Page 18

The Prisoner

He comes and sits with me in the cage.

He does not say much, this time. He just…he enters through the door and sits quietly on the cold floor of the cell. Far away from me, yet at the same time, so close.

Rui’s eyes are bruised with purpled shadows of exhaustion. He is again dressed in war garments, and his hair looks so uncharacteristically mussed, as if he has not gotten a chance to comb it in a very long time.

He looks so different from the Dokkaebi I once knew, the Dokkaebi who dressed in jewels and arranged his hair in painstaking perfection. The sight of him nearly breaks my heart.

Nearly.

The Aglyeong, as always, is standing outside of the cell, keeping up a steady stream of rasping malignance. Rui shoots it a glare as it chants “ monster ” and urges me to “ come here ” over and over and over. Yet he does not say anything, not until what could either be minutes or hours have passed, until I have reluctantly begun to relax in his impossible presence.

And his tone is so strangely conversational— casual , as if we’re speaking over cups of steaming gyepi-cha—that it takes me aback. “A lovely companion you have here, little thief,” Rui murmurs, tilting his head at the Aglyeong as it rasps about sucking the marrow from my bones and other such pleasantries. “It has been a while—centuries, really—since I heard of its kind. Tell me, Lina.” His eyes glitter almost desperately. “Do you know, exactly, what sort of being your chatty little friend is?”

I blink at him wearily. My sleeps have been dreamless, fitful, with no more visions of Eunbi. I am beginning to think I imagined it, imagined that moment of connection.

When I don’t reply, Rui’s mask of amused indifference cracks right down the middle. Grimness tightens his lips, the skin around his eyes. A muscle in his jaw flexes. “Do you know, Lina?” he asks again, and this time his voice is a shadow: dark and quiet, slipping through the cracks in my defenses, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

It is an Aglyeong , I reply reluctantly. There is no word for it in the Quiet Language: I must spell it out with individual letters. Rui tracks my hands intently. Each movement suddenly feels ominous. A demon. The Prophecy sent it to guard me.

A contemplative tilt slants Rui’s mouth. “I do not think that the Prophecy summoned this creature to you,” he says slowly. “I do not know how she would. No, these beasts—these ancient bottom-feeders—are attracted to despair and misery like flies to spoiled fruit. Their hunger drives them. They listen to nothing but their appetite, filling their victims with even more hopelessness until they’re ripe for the taking. This creature came, I think, of its own accord. Drawn by your helplessness. But you are right that it is a type of Aglyeong. But do you know what sort?”

Slowly, I shake my head.

Rui’s throat bobs. “It is a Dalgyal Gwisin,” he tells me, each word soft.

An egg ghost. I blink, unsteadily looking at the Aglyeong where it stands half in shadow, keeping up its steady chant of “ monster .”

I suppose the name makes sense: its cracked, faceless visage is like a ruined shell of an egg. Yet I do not understand the fear lacing Rui’s tone. And despite all my knowledge of my continent’s myths and stories, I have never heard of the Dalgyal Gwisin.

And there is very, very little I’ve not heard of. Very little that my appa deigned too frightening for my ears.

“ Brave words, Dokkaebi, for one who knows what I herald ,” the Dalgyal Gwisin had hissed to Rui the last time he visited me. Foreboding slithers down my back like ice.

What does a Dalgyal Gwisin herald?

Rui’s eyes shine in the darkness of the cell. “The sight of a Dalgyal Gwisin is a harbinger. To lay eyes upon it is a sure omen. You need to know this, little thief. For we have seen it. And it means only one thing for the both of us.”

It is almost as if we’re back in the library in Gyeulcheon, the fire crackling as Rui tells me tales of the gods of old. Yet this story is none too pleasant.

“When one sees a Dalgyal Gwisin,” Rui breathes, “it is a sign that the day of their death nears.”

…

For a moment, I can only stare at Rui, my lip slightly parted. His fear of the Dalgyal Gwisin, the way he paled when he laid eyes upon it for the first time: the blood draining from his face, his body flinching back as though he could erase what he had just done—looking at the demon with his own eyes.

I have looked upon it more times than I can possibly count.

Suddenly, I feel hollow. There is not the relief I thought there would be: only an uncomfortable feeling of emptiness . Perhaps if it was only me who’d seen the Dalgyal Gwisin, I would feel more…at peace with the knowledge that death looms on my own horizon. It’s what I wanted, after all. But I am not the only one who has looked at it. Rui has, too.

Rui is…going to die. It is a certainty.

