Notes.

And here it is, the very last chapter (phew !) of this very long third arc of the Gwishins! With it ends "The Island of the Dead", and will start in a short time the fourth and longest arc of this story, called "The Peacock with a Hundred Eyes", which will probably be even longer than this arc since everything (or almost everything) will be answered in it.

I will publish the interlude, "The Other Place" by the end of the week, and then I will take a one month break in order to prepare this last arc, but also to advance in the final writing of my thesis, and maybe to post some more stories (including at least a one-shot for this fandom that is desperately waiting in my computer files).

In the meantime, I thank you all immensely for your support and for reading this story so far, and I hope with all my heart that you're still enjoying it!

The scene in the second part of the chapter with the sea rising is of course inspired by the biblical story of the crossing of the Red Sea, and in particular by the animated movie "The Prince of Egypt" (I'm not a believer, but how I love that movie).

Soundtrack

I Give My Consent, starting at 3:17 (Ghost In The Shell OST by Lorne Balfe - this man is a genius, if you want to split the sea in two, this is the perfect track)

CHAPTER LXXIII

" Because from there on in, the shadows get deeper, the nights get longer. We're heading into the dark, and we have to hang onto each other."

(Mike Flanagan,"The Haunting of Bly Manor")

a. Funeral March

Both Gyo Hui Seon and the old shaman believed that the capture of Hanyang by the gwishins was based on two major attributes that had nothing to do with military experience or the use of particularly advanced war weapons. On the one hand, they had easily outnumbered the military forces gathered within the capital, regardless of their expertise and training, but also of their artillery equipment, on which the living had probably placed too high hopes to repel an army of the dead whose density had ended up completely drowning them. On the other hand, the near-immortality of the gwishins and their insensitivity to pain had fatally depleted the resources and endurance of the living, in the sense that it was almost impossible to eliminate the dead apart from fire and decapitation.

The flaming arrows had caused the greatest number of casualties among the gwishins, as well as the burning pitch to which the troops of soldiers positioned along the ramparts had all resorted without exception in an illusory attempt to get rid of the gwishins, but nevertheless considered courageous by several of them who had witnessed the scene while their peers were climbing one after the other to the tops of the walls, using harpoons and ropes, which were essentially the only real weapons they had brought with them, in addition to more offensive instruments such as bows and swords, the use of which had become much more extensive as soon as the dead, having exhausted the soldiers' stocks of gunpowder and fuel, had begun the final conquest of the ramparts and climbed them to find themselves face to face with the living who had survived the salvos of the Gwishin archers.

Some of the latter had been stationed in the heights of the trees, and others had been protected by their congeners, who were nevertheless careful to move aside and give them free rein as soon as they started a wave of fire.

Dong Soo was too far away and too surrounded by gwishins to hear clearly the summary of the battle that Hui Seon was trying to narrate to Woon, but he managed to get some information from the little So-Ri, who was walking near him, Sa-Mo and Woon's student Mago, alongside with Min-Su. The latter seemed much less taciturn than when she resided at the Spring House, and she spent the entire walk to the royal palace conversing with a young woman who had tied her arm around her waist, and whose charming dimples at the corner of her lips surfaced regularly whenever she smiled at Min-Su's words and looked only at her.

Dong Soo's mother was walking behind them, silent as a grave: he still remembered the look she had given him when Sa-Mo had told him about his father's death. So-Ri gave her small audience a detailed account of the confrontation, which she described as relatively calm in comparison with other conflicts that had shaped the history and territory of the kingdom of Joseon, and of which all its subjects were aware to a greater or lesser extent depending on their social rank and wealth, since the latter determined access to an education and consequently to the study of the ancient wars with Japan or China.

Most of the gwishins who had joined the north had obeyed a series of indications relayed through the collective consciousness in the weeks preceding the issuance of the Royal Decree of 1777, and which had circulated for several weeks after the disclosure of the new repressive measures until confirmations of the use of torture by the living to gain access to information shared within the common mind of the dead were relayed through it, pushing the entire people of the gwishins to the utmost discretion and to immensely restricted uses of the main channel of the consciousness.

