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He doesn’t do things without a reason. Reasons can be regrettable, but they cannot be forgone. Something Yeongchul keeps in mind when invitations feel aimless, no end point in sight. There are valuable things to be done here, anyway, besides the supposed point of his wanderings. And the air feels much fresher. There is something he has to deliver.
Yeongchul steers closer to the shadows that line the streets as he walks. Adjusts his hand to cover the insignia on the front of the tome he carries as much as he can. He refuses to draw attention to himself.
The leather feels smooth under his fingertips. Unfamiliar despite having his own hands perpetually sheathed in leather once. But what else is new? (Everything, apparently.)
He manages to cross another block before he freezes. A stranger walking behind him scowls at the sudden stop, brushing his shoulder on purpose as they pass around him. His eyes follow their movements before focusing on the greater buzz of the street’s center just behind them. This isn’t where the threat is, he knows that much. He’s long since learned to stop denying something’s existence just because isn’t right in fucking front of you. (Failure, for example. Should have predicted it from the very beginning.)
There’s a brief sensation, as if something within his brain short circuits. A disruption of energy, much akin to the likes of Vervain, though somehow more impure. What even makes vitality impure? All he knows is that he feels the presence of something, at their courtesy, really. He should have been able to sense the severity from much further away if the being responsible wanted him to.
They extend their courtesy when Yeongchul passes the next alley entrance. They appear in the flesh, tall, but still unobtrusive to anyone else. And though obviously not a native, they seem much more comfortable here in Udayan Anala than Yeongchul is. The hood they wear is local dye, he recognizes. It somehow doesn’t clash with jewelry obviously from the desert.
The impurity reeks stronger. Though he isn’t sure it’s actually the stranger’s anymore. More like whatever the energy they have is tainted in a way. It’s spilled varnish. You can wipe it off as much as you want, but you’ll never rid the initial stain.
“Former Prime Minister,” the stranger addresses, maintaining eye contact as they goad him.
Yeongchul’s reaction is instant, before he can even process what the hell just happened himself. He’s stepping into the alleyway to approach. The stranger’s face the suddenly snaps towards their left while the tome is extended to Yeongchul’s right.
He had struck him.
Regrettable, by some measure, some time in the future. But certainly fucking justified in the moment. His eyes are narrow, a viper’s glare.
“Who the fuck are you?” He demands. There should be no one here who’d address him this way.
“An observer,” they reply casually, hand wisping their reddened cheek as they turn back towards Yeongchul. They’re too good at holding such a vague expression.
“Like fuck you are!”
“You’re being loud.”
Yeongchul is immediately taken aback, straightening his posture. He sees the shadow of a few people at the alley’s mouth stretched upon the ground. They had curiously stopped upon hearing the shouting, before they tentatively carry on their way once things had quieted down.
He lowers his hand, transferring the tome to the other at his side. He takes another look up at the stranger, no less stern, no less fury simmering behind his teeth. His breaths shudder.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Yeongchul grits out.
“No, I did not,” the person agrees.
A moment of silence. The only sounds around them are muffled ambience from the street. Vendors. Wind chimes. Children. Conversation. It’s beginning to wind down as dusk encroaches the day.
Yeongchul grows uncomfortable for a moment. What a familiar and unwelcome feeling. He’s never met someone who hasn’t defected to his aggression, in some form or manner. If they don’t cower, they fight.
Instead of either, this stranger has nothing for him.
The person then reaches out. Two delicate hands, unmarred by battle (typical mage, he notes; they don’t like getting their hands dirty), extended in a particular manner. They expect to receive something.
Somehow, Yeongchul knows it’s the book.
Without thinking, he lifts it, perhaps to shove it into their arms and hope that is all they want from him. But he knows better than that. He hesitates, drawing the book back with a slight glower.
“You are better off if I am the one to hand it to Imai,” they say, softer now.
Yeongchul pales.
No one is supposed to know that. It is most ideal—no, safest—that no one knows that. For either party. He couldn’t imagine the sheer scandal that would arise if anyone knew Udayan Anala’s most elite mages were colluding with…well.
Maybe there’s fun irony in sentencing a death magician to the noose. Yeongchul speaks again.
“You know what this is, then.”
“Yes.”
“Pry it from his fingers instead.”
The stranger frowns slightly, but lowers their arms. They then lower their hood as well. Sharp features. Hair like spun gold, pleated in a loose braid down their back.
“I was told you may say as much,” they admit. “It is not what I have to ask of you anyway.”
Yeongchul grows annoyed. They’re still too cryptic. Too guarded. Threat recognizing threat.
