Notes.

Warnings. Mention of physical injuries.

CHAPTER LXVII

"I saw the flashes, I saw the fire grow
I see the ember, I see the sender smoke
And the room around began to catch fire and disappear"

(The Midnight, "Fire in the Sky")

a. The White Clearing of Hanyang (the last one)

They left the lovely Baek home at the second hour of yusi, on the thirtieth day of December 1781. The weather had been sunny all day, and the sky was dotted with delicate, frothy clouds in which Mago liked to imagine shapes of animals or objects, the way she had been doing since she was seven. The game had been suggested by her grandmother, to keep her busy back when Mago was too small to stay alone in their house near the lake and had to accompany her to her work in the fields.

One thing leading to another, and by dint of patience but also repetition, she had developed an increased ability to discern figures of all kinds on the heavenly vault, and had devoted herself to the activity for a long time during the journeys she had made both throughout the territory of Joseon after her resurrection, and along the broad roads of Qing, on the back of Danggeum, while Yeo Woon walked and held the horse by the bridle, while making sure for both of them that they were following the right path in the desired direction.

Although Mago knew that the sky was to a certain extent the same everywhere else, she couldn't help but find the Qing sky clearer, more open, more vast. She had spontaneously attributed such perception to the feeling of freedom and security inspired to her by the change of country, and remembered, while following her companions, that her first vision of the sky of Joseon after four years of absence had been characterized by the sensation that it had undergone a considerable shrinkage, and had become grayer. She looked up at its clear blue expanse, and saw a thick, elongated cloud that was shaped like a tree.

They formed a very disparate cortege of four companions : her, her master, Baek Dong Soo, and finally Seung-Min. To say that the latter's participation to their night near Hanyang clearing had been unexpected was an understatement, in the sense that it had first aroused in Mago a hint of fear, brief but nonetheless particularly tenacious, as soon as Yeo Woon had told her that the soldier had been warned of their true nature, both his and his student's.

They were having lunch at that time, and Baek Dong Soo's eyes were puffy and bloodshot, but the rest of his face was relatively fresher than a few days before, and more exactly since it had been agreed that his parents as well as Yeo Woon's father would not be coming back to visit them. Mago had followed the matter from afar. She had not been present at the last meeting, yet she had seen, upon leaving Baek Dong Soo's room after hearing heavy footsteps and what had seemed to her to be bursts of voices, her host coming back from the street with Mago's master at his side.

Yeo Woon was standing close to him, and seemed to be whispering something. From her vantage point, slightly concealed by the door she had not fully slid open, she had observed that Baek Dong Soo's face was completely leaning toward Yeo Woon's, and that his eyes were watching Yeo Woon's lips form words with a mournful fascination.

From the large hanok had then emerged the man whom their host had designated as his adoptive father, Huk Sa-Mo, followed by his wife and Baek Dong Soo's. They had met halfway, and had then begun a visibly agitated conversation from which Mago had not been able to extract any meaning. But she had clearly seen Huk Sa-Mo's dejected expression, as well as his wife and Baek Yun-seo's worried features.

Baek Dong Soo's parents had come out of the main hanok too, the mother showing a hostile face, which Mago had associated with the presence of Yeo Woon's father, who was following them. None of them had exchanged even a single words with their sons. Huk Sa-Mo had dragged them all towards the street, while glancing at their hosts with a sorry look. As for Yeo Woon, Mago had noted the icy look he was giving his father, which was no longer a surprise given the latter's reputation.

She had learned what had happened through Baek Yun-Seo. The latter had given her a concise but enough detailed summary of the meeting that same evening so that Mago had been capable of understanding the main issues at stake and the consequences of the visit. Baek Dong Soo had kept his nose in his dinner, and had been more silent than ever. His face was gloomy. Mago had even seen the traces of remorse, and of haunting.

Yoo-Jin, who was dining with them, had tried to lighten the mood by telling of his exploration of the streets of the capital with Iseul and all his clique of young friends, but he had probably sensed very quickly how tensed the mood was, and he had finally given his mother a puzzled, concerned, look. Your father is having a hard day, son, she had said kindly, you mustn't blame him.

The boy had nodded so promptly that Mago had been vaguely taken aback by his behavior, before guessing that analogous scenes had probably occurred before on several occasions, in connection with Baek Dong Soo's drinking, and that Yoo-Jin had been used to seeing him in such states from a young age. Nevertheless, unlike Yeo Woon, he did not seem to harbor any resentment against his father, nor did he seemed to judge him harshly, and Mago had deduced that their host's drunken attitude had probably been more respectful and less extreme than that of her master's father, which she had witnessed indirectly during a few of the Huk's visits since the Yeogogoedam meeting. Moreover, he had apologized for his taciturn behavior to Yoo-Jin during dinner.

Mago's master, on the other hand, had barely commented on the event once he and his student had been back in the privacy of their host's room.