Contrary to the majority of her peers who had been unaware of the identity of the first whistleblowers, So-Ri had been informed very quickly of the role of the director of the Spring House in the communication of the different messages to the gwishins, since Gyo Hui Seon had not hidden her implication from her dead courtesans. She had also been the one who had advised them to leave the establishment after her retirement, in order to come and join her and their kind about thirty miles south of a small fishing village called Nampo, built at the mouth of the Pae River, also sometimes nicknamed Taedong, the currents of which came to flow lovingly into the western sea and sometimes met the shores of the Qing.

The location had been deemed ideal due to the notoriously misanthropic nature of the northern region, where few living were concentrated because of the warring conflicts with China and the fear that their lands would be the first to be impacted by the enemy, should they decide to resume hostilities. The last confrontation dated back to a century old, but the damage and losses had been so heavy for the north that it had taken many years for the region to be reinvested, and it remained to this day the least populated part of the kingdom, left almost abandoned while the southern coasts and the towns in the center of the country attracted more and more people seeking the hypothetical comfort of the cities and their protection in an unstable context.

Because of these characteristics, coupled with the access to the sea that the Nampo region offered, the north had been seen very much suitable for welcoming the gwishin population, and for regrouping their forces and preparing them. There, in the mountains, they had waited for what their kings and queens, fourteen men and women designated as such by virtue of their abilities to bring back the dead and which had been conferred upon them by an authority whose existence they all more or less perceived through nebulous mechanisms, but whose nature was then indistinct and whose designs were uncertain, except perhaps for the Eye, had called the "sign", and which they had announced to them as being closely related to those clearings of white flowers with which most of them had been confronted at some point since their resurrections.

One of them had been discovered east of where they had settled, and many gwishins had frequented it and basked in its tender illusions.

As the years were passing by, more gwishins had joined their ranks. Sometimes, during the day or at night, those with the status of king and queen would leave the camp built in the lap of a mountain valley, not far from a beautiful lake, in the waters of which some of them had bathed during the summers, taking advantage of the warming of its quiet surface by the sun's rays, and return much later, accompanied by a new group of gwishins they had awakened.

Sometimes they would not return for several days, having struggled to find a graveyard or to locate corpses under the ground, in accordance with the abilities conferred by their status. Some of these gwishin had been sent by their leaders to be captured by the living and taken to the camp of the army of the dead, so that they could regain control of it when the time would come.

The old Jae-Ji went regularly to meet their people, even more than the other kings and queens, and had begun to receive them one by one, in the miserable hut she had settled in on the edge of the colony. Gyo Hui Seon came to visit her frequently, and the shaman had also taken it upon herself to give advice and a sympathetic ear to those gwishins who had expressed a need for it, either because they had just woken up and felt lost, or because they wanted the help of a friendly companion.

Most of the time, however, she was the one who asked the dead to meet her and give her some time.

"She was taking us into the consciousness, but only ours, not the one we all share," So-Ri told Dong Soo. "She was looking at our memories. I didn't even know it was a faculty of the consciousness."

"What was she looking for?" Dong Soo asked her.

"I don't know," So-Ri shrugged. "She never said."

As time was stretching out and no action was taken against the living, impatience had spread, along with frustration, despair, and weariness. Then, one night, they had all been seized with the same vision, that of an infinite, deep blackness, from which something was coming up to them, calling them, bringing flowers and whispers in its wake.

"It terrified me," So-Ri explained. "I was scared to see this thing, to look at it, even though it was here to help and guide us. I was sure it would be abominable, and that I would go crazy if I ever looked at it in the face. I closed my eyes. We all did, even the Eye."

They had left the mountains barely an hour after the vision, dividing themselves diligently among the troops that were supposed to be coming to surround Hanyang from the north, east, or south, and marching through the night to reach the kingdom's capital. The plan of attack had been conceived and adapted during the time they had been in hiding, both by the gwishin-kings and queens and by the dead who had received a military education or had had significant experiences during their living existences.

They had served as technical support, advising on approaches and strategies, and had been given command of specific troops such as archers and scouts, who had received the order of entering the city before the rest of their forces to check the distribution of the remaining soldiers of the living and to kill as many as possible to clear the way, thus facilitating their victory.

One of their gwishin-kings happened to be none other than Daejoyeong, the founder and ruler of the kingdom of Balhae who had repelled the Manchus more than a thousand years ago, and who had been saddened to learn that these same Manchus had finally regained the upper hand and conquered the kingdom.

