Chapter Text
What is known of the First and Original Demons is, in truth, scarcely more than rumour. A handful of surviving texts—those copied in haste before the burning of the Church of St. Ireum—offer vivid yet inadequate descriptions: figures not unlike humans in silhouette and demeanour, marked only by their practice of the forbidden Magicks; by their rites performed in full secrecy; their ink-darkened tongues that hiss like snakes; and, most of all, by their eyes.
Those eyes are remarked upon most often. It is said that to meet the gaze of such a creature is to feel one's own humanity called into question—for their pupils, instead of their proper spherical form, are narrowed into a horizontal slit, akin to the Goat of Mendes: the symbol of Primordial Evil itself.
Whether these accounts describe truth or only the fearful imagination of their authors is uncertain. Yet in every surviving record, one truth remains unchanged: that these beings stand in opposition to all that may be called human.
— Ryu J. & Lee K., An Illustrated History of Demonology (rev. ed., 1877)
ON THE VERANDA overlooking the garden—where the cobbled road curved in toward the gate, and where the morning glories had only just begun to open their full-petaled indigo faces against the rising sun—sat both parents.
They shared the wrought-iron settee, a wool blanket drawn across their laps despite the mildness of the hour. Autumn had come early to the valley. Baek Sawol felt the cold first, as she always did those days, deep in the joints of her hands, which she curled and uncurled intermittently on her lap. Beside her, Baek Hyunshik, held open a thin pamphlet printed on cheap pulp—some circular from the apothecary concerning a shipment of tonics distilled by steam apparatus newly arrived from the capital. His gaze, however, strayed often from the page, and gravitated to the figures playing in the garden below instead.
It had once been orderly with neat rows of garlic, turnip, and hardy greens, but the monsoonal rains had undone much of that work. The beds had softened at the edges, the weeds growing back quicker than could be pulled, and the narrow irrigation channels Hyunshik had dug glimmered with standing water. He would need to aerate the soil again—a task he had neglected time and time again in favour of other, more pressing chores. Through that messy patch, two children ran: a daughter of fourteen and a son of twelve, both still in their nightclothes, barefoot in the wet grass. Their laughter cut cleanly through the thin morning air. Baek Sayeong ran ahead, her loosened braid trailing behind her like a dark banner. Nipping at her heels was Baek Saheon, no longer so little, though still slight for his age. His long linen nightshirt hung past his knees, the hem already dampened with dew and mud, slapping against his calves with an exaggerated sound.
Then Saheon tripped. He hadn’t been watching his footing; he never did, not when there was something ahead of him worth chasing. He pitched forward, arms pinwheeling, and collided directly into his sister's back.
They tumbled together as a tangle of limbs, and landed as one heap at the edge of the vegetable patch that Hyunshik had been tending to for the better half of the week.
Sayeong came up first, spitting grass and dirt. She wasn’t hurt, but whined all the same, dragging out each syllable like taffy being hooked. "You idiot—"
"You pushed me first, hag."
"I did not, you miserable little piece of sh—"
"Baek Sayeong. Baek Saheon. Language." Sawol rose, the blanket slipping to the floor. One hand gripped the railing of the veranda; the other pointed sharply toward the house. Her expression was tight with weary impatience. "Inside. Both of you. Now."
The children exchanged a look—co-conspiritors caught in the act, but not yet sorry—and trudged toward the kitchen door. Sayeong brushed leaves from her hair as she went, head lowered in reluctant submission. Just behind her, Saheon favoured his left foot as he dragged himself past them, his head bobbing forward slightly with each step, his limp slight enough that he must have thought it went unnoticed.
It didn't.
Sawol noted it silently. She would tend to him later, when her temper had softened. And there was no doubt that it would, like clockwork; she had never managed to stay angry with them for long, no matter what kind of mischief they enjoyed bringing about.
Hyunshik lowered his pamphlet after the children passed. He did not speak, but the faintest smile graced his mouth, and his eyes twinkled with mirth. Sawol caught that look, and shook her head.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were thinking it."
"I was thinking," Hyunshik conceded, his smile deepening a fraction further, "that they sound just like you and your sister at that age.” As a teenager, she'd have shoved him for that, and deservedly so. A newlywed, she'd have laughed and let the laugh stand as its own answer. But now? She turned away so he would not see her smile, though he saw it anyway.
