Notes.

Guys, I bow before you to beg for your forgiveness, but I just counted the number of chapters I have left in order to end this arc, and we're very close to thirty. So, with the fourth arc, this one will be one of the longest of the entire story. And the chapters will be most likely a bit longer as well (like this one), cause even with that, I still have half a million of things to write about (sometimes I'm getting tired with my own self, honestly).

CHAPTER LXI

" Call it magic
Call it true
I call it magic
When I'm with you

And I just got broken
Broken into two
Still I call it magic
When I'm next to you"

(Coldplay, british artists, "Magic")

a. Latent content (part 1)

Dong Soo had not been able to see or hear Jae-Ji's announcement, but he did witness Mago's subsequent agitation and Woon's circumspect puzzlement on their way home and during the week following the event. Immediately after reaching the Baek's house, Mago had considered it opportune to dive into the collective consciousness, in order to try to contact the shaman again and to extract additional information from her in order to enlighten the message she had transmitted to them, the nature of which neither of them was certain.

The latter had not reappeared since, and Dong Soo continued to assure them that he had been unable to distinguish her at the moment she had shown up in the small alley facing them back then. Mago was leaning more and more definitively towards the hypothesis of a vision specifically addressed to the gwishins, one that had used the cogs of the consciousness to function.

When Woon had objected to her that neither Jae-Ji nor any of the other dead he had encountered since his resurrection, especially the oldest and most experienced in the handling of their common mind, had ever evoked the ability to physically project themselves into space to communicate with their peers, she had become even more exalted, imagining the discovery of a new use of the consciousness, or of a skill inherent to Jae-Ji and to the role she played, whose stakes, according to her, could amply justify the development of powers going beyond the limits observed until then by the Gwishins.

However, the frightening silence they had met later when immersing themselves in the consciousness once in the quiet of Dong Soo's room, the total absence of response to their echoes about the shaman or a clearing near Hanyang, and the permanence of the abyssal emptiness they had been confronted with during each of their previous attempts, clearly blunted his student's emulation, while further amplifying his own concerns, fears and annoyances regarding the mutism of the others, although it became much more understandable after Dong Soo and his wife's accounts of the tortures of gwishins.

Dong Soo contributed as much as he could, questioning his entourage on the presence of a clearing in the surroundings of the capital, the appearance of which could have seemed confusing to them. With their consent, he had informed Yun-Seo about it, and she had started looking for information from her own acquaintances, slipping a word to a courtesan, another to the wife of an officer.

As for Dong Soo, he addressed the soldiers in the barracks, and the few bureaucrats in the royal palace with whom he felt that a discussion was possible. He had also assigned his young assistant to the same commission, but in spite of their good will, combined with that of his wife, they obtained almost no confirmation regarding a potential clearing near the city.

Only a brigade captain, with whom Dong Soo got along rather well since his entry into the repressive militia, had succinctly mentioned the fact of having caught a glimpse of the remote heights of the Cheonmasan, during a gwishin hunt which had led him in the deepest sections of the forest with his men, a place that, when he had described it, seemed to be similar to the clearings mentioned by the Herbalist and met by Woon and Mago, more frequently for the latter.

He had not seen it well, and had not approached it further because of a feeling of uneasiness attached to the simple idea of taking a step in its direction, but he had evoked a solitary tree, with a black trunk, and a bed of immaculate white flowers. On the other hand, he had indicated to Dong Soo that he was strictly unable to find the exact path leading to the clearing, and although he was widely familiar with the entire perimeter near the capital, he had seemed sincerely incapable of remembering its location, even vaguely.

"Do you think it means anything?" Dong Soo suggested a few days later, as they were walking together along one of the banks of the Han River near the street where the Baek residence was located, lined with ash and fruit trees, which the children liked to relieve from their nourishing weights at the first glimmer of sunshine, and now were looking somewhat sickly in their nakedness. "That his memories could have been altered, or erased?"

"Perhaps. It has never happened so far, at least not to my knowledge, but things can change."

"Like with the vision you had of the shaman?"

"Yes."

"And since then, still nothing else?"

Woon shook his head.