"You're worried," Mago had said, noting his sullen face, the frown of his eyebrows. "You're afraid he'll start drinking again, aren't you?"

Once you had the right information, it wasn't particularly difficult to make the right connections. She may not had been completely certain that the origin of her master's apprehensions was related to Baek Dong Soo's taste for drinking, but she had observed his afflicted reactions whenever their host poured himself a cup of soju or magkeolli during his parents' visits,. From there, she had drawn her own conclusions.

"My father provoked him," Yeo Woon stated, as he was changing into his night clothes. "He knew very well what he was saying. Dong Soo showed as much composure as he could, but his reaction was understandable, and he knows it. I told him so. I'm not afraid he'll start drinking again. I'm more concerned about him blaming himself."

Mago thought it wiser not to pursue the conversation further. Having run into Yeo Woon's father more than once, she found it hard to blame their host for coming to blows. Some people only understand the langage of fits, she had heard from a gwishin a few years earlier, after he had beaten up another dead who had tried to steal their food, even though they had invited him to share their meal.

The guy, who was perhaps in his forties and had the musculature of an ox, had evaluated through a very personal association of ideas that he should have received a much larger quantity of meat than the rest of his fellows. They were six in all. Mago had traveled two weeks with them in the south of the country, and had been quite sad to leave them. She had never known what had become of them, and had not been able to reach them through the collective consciousness.

Before going to bed that night, and diving in their shared mind, she had asked Yeo Woon if he was thinking that their parents would come back to visit them.

"No. No one will accept them here. They're not welcome anymore."

His voice had been cold, imperious. She had heard the way he had integrated himself into the house and among its original inhabitants, as if he had always been part of it. She remembered thinking of Baek Yun-Seo. There had been a gleam in her eyes while she was gazing at her husband throughout the meal, as if she was discovering something she had only presumed the existence of until then.

She was walking next to Seung-Min, and thought that she probably should have refused to fight him in a one-on-one battle, or restrained her strength and agility a little more. She was angry at herself for getting carried away, for forgetting, and at the same time she felt a bitter weariness and irritation at the idea of having to spend all her time hiding and being careful. The Qing had seemed very far away, and her unrestrained training even more tragically out of reach.

"Seung-Min will come with us," Baek Dong Soo had said the day before, after he had informed Mago of the discovery of the clearing. "He knows about the two of you, and he promised me not to say anything. I'm sure he's reliable. And if he isn't, taking him with us will be a guarantee : it will make him an accomplice by default."

She had recognized the validity of the maneuver, and yet still feared a random betrayal. She had learned distrust since she had risen from the grave, and had made it an automatic reaction. She trusted Baek Dong Soo now, as well as his wife and their son, and she wouldn't have gone so far as to say that Seung-Min had all the makings of a deceitful mind, but her experiences since her resurrection had been such that they had definitely established skepticism as the foundation of her temperament.

Finding Seung-Min likeable hadn't changed it : from the moment Baek Dong Soo had pointed him out as a complementary member of their journey to the clearing, Mago had been wary, and she was still wary now, even after passing through the gates and walking the paths toward the Cheonmasan heights. It was distrust that had enable her to survive, until now. Mago had integrated it too well to be able to get rid of it overnight, even in a situation of relative tranquility.

Getting through the gates of the capital had been the easy part. The people leaving aren't the real problem for the soldiers, Baek Dong Soo had told them, unlike the people who want to enter the city. As a result, the surveillance was effective on one side, but the other was completely free of risk, and unless one was openly displaying white hair or had the word "gwishin" written on their forehead, individuals leaving Hanyang were left alone, while on the other side loomed a line of visitors waiting anxiously for their status to be checked. Don't look at them, Seung-Min had advised her.

They had come out of the capital's boundaries, standing together, and pretending to converse as if nothing was wrong. She and Yeo Woon had made sure to dye their hair with the bottle she had brought back from her last visit to a commercial street in the city, and Yun-Seo had offered to add some fake color to their complexions with her cosmetics. Mago's cheeks were more pink, her face less livid. Baek Dong Soo's wife had to be given credit for her mastery of artifice, for even Yeo Woon looked more alive.

The number of white strands in his hair had increased, while Mago's had not shown any new discoloration. A few nights earlier, she had found him sitting cross-legged on his yo, staring at the wall, motionless, inexpressive, his hair wet. He hadn't paid any attention to her. She had not called out to him, for she had thought at the time that he had immersed himself in the consciousness, but the more time passed, the more she wondered about that possibility.

Seung-Min and Baek Dong Soo were carrying materials to build a camp under the stars, and food supplies in which meat was predominant. They were supposed to spend one night and then come back the next morning through the same gate Baek Dong Soo had used when he had first brought them into the city a little over a month ago.

"I asked the same soldiers of the network to return to their posts," he had revealed to Mago and Woon, "and Seung-Min and I made sure that the rations served to the guards who were supposed to watch the gates tomorrow contained enough to make them sick."