Funny how that worked. No matter how she angled her face or what she did, his gaze always seemed to find hers—like a sunflower bending, almost without thinking, to turn its face into the sun.
/
In the kitchen, Sawol set out the rice porridge she had started at dawn. It still steamed in its earthenware pot, fragrant with toasted sesame oil and a whisper of garlic harvested from the previous week. With the cold setting in, they would need to plant new bulbs soon, before the soil hardened further beneath their feet. If that wasn't enough, her husband would slice yesterday’s loaf from the village bakery, miraculously still soft despite the sudden chill that had settled over the town. Their children would squabble over who got the heel, as they always did.
She also had eggs—six of them, brown and speckled from their neighbour’s coop—and was reaching for her cast-iron pan when Sayeong asked sweetly, in a sing-song voice, “Eomma, can we eat outside today?”
And because the morning was fine, or at least fine enough: still wet and cool from the night’s rain, and not yet drizzling once again—and because her husband was already carrying the tray toward the veranda without waiting for her answer, she said yes.
But that breakfast never came.
HIS BREATH CAME in small, visible puffs. Ghosts in the cold morning air, vanishing almost as soon as they appeared. The view in front of him refused to settle into focus; sweat stained his lashes and dripped painfully into his eyes like saline drops. The world behind him, however—all of it was now gone, passed, and soon to be abandoned. He would not look back. He could not allow himself to turn around.
All that lay behind him was a sprawling, terror-struck disaster—the accumulated damage of his own mistakes, and a chain of errors that had driven him back onto the road with nothing to his name except the clothes on his back and a wound that would not heal. The indignation of it rose like heat beneath his skin: an acute, needle-like prickling at the nape of his neck. Shame followed close behind: the shame of being caught, of being seen and thus identified by villagers who would have remained oblivious had he simply not been in the wrong places at the wrong times.
What had he done wrong? He had stolen—yes, stolen—food from three market stalls in the past fortnight. Garments from a washing line outside a cottage whose occupants, not a week before, had given him water and a hunk of stale bread upon assuming he was a homeless beggar, innocent and entirely pitiable. Nothing more than scraps. Measly trifles. Nothing at all that would be missed, and in practice, hadn’t been missed—nothing, that is, except his dignity, and that had been absent so long he scarcely remembered what it felt like to have it before. He had even managed to build a small shelter for himself on the roof of someone's lodgings. In the end, he had been exposed not by his supposed crimes, but by the soft meow of a fellow illegal occupant. How trivial! That a small, brief sound had been the only thing that revealed his hiding-spot, and thus sparked his relocation.
That was the fourth refuge he had abandoned in as many months on the run. Four roofs. A pallet, if he was lucky enough to find one tossed out into the streets; otherwise, makeshift cushions fashioned from discarded rice bags refilled with straw or grass. He had gotten rather creative, though he longed for something more. The illusion of permanence, at the very least.
And each time, the men of the church seemed to find him, accosting him with receipt of his wrongdoings. His list of crimes grew impossibly longer with each village he visited and inevitably overstayed his welcome in. His poor, no-good, thieving fingers! It wasn't his fault he had inherited this life with an utter lack of inheritance; it wasn't as though he would be doing this if he had any other choice.
The only reprieve: he was, at least, farther now from that thing in Jisan. That much he knew. The stench of rot had lessened with distance; the thick miasma that once clung to him—his hair, his clothes, and even the inside of his mouth—had thinned and become no more than a phantom scent at the edges of his awareness. A whiff of something spoiled, there and gone, like meat left too long on the butcher’s block on a warm summer’s day. And the wound at his stomach no longer hurt with the brilliance of ten burning suns. It was now a more distant throb—one he could almost hope to ignore, if he kept moving, and didn’t press on it. But it was still a weeping, gaping wound, and it wouldn’t close no matter how many weeks had passed since that day.
The first night after escaping alone, he had run until his lungs burned and his vision blurred. His stomach had begged for relief, but he had not stopped until the screams faded, not until the orange glow of fire had shrunk into dancing pinpricks in his vision, then into nothing at all. Not until the only sound left was his own ragged breathing and the wet slap of his ruined shoes against the dirt.
He had not looked back then. He could not look back now.