Their walk was following an indolent rhythm, the same one they had adopted in the gardens of the Spring House four years earlier, and the earth was cracking under the soles of their shoes. They were alone, thanks in part to Yun-Seo, who had declared with a knowing expression that she didn't want to go out when Dong Soo had made the proposal to the whole household, and who had managed, presumably through an oblique glance, to convince Mago to stay indoors as well.

As for Yoo-Jin, he was in his room, immersed in the reading of a tale which, according to Dong Soo, retraced the extraordinary adventures of the founder of the country. Woon, upon waking up one morning, had found a pile of papers held under a stone, to prevent them from flying away, just in front of the door of Dong Soo's quarters. While collecting them, he had discovered sketches, some of them close to refinement and exquisite poetry, others more coarse but no less pleasant, which represented a female silhouette, dressed in red and black, wearing a veil over a large hat. In a few drawings, the character's immediate environment had been outlined.

Later, he had shown them to Dong Soo, and the latter, with an endeared laugh, had simply said to him "They're from Yoo-Jin". Then he had added, in a more mischievous way, relegating his first emotion in the distance : "I think he has a little crush on you". Somewhere in Woon had risen, crudely, the impulse to ask Dong Soo if it was hereditary.

The river, in its brown earthen bed, flowed between the houses to the nearest city gates, and offered a restful phlegm in response to the vigorous races of the children and the sometimes turbulent, sometimes hushed conversations of the walkers. Its banks were closer at this place of the capital, giving it a more intimate, less intimidating appearance than the widest branch rushing towards the sea, which had split Hanyang into two fractions since its foundation all around the stream.

It froze very regularly during the winters. Once, at the age of fifteen, Dong Soo had wanted to clown around and had ventured to walk on the slippery and frozen surface of the mountain river that ran between the rocks not far from the training camp, just to see, because it had sounded fun and entertaining to him. Not surprisingly, the ice had given way under his weight, and he had come out completely soaked and shivering from that experience, falling ill just a few hours later and being severely ordered by Sa-Mo to stay in bed for several days.

Woon had been furious at him, at his stubbornness, at his foolishness and pride, at his own worry and inability to stop him and get him back when the event had occurred, since once the ice had broken at one point of the river, it had disintegrated at all the others, giving the river back its mobility. He had not expressed any direct reproach, but remembered being more distant, and practically throwing a poultice at his face when Dong Soo had remarked to him that he could beat him even with a fever and a stuffy nose.

Instead, he had coldly dropped the plaster into the bowl containing the herbal mixture, stuffed it into Dong Soo's hands, then stood up and left the room without a word. He thought he had seen Dong Soo's eyes following him, full of confusion and dismay.

Their parents hadn't came back since Dong Soo's last visit to the Huk. Two new invitations to lunch and tea had been sent to them, but both had declined them, Woon without explicitly giving his reasons, but assuming it wasn't difficult to conclude that his conflicting relationship with his father and the latter's offensive behavior was a sufficient justification, and Dong Soo under the pretext that he was facing a heavy workload related to his duties at the Royal Investigation Bureau.

Yun-Seo had covered for him, but Woon doubted that Sa-Mo and Jang-Mi would have been gullible and ignorant enough of Dong Soo's temperament to fully believe his excuse. While it was easy to see that his interactions with his father were an ordeal for him, it wasn't fundamentally laborious either to understand that Dong Soo's encounters with Baek Sa Goeng and his mother were also burdensome for him.

"I think my mother is mad at my father about something," Dong Soo thoughtfully noted. "And that I disappoint them, about as much as they disappoint me."

"Did they tell you all this?"

"They don't need to. That's the worst part. I feel that most of my choices bother them, especially my mother, and that nothing I do can really find favor with them. If it does, they don't show it. I can't talk to them. Neither can they. No matter how hard Sa-Mo and Jang-mi try to make conversation, we keep running around in circles. The only thing we can agree on is Yoo-jin. Everything else is a dead end, and good for criticism, whether it's Yun-Seo, my work, my education..."

He hesitated. Woon concluded for him.

"And me."