"Another laxative?" Mago had asked him.

"No. An emetic. I can't always use the same tricks, otherwise it's a risk to get caught."

Mago had taken the liberty to compliment the ingenuity of the process, and the wide smile that had appeared on Baek Dong Soo's face had been bright, warm, and very youthful.

Their host and Yeo Woon were walking side by side. Mago was seeing them sometimes leaning toward each other, talking in low voices. Some of Baek Dong Soo's remarks brought a smile to her master's lips, while the latter's caused laughter to rise from the former's throat. They were moving together at an almost synchronized pace, familiar, relaxed, and betraying a common experience.

As they were venturing further and further into the mountainous forest, the trees of the Cheonmasan were growing taller and taller, closer and closer together. The smell of pine trees rose to her nose, mixed with the scent of wet earth, moss, and animals. Baek Dong Soo had warned them that the clearing was located in the northern depths of the forest, and he had taken a piece of paper with him on which he had written down directions that would help him find the way back.

Seung-Min, who had taken part to the patrol and had also seen the clearing, made a few suggestions along the way, when his captain seemed to be wavering on a direction or looking for a landmark. Mago saw the concern on his face, and partly the uncertainty, but she noticed no trace of regret or even a desire to flee, and it somewhat reassured her.

"It's nice of you to come with us, Seung-Min," she said to him as they were working their way up a slope, and she and her companion hadn't exchanged a word since they had left, except for hesitant greetings. "You didn't have to."

It was a lie, for she suspected Baek Dong Soo to have presented the situation to him in such a way that he had felt little trapped, but she assumed that Seung-Min would appreciate having his free will emphasized, and his altruism praised. He shrugged, saying it was no big deal. He looked like a young boy embarking on an adventure a little too big for him.

"I can imagine it's not easy for you," Mago continued. "Are you sure you don't want me to carry anything?"

She and Yeo Woon had taken their swords with them, just as a precaution. The Boogeyman was still supposedly hunting in the woods, and although Seung-Min and Baek Dong Soo were wearing civilian outfits, their own weapons had also been incorporated to the camp material, along with extra meat that they were hoping to use as a distraction in case they came face-to-face with the creature.

Yeo Woon had insisted on taking some of the load off Baek Dong Soo, insisting on how bad it was for his back and how the dead were not likely to get tired while carrying anything anyway. Seung-Min on the other hand had clung to his bags like a man to the edge of a ravine he was about to fall into. This was the second time Mago was offering to relieve him of his burden. He was less encumbered than Baek Dong Soo, and he was robustly built, but she could hear him panting occasionally.

"No, it's all right," he affirmed, readjusting the straps of the bags on his shoulders. "Don't worry. I know what I'm getting into. I'm helping you willingly. To be perfectly honest, I've been asking myself question about this for a while."

"About what?"

"All this," and he gestured with his hand to encompass a vast, invisible whole. "The gwishins. The living. The hunts. The executions. I've had my doubts for some time."

They reached the clearing after three hours of walking, and it was already dark, so they had to light torches to see in front of them. The place was exactly the same as the other clearings Mago had seen in other forest, elsewhere on the territory, and it was immersed in a lastescent halo, except that the light produced by the flowers, always the same, seemed even more morbid and intimidating. The black, dented tree was also still in its place in the middle of the circle.

Mago took a quick look at it, as did Yeo Woon, while Seung-Min and Baek Dong Soo were unpacking and began to prepare dinner with the provisions they had brought along. Following the recommendations of both Yeo Woon and his student, they set up the camp a little away, close enough to observe and see the clearing clearly, but far enough from it so as not to risk, or at least as little as possible, any danger from it.

During the trip, they had been told about the effects of these places on the gwishins, and what they could possibly expect during the night. They ate together in relative calm, feverishly, while glancing frequently at the clearing. Mago felt more tense than usual, more impatient. Old Jae-Ji had spoken of the "last one", but without specifying what the qualifier referred to.

And she had to admit that there was something about this particular clearing, an unusual atmosphere, of a different kind, that attracted her while at the same time repelling her. Never before had she felt disgust or fear of the clearings. After dinner, they began to wait. Baek Dong Soo leaned against a tree near Yeo Woon. Seung-Min stood by Mago's side, staring at the white flowers and black tree as if he wanted to understand all their meanings in an instant.

A cloud bared the round and full moon. Its disturbed glow illuminated the clearing between the trees. Mago closed her eyes for a heartbeat. When she opened them again, she saw her house by the lake, and her grandmother smiling at her (here we go).

b. The Flowers of Evil

Mago, using imagery and macabre poetry, had explained to Seung-Min on the way to the clearing that these acted on gwishins in the same way a carcass acted on scavengers. The seduction embraced a similar operating process, but the lure differed. The clearing, she had learned, showed things. Those things could be sounds, people, places. It didn't matter, in the end, what they were, because it was what they meant to the dead that mattered.