Saheon turned abruptly into an alley.
The alley narrowed quickly—oppressively so, the space barely wide enough for two men to walk side-by-side. They were hemmed in by leaning walls of wet grey stone. A lantern hung just out of reach, its wavering flame revealing a draft he felt keenly through clothes too thin for the hour; even his shoes, worn down to the sole, conscripted the chill of the slick cobblestones beneath. Rain had passed not long before—a sudden, drenching sun shower that had swept through and driven him out from his ramshackle shelter formed from scraps of thatch left outside—and the smell of damp earth still lingered, promising more before nightfall. He would need to find cover before then. Anything would suffice. Even a place fit only for beasts.
And then he would start again, as he always had, and he would—
A throaty hiss broke him from his thoughts.
The wound at his stomach smarted—a sharp, pulling throb, as if something inside had recognised that sound before his mind had.
He knew it. Knew it better than his own heartbeat.
ቻረቿነዘ. ፕቿክዕቿዪ, ፕቿክዕቿዪ.
The words slithered into his mind. Demonic tongue. He understood them whether he wanted to or not.
Flesh. Tender.
Then a wet, tearing crunch: the unmistakable sound of flesh yielding to teeth.
Hunger. Feast. Happy.
Saheon did not think. His body moved of its own accord, flattening himself against the wall, one hand rising instinctively to the wound that should have long since closed. A body such as his—sturdy and quick to heal in most other scenarios, the only Gift he’d received after his awakening—should have mended such damage within hours. Days, at most, to scar. And yet it remained a wound four months later, itching and burning with a low, steady heat that said plainly enough: the thing that had made it still lived.
He glanced past the alley's mouth.
The alley opened into a small courtyard. A loading space, by the look of it, for the district's warehouses, empty, save for the dead. Two bodies lay crumpled against the far wall—both human, by the look of their clothes—though their throats had been flayed open, their blood already darkening in the cold. Between them, crouched over a third victim, stood a demon, its limbs twitching in opportunistic delight as it fed.
Then Saheon saw the man.
He hadn’t noticed him at first because the demon had commanded his eye, but now he perceived him more clearly, saw that he was young, possibly younger than himself; perhaps no older than twenty, though it was hard to tell from the angle of his profile. He was clad in the simple black and white coat of a holy man, the fabric plain and unadorned, cuffs frayed and slightly marred with something that might have been a wine stain, darkened over time. He carried no visible weapon, ornament nor talisman. Nothing but his two bare hands, clenched into fists. But even in the dim light of dawn, Saheon saw it: a dark, ink-like wetness spread across his palms, dripping black from his knuckles. Spattered at his neck and over his collar were specks of the same material, dried over.
The demon finally sensed him. It uncoiled from its victim with a terrible tearing sound—flesh pulling away from flesh, a suction released—and lunged. Its mouth opened wide, wider than any mouth should open, revealing rows of teeth that curved inward like fishhooks.
The man moved quickly. Not gracefully; there was no formal elegance here, nothing at all like the published accounts from the capital's exorcist corps in the circulars that had once made it into Jisan fortnightly. This was something else entirely. The clergyman stepped forward into the demon's rush, closing the distance instead of retreating, and seized it by whatever passed for its collar—a fold of leathery skin, a ridge of bone that squelched beneath his grip—and slammed it against the nearest wall. The impact seemed to crack the stone.
It was dirty and brutal. The way a man might beat a rug against a stone wall to knock a hundred years’ worth of dust out, except the rug was screaming, and the dust was black ichor, and the wall was also, unfortunately, beginning to stain wildly.
The creature shrieked and lashed out, claws raking for his wrists, his face. One caught him across the forearm—Saheon saw the fabric of his sleeve part, and a thin line of red well up—but the clergyman did not relent. He struck it across its misshapen jaw. Then again. And again. Each blow landed with a wet, heavy finality, while his mouth moved, too fast for Saheon to decipher what he was saying.
The demon screamed. It was a sound no human throat could have borne—a tearing of the air itself, a vibration that made Saheon’s teeth ache and his vision dip in and out of consciousness.
Help. Pain, pain.
