Chapter Text
The new Honmoon was sealed. Not with the golden radiance they expected, but rather a mix of colors bound in a hypnotic dance. It was chaotic, imperfect, but, in a way, profoundly beautiful. They had won.
But the momentary relief didn’t last long, barely born when it died in their chests.
Zoey turned to look at her friends, but only saw Mira. Rumi, who minutes ago had been between them, had disappeared.
“Mira!” Zoey’s voice, filled with a sudden panic, cut through the blissful scene. Her fingers gripped Mira’s arm with desperate force, like the floor was going to collapse.
Mira turned, following Zoey’s terrified gaze. In the place where Rumi had stood seconds before, in the center of their triumph, there was now only emptiness, a stifling space between them.
When their feet landed on firm ground, wordlessly, Mira grabbed Zoey’s hand, and the two broke into a run, away from the stage, the lights, the eyes of the public.
The sound of their footsteps resounded in the deserted hallways leading to the back doors of the tower. A frantic echo accompanied the insistent buzz of their phones. Calling and calling Rumi’s number. It only went to voicemail.
“Where’d she go? She was there just a minute ago!” cried Zoey exasperatedly as she kept texting, following Mira closely as they ran towards the exit.
Mira didn’t answer. She didn’t have answers. Only a visceral feeling that told her to run faster, dragging Zoey along behind her.
“The tower,” she gasped, panting, breathing faster until the air burned in her lungs.
Their apartment was exactly how they had left it, a time capsule of their life before everything had happened. An oppressive silence lay over the rooms.
“Rumi?!” Zoey’s shout echoed on vacant walls, an answerless plea.
“Rumi!” Mira’s voice, lower but just as desperate, emerged from the bedrooms as she looked through wardrobes and under the beds with unrealistic hope.
The Honmoon shuddered, as though it were responding to their calls.
Nothing was there. No note, no trace. Anguish coiled in their chests, an icy knot that restrained their breathing. Their eyes met, and then turned to the window, to the city on the other side, bathed in the chromatic lights of the sealed Honmoon.
“The Honmoon ...”
Suddenly, Zoey realized. And she knew Mira had come to the same conclusion. “It’s sealed. The demons are exiled —”
“Zoey —” started Mira forcefully.
“What if we banished her to the demon world when we sealed the Honmoon?!”
“Zoey!” shouted Mira. Her chest rose and fell violently, like each breath was a rejection of the idea. “She’s not a demon like the rest of them are!”
The words tasted sour in her mouth. Her denial wavered on her tongue as she remembered the hours before.
It hadn’t seemed important when she had been the first to raise her weapon.
“But ...” Zoey tightended her knuckles until they lost their color. Her lips trembled, bitten time and time again, unable to push away the memory. Zoey, please. That plea, so human and fragile, yet she still raised her shin-kal against her.
“Celine.” Zoey raised her gaze and saw Mira already looking for the phone, saying, “She must know something.”
Zoey agreed and quickly sent a message to Bobby asking for a chauffeur. Mira, meanwhile, cursed under her breath as she was sent to voicemail for the third time. “She’s not answering.”
“The chauffer gets here in five minutes,” Zoey informed her, squeezing her phone tightly.
The drive to Celine’s house was torturous. Every red traffic light and every turn was an eternity. The anxiety rose up in the car like a tide, fed by the silence of their phones, with neither Rumi or Celine responding to their calls or texts.
When they arrived, they didn’t bother to knock. Mira yanked open the door. The house was silent, sunk into unnatural stillness.
“Mira —” Zoey gripped her arm, and Mira could feel Zoey’s whole body shaking. “Where is she?” she whispered, her throat half-closing with fear.
The Honmoon started to shake again below their feet, the sensation only heightening their trepidation.
Mira didn’t respond at first. With one hand, she stroked Zoey’s back, trying fruitlessly to console her. With the other, she started to dial Celine’s number again. Then, handling the phone clumsily, she pressed the home button.
Her wallpaper lit up: a selfie of the three, smiling and unworried, taken by the spirit tree in the graveyard. Her heart skipped a beat.
“The tree,” she whispered, a spark of lucidity amidst the chaos. “Maybe she’s there.”
Hope, rash and ferocious, lit up across Zoey’s face. The two grabbed hands and started running, their feet taking them towards the mountain.
Neither could explain why their chests became heavier with each step uphill, nor why the Honmoon seemed to palpitate in unison with their speeding hearts. When they could at last make out the top of the spirit tree, the Honmoon shook so heavily that for a moment it felt like it would split open again.
But, suddenly, everything quieted.
The Honmoon was unmoving, terrifyingly calm, as they reached the summit.
The color left their faces. Their hands, intertwined, became cold as ice.
“Rumi?” The name was spoken in barely a whisper.
A dull buzz invaded their hearing. The world spun. Mira was the first to lose her grip, her legs moving forward on pure instinct.
A few steps forward, below the tree, was a figure lying on the ground, covered in a white blanket that didn’t fully cover its familiar form. Nearby, Rumi’s sword stood driven into the ground, and around its blade, the plants were stained in a grotesque, obscene red.
Mira’s knees hit the ground with a dull thud. Her hands shook uncontrollably as her fingers found the edge of the sheet. Her eyes, clouded by tears, still couldn’t avoid following the slow descent of the fabric.
First, the face. Oh, that beautiful face. Serene, pale, with a thin thread of dried blood escaping the corner of her lips. Mira extended her hand, her thumb brushing gently against the dried stain. The cold of her skin struck her like a lash, sending a shiver down her spine.
Her gaze descended.
And the air left her body.
In Rumi’s chest, a brutal open wound showed its blackened edges, the blood congealing. There was no life there. Nothing could save her.
In that moment the revelation hit her so hard that she wanted to die.