Their purpose was to generate a movement, an impulse towards them, strong enough for the gwishins to want to approach them, to feel curious and at the same time safe enough not to refuse any contact. They invariably brought them to the center of the clearing, near the black tree, making them move without their being aware of it, as if in a trance, or a hypnotic manipulation.

Mago had told him that she had always seen her grandmother, and the old house where they had both lived, by a lake. I miss her, she had confessed to Seung-Min. Although there was no formal confirmation from more experienced gwishins or those who were considered to be in major positions of command and influence among their peers, Mago was convinced that the clearing essentially showed the dead things they longed for. Nothing created movement as strongly as desire.

Seung-Min had noticed the somewhat fervent intonation in the girl's voice when she had told him about the place, and especially about its effects. She was then looking straight ahead at her master and Captain Baek, who were walking ahead, but Seung-Min had realized that she didn't really seem to see them. Her very dark eyes, her (dead) eyes, were elsewhere, lost, and most likely in a reminiscence of those things the clearings had shown her.

"Have you encountered many of them?" Seung-Min had asked her, with a sincere curiosity.

Mago had turned her head towards him. Her pupils were inevitably very black, the whites of her eyes almost grayish. Up close, Seung-Min could fully see the aberrant whiteness of her skin, and the shadows that death tended to leave as evidence of its passing. All members of the Joseon army had been densely and relatively thoroughly trained to detect the characteristics of gwishins, and the military, even more than the bureaucrats, even when the latter were in charge of matters related to the dead, usually knew where to look for the tell-tale signs.

They were not always obvious, but remained more or less the same. The eyes. The skin. The visible, darkened veins. The strange scars. The cold. He had thought again of his confrontation with Mago, the polar touch of her body as she contorted to bend him to her will. The strength, too. Seung-Min had looked at Mago, thought he had believed her to be alive, before realizing that she never had been, or rather that she wasn't anymore. But she used to be.

Perhaps the whole problem laid in such nuance. The gwishins had been alive. Like him, like Captain Baek, like his brigade mates. Like his parents and his little sister. And it had regularly occurred to him, after he had joined a militia, that perhaps the living tended to purposely put aside the fact that gwishins had been like them before, and therefore could not be fully considered as pure monsters. Unless, of course, you considered that all men, in the broadest sense, were monsters, to a greater or lesser degree (who are the monsters?).

Mago had seen exactly three clearings, and had told him about each of her experiences with a confidence he appreciated, and which had made him feel more comfortable when setting up the camp with Captain Baek. Not to say that he had felt a vague sense of danger when the latter had come to him immediately after returning from patrol the day before, to ask if he wanted to accompany him and the two gwishins he was sheltering to the clearing, Seung-Min had been somewhat taken aback, however, for he had never expected to receive such an offer, and especially had not been able to completely prevent a residue of distrust from rising within him.

The way Baek Dong Soo had phrased his request had not in itself been particularly ominous or threatening, since his voice had been benevolent, curious, in no way timid or hesitant, not even imperious. It was a voice that was asking a question without any desire to dominate or to warn someone. And yet, in his captain's expression and eyes, Seung-Min had seen shadows, mists, that invited him to this integration, urged him to let himself be engulfed in it.

He had been sincere when he had said that he had no intention of turning Mago or her master in, but he also remembered what he had thought back then, his fear that Baek Dong Soo would resort to more aggressive extremities. They had been contained in his first confirmation, and had also been apparent, in spite of himself, in the acceptance he had given the captain.

I'll come, because I don't want to hurt them, because you're my captain, because I'm asking myself question, but mostly because I'm part of it now. He had felt the impression to have begun the descent of a steep slope, particularly uneven, and he knew perfectly well that a single faux pas could from now on be very costly for him.

Besides, and in the end, it was no less easy to talk to Mago now that he was aware of her true nature. There had been an awkward moment when he had reached the Baek house after being informed by the captain of the date of the excursion, which had been scheduled on a day off during which they were both exempt from patrol. On his arrival, the eyes of the girl and her master had rushed on him with a hasty defiance, which would have probably paralyzed him on the spot had not Captain Baek played the intermediary, making conversation and bringing it on the subject of the clearing and the preparations.

Afterward, Seung-Min had realized that the gwishins' distrust had been essentially fostered by the same anxiety he had felt upon entering the house's courtyard (they are just like us). It was once they had been away from the city, and protected by the boughs of the tall pines of the Cheonmasan forest, that things had relaxed overall. Mago had spoken to him. In front of them, Baek Dong Soo and her master were talking calmly, with ease.

Until Mago had paid attention to him, Seung-Min had been a kind of intruder, a living undergoing an examination to see whether or not he was trustworthy. He suspected that his silence, and his lack of denunciation as they were passing through the streets of Hanyang, had worked in his favor.