Not the demon’s hunger this time, but its fear. Its suffering, which Saheon was the sole other witness to. Saheon had never heard a demon beg before; he wasn’t sure it was possible. And yet here it was, crying out to something that would not answer. Eventually the creature began to come apart beneath the man's hands like wet paper, dissolving into black ichor that steamed in the cold air. Its limbs struck at nothing, thrashed once, twice—clawing at the man’s chest, leaving dark smears whenever its limbs caught the whites of his coat—then stilled. Then melted, running in dark rivulets between the cobblestones, pulling in the low spots like spilled ink.
Silence.
Their eyes met.
Saheon’s first instinct, carefully honed through months of flight, was to run. But his body betrayed him; the wound at his stomach flared with a sudden heat, which made his knees buckle—only slightly, but enough to give him pause.
"Still hanging around?" The clergyman tilted his head, studying Saheon. “That’s certainly a choice.” Then he moved towards him, a few slow steps that closed the distance between them until he stood close enough for Saheon to see the slight beading of sweat on his brow. Up close, he looked even younger, the angles of his face sharpened by exhaustion rather than age. Voice colder: "What are you doing here, at this hour? This part of the town doesn’t see many travellers."
"I was—" Saheon faltered, reaching for the first lie he could summon. He made his voice tremble, and his eye—the one uncovered by the eye patch—widen, blinking slow and naive. "Please, I don't know what that was—I, I was only looking for shelter—"
"Don't." The clergyman cut him off, though there was no real heat in it. "You may lie to the nuns when we arrive. For now, are you able to walk?"
Saheon blinked owlishly, now genuine. This line of conversation was not what he had expected at all. “Uh.”
The clergyman sighed—a long, slow breath that fogged in the cold air between them. He looked, suddenly, very tired. The dark circles pooling beneath his eyes seemed deeper in the blue light. “I’m not going to hurt you, if that’s what you’re waiting for.” How the man kept anticipating his thoughts and answering them before they had fully formed, Saheon couldn’t begin to guess. In these strange circumstances, it felt like a natural enough conclusion to draw, but that did nothing to explain how the clergyman had seen through his act moments earlier. He had always considered himself a decent actor, but he'd begun to second-guess himself from just this one interaction. Perhaps something had slipped from him long ago, something he had never recovered. "I assure you that I'm not."
"You swear on it?"
"I do."
Saheon considered this. Then, wincing slightly as he shifted his weight more solidly onto his heels, he said, "I can walk. But not far."
The clergyman's gaze dropped briefly to his foot, and something in his posture shifted toward something more openly pitying. Considering or assessing, Saheon couldn't quite tell.
"My church is another mile," the man said. "Likely further than is comfortable in your condition. The clinic isn’t well supplied, unlike those in the capital. I cannot promise you anything beyond what a village physician might offer." He tilted his head, then patted the small cloth bunny pinned to a cloth he tied around his waist. A strange object for someone so stern-faced. "Still. The sisters there are accustomed to fixing wounds such as yours."
He did not wait for a reply. Instead, he turned—presenting his vulnerable back, whether in trust or test—and began to walk forward steadily, his long stride widening the distance between them in seconds. Saheon watched that back for a little longer, but in the end, there wasn't really a decision to be made. With his perpetual wound, he was more concerned about his body's failure to heal than anything else.
After a moment, Saheon followed mutely after him.
Illustration by Gajayo
/
The church was named after Ireum-nim, though no one Saheon met there seemed able to describe who Ireum-nim had been, or why she merited a building—several buildings, really—in her name. It was a small thing, hunched between a cooper's workshop and a row of terraced houses, its stained-glass windows obscured by decades of grime. A sign above the door, painted in faded gold leaf, read: A Refuge for the Weary. A Home for the Homeless.
A woman dressed in a stately grey habit pressed a bowl of milk-coloured broth into his hands before he had even finished sitting up.
"Drink," she said. "You'll need your strength."
She was young—younger, somehow, than the clergyman he had met the night before—with a soft, rounded face, and a voice perfectly designed for soothing feverish children. Her nose was delicate and sloped to a blunt at the tip, giving her an air of gentle innocence that seemed at odds with the quick, almost dismissive way she handled the materials on her medical tray. Her name, she told him, was Sister Yeongeun, though she added with a small smile that she had not taken her final vows yet, so perhaps he ought to call her Yeongeun and nothing more.
Saheon drank the broth. It was thin and barely warm, but it was something—and a great deal more than he had had in days.