Upon hearing this, Mago asked So-Ri about the behavior of the former king.

"His manners are a bit impetuous and careless," she noted with shy embarrassment, "and he's very forward with anyone who meets his eye, but it seems to me that he has a good heart, and he knows how to make people like him. The "Builder", is what Jae-Ji called him."

He had taken under his command, together with two other gwishins-king and one gwishin-queen, known respectively as the Shark, the Shield and the Sword, the troops coming from the north, whose route to Hanyang had been traced to run into the location of the camp of the army of the dead. The troops from the south, moving towards the main gates of the city, had also been led by four kings and queens.

As the gwishins advanced toward Changdeok Palace, Dong Soo noted, as he glanced around hastily, that the inhabitants of Hanyang, probably reassured by the cessation of cannon fire and the absence of the chaotic, deafening din usually associated with war, were coming out more and more from their hiding places in their homes, across their threshold, in order to observe the march of the dead with a growing anxiety as they were taking the measure of their numbers.

Children timidly passed their heads from behind the legs of the adults to admire the long white procession, in the midst of which the few living who had joined it were distinguished by the more varied colors of their garments. In front of each new door, a gwishin from the procession stopped and stood guard, gleaning worried glances from the residents who dared not advance further. Soon, accumulations took place in the small alleys adjacent to the main avenues, and three or four gwishins posted themselves in front of their delimitations, preventing the living from approaching the procession.

Suddenly, a cry broke the harmony of the conversations that had been taking place in low voices until then.

"Grandma!"

Dong Soo turned his head, as did Sa-Mo, Mago, So-Ri, and many other gwishins in the procession. A little girl, no more than five years old, with chubby legs and arms, ran out from inside a hanok so fast that the adults at the door could not hold her back. The gwishins, on the other hand, made no move to stop her. Making her way through the mass of the dead, she crept up to an old woman who lifted her in her arms and exclaimed "Areum-ah!" while hugging her.

The child's call had attracted the attention of the gwishins who were walking in the front line. While pointing out the scene to Gyo Hui Seon and her peers, a smile appeared on Jae-Ji's lips. Woon turned around as well, and Dong Soo noticed he had removed the bandages applied to his face along the way. From his position in the crowd, Dong Soo could not clearly see the ravages of torture, but he assumed that Woon's skin must have regenerated enough for him to remove the bandages.

Woon's eyes met his. He gave him a wry smile. His hair was completely white now, like all the other gwishins', just like the day when Dong Soo, sick and exhausted, had seen him in the palace corridors, leaning over him, holding his face in his icy hands (my dead love).

The little girl and her grandmother were gently pulled out of the procession by two gwishins, and brought back to the house from which the child had come. Immediately, the adults started talking to the old woman, taking her hands and touching her. It was like ten years ago, during the first days of the resurrections, when the majority of the living expressed their joy at seeing their loved ones again.

They were walking in a straight line, crossing the widest lanes of Hanyang serenely. The sight of the old woman and her granddaughter repeated several times : women and men met their husbands and wives, parents their children and vice versa, old friends saw each other again, sisters and brothers opened their arms to their siblinds. Exclamations frequently rang out, signaling the presence of a loved one in the procession, and sometimes leading to touching reunions.

Each time, gwishins were removed from the procession by a few of their kind, but their absence did not dramatically diminish the total number of dead. After a while, however, the living began to follow them. The streets seemed to have never contained a single living soldier, although Dong Soo saw corpses here and there, lined up against the walls of houses as if they had been placed there to clear the way for the gwishins.

At the very back of the line, So-Ri had told him that there were soldiers from the southern rampart who had been taken prisoner while waiting for the gwishin to arrive at the palace. Dong Soo glanced at them, and although he could not see them clearly because of the distance, he did notice their distressed looks, the dark traces of gunpowder on their faces, and the deplorable condition of their clothes.

As So-Ri was explaining to Dong Soo how the cannon and arrow fire of the soldiers of the southern rampart had been poured out on wave after wave of "sacrificial" gwishins, sent out ahead of the others as cavalry to take the brunt of the fire and risk, most of whom surviving for being quickly recovered and tended by their peers as the rest of the troops was moving to approach the walls, the northern troops appeared in their turn, just as plentiful as the battalions that had sprung up in the south.