He won’t—he won’t survive what’s coming. No. No.

The Dalgyal Gwisin laughs softly from the shadows. I feel its eyeless gaze tracing me through the bars. Rui is watching me carefully as well as I sign, When?

“It could be hours from now. Days. Weeks. Months. Or even years.” The line of his mouth is very tight. “Omens like this are fickle, in regard to time. Yet there has been this…feeling, within me, Lina, for a while now. A suspicion. Like a mercenary, breathing down my neck. I can feel them approaching, at my back, reaching out a hand. Any moment now, it will touch my shoulder. I do not think that I will leave this war alive, little thief. I can feel it on the battlefield, can hear it in the clashing of sword against scale. My death rides swiftly toward me.” His voice is harsh, bitter, as he raises his chin, and I see him for the warrior that he is, even as alarm seeps through my blood at his words. “I would rather die, sharply honed in battle, than rust away as an unused blade,” he tells me quietly. “That is the Dokkaebi way.”

The barb strikes true. Despite myself, I flinch.

Rui holds my gaze. “Even if this war is futile, I must give my death—my life —meaning. Even if I die tomorrow, or years from now. I must meet death honorably. I want to travel to Jeoseung knowing I did all I could.” His hands twitch, as if he wants to reach for me. “What about you, Lina? Will you take your last breaths as yourself? Or forever imprisoned here? Will you die a honed blade or a puppet to the Prophecy?”

My heart slams painfully against my ribcage.

“Will you die with the blood of innocents on your hands?” Although his eyes are gentle, his voice is like steel. “Or will you wash them clean, and redeem yourself? Will the legends of you be ones of horror, or ones of redemption?”

Damn him. Damn him—he must know, he must know how an image of my appa flickers in my mind, his eyes kind as he told me the stories of the gods, his brows pinched together as he told me the stories of the monsters. I swallow hard, pressing my palms to my eyes, my head swimming so much that it aches.

They have been gone so long that sometimes I forget to wonder, what my eomma, what my appa would think of me.

But now I wonder. And I…I do not think they would be proud.

“The way I see it, there are two paths looming before us—each leading to the same inevitability. Yet one is covered in shadow, while the other is dappled in sunlight.” I can hear his desperation in the quickness of his words, as if he is frightened that at any moment, he will somehow be silenced. “You meet your foretold demise many years after the Prophecy reaches Fulfillment. Iseung is terrorized, decimated. Long has the Prophecy reigned. The Three Kingdoms fell years ago. Your body grows old; you die. Your death changes nothing. We have still lost. Perhaps it is the most likely scenario, or what the Prophecy itself predicts.”

Ice sluices through my veins. Sonagi had once assured me not to heed those last lines: that the death they referenced could be years in the future.

And the Child of Venom will rule all

Before making her home in Yeomra’s halls.

Yet…

Your death changes nothing.

“Or— or you fight your way back into your body, little thief. And we—we try, our hardest, to save these Three Kingdoms. Together. It might be futile. It might very well be foolish. A losing game, an uphill battle. We die trying and either fail or succeed. Death is coming for us both, Lina. It is only a question of how we choose to meet it.”

His words have struck me harder than any weapon ever could. Violently, I flinch, my pain flaring down our bond just as Rui’s own torment pierces me from the outside.

“Do you know,” he whispers raggedly, “the first time I realized I loved you? Truly loved you? Soul-crushingly so? When I saw a future with you, as if told by the stars themselves?”

My hands flutter in my lap. I want to know, but I cannot. I do not deserve to know. I was never worthy of anybody’s love, least of all Rui’s. Just look what I have done with it. I have hidden away, in a cold cell, like the coward I am. Terrified by what I have done. Unable to do anything but weep. A weakling, a shell of myself.

The emperor smiles, just slightly. A small, broken thing, but there all the same. “It was in the gardens, when Wang Jiwoon attacked. You were beaten. Badly broken. Laying on the cold ground.”

Images of that night flash before my eyes. Jiwoon’s mocking smile. His blows, falling down upon me, fracturing bones, shredding skin. Despair consuming me as he walked away, retrieving his ax, intent on beheading me.

No hope of survival had flickered inside of me. Nothing but bone-deep defeat.

But then…

“But then,” Rui breathes, “you planted one fist down on the ground. And then the other. You pushed yourself back to your feet. You rose , Lina, you rose like an ember to flame. You emerged from the ashes and you fought . I know you’re hurt. I know you’re grieving. But I’m here now, asking you to do it one last time. Rise to your feet, Shin Lina. One last time.”