Dong Soo gave him a distraught, sad look. Woon suspected, even without explicit confirmation, that his father had been proclaiming as much as he could to Dong Soo's parents about how dangerous, evil, violent and unpredictable his son was.

It was also likely that Sa-Mo and Jang-Mi had mentioned his affiliation with Heuksa Chorong and his career, though brief, as an assassin within the guild, first as a mere agent, which could still be partly excused, and then as a leader, which was more complicated to defend. The two stories combined had certainly not helped to make him look particularly pleasing, even with the addition of his attempt at redemption, and it was therefore hardly surprising that the Baek parents didn't hold him in high esteem.

"I'm sorry, Dong Soo-yah," he said.

Dong Soo was walking, arms behind his back, hands tied together. He had grown older, some of the wrinkles around his mouth had deepened in four years, there was like a veil in his eyes, sometimes, and Woon still wanted to take his hand, put one of his own under his arm, lay his head on his shoulder, let him guide their footsteps somewhere and not worry about it, because in the end the destination or even just the journey had never had the slightest importance, and all that had always mattered was that they were both together, with no one else.

"It's not your fault, Woon-ah. Maybe it'll get better in time. It's only been a few weeks, and I don't see them that much. Maybe it'll change eventually."

A gisaeng walked by them, with a secret, velvety smile and a sky colored hanbok, all in a gradation of azure and dawn. The thought of Hui Seon crossed Woon's mind.

He persisted in his attempts to contact her, encountering silence, but continuing to transmit faint, inaccurate echoes, containing only her name and nothing else that might have revealed his location or compromising information about either her or Woon.

"Your father," he heard Dong Soo articulate with infinite caution. "He doesn't... I mean, he doesn't look easy to live with."

"No," he confirmed to him, colder than he would have liked. "He never was."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No."

"Okay."

And that was it. When he was younger, Dong Soo had shown the opposite tendency, insisting, asking more questions, wanting to know at all costs, not accepting Woon's silence and his wish not to broach the subject, but causing, no doubt involuntarily, his accentuated withdrawal.

He had understood the mechanism definitively in the course of his fourteen years, and since then, the scheme had taken another, unforeseen deviation, whereby Woon was driven by the urge to want to tell him everything at times, absolutely everything, confident that Dong Soo could listen and understand, while simultaneously being appalled at the mere idea of revealing things he had never told anyone, and the keeping of which under lock and key remained a security and a reassuring habit, with foundations too old to be swept away overnight.

"I'm sorry."

"What?"

He looked up at Dong Soo, who gave him a sheepish smile.

"I said, I'm sorry. For the last time, in my bedroom. I shouldn't have left. I didn't want to, anyway. I swear I didn't."

The theme towards which the conversation was drifting was unexpected, and it took Woon a brief moment to adjust to it, as his mind quietly tipped over to the sensation of Dong Soo's body between his thighs, his arm under his back, the bridge of his nose against his temple. To the other times, too, in the royal palace office, in the courtyard of the abandoned house they had found during a hunt at the training camp, on the way back from the courtesans, in the study room of the camp. Between the autumn leaves (it has always been in his veins).

In the fields, before their confrontation, when they first met again without misunderstanding or intrigue, and Dong Soo, when Woon had gotten back on his horse, had pressed his thigh with his hand, looking at him with conviction, with devotion, and Woon remembered wanting to bend down, take his face between his hands, kiss him, let himself be pulled down from his saddle and laid on the ground. It never stopped.

Hui Seon, the Eye and the Herbalist had promised him answers during his journey, but four years had gone by, and Woon felt even more stuck than before, stubbornly burying himself under an increasingly thick layer of denials, excuses, pretences and diversions, to the point where he felt he was reaching critical depths and worried he could never really get to the surface again.

He shook his head.

"It wasn't your fault, Dong Soo-yah. You had guests."

"You're my guest too. For a longer period of time, which gives you precedence," he clarified, as he saw Woon smiling.

"It was Sa-Mo."

"That's not an excuse. I left, I shouldn't have. Not like that, anyway. I put us aside. I'm sorry."