"The man who brought me," he said between sips. "The priest. What's his name?"
Sister Yeongeun was busy with a roll of bandages, her back half-turned toward him. Like this she looked small and ridiculously vulnerable, hunched over as she fussed with the items on her tray; setting one thing down only to pick up another, swapping one for the next. Seriously, Saheon thought, what was with these people and always turning their vulnerable parts toward suspicious men? How had they not all been murdered in their sleep by now? If he weren't injured, he might have even considered—
"Oh, that's Kim Soleum. Though he's not technically a priest—not officially, at least. He does the bookkeeping, mostly, and on occasion, some of the heavy lifting for the church. We particularly lack handymen." She paused. "Among other things."
"And why isn't he one yet?"
"I'm afraid I can't say. You'll have to ask him yourself." There. He saw her shoulders stiffen slightly, reluctance already setting in. Changing the subject would be wise, he knew, but small talk had never been his strength. And even if it were, he saw no reason to bother with it now when he had more questions than real answers.
"This church is very lucky to have him."
"We are," she agreed at once, her voice lifting in a way that seemed almost proud. "He's been exceedingly helpful in all kinds of matters."
"Including what I saw yesterday?" Saheon tilted his head, keeping his tone light and curious—a decent impression of a passerby who had stumbled into something far beyond his grasp and simply wanted to understand what it was he was missing. In truth, only half of that was an act. He really had never seen anything like it at all in all his years on the road, and a skill like that would have made his life immensely easier if he'd had it himself, because no one, not even petty thieves, enjoyed having their lives at someone else's mercy. With strength like that came a real, absolute power. "I recognised those creatures. I was attacked by them a long time ago, after all. They were demons, weren't they?"
Sister Yeongeun said nothing, though her hands stilled on the bandages.
"What he was doing—" His voice took on an unexpected cadence, higher now, pitched higher now in a clumsy mimicry of excitement. Not that he had to try very hard; he was buzzing with it. "That was an exorcism, wasn't it?"
She glanced at him over her shoulder. Something flickered over her face—caution, perhaps, or the beginnings of suspicion. Then it was gone, smoothed over by the placid mask she wore.
“You ask a lot of questions,” she noted.
Saheon let the silence stretch. Then he shrugged, wincing slightly as the movement pulled at the stitching around his wound once again; he could feel the freshly sealed edge of it reopen and bleed through the gauze, and that part at least wasn't an act, not in the slightest.
Sister Yeongeun saw this and sighed. She set down the roll of bandages she had been holding.
"You're going to undo all my work before I've even finished," she muttered, more to herself than to him. Then she knelt beside his cot, beginning to unwrap the wound in his side with careful, practiced movements. She sighed again, softer this time. "I suppose it's natural to be curious, if I were in your position. Soleum doesn't like to talk about it. What he does, I mean. He says it's not holy work." She shook her head. "Though I really shouldn't gossip. Forgive me."
"Please," Saheon said, keeping his voice soft and his eye downcast in what he hoped was a humble sort of way, though he wasn't even sure she was looking at him. “I'm just trying to understand what’s going on, that’s all.” The wound beneath was uglier than he remembered, though it was no longer weeping with a putrid, grey liquid. The stitches were neat—neater than he had anticipated—and his earlier movement hadn't dislodged them entirely as she had feared; Sister Yeongeun's work was precise, clearly practiced. So she had to be at least partially trained in the medical arts. What she was doing out here, in a crumbling church at the edge of nowhere, when there was more work and more patients in the larger cities he’d heard of, he had no idea.
"The Church," he said carefully, "sends people to deal with things like that, don't they? Exorcists. From the capital."
"The Church barely knows we exist. We're too small for them to bother with. Too far from anything important." She reached for a clean cloth. "Soleum isn't trained. He's not even supposed to be doing what he does. He just—"
She poured a dab of alcohol onto the cloth, then pressed it against the wound. Saheon had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from flinching visibly. The contact burned. Everything—inside, outside—burned.
"He just can,” she finished, her voice softer now. “No one knows why. Not even him, I think."
Interesting, Saheon thought.
He let out a slow breath, forcing his muscles to relax. "And the Church doesn't care? A man who can kill demons with his bare hands, and they just leave him out here?"
