons will be gone from this world. And so will your patterns.”
The Honmoon. Her one lifeline. The one thing that might truly free her from this turmoil. Her one chance to break through this storm, this endless conflict.
The one thing that might be able to set the axe down once and for all.
The Golden Honmoon
“So these will be gone?” She is hesitant but hopeful as she cranes her neck to spy her birthmarks once more. The wistfulness in her eyes is unmistakeable, but she can't tell if it's for the patterns themselves or some deeper part of herself they represent.
“Yes. Those will be gone.”
Either way, Celine sounds assured. So, she manages a weak smile.
For the briefest moment, Rumi feels a small sense of relief. As conflicted as she feels about losing her patterns, she knows she won't miss the way they make her feel. She won't miss the stares or the quiet whispers she can just barely make out when no one thinks she's listening. She won't miss the way her heart lurches whenever she sees a picture of her mother - not from guilt for her, but from guilt for not knowing how to feel about her. She won't miss the stomach aches that come from being so worried whether or not her clothes will cover up her patterns.
She'll finally get to live.
Yet, just as she begins to feel herself reveling in the thought, she feels Celine's hand against her back. It pushes at her firmly, urging her to stand. She does, slowly, moving to feel the long, smooth braid her hair has been neatly tucked back into.
"Why don't you start heading back? I'll follow you. I just want to put some fresh flowers down for your mother first."
Rumi nods, offering that small smile that reminds the older Hunter so much of her mother. She nods, giving a quiet 'yes, Celine' before moving to find her way back through the rows of headstones, leaving her mentor alone at her mother's grave.
It is a protective measure.
What Rumi doesn't know— couldn't, still much too young to have her senses for the supernatural adequately honed for hunting demons— is that they are being watched. The air is tainted by the unmistakable, oppressive weight of some supernatural being. Their presence hangs like a heavy smoke, whispered incantations inaudible to the untrained ear lingering on the breeze like an unholy aura. An oil spill, deceptively beautiful in its murky, prismatic shimmering on the surface of the sea; dark and choking in the void of its true nature. It is a threat Celine has become all too familiar with.
And this one worst of all.
True to her word, Celine lingers to carefully place the delicately wrapped bouquet of flowers she's brought upon her old friend's grave. It is an act of tender devotion, of love; completely in contrast to the way she suddenly turns to reveal her drawn blade, sharpened as much with hatred as it is with whetstone. The very tip, sharpened and poised like the fang of some dreadful serpent, offers only a hair's breadth of space between itself and the broad chest of her target.
"You have some nerve coming here." Her eyes cut into slits, her glare perfectly venomous as it falls overs the painfully familiar shape of the demon. She presses the tip of her blade into his flesh, barely enough to nick. He does not flinch. He remains perfectly calm, stoic in a manner comparable to a stone statue, and somehow that only makes her angrier.
Alu towers over her, easily pushing the bounds of 8 feet to 9, not including the massive caprine horns that adorn his head. Thick black hair falls from his crown in a mess of wisps and curls. Somewhere in the controlled chaos of their shapelessness there exist seven braids carefully woven and held fast by iron and silver bands inscribed with arcane symbols only his kin could decipher. As if that wasn't enough hair, his roughened, scarred face, chiseled from stone in its broad jawline and sharpened cheekbones, is made all the more intimidating by the long beard he so meticulously maintains. And like his hair, it has several braids of its own. Long, floppy ears peer from between the two long masses of hair, finding kinship in the sharp, tusk like lower canines that jut out from his lower lip, and the dark red eyes of a caprine monster that glow in low light.
The rest of him is equally as monstrous. A broad-shouldered body thickened with muscle and scar tissues, etched with patterns of his own; far from the jagged stripes and iridscent glow of her usual targets, his skin is marked with endless symbols tattooed in dark shapes. Alchemy of another world and symbolism of death and destruction that blend into the dense patches of hair on his chest and arms that melt into long claws and the legs of a satyr. Cloven hooves dig into the earth while behind him, a long tail more akin to a lion and red, skeletal wings remain carefully tucked behind his back as if to somehow make himself smaller.
In some way, he is alluring. With a sort of conventional attractiveness that blends well with the supernatural mystique of an infernal creature, it isn't a total shock that he might garner the interest of some. Yet the scars that mottle his flesh, that darkness of his eyes and the sharpened points of his claws and fangs and horns are a stark reminder that he is a full-blooded infernal. A powerful one at that. A demon of rank and skill, and for that alone he deserved to be destroyed.
She will never understand what Mi-yeong saw in him.
"You can't keep her away from me forever." His voice is a low rumble, laced with some guttural quality that reverberates into every sound he makes.
"I can keep her away as long as I need to." Celine presses the blade deeper, drawing blood. He still doesn't flinch, but he takes a step back anyway.
"She is my blood, just as much as she was-"
"Stop." Celine bares her gritted teeth, stepping forward to sink her blade in deeper. "Don't you dare. You have no right to speak her name after what you've done."
At that, the demon finally bristles. In an instant, his shape warps and vanishes in a blur of dark smoke and infernal magic. When he reappears, her blade is in his grip, his face mere centimeters from her as he snarls.
"Selfish mortals- believing that you have a monopoly on grief." He squeezes, and a small gasp escapes Celine as she hears the unmistakable sound of something cracking.