“Rumi!” Zoey’s voice exploded behind her, torn and broken. She threw her self across the body and held it desperately. “Rumi! Rumi, please!” Her voice faltered, tears clouding her eyes. “Please!”
Mira remained in the same state of shock. Her hands, unable to keep still, quavered as they held the sheet.
“Please ...” she whispered.
“Rumi! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry for everything!” Zoey held Rumi even tighter, almost sinking into her. “Please, say something!” She buried her face in the hole in Rumi’s neck, searching for her smell, her warmth ... but she found only the cold, the metallic smell of death.
Abruptly, Rumi’s head leaned back, inert. Mira, breaking out of her paralysis, cradled it gently between her hands before wrapping Rumi and Zoey between her arms in a hug, like she could protect them from something that had already happened.
At the same time, she sought refuge in them.
Questions surged into her head.
What happened?
Did a demon attack her?
How?
They were together at Namsan Tower and Rumi disappeared! Why?
Why?!
Amidst her agony and questioning, she neglected to let go of Rumi. It wasn’t until she heard footsteps a few feet away that she raised her gaze, her eyes fixing with hate onto the stranger that dared approach Rumi.
“Mira? Zoey?” Celine observed them with genuine surprise on her face. “What are you doing?”
She noted the girls’ blood-stained clothes, the fierce grip of their hands on Rumi’s body.
“What happened?” Mira was the first to speak, sounding calm though she didn’t feel it.
“Mira ...”
“What happened?!” she roared, and the Honmoon shook violently, responding to her anger.
“Congratulations for managing to seal the Honmoon.” Celine cleared her throat, unfazed by Mira’s outburst. “It’s not gold like we hoped, but it will work until a new group of Hunters is ch —”
Celine stopped as a shin-kal flew by the side of her head.
“What happened?” Zoey repeated, with the same cold anger in her voice. The Honmoon continued to quaver.
“She was a demon,” Celine said curtly, like that explained everything.
It was then that the girls noticed the shovel between Celine’s hands.
“Did you do this?” Mira summoned her gok-do, the blade shining with a menacing glow, gripping it so tightly her fingers trembled.
“The Honmoon was already broken. Her instability was only causing more damage.”
Mira broke from the embrace. Zoey, with great sorrow, laid Rumi’s body on the ground and stood, her shin-kals appearing in a burst of light.
Celine remained unperturbed. The Honmoon began to shake with a faint rumbling, a roll of phantasmal drums that expanded over the hill.
“She asked m —”
They didn’t let her finish.
Mira and Zoey surged towards her in blind range, uncontrollable. Their weapons cut the air in lethal arcs. Celine dodge out of the way and backed up, but the combined whirlwind of their fury was unstoppable.
The Honmoon responded to their anger.
Its beating grew in intensity.
It rang out like a war drum.
Like a reminder of something that was at a breaking point.
When Mira’s first blow caught Celine — a blunt, forceful impact — a violent white light erupted behind them.
Rumi’s sword.
Cleaved into the ground, it shook as though it were breathing. A smooth, pure note, almost like a lullaby, rang out from the blade, such a sharp contrast to the chaos before it that for a moment it seemed the world stopped. Rays of white light began to spiral out from the weapon, the same that had enveloped them hours before at Namsan Tower, when they still believed they could fix everything.
Without warning, the lights dissipated around them.
The hurt was immediate, devastating.
Not physical, more profound ... like a tear in the very soul.
Their knees gave in.
Their voices caught.
The Honmoon rumbled, synchronized, an earthshaking din.
Their weapons disappeared into motes of light. The world blurred into a paling spiral. Their senses fractured.
And before the darkness swallowed everything, they could see one final image:
Rumi.
Unmoving under the blanket.
Only a few steps away.
Too far ... even now.
First came the nausea. Violent retching folded their bodies. A throbbing pain in the chest, a dizziness that sent the world spinning. They kept teir eyes down, gripping their stomachs, trying not to vomit.
“You came at a bad time.”
A voice. Her voice. Familiar, vibrant, alive. A sound that pierced the heart more deeply than any weapon.
“But you just crossed the line.”
It hurt. It hurt more than the dizziness, more than the nausea.
“You wanna get wild? Okay, I’ll show you wild!”
Their legs failed in the same moment as Rumi lifted her arms, giving them the signal to attack.
Rumi turned, her face moving from fierce concentration to genuine concern as she saw the two, trembling, with silent tears running down their cheeks.
“Rumi.”
They pronounced her name in unison. It wasn’t a greeting; it was a plea, a lament filled with all the pain of the world, forcefully piercing into Rumi.
A demon, taking advantage of the distraction, leapt toward Rumi’s undefended back.
Mira moved first, instincutally. Her gok-do appeared in her hands and hit the demon with a clean and brutal strike. But what fazed Rumi was not the monster’s death, but rather Mira, immediately afterwards, hugging her desparately, burying her face in her shoulder.
“Rumi ...” whispered Mira, her voice shaking with restrained sobs.
Zoey followed, eliminating the remaining demons with cold efficiency before throwing herself upon Rumi and Mira, embracing them both like her life depended on it.
“Rumi,” repeated Zoey, laboredly.
Rumi, confused but moved, didn’t move away. She placed her hands on Mira and Zoey’s backs, stroking the cloth of their clothes, until their trembling began to fade. When at last they separated, Rumi looked over them softly. She took their faces between her hands, her thumbs brushing away their tears.
“Better?” she asked, with a tenderness nearly sending them crying again.
Mira and Zoey clung to her touch, to the warmth of her palms on their skin, to her radiating life. It was real. She was alive.
They gave in, agreeing, despite their will unable to separate from Rumi.
“Great, because the plane doesn’t have a pilot.”