The gwishins who composed them wore more sophisticated armor, and wielded firearms in addition to swords. Their leaders were two men and one woman, and the center one's large, impressive build betrayed his identity. Under his broad bushy eyebrows, his eyes were small but piercing, and his dark beard surrounded a mouth with a sagging lower lip. He was dressed in a thick, silver armor with a long, white, fur-lined cape. His helmet, though antediluvian in appearance, was beautifully decorated with an inverted crescent moon motif.

At his side stood Chun, who gave Dong Soo a sarcastically inclined smile and a slight nod. Like the gwishin-king and all those from the camp of the army of the dead, his battle dress was a deep gray, and its formality contrasted with his former night-black attire, making him look paradoxically younger. His white hair had been gathered into a high, strict bun, highlighting his facial features.

The elegant and majestic lines of the Prosperity Palace walls loomed ahead of the procession, and soon the tall red wooden gates were in sight. A troop of gwishins was already in front of them, and Dong Soo found others dotting the palace grounds, gathering around it the way they had around Hanyang, holding the palace in a firm, definitive grip.

Dong Soo thought of the white flowers in the clearing between the Cheonmasan pines, the way they had closed over the burnt tree in their center and along the bodies of Woon and Mago. The gwishins were like them now, patiently encircling the king of Joseon with their multitude, becoming a vine, a spider's web engulfing the capital and the seat of its political authority.

"Will they ask for an audience with the king?" Sa-Mo worried, even as he stood close to Woon's father, behind whom walked his dead wife and the gwishin who had accompanied her when they had all met in the street, each on the lookout.

Woon looks like his mother, Dong Soo mused absentmindedly, remembering her smile when she had left the store of the gwishin drawing maps of unknown territories, whose death Woon's student had mentioned while she was telling Sa-Mo and their parents about the circumstances under which they had escaped from the royal prison.

"Not an audience," So-Ri corrected him gently. "An audience must be granted by the king and depends on his will alone. Our people leave him no choice. He must listen to us."

Sa-Mo did not ask her about the words the dead wished to address to the monarch, probably guessing their content on his own. Dong Soo looked away from the slender, bloody beams of the gates, and turned his gaze eastward toward the barracks. There rose gracefully spindly debris of smoke clouds. He found himself hoping that Seung-Min had not been injured in the attack, and that he had escaped to a safer place.

As for his audience with the king, Dong Soo had never went through it. There was an abyss in his memory, disturbing uncertainties, but he was almost certain that he had been knocked unconscious by the soldiers who were taking him to the palace, for he had felt a sharp pain in the back of his head, like a sledgehammer being brought down on his head.

He had regained consciousness, frighteningly disoriented, in an alley in the city, immediately opposite the one where Sa-Mo and the others had discovered him. That the soldiers had beaten him into unconsciousness and taken him further away still seemed a plausible possibility, for he knew of the clandestine violence of the military against the gwishins, and how some of them did not hesitate to attack the living who expressed any compassion for them.

He had also considered the eventuality that the king had decided, because of his recent choices, his obvious treachery, and his attitude in the years before he had taken office as a brigade captain and deputy prosecutor at the Royal Investigation Bureau, to have him assassinated in the quiet, or that one of his ministers or advisors had made such decision to protect some interest that Dong Soo, through his disloyalty, was undermining. It was certainly implausible, but it remained an option.

Finally, there was the hypothesis that the monarch had wanted to save him in the greatest secrecy, without warning him, and to give him back his freedom by demanding the soldiers to simulate an attack. Since he had awakened, Dong Soo had considered every single case: in each of them, however, two details refused to stick to the whole, and the persistence of their independence and nature of strange anomalies clouded his resolution of the matter, disorienting him and plunging him into increasing confusion every time he proposed a new hypothesis and tried to integrate it into the skeleton of events.

The first of these details had been his waking up next to the freshly dismembered corpse of a soldier. The second, which had encouraged him to take the uniform of the deceased man, was that he had discovered himself to be without his clothes, his skin on edge, covered with a greasy layer of blood, and this second element remained the most disturbing, the most inexplicable, the one that distressed him above all, because he perceived no logic, no sense in it.

He had not seen either of the two guards who had escorted him to the palace when he had emerged from the alley, barely fitting into the uniform that was too small for him. Only the sound of cannon fire had reached him, and his hearing was muffled, as if a cannonball had exploded right