She looked up at him then, her round face suddenly serious. "Who said he kills them with his bare hands?"
“I saw what I saw,” he said carefully, holding her gaze for a moment, before looking away.
Sister Yeongeun said nothing to that. She simply continued her work on his wound, her movements steady and sure, as she applied a poultice from a small brass tin etched with unfamiliar symbols. The salve inside was dark green, almost black, and it hissed faintly when it touched his skin—a soft, chemical sizzle that smelled of copper and bitter herbs. He felt the wound pull and tighten, as though tiny invisible threads were stitching him back together from the inside. Certainly this antidote had to be precious, given its efficacy, but she had simply pulled it out from a small wall cabinet beside the cot, made of dark wood and fitted with brass hinges; Saheon filed this away into his memory in case it would be useful.
Across the room, a half-open door led into a small study. Through the gap, he could see the edge of a desk, a shelf of ledgers; and standing further in, speaking to another figure he could not quite make out, was Kim Soleum.
Saheon kept his eye on that profile.
Kim Soleum seemed to sense his gaze, and turned to him sharply.
“Apologies, I have to leave. Our patient is finally conscious, it seems, and I have much to question him about—”
“Nonsense!”
The word came like a crack of thunder in the small space, striking bright and loud—almost too loud for the room it came from. A hand clapped Soleum on the shoulder, and then the hand’s owner was pushing past him into the doorway, ducking slightly to clear the frame despite not needing to. There: a man with copper coloured hair, the strands catching the light like burnished wire. A giant broadsword was strapped to his back, the leather of the grip dark with sweat and age. A quick scan told Saheon that his clothes were fine but not precious; a well-fitted navy jacket made with thick, sturdy fabric clearly meant for the field. Pinned onto his breast, a tortoiseshell sigil. It was a crest Saheon did not recognise, though the quality of its make suggested a decent amount of money had to have been poured into it without regret.
“Do they make you do errands like this in this church?” the man was saying, his voice carrying easily across the room. “You’re not even one of their priests, for Heaven’s sake!”
A grin spread across his face—wide and wolfish, looking entirely too pleased. The man braced one hand against the doorframe and leaned into the room, his eyes scanning until they landed on Saheon, and stayed there. The way a cat might watch a hole in the wall, waiting to see what came out.
His irises were an electric, startling blue, the colour of the sky at midday. Unnerving, the way they seemed to hold still while everything else about him moved. And there was that strange red band around his neck too. A rash, perhaps, though it looked too neat for that; the mark had to be deliberately made. No longer fresh and bleeding but long-healed over, like a scar from a rope burn, or an old, near-fatal accident. Saheon found himself staring, mouth slightly agape, before he reminded himself to look away.
“Well, well,” he said. “Look what we have here. No wonder our lovely Soleum has now become so particular about his bedside manner.”
The man pushed off from the doorframe and took a few lazy steps into the room, his boots heavy on the floorboards. Up close, he smelled of oiled leather and smoke. Not an occasional indulgence, then. Behind him, Kim Soleum’s eyes twitched; the grooves between his eyebrows deepened as he watched the man move to stand in front of him silently, his arms folded stiffly across his chest.
“What’s your name, then?” he asked, dropping to a crouch beside the cot, to bring himself to Saheon's level. His knees cracked slightly as he settled, and he let out a small grunt. He was close enough now that Saheon could see the fine lines at the corner of his eyes—whether simply from age or mirth, he still couldn’t tell. “Or should I just call you ‘the stray’ until you deign to tell me your name?”
Sister Yeongeun made a small sound in the back of her throat. Disapproval. “Choi,” she said, “he’s injured. He doesn’t need an interrogation. At the very least, not from you. Where’s Ryu Jaekwan?”
Choi waved a hand without looking at her. “He’s busy today, so I didn’t bring him along. Besides, I’m not interrogating—I’m just conversing with the newcomer. There’s a difference.”
His grin didn't waver, but something in his eyes had darkened. A sharp, almost cunning look was beginning to take over his features, and Saheon had the unfortunate feeling that this… Choi, whatever his real name was, seemed the kind of man who enjoyed taking things apart to see how they worked. Including people.
He turned back to Saheon, who had simply remained quiet throughout the scene, then leaned forward, elbows resting on his knees.
“So. Your name?”