"Do you think we should follow them?" He asked Captain Baek, leaning against the massive trunk of a tall, imposing tree, as he saw Mago and her master suddenly rise and head into the clearing.

They had waited maybe an hour, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. At night, knowing the time was more difficult than during the day, and Seung-Min was further distracted by anxieties of another kind, related to the possible presence of the creature (bogeyman) that was savagely killing the soldiers of the brigades, as well as to those traditional apprehensions that awakened in the dark, when he could not see far enough ahead.

"No," the captain said. "I'm not sure this place is for the living."

"Do you see anything?"

"Nothing."

Except for the white light, which had become more opaque, more sepulchral, Seung-Min had noticed no change in the clearing, no appearance like those Mago had told him about. He continued to watch the gwishins move toward the center of the clearing with slow, mechanical steps, like two moths drawn to a torch. Baek Dong Soo did not move, one arm resting casually on the knee of his bent leg. But his eyes followed the events carefully, and he had kept his sword close.

Then came the surprise, after what seemed to Seung-Min to be a few minutes of waiting. Mago had stopped on one side of the clearing, and he kept his eyes on her, worried about her but knowing full well that the dead had little to fear except the living, and perhaps the Boogeyman. On the other side stood Yeo Woon. Both were standing very straight, with their backs to Seung-Min and his captain, but their heads were raised up a bit.

When Captain Baek had called out to Mago's master when the latter had stood up, he had not reacted, as if he had been unable to hear him. It had been the same for Mago. Even shouting hadn't made them jump or turn toward Seung-Min and Baek Dong Soo. Looks like they're sleepwalking, the former had observed. He had seen the captain's eyebrows furrow, and his face darken.

"They have experienced similar absences before," he explained. "They had no memory of it, nor could they explain it."

Seung-Min had suspected so. He had heard the rumors in the barracks, among the men, that the captured gwishins, but also those in the army of the dead camp, had undergone a kind of collective trance from which no living had been able to extricate them, and of which they had not retained the slightest memory. It had been said, in addition, that the phenomenon had caused an increasing whitening of the hair of the dead.

White hair, white clearings. White had always been the color of the dead.

After a while, Seung-Min noticed that the halo of light produced by the clearing seemed to grow in intensity, making a larger portion of their immediate surroundings visible. All the sounds of the forest, the ones that usually populated the patrols, had stopped when Mago and her master had passed the edge of the clearing. Seung-Min discerned a slight movement among the flowers at the feet of the gwishins.

He alerted Captain Baek, who immediately straightened up.

"Captain, something's going on."

With his finger, he pointed to the ground of the clearing, to the ivory flowers that seemed to move, spread, and bend under the impulse of a force whose form and origin Seung-Min could not distinguish. The languid, indolent ripples reminded him of those of the sea, produced by the effects of currents and wind, but none of these elements could have justified such swirls in a flowerbed in the middle of a forest.

Seung-Min, although far away, nevertheless perceived the sound of delicate rustling, of the earth against the surface of which something was sliding, an impalpable, invisible, disturbing touch. It was only afterwards that he understood where the movement was coming from, and what it was due to. His mistake had been to look for a known form, to try to detect an animal, a snake for example, and he had omitted in his observation the fact that everything that surrounded the gwishins went mostly beyond what the living had accumulated of knowledge about what they had seen or known. The gwishins themselves were beyond this boundary of theoretical and practical knowledge since the beginning.

(the flowers)

There was something wrong about the flowers. At first, Seung-Min had thought they were swaying, bending in response to an external stimulus that he was unable to see, or rather perceive.

The fact was that they had indeed started to move, but contrary to what he had supposed at first, the twitching they were undergoing was not the sign of an external presence, and Seung-Min, while feeling his spine stiffen violently with stupefaction and his incomprehension grow at full speed, gradually came to state, both in his mind and aloud, for surprise and shock had caused both to work in concert, a senseless, impossible, and yet the only statement that could account for what he was observing with Captain Baek.

For nothing, in truth, pushed or forced the flowers to move. The flowers were moving, but they were moving on their own. Their peaceful, languid, unexplained rhythm of activity was strictly independent of any other impulse, and they moved in front of Seung-Min's horrified eyes like a conscious being with a will of its own.

"Can you see this, captain?" He panicked, adressing Baek Dong Soo.

The flower stalks were thin, frighteningly thin, like filaments of cloth or seaweed. They began to rise upward, carrying the corollas with them during the ascent. With anguish as well as fascination, Seung-Min saw them wrap themselves around the ankles of the gwishins, then move up their legs in a circular way, without hurrying, like the vines that invaded the walls, the facades of the houses, and all the surfaces that allowed them to pull themselves upwards, towards the sky and the sun that they needed to survive.