It wasn't the first time he was saying "us". Woon loved the word, the idea, the union it implied, the sense of power and belonging it gave him. Mago referred to the Gwishins as "our people," and Woon had never felt fully integrated with them as a whole, nor with Heuksa Chorong, or even with the boys in the training camp, the martial artists, Joseon's subjects.

But Dong Soo said "us," and invariably, Woon in turn thought " us," as in "you and me together," he and Dong Soo, their two individualities next to each other, blending, embracing, without devouring each other, becoming something that was both Woon and Dong Soo at the same time, and the image vibrated within him, resonated as if in a cave, shook its walls, reduced it to nothing, and never had Woon known a kinder, more absolute, more desired destruction.

He repeated that everything was fine, that Dong Soo had nothing to blame himself for. The conversations were also the same (I'm sorry it's okay it wasn't your fault yes it was).

"Woon-ah, I was wondering..."

"What?"

Dong Soo paused for a very short time, and then he spoke again in a firmer tone.

"If we shouldn't talk about it. About what happened, I mean. At least a little. You don't think so?"

"But we never did," was all Woon managed to say. "Why now?"

"I don't know," Dong Soo admitted with a shrug. "Maybe because we've never gone that far. It's never been like this before. Not that much, at least. I thought maybe it could..."

(before)

"Help?" Woon suggested to him, seeing him look down at the ground and then at his hands, as if one or the other had held the correct word.

"Yes. Help. Something like that."

He looked shy and determined all at once, and his eyes briefly met Woon's before quickly wandering off elsewhere. They had it in common to try to run away when the situation became too delicate, but not in the same way. Woon preferred to cancel it, to escape through words or physically. Dong Soo managed to stay in the situation, but his gaze flew away from it at full speed.

"Okay," Woon replied, to soothe him, and maybe, also, to remove some dirt, just a little. "What do you want to talk about?"

"I'm not sure. I don't know where to start."

Then he suddenly blurted out, with a frankness and lack of diplomacy that Woon hadn't seen from him since his resurrection, and which brought a disbelieving smile to his face.

"Did you like it?"

Once the surprise was over, but also the amusement, and the embarrassment caused by the question, which he then understood nevertheless that it had to be formulated in such a spontaneous and direct way, he granted himself a deeper, more thorough reflection, and Dong Soo's hands were back on his hips, around his waist, on his thighs, his body on him, his mouth pressed on his.

"Yes," he concluded. "You?"

"Yes," Dong Soo was quicker to answer. "I was afraid I had gone too far. That you didn't like it."

"I liked it," Woon then affirmed, looking up at him, and meeting his eyes. "I promise, Dong Soo-yah. I liked it. I always have. With you."

On Dong Soo's face, he saw a memory, "I liked what you did," dating back to over a decade ago. They smiled at each other. Woon thought "us", and watched the word, the concept, the creature, reverberate in Dong Soo's expression, in his smile, and in his older eyes.

b. The Sky Lord

The gwishin's long, disheveled hair covered his face when the soldiers brought him to the torture chamber and forced him to sit on the chair where the festivities usually occurred, but Dong Soo's first apprehensions about him had arisen as soon as he had appeared in the underground room, with its earthen walls made incandescent by the torchlight.

Since it had been built, or more exactly drilled into the noble ground of the royal palace of Changdeok, Dong Soo had never heard of the slightest attempt to make the chamber more airy or even comfortable from a strictly aesthetic point of view, had it been only for the consolation of the yangban brigade captains, accustomed to sumptuous and elegant interiors, who for many tended to complain more about the shape of the gwishin torture room than about its function, relegating the latter to a custom like any other they had to observe for the preservation of peace in the kingdom.

When he had lunch with some of them occasionally at the barracks, before or between patrols, Dong Soo would listen to them argue with their mouths full of rice and cabbage, dishes that made up the vast majority of Hanyang's military cuisine, that witnessing the mistreatment of the dead in what they commonly referred to as a "cave", more rarely as a vault, although one or two had ventured to slip the comparison into a conversation and had earned the contempt of his comrades as a response, seriously affected their mood and morale.