They’re polar opposites. Life from the sand facing death from the tundra. He wants to roll his eyes, but won’t. The less he shows, the better.
“Then what is?”
He shifts the weight on his feet. Maybe a bit too confrontationally, he realizes only after he says it.
They smile.
“You know a truth of this world no one else knows. No one but you, and I, the death purveyor and life weaver,” they speak, circling Yeongchul.
“And what would that be? Perhaps that it’s retarded to argue over a book in an alleyway?”
“You were the one who put up a fight,” they correct. “Not I.”
He scowls.
“I know of nothing,” Yeongchul snaps. Too quickly. Liar, his mind sneers, with a voice that sounds too suspiciously like Vervain’s.
“You. You, the man who permanently scarred Mortressa with power too great for your own mind to handle, knows nothing,” they mockingly accuse. Accusations molt into convictions when they’re correct. Yeongchul stands guilty.
“What, and you think I’ve learned some valuable lesson from that?”
Shut the fuck up, his mind (Vervain) screams.
“You must have,” the stranger states nonchalantly. “You authored the tome in your hands.”
“That’s not-“ Yeongchul stops himself. Takes a deep breath, unable to hide his shudder of rage. He’s being deliberately lead off topic.
“Fuck the tome. Fuck Imai. Are you why he wrote me?”
“Did he mention a man named Mulan?”
Silence. Yes. To both questions.
Mulan huffs a laugh while Yeongchul stands still. Still in hatred, still in anger.
After a moment, Mulan stops circling and begins to walk further into the alleyway now. He looks behind his shoulder once. It seems like a suggestion to follow, yet Yeongchul knows it’s not.
It’s a command.
Yeongchul’s jaw strains in the face of his ire being willed into a box. He can’t win this fight. He isn’t quite ready to pick one anyway. Dust has long gathered on his blade.
He steps forth without looking back, tucking the book under his shoulder once again. He steps in line to Mulan, following him into the shadows.
The first stars begin to shine overhead.
Suddenly, the life weaver turns around, pushing his shoulder to force him to turn before he can react. The sickening stench of vitality that somehow can rot. It’s not a force from this earth, he realizes as a slender hand grabs and holds him by the back of his neck. At first, he tenses because the hand is cold.
But it’s not. It’s everything else that’s cold. He now stands at the foot of the palace, facing a burning Anima Nivis.
Yeongchul freezes. His eyes are wide, the view focusing in and out. Seeing everything, and nothing. Subzero wind blows through his hair, rustles his clothes. It reeks of charred flesh and ash. This isn’t violation of the mind, the way men like Nico burrow into one’s memories. It’s more. This stranger had crawled into his soul.
And all they had to do was grab him by the back of his neck.
Yeongchul wonders if this what terror feels like.
Knows by the bloodstain on the ground and snow to his left that this is at least what it looks like.
Unconsciously, his shaking hand lifts to his face, fingertips ghosting over the scar down his cheek. He remembers the blade cleaving through his skin. The way he bled. The stain sits staunch, on the ground and to his left, in the very same spot. The very same pool.
He feels the roar of death’s energy beneath his skin in defense. It’s rotten and wicked and everything in between. It’s his. But so long as the life weaver observes him in any way, beneath his skin is where it will stay. It burns and bleeds inside. Bleeds like his face into the snow.
Yeongchul somehow finds the strength to whip around, shoving the hand off his neck and instead slamming Mulan by his own into nearby standing rubble. The tears in his eyes are from the cold. They have to be.
“What the fuck is this?!” He screams. It doesn’t even sound like his own voice to him anymore at this point.
Mulan doesn’t fight. He simply looks down at Yeongchul instead. Passive, even with a hand around his throat. His eyes then flick sideways, focused on someone approaching the both of them.
A woman, with half her face covered and a dagger she sheaths as she walks. She has a tome of her own under her arm. There are eleven runes on the cover, arranged in a circle with a gap at the very bottom. One is missing.
Yeongchul becomes distracted by the sight of her. Recognition is instant, known to be mutual when a look of amusement crosses her features. She was a tool, happy to be left alone years ago. He pales once more, releasing his grip on the other man.
He suddenly knows exactly why they’re both here.
The myths and legends were never such. He of all people should know, does know, but it’s one thing to write in a tome. Another to have their faces staring him down in subzero ruins.
He stumbles backwards before falling to his knees, his book forgotten on the ground. The cold soaks through his clothes. It feels the same way it had three years ago. Nothing has changed. Nothing ever does.
Time feels like it stops for a moment, as if the universe itself halts to wait for his repentance. Snow continues to fall, flakes melting into his hair. Some don’t melt, he notices.
Because it’s ash instead.