At the barracks, the low walls that delimited the extent of the buildings were almost all covered with a mantle of greenery, and the clay was imprisoned, enslaved under the assault of the thick foliage, unable to slow down the escalation of its opponent unless a human intervention was charitable enough to rid it of the invader as much as possible.

Climbing plants had that reputation as pests among plant species, and played the same role as cockroaches, except the latter always moved on the ground, while climbing plants aimed at heights. They could never really be eliminated : Seung-Min had frequently heard from annoyed owners that somehow they always found a way to come back, to cover the walls erected by men with their green coat, and to remind them again and again that there were things against which their determination was powerless.

"Do you think it's normal? Should we intervene?"

The flowers were going up and up, grabbing Mago's and his master's legs, chaining them. Seung-Min, even though he had never witnessed the effects of the clearings on gwishins before, found it disturbing, and potentially alarming.

Captain Baek had left his vantage point, picked up his sword, and approached Seung-Min, not taking his eyes off the clearing.

"I don't know," he admitted. "Woon never told me about this. We can't see much from here. I suggest we move around, but keep our distance."

Seung-Min complied, and cautiously followed him as the captain straightened up and circled, with extreme caution, the edges of the clearing, taking care to remain under the protective shades of the trees and not cross any boundaries. The flowers continued to rise, now encircling the entire body of the gwishins, creeping around their necks.

They were completely unresponsive, showing no signs of discomfort, and as Seung-Min shifted his perspective, he noticed that their eyes were veiled in white, and their lips were parted, but the rest of their faces showed no expression. They looked completely empty of all substance, of all will, and offered no resistance to the flowers that besieged them, and girdled their legs, their waists, their arms. The white light of the clearing became frightfully blinding.

"What do we do, Captain?"

He looked up at Baek Dong Soo, and saw his own panic reflected in Baek Dong Soo's tense features.

"I don't know," he said, "I don't know at all."

A series of short, vile cracking sounds stopped them for thinking further, cutting short their dithering. For a terrible moment, Seung-Min thought it was the bones of Mago and his master, and he immediately looked back at them in anguish, only to find that it was not the gwishins, but the tree at the center of the clearing, whose trunk had just fractured into a yawning hole, blacker even than its bark.

Another stem came out of it, reminiscent of the flowers in the clearing, but this one was wider, more massive, and it slowly unwound towards the gwishins, splitting in two so that it could reach both of them simultaneously. I don't understand what's going on, Seung-Min thought, I don't understand, I don't understand anything, I shouldn't have come, it was a mistake.

Beside him, Baek Dong Soo, standing still and crouching, watched the long appendage move through the air towards his childhood friend with a look of horror, especially since he didn't seem to know what to do. Seung-Min felt the urge to run away, to run for his life away from a spectacle the mechanisms and purpose of which he could not explain.

A part of him, primitive, boorish, wished to act, to convinced himself that the appendix was of ill omen, that it was necessary to eradicate it before it came too close to the gwishins. Another part of him, on the other hand, was firmly telling him not to move, not to approach the clearing, at the risk of putting himself in great danger, and to watch the events unfold as a simple spectator.

He guessed, to some extent, that Baek Dong Soo was experiencing the same uncertainties, the same torments, and it was possible that his owns were more pronounced since he was emotionally linked with one of the gwishins in the clearing. As Seung-Min was thinking about it, and recalling, in a sort of involuntary instant, the glances his captain had given to Mago's master whenever the latter had appeared in the maru, he noted that the tree's appendage had finally advanced far enough to face the girl and Yeo Woon, who made no move to back away or avoid its contact.

The tip of the appendage, which until then had showed no real shape, suddenly began to change, to reshape itself, and Seung-Min saw it lengthen, sharpen, so that it soon took on the appearance of a spear with a particularly sharp point, and it curved in the air, resembling the long neck of a gisaeng (Min-Su) for the time of a blink of an eye. Then, after having held still for a short time, it suddenly plunged forward and pierced the bellies of the two gwishins, and its point came out in their backs with a horrible flesh noise.

Seung-Min didn't even have time to restrain the captain, who leapt up and rushed into the clearing, sword in hand, shouting Yeo Woon's name in a desperate voice, hoarse with fear. Seung-Min ran after him, drawing his own sword, but noticing that none of the gwishins had protested, nor had they expressed any signs of pain or screamed out of suffering. They were somewhere else, probably far away in what the clearing was showing them, and Seung-Min wondered if all the clearings had the same effect, did the same to all the gwishins.

Thick trails of black blood flowed from the wound inflicted by the appendage, staining the gwishins' clothes, the flowers at their feet. The point did not withdraw from their bodies.

Baek Dong Soo reached the edge of the clearing before him. No sooner had his foot touched the boundary of the flowers than a huge spray of flame shot up out of nowhere, out of the ground, and all around the clearing rose a wall of wild, fiery fire whose unnatural whiteness terrified Seung-Min. Captain Baek was thrown backwards as the flames erupted, and their blast was strong enough to make him fall on his back and drop his sword.