On the other hand, the main task related to the place itself, namely the monitoring of the torture sessions, punctuated by shouts, tears, supplications, prayers too, was never mentioned as the probable cause of the alienation of the militia leaders. The subject was carefully avoided, sequestered like the dead in the royal prison, with them, and most of the soldiers struggled to keep its strands of doubt and empathy from reaching them, without ever really succeeding.

If there were some who were totally impervious to the suffering of the gwishins, or who supported it, taking obvious pleasure in seeing them endure all the torments at the hands of the executioners, Dong Soo had mostly seen the ones who closed their eyes, did their best not to look, not to see, not to talk about it, so as not to be confronted with the terrible hypothesis of a resemblance, of an understanding, which would have damaged their careers and, in a general way, the confidence they had to feel towards the army, the government, and the king.

The most common monster is never the one who attacks you in the middle of the night, Ji-Seon had once told him, shortly before Dong Soo had tried to propose to her, it's above all one of silence, one who has neither eyes nor mouth, and who doesn't want to have them. Over the years, Dong Soo had nuanced her statement, and had come to believe that everyone was monstrous, on a daily basis, but to very different degrees, each in their own way, more or less violent depending on the context and the situation.

He had recognized the gait before anything else, the slightly dragging leg, the heavy, massive step, which scraped against the ground like the (fingers of a dead the earth of his grave), and the way the gwishin held himself, voluntarily leaning to one side, tilted like a ship under the jolts of waves, and yet imposing in stature. He had shown no resistance when the soldiers had tied his wrists to the wooden armrests of the chair, or even when they were dragging him inside the room.

For a moment, Dong Soo had even thought he had seemed to be directing them himself, using them simply as supports, or as an ornamental escort. The torturer was already there, cleaning his tools, white-warming the blades to make sure that they inflicted a minimum of pain on beings otherwise insensitive to any other traditional torture technique, and occasionally meeting Dong Soo's eyes, with an expression that looked like embarrassment.

It wasn't the first time Dong Soo had seen him, for the profession of tormentor for the Gwishins was not particularly common, even less so than that of torturer for the living, but his face had until then hardly ever shown such blatant signs of uneasiness and, in places, in the frowning of his eyebrows, in the crease of his forehead, in the lowering of his eyes to the ground, of shame.

It would have been too presumptuous to say that, over the course of the torture, the executioner had developed deep compassion for his victims and intended to take their defense from one day to the next, but Dong Soo nevertheless saw in his less confident, less eager attitude a tonality of a different kind, a gradation, something new and, perhaps, encouraging, something that had already been expressed by soldiers, by brigade chiefs, by officials at the palace or by the inhabitants of the capital, more broadly of the country, in a low voice, in whispers, saying "there's something wrong".

The entire Gwishin condition over the past four years seemed to depend on this hesitant and worrisome formulation. Dong Soo knew it all the more since he had accepted the position of brigade chief to recognize it, to hear it, to see it emerge, and also, above all, to bring it out into the open air.

The Gwishin had raised his head, his hair had been parted, and Chun's face had been bathed in the light of the torches, taking on coppery shades. In spite of the absence of his former attire, his bandana, his hair pulled back, his eyes poached in black and his katana, his gaze was similar to the one he already had when he was alive, seemingly languid, tired, but at the bottom of which, if one lingered long enough, there was a patient, dormant danger. He had smiled, without any joy, when he had spotted Dong Soo standing in his corner of the room, arms folded, staring at him as the torturer was adjusting the straps that held him to the chair.

Then he had begun to laugh and shake his head, giving the impression that he was reacting to a particularly witty and subtle joke. He took up all the space on the chair, but when Dong Soo had fought him for the first and last time nearly fifteen years ago, and he had pierced his side with his sword, shedding blood, reversing roles, becoming the assassin, becoming Chun, taking his place before Woon, he had seemed to shrivel up on himself, to undergo a collapse within his broad form, and Dong Soo remembered very vividly thinking, as he was watching him walk away, that he was old, that he was going to die, that he was a remnant soon to be brought back to dust, like Gwang Taek. He remembered almost not being tired. He remembered, above all, the disappointment (that's all ?).