He his gaze breaks away from the woman, turning back towards the burning city behind him.
Time stops as he stands in the face of his two greatest sins.
The woman continues to approach until she stands between both him and Mulan, still looking down upon Yeongchul. She tilts her head as she notices the book on the ground beside him. Says nothing.
She then turns around to face Mulan now, placing the sheathed dagger at her hip to take the tome of her own into both her hands.
“Thank you, Venus,” Mulan says warmly. “You’ve done well.”
Venus simply bows her head before refocusing her attention on Yeongchul.
She knows he’s beginning to understand now. What he’s done. What he knows was inevitable, and what he thinks was choice. The former doesn’t matter. There are no choices here.
As Yeongchul sits there on his knees, each breath he heaves harder to do so than the last, he blinks.
“You brought me back to this reality,” she states, not unkind, but as if she were explaining things he was not meant to understand. “You did not bring me back to this point in time.”
The legend goes that Andromeda destroyed every piece of research he ever owned before he disappeared by a force not known to this world.
He and Yeongchul, and assumedly Mulan are all bound by time. Yeongchul’s oversight in using magic he was far too immature to use ensured Venus wasn’t.
Yeongchul looks past her to meet Mulan’s eyes, devastated by the scale of these natures he was never meant to interact with.
“They are complete now,” she says. “You weren’t vain in your choices. Only in the fact that you are now the last herald because of them. You are not prepared.”
She looks down at the tome Yeongchul wrote. The wind has flipped it open by now, whether by her will or by coincidence, he isn’t sure.
The page is marked with the missing rune. Yeongchul had only written passing commentary that this rune represented death before becoming obsolete to modern mages. You are either born a proprietor of death, or you weren’t. It never occurred to him why the rune was needed. Unless it didn’t always use to be this way. Unless something permanently altered the laws of this world.
Venus had used her untethered nature to time to reconstruct and recollect all of the contents of Andromeda’s research. All except for that pertaining to death.
Yeongchul didn’t just write to record what he knew before forgoing all his abilities as a mage.
He unintentionally filled in the gap.
He was destined to.
And someone out there knew this.
This curse wasn’t to make his life miserable. It was to mark him. A banner of hope in a war he never started, but one he will help to end, and for once, there’s childish confusion, and Yeongchul feels like sobbing.
Venus steps back, the wind tossing her hair around her neck now. Her head is held high as she looks down upon him still. It is judgment. It’s approval. He was told he wasn’t ready.
But he will be.
The world around him begins to grow quiet. He notices immediately, head whipping around to stare out beyond. From the horizon and inward, the world is wavering and falling out of existence. He turns back around to reach for Venus, to ask more questions, to beg for answers, but she’s already gone. Only Mulan remains, a length away as the world shatters into fractals behind him.
The wind still blows as the edge of this world creeps closer and closer, hair still battering against his face while the snow soaks colder still beneath him. The edge grows dangerously close before Mulan approaches Yeongchul the way he would a wounded animal. He nudges the book on the ground towards him. Yeongchul reaches for it, breath shuddering as he shivers. He misses the edge of the book once before managing to pick it up.
Mulan steps behind Yeongchul. Places a hand on the back of his neck again.
His fear had never quite vanished since arriving here. He winces while holding the tome with his head hung low. It should be over. It has to be. But the world isn’t fading to black, it’s merely fading into another. This one is unfamiliar.
Yeongchul is still on the ground when everything refocuses into another reality. Realities. He’s seeing multiple things at once, overlapping in time and space. It overwhelms his senses and snuffs out the last of his magic for now.
Ten visions. Some from the past. A few from the future. Knowledge doesn’t obey the chronological nature of this world.
Venus standing at the foot of the real Anima Nivis, mere days after the war. Her stepping forth before she fades from sight. From time.
A young man, blond, powerful, surrounded by star charts on the ground of an observatory, illuminated only by the moon and the lantern across the room. He doesn’t know where this is. The center of the room contains old machinery clearly powered by magic. “It’s not a star,” he says, shuffling through charts. “It’s a galaxy.”
An old woman standing on a beach in Callisto, the ocean lapping at her feet while she holds a parchment with lines on them. Wave patterns.
A middle aged man in a quaint lab deep underground, fingertips delicately handling a machine while two slits appear on the wall in front of him. He laughs as he processes what he’s seeing, calling someone over who looks suspiciously like the younger version of the woman previous. She doesn’t seem to understand why he’s laughing.
A student in Udayan Anala. Harsha, he realizes, mathematically designing the mechanism for delivering his own magic in a form only he understands. His hands are covered with chalk as he slides a filled chalkboard up to reveal a blank one underneath. He continues writing equations.