Her blade.
"I loved Mi-yeong. More than this entire world and anything it could possibly offer. And she felt the same, despite all that she was taught to believe. She was mine, and I, hers. Our love story was a miracle, and our daughter was proof of that. And in her mother's absence, she is my most treasured gift. The only part of my mate I have left."
"She was never yours!" Celine moves to draw back and slash at him but only air finds the sharpened edge of her sword. "And so long as I live, you will never have the chance to do to Rumi what you did to her!"
The breath is forced from her lungs as she's launched forward, her blade falling from her hands as she tumbles across the grass. Pain explodes in the muscles of her back, already beginning to paint them shades of purple from where the demon rammed her like a vicious beast.
"What I did?" He bellows. "I tried to warn you. I tried to tell you what was coming. What Gwi-Ma was planning. But you wouldn't listen to me. No, you insisted that I was lying, that I couldn't be trusted."
Through pure grit, she manages to crawl to her blade, taking the hilt of in hand just in time to endure another blow from Alu as he charges her. Again, she's tossed a fair distance. This time, the soft grass cannot cushion her. She collides with a headstone, feeling it crack against her shoulder as it dislocates from the force of the impact. She cries out in pain, abandoning her weapon to hold the angry, enflamed joint.
"She didn't believe you. She trusted me. But your words planted that seed of doubt and made her hesitate, and in her hesitation—"
"You killed her!" Celine shouts, snatching up the blade to stab at him as he manifests in front of her once more. To her horror, it stops just shy of his heart, caught in his grip once more. Her blade digs into his palm and his fingers, spilling dark red blood that drips down its iridescent edge and bleeds into the cracks that spiderweb from him slowly crushing it in his grip.
"She was ambushed! Because you made her doubt herself, made her drop her guard- made her feel ashamed. And that shame sealed her fate."
With a growl, he finally shatters her weapon. The gleaming, shimmering fragments of her salvation fly apart between droplets of dark blood, catching the daylight with a kind of beauty a lightning strike in a rainstorm offers. For a fleeting moment, she realizes that this might very well be the last time she feels the sun on her skin. Sees the sky. Sees Rumi.
"You killed my Mi-yeong. My mate. And for that, I should destroy you."
No sooner is her blade destroyed than his hand is around her throat and squeezing. She kicks and claws at him in a wild fury of animalistic panic, all training and technique thrown to the wind a blind frenzy of desperate survival instinct. She can't stop him. She knows this, rationally. But it is hard to be rational when he's crushing her windpipe. The adrenaline can't stop the way her vision is beginning to blur and fade at the edges. She gasp, desperately trying to pry his fingers from her neck with weakening attempts. It's only as those dark edges begin to spread and cloud out the world entirely that she feels the pressure vanish.
She gasps, letting sweet air fill her lungs before bursting into a fit of coughs at how dry her throat now feels. She collapses onto her good arm, trying to find herself between the acut hypoxia and the throbbing pain of her dislocated shoulder. When she finally finds her mind again, she is left staring up at him equal parts enraged and bewildered.
He watches her, equally as contemptuous in his expression but somehow resigned to the fact that he can't kill her.
"If you weren't so important to her, I would." A silence, permeated only by Celine's heavy breaths. "But I promised her I would protect you, just as I would Rumi."
He watches her another moment before finally turning to leave. He's made his point. No need to further complicate things. As much as his vengeful streak gnaws at him to give in to his violent desires, he is nothing if not faithful. And he always keeps his promises.
"She's not like you." Celine calls out between choked gasps, pulling herself to her unsteady feet. "She's not a demon and she never will be."
At that, he stops. The breeze picks up and sweeps his hair alongside the falled petals and leaves of the flowering trees that shade some rows of the cemetary. Then her turns to look back at her over his shoulder.
"She is my blood, Celine. At least half. Lie to yourself if you must, but do not deny her the truth. It is her birthright, and who she is. If you cannot accept that, then you need to let her go."
She steps forward, battered and bruised but not broken.
"Never. I promised Mi-yeong that I would protect all that was left of her. Even… a child like her."
At that, he turns around completely. "You cannot love only part of her. It would be better if you did not love her at all."
"You're wrong." She fires back, firm and unwavering. "I love Rumi. And I will teach her to love herself as she's supposed to be. Without you."
The axe falls once more.
Silence descends, thicker and heavier than any ocean's deepest depth. It is a choking pressure that crushes them both from within.
Their glares are well met with even venom and hostility. Two sides of the same love, divided by duty and grief and unwavering principles.
He knows he cannot make her see reason- his side of reality. His truth. She is far too entrenched her beliefs, archaic and rigid as they may be. No matter what he says, what he does, she cannot be convinced that there is anything else to believe than what she has been taught to believe. To hate.
She is not like Mi-yeong, and she never will be.
And maybe she will try to poison Rumi with that same irrational, unwavering hatred. Maybe she will try to destroy his child with her rigid, uncompromising mentality. But she is a miracle born of love and understanding between impossible ideals. She is her mother's daughter. She is his daughter.
She'll be okay. He knows she will.
He will make sure of it.
And so he leaves Celine with a chilling final message before vanishing once more, leaving her with both physical and emotional wounds to lick.
"When she finds out what you've done— what you've robbed her of— she will never forgive you."