The executioner went back near his arsenal of suffering, preparing the white-hot iron, the flames, the mechanism where your feet were locked up in an iron cage under which they placed steaming and frighteningly hot embers, the one that did the same for your hands, the incandescent iron balls, the device that was stuffed in your mouth and that roasted your palate, your tongue and your jaws.

In four years, Dong Soo thought he had seen them all, but he frequently heard in the corridors of the palace lively discussions about the invention of new techniques, more and more vicious and ingenious. He approached Chun. The executioner didn't know the names of his victims, didn't care about them at all. Whether a brigade captain took the time to talk to one of them or not, he didn't give it the slightest importance, as long as he could then proceed with his activities in peace.

"I told Woon that there was no such thing as fate," Chun began mockingly, and lively despite his deplorable condition. "Maybe I was wrong after all."

"Or you could just do what everyone else does, and admit it's a small world," Dong Soo replied. "Since how long?"

He didn't need to specify that he was referring to Chun's resurrection.

"One week. I think."

"You're lying."

"Come on. What's the point?"

"Because the last wave of resurrection happened three years ago."

"And so?"

"Rising only takes place during the waves. Not between them."

Chun grinned, vaguely dreamy, a little disillusioned.

"I don't know how the waves work, kid," he told him. "Or the resurrections. I thought I was still alive when I woke up. That I'd been buried alive. And then I got hungry."

Dong Soo waited for the rest.

"And?" He finally urged him, seeing that Chun was remaining silent.

"I lost consciousness. When I came to my senses, I had a sword through my body, and my mouth in some poor guy's guts. Made me think. That, and the men who arrested me at the entrance of Hanyang."

"You showed up at the city gates?"

"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't have. I had just woken up, and I didn't know anything. Not about the resurrections, not about the year, not about the surveillance, nothing. I came because I thought I would find Hanyang as I had left it, and I was greeted with a hot iron flat on the back of my hand, and imprisonment. Not because of who I was before, unlike what I thought at first. But because I'm dead. Apart from that, I don't know anything. I haven't been told anything. So enlighten me, kid. While our friend is getting his toys ready."

Dong Soo gave him a concise and distracted summary, evoking the first resurrection, the chaos that had followed it, the return of King Yeongjo's ancestors, his decision to hunt down and decimate the gwishins to preserve his throne and the stability of the country, the Encyclopedia of the Dead and its list of attributes, the rise in power of the Yeogogoedam then their repression parallel to that of the gwishins, the splitting of society on the subject, the escape and hiding of the gwishins, the ethical and moral disagreements, the continuity and reinforcement of the repressions by the new monarch.

Chun questioned him about the usefulness of torture, about the contradictions it raised in relation to the desire to get rid of the gwishins, and Dong Soo then explained to him the existence of the collective consciousness shared by the dead, its advantages in locating them in the territory that the government wished to take advantage of, but also the role of the torments in the constitution of an army of the dead.

Chun openly mocked the allusion.

"The king claims to want to defend the country with the dead now?"

"Yes. For your sake, I suggest you agree to be part of it. It will shorten your suffering. And keep you alive. You're still a martial artist, and they'll think you could be useful."

"What about you? What do you do? Are you contributing?"

"No. I'm a spectator, that's all. That's the rule."

"I see."

Chun was nodding his head while responding, smiling, and there was an additional derision, resignation, and innuendoes in his grin that Dong Soo didn't like.

He was forced to admit that there was no reason for Heuksa Chorong's former Sky Lord (Woon is the former Sky Lord) to lie to him about the date of his rebirth. The possibility that he was telling the truth, however, implied a major, and potentially ominous, change in the mechanisms that had until then structured the waves of resurrections as regular events occurring over a fixed period of time, and then stopping in anticipation of the next one.

If Chun had truly awakened a week earlier, it was therefore possible to assume that the dead could emerge from their graves at any time, and the news was likely to generate widespread terror and panic, because the control of resurrections and their predictability had been an element of reassurance for all the living, making repression easier to carry out.

He asked him a second time, and sought to know if he remembered anything specific related to his awakening, an element that could have explained this alteration in the phenomenon of resurrections as it had been known until then.

"Sorry, kid. The only thing I remember about it is feeling like I was being pulled up."