(Yeongchul becomes panicked at the sight, and turns around. Mulan isn’t there.)
A young girl sitting in her knees in a Gracieusean forest, hands covered in mud while the sky rains down upon her. She watches the water drip down the side of a rock, following a path weathered down eons ago. She tilts her head in interest.
An old man standing guard outside what looks like ruins of the observatory. He has long stopped clearing the overgrowth, but he guards the contents inside nonetheless. A suicide mission lasting eternity.
A young woman in ancient Afdal Jazira, watching her master demonstrate his magic. She looks down at the tinkering on her table, then back up to him. She wonders if the kinetic energy of magic can power machinery.
Another young woman, but one who isn’t quite human this time, instead more akin to a rabbit. She tearfully kisses another woman beneath exploding fireworks, heart no longer held back by what the future holds.
An old man in the flower fields of Yungsonghan, hand against his brow to shield from the sun as he stares out upon the river. He writes in the notepad he’s carrying about the way the light reflects off the water, and how to harness its energy for magic.
The final one appears to him in full clarity, by itself this time.
He then realizes this isn’t a vision anymore. He’s instead kneeled in grass near a lotus pond. The air is thin. It’s a mountain peak.
It takes him a moment to adjust to the brightness and warmth. It seems to be early morning. He isn’t shivering anymore at least.
Mulan lets go of his neck and steps around him, evidently familiar with this place. It looks to be Huaxia, rice paddies and villages splayed further down the mountain. Yeongchul watches Mulan stand some distance in front of him once more.
“…What did you just show me?” He shouts. The same voice he used to lead armies with feels feeble now.
Mulan crosses his arms, as if debating which manner of delivering the truth (or at least half of it) would do the least damage. He seems more solemn. The back alley bickering feels like ages ago.
“Depends on what you know,” he then says thoughtfully. “You are no fool. It leaves me with hope I can speak freely.”
Yeongchul glares up at him, shock simmering into rage once more.
“I didn’t fucking ask for this,” he grits out. “If you wanted this fucking book so bad then take it!” He then screams, throwing the tome at Mulan. It strikes the man in the chest and falls to the floor. Mulan never flinches.
“There’s twelve of us,” Mulan states bluntly.
Yeongchul grows deathly silent.
Us?
He bites his tongue.
“Twelve heralds throughout time. You witnessed the marking of each one, starting with your own,” Mulan continues before pausing and glancing down at the pond. “And ending with mine.”
Yeongchul’s head spins with more questions upon each answer he’s given. This has everything to do with the runes. With Venus. With the fucking tome.
“Andromeda’s original scripts were destroyed,” he barks. “What the fuck is this about?”
Mulan huffs a laugh, tossing the book Venus has given him earlier next to the one on the ground.
“Yes. They were. But each of us unknowingly recreated each fragment of it. I the one of life, you the one of death.”
“Get on with it,” Yeongchul scoffs. He’s sick of hearing the obvious, as if it softens any blows at this point.
Mulan’s eyes narrow in return now.
“Venus traversed time and collected each fragment from each herald. You became the herald of death that night in Glacies.“
Yeongchul’s hands clench in the leaves and grass below before he stands. He takes a step closer to Mulan.
“And you? You got to sit pretty on a mountain when fate rolled the dice and decided to fuck you over?”
“If you want to put it that way,” Mulan replies, though it’s clear something about the way Yeongchul phrased it irked him.
“But I did not lie to you. There is something and you and I know about this world.”
Yeongchul feels sick as he recalls the beginning of all of this.
“No,” he says quickly. “I’m not part of this. Take the books and leave.”
“Is that what you really want?” Mulan asks, almost amused by the reaction. “You vowed to never use your magic again. But then you wrote the tome,” he points out while Yeongchul’s jaw hardens. “There is a part of you inside that does not want to be suppressed. You are a mage of death, not an idle author.”
Yeongchul feels an ache in the back of his throat. His greatest sins, and now his greatest denial. He does not deserve to even exist after what he’s done.
“I don’t regret it,” he admits, averting his gaze now that he feels the wetness in his eyes. The other part goes unsaid.
But I mourn them anyway.
There’s no purpose for him beyond what he is. No amount of letters to Dain or hiding in flower shops will ever tire this curse enough to fizzle it away.
“You were powerful. You commanded attention. You didn’t cower for anything,” Mulan reminds austerely.
“And look where it got me!”
Mulan lets the silence settle, heaving a breath.
“It got you to the truth.”
Yeongchul holds his arms close to his chest. He has no idea his cheeks are wet.