Seung-Min, giving up any thought of entering the clearing, ran to help him up.

"Did you see that?" he exclaimed, feeling like he was losing his mind. "Did you see the flames?"

"I saw them," the captain gasped, while straightening up with a grimace. "I felt them, you mean."

"You think it doesn't want us to come in?"

He said "it," not seeing how else to refer to the clearing. There was something, obviously, something alive and conscious stirring in the flowers, in the tree, in the appendage that had pierced the gwishins, and Seung-Min could almost feel its emanations along his muscles, causing an unpleasant tingling, uncontrollable goosebumps. The wall of flames was so high it prevented him from seeing clearly what was happening inside the clearing.

"I don't know. We should go around again, try to find an opening and see if we can..."

But as he was about to explain the rest, the flames vanished just as suddenly as they had appeared, leaving them with a clear view of the interior of the clearing. There, Seung-Min saw that the appendage was still lodged in the gwishins' bellies, that they still hadn't reacted, but that the flowers that had previously crawled up their bodies now seemed to have clumped around the wounds, and all along the furrows of blood that had dripped onto their clothes.

For a moment, Seung-Min did not understand, could not explain such a gathering of flowers around the wounds of the gwishins. He pointed it out to Captain Baek, and as the latter was squinting his eyes, looking more carefully, Seung-Min heard him make a gloomy observation, one that probably frightened him more than anything else, more than the halo of white light, the living flowers, or the empty look of the gwishins.

"It looks like they want their blood."

The flowers were massed around the tip of the appendage, where the gwishins' wound was, and their corollas were turned inward, toward the blood. It was also the case along the blood trails on Mago and her master's clothes. Otherwise, the flowers that were not nearby any source of blood had not moved, and were still clasping their limbs without trying to reach the wound.

Seung-Min slipped an arm under Captain Baek's, pulled him up, and when he was back on his feet, he felt a wave of relief, mostly due to the the fact that he didn't have to face the sight entirely alone.

Together, by mutual agreement, they cautiously approached the clearing, and stood just in front of the border of the flowerbed. Baek Dong Soo simply held out a hand inward. The wall of white flames immediately reappeared, and they were forced to back away from its damage.

"We can't enter it," Seung-Min observed. "It doesn't let us in."

He took a few cautious steps to try to see inside the clearing, and the two gwishins.

"They don't seem to be in pain," he remarked. "What should we do, Captain? Should we wait? Do you think that's how things always go in places like this?"

But Baek Dong Soo looked lost, distraught, shaking his head gently, and Seung-Min hardly needed to follow his gaze to know that he was looking for Yeo Woon.

"I don't know," he said for the third time, falling back against the trunk of a tree and running a nervous hand over his face. "Woon-ah never told me about this. He never told me it was like this. I don't know if it's normal."

They had moved away from the flames again, and the fire, like the first time, soon faded away. They then noticed, as they peered inside, that the appendage was retracting into the opening of the tree trunk. Blood was dripping from its tip, falling to the ground, staining the flowers that lifted slightly as it passed, as if to receive more.

The eyes of the gwishins were still veiled in white, and the appendix planted in their belly had been replaced by flowers, which hid the sight of the wound, and accumulated in all the other places of their bodies where the blood had flowed. When the appendage disappeared completely inside the tree, as if sucked into its trunk, the flowers unanimously followed its retreat, and only then did they release the dead.

They loosened their grip, unwound and went back to the ground, then to the tree, and Seung-Min thought once more of the sea, and of the waves that went back as if absorbed. The moment all the blood-stained flowers reached the trunk and stuck to it, cupping their white corollas to the black bark, there was another crack, more powerful, more terrible, and the tree burst madly into flames in the dark night, cancelling out the whiteness of the clearing, blazing like a bonfire, almost triumphantly.

There was no more movement, no more ripples among the flowers.

"Dong Soo-yah?"

The voice of Mago's master startled both of them, as they were too busy contemplating the burning tree, remembering the appendage, the moving flowers, the blood. Turning his head, Seung-Min saw that Yeo Woon was looking at both of them with a puzzled expression, eyebrows furrowed by incomprehension.

Seung-Min looked down, expecting to find the bloody hole left by the appendix on his stomach. He saw nothing (what?). Absolutely nothing. No trace of blood, no wound, nothing. Even his tunic didn't seem to have a hole in it. He turned a little, to get a better look at his back, inspected his clothes. The rivers of blood had vanished. I don't understand.

As Yeo Woon was taking a step in their direction, Captain Baek signaled him to wait, with a hand raised flat in front of him.

"What's the matter?" Mago's master questioned him with a suspicious tone, while standing still.

Seung-Min guessed Baek Dong Soo's maneuver without needing him to explain it. He saw Baek Dong Soo walk with deliberate slowness to the edge of the flowerbed. Then, as he had done before, he reached inside, and unlike his last attempt, this time no flame blocked his path, no wall of fire rose from the depths of the earth to prevent him from entering the clearing.

He turned to Seung-Min, nodding his head to indicate that the way was clear, and entered first, walking briskly toward Yeo Woon, who frowned as he gauged the captain's tense expression.

"Dong Soo-yah, what's going on?"

"Seung-Min, go to Mago," Baek Dong Soo ordered when he came close to him, and as Seung-Min complied, passing them to approach the girl, who seemed just as taken aback as her master, he asked the latter : "Are you in pain, Woon-ah?"

"I'm not," he said. "Why?"

Mago stared at Seung-Min, waiting for an explanation. She had no more trace of injury or blood than her master, and when Seung-Min knelt before her to look into her eyes, she did not hide her confusion.

"Is there a problem?" she asked, watching Seung-Min warily.

"You don't remember anything?"

"Remember what?"

"The flowers, the tree...you don't remember?"

"What are you talking about?"

She was sincerely disconcerted by Seung-Min's questions, and he informed Captain Baek, who was also inspecting his childhood friend's belly for any wound or mark from the passage of the appendix.

"Tell me what's going on," Yeo Woon invited him, softly but firmly.

Seung-Min approached them, accompanied by Mago, and heard Baek Dong Soo's bones crack as he straightened to face Yeo Woon.

"Did you see anything?"

"What?"

"In the clearing," Captain Baek said. "Did you see anything?"

"The training camp," Mago's master answered with a shrug. "Why?"

The captain turned to his student.

"What about you?"

"My grandmother's house."

He then looked at them, one after the other, before meeting Seung-Min's distraught eyes (I don't understand I don't understand I don't understand).

"And there was nothing else? Anything unusual, or new?"

"No," Mago asserted. "It was the same as the other times. The clearing showed us things."

But Yeo Woon was staring at Captain Baek with sustained attention.

"What did you and Seung-Min see?" he asked him.

Baek Dong Soo's gaze met Seung-Min's again, briefly, but for a long enough time for him to validate his decision.

"The flowers," he began. "They came up from the ground, and they wrapped around you like ropes. Then something came out of the trunk of the tree. Seung-Min, tell me if I'm wrong, but it looked like a very large flower stem."

Seung-Min simply nodded his head to express his approval of the comparison.

"And?" Mago urged him, her voice taking an anxious inflection.

"It came to you, and it turned into a kind of sword, before it..."

He hesitated, stirring Mago's impatience.

"Before it what?"

"Dong Soo-yah, tell us," Yeo Woon encouraged him.

"It pierced you," he admitted to them, then placed a hand on his stomach, and added : "right there. Right in the belly. You kept bleeding, and the flowers seemed to suck your blood. You didn't feel anything?"

Mago and her master exchanged a stunned, but also troubled look. Yeo Woon shook his head.

"No," he assured him. "Nothing at all. I was in the camp, with you. I saw nothing, I felt nothing."

"And after that?" Mago asked him. "Was there anything else? Did it last long? Did you try to do something?"

Seung-Min spoke up.

"We tried to enter the clearing," he told her. "But when we did, flames rose from the ground and blocked our way. We couldn't get through. We had to wait until it was over and you had regained consciousness."

Mago began to fidget, to spin around, to look at her clothes. It didn't take a high level of intelligence to figure out what she was studying.

"There's no blood," she observed, examining her tunic, especially the one that protected her belly.

"No. It looks like the flowers sucked everything out, even on your clothes," Seung-Min admitted. "And they healed you, too."

They had no scars, no visible wounds on their abdomens. But Mago found a relatively small hole in the fabric that she could have sworn she hadn't seen before, because she was, according to her own words, careful with her clothes, and always made sure they were in good condition. Yeo Woon checked in turn, and spotted a similar snag on his own clothes in the same place.

The tree was still burning behind them, and was making timid, soothing crackling sounds.

"I don't understand," the girl confessed sheepishly. "No one ever told me that about the clearings."

"So it wasn't normal, then?" Captain Baek concluded.

"I'm not saying that," Mago objected. "I'm just saying I've never been told about something like this before. But that being said, I've never had a living with me to watch the whole thing."

"So it could be something usual?"

She shrugged, focusing on the burning tree.

"Perhaps."

"You don't think it could be because it's the last one?" Her master offered.

Mago's shoulders lifted once more, a sign of her indecision. The silence fell again. Seung-Min glanced around, noticing the quietness of the clearing, the dimming of its white light, and the fading of the blaze in which the dead tree trunk was caught.

"Let's get out of here," Yeo Woon said, pressing a hand against Captain Baek's shoulder. "Let's go back to the camp."

Baek Dong Soo, Seung-Min, and Mago followed him without further ado, leaving behind the insect-like flowers, the charred trunk, and the eerie white glow of the clearing.