Inwardly, Dong Soo began to dwell on Woon's and other Gwishin's descriptions of their rebirths, and he found no match, no suggestion that they had experienced the same sensation mentioned by Chun.

Ordinarily, he would have tended to consider such a detail as negligible, or of no priority, but there had been other things since then, the vision of Jae-Ji by Woon and Mago, and then that night when, coming back from his patrol, he had found the two gwishins standing at the entrance of the house, totally motionless, next to each other, their eyes glassy, covered with an opaque black veil as if they had just come out of their graves.

When he had came closer and asked them if everything was okay, he had realized with fright that they did not see him, but simply looked ahead without being aware of their immediate surroundings. He had shaken them, called them, wrapped Woon's face in his hands, woke up Yun-Seo who had panicked in turn and tried to wake up Mago by snapping her fingers in front of the girl.

They hadn't reacted, but suddenly their noses and eyes had begun to bleed, painting both their faces with long, thick black streaks, and some drops had crashed to the ground. They were speaking, but without hearing Dong Soo and his wife, and their words had terrified them, for they were repeating "The Eyes the Eyes the Eyes the Eyes", tirelessly, in a sinister, lifeless melody.

He and Yun-Seo had managed to bring them back to his room, not without effort, for they had seemed to be nailed to the floor, and had made them sit on the bed while they were still murmuring. Yun-Seo had rubbed Mago's hands and arms. They were both cold and terribly stiff.

"Woon-ah," Dong Soo had called him, with distress, barely containing the panic that was rising in his throat, caressing Woon's face, massaging his shoulders, trying to reach him. "Woon-ah, my love, wake up, please wake up."

The word had escaped him. Yun-Seo hadn't even seemed to hear it, too busy as she was trying to provoke a reaction from Mago. The trance, because they hadn't known how else to describe it, had lasted more than ten minutes after Dong Soo's return. Then, finally, the eyes of their guests had returned to a more normal, more human aspect, the darkness had dissipated, and Woon had emerged by breathing in a huge gulp of air, while exclaiming "They've always been there ! ".

Mago had come back to her senses almost simultaneously, and while Dong Soo and his wife were trying to calm them down, to help them find their bearings, they had exchanged a terrified, lost look.

"What do you mean?" Dong Soo had asked him, kneeling in front of him, his hands on his shoulders, watching him wipe away the black blood that was staining his mouth and cheeks with the back of his hand. "Who has always been there?"

But Woon had shaken his head, before saying he didn't know. The next day, when they had appeared for breakfast after the cook had gone away, their hair had gained new white strands. Neither of them could explain what had happened.

Dong Soo stepped back, to make way for the executioner. Conversations with the dead before a torture session were not meant to last freely, and he did not wish to draw attention to himself by talking more with Chun. There was nothing he could do for him, at least for the time being. And Chun was not Woon.

"Tell me," he asked him nevertheless, with more hesitation. "Who else has come back?"

"Why? You want to find someone?"

And he noted that Chun's shoulders were sagging, that he seemed to be bending over himself, like before, like when Dong Soo had wounded him, bled him, had started his killing. How dare you leave a scar on my body ? he had asked, when Dong Soo was twelve years old, and he had seemed so big, so terrible, so indestructible.

Because I had to start somewhere, Dong Soo thought, because it showed me I could, because I had to understand it, because it had to go from him to me, and because it set everything else into motion. Chun's face was of shadow and gold in the glow of the flames, and oh, here were the colors of autumn, of leaves, and there were things a thousand times worse, much worse than Chun, because Chun had been old, Chun had been blinded by his desire for greatness, and the horrors committed for the love of others were always more atrocious than those perpetuated for the love of ourselves.

"Gwang Taek," Chun said, in a pitiful tone. "Ga-Ok."

Dong Soo shook his head, denying him hope.

"Their remains were burned. They won't come back. They never do."

The executioner approached, flames in his hands, contained within an iron blade.

"Woon came back," he blurted nevertheless.

Chun gave him a heavy look.

"Then you're lucky, kid."

The iron came into contact with his thigh. Dong Soo looked away. There would be nothing for now. It always took a little time for the gwishins to start hurting.