“An entity exists out there. One of might and mystique far beyond our comprehension. Andromeda died in it,” he begins. “But here is what you know. Death is meaningless. Life is meaningless. It is how you take and I give so callously.”
“That’s not true.”
“Everything else about you says otherwise.”
Yeongchul stays silent.
“That makes only us fit against a cosmic threat that devours,” Mulan says, quieter now. “I faced it alone, and I came back tainted and subdued.”
That’s what it is, Yeongchul recalls.
The impurity lingering on Mulan is a scattering of his magic into something unintelligible. Something only the being responsible for it understands.
“You’re not human. I am. What am I supposed to do?” Yeongchul snaps.
“You are human. But you don’t have to be alone. Four heralds live today. Bide your time and suffer in solitude for all I care. You know that even if life and death are meaningless, the experience of this world is not.”
Mulan won’t say it, but Yeongchul understands exactly what he’s implying.
This is beyond Yeongchul in the way his magic is beyond himself. Experience is beyond life and death, in the way this threat is beyond anything they knew.
But the knowledge has been rebuilt, Yeongchul as the final piece. Beyond no longer exists, and Andromeda only failed to do anything because he was one man.
Yeongchul then has half the mind to wipe his face. To stand a little straighter. To stop cowering. He drops his arms.
Mulan smiles ever so faintly.
“Take the tome,” Yeongchul says. There’s no anger.
Mulan bends and reaches for both books. The moment he touches the one Yeongchul authored, the final rune appears on the other. The rune of death.
He stacks one atop the other, and takes both into his arms. He looks around the peak for a moment. Yeongchul does as well. The koi in the pond grab his attention.
“This place…” Mulan starts. “I climbed it when I was much younger. I grew up in the deserts, where life is sparse. Here is where I learned what the experience of this world is meant to be, in a place I could so freely feel vitality,” he says. He idly brushes dust off the cover of the book atop the stack he carries as he speaks.
Yeongchul understands what marks him now. He too learned what experience meant to him, when power flowed beneath his fingertips like blood itself. Death is a tool. It is meaningless in the face of consciousness existing. The vessel will live and die. Consciousness is sewn into the fabric of this reality. What matters most cannot be destroyed.
Whatever this is surely won’t obey that. The claws are sharp enough to tear through like it’s linen.
He raises his head slightly, eyeing the tomes before looking back up at Mulan again.
“I do this on my own terms only,” Yeongchul declares.
Mulan huffs another laugh.
“I was also told you’d say as such.”
Yeongchul scoffs. But when Mulan approaches again, he doesn’t flinch or step away.
Mulan steps close, cradling the back of Yeongchul’s neck while their foreheads meet. It feels warm. Yeongchul’s breathing slows. It burns with life and something else, something incomprehensible but alluring. Mulan isn’t clutching the base of his skull anymore, crushing the flesh that shelters his consciousness.
“The final muse has been summoned,” he affirms, as if speaking to a force beyond this world.
On queue, the reality around them simply begins to fade away as it did earlier, yet Yeongchul does not feel fear.
He closes his eyes until he can no longer feel soft earth under his feet. It returns to stone brick before he opens them again.
They’re back in the alleyway, the bazaar still alive at its mouth, but Mulan does not let go quite yet. He meets Yeongchul’s eyes.
“Tell no one,” he says, not unkindly before releasing his hand and stepping back.
Yeongchul blinks, hesitating before nodding slowly. He eyes the tome he wrote clutched in Mulan’s arms one last time, as if to second guess himself. Mulan notices.
“Why should I trust you?” Yeongchul suddenly asks, eyes flicking upwards back to Mulan’s gaze.
It doesn’t mean anything, really. Yeongchul submitted to all of this the moment he sunk his knees into the snow.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” Mulan admits.
Yeongchul’s eyes narrow once again into a glare. Even if the answer (or lack thereof) technically didn’t matter, it would have at least been nice to hear that he isn’t signing his soul away.
Mulan merely smiles and relaxes his shoulders, both arms around the books still.
“But I trust you,” he says. “You are the balance an optimistic world needs to survive.”
“You call this world optimistic?” Yeongchul laughs.
“In a way. It exists despite itself. Despite us.”
He also knows what that means.
“And what am I to do now?” Yeongchul then asks.
Mulan simply continues to smile.
“I still do not have an answer,” he says.
Yeongchul tilts his head ever so slightly.
Suddenly, commotion at the mouth of the alley draws his attention away. It’s a haggling gone wrong at a nearby vendor. Nothing of note, but soldier’s instincts don’t let him ever ignore.
When he turns back towards Mulan to reply, he’s gone.
There is nothing else for Yeongchul to do but go back the way he came.
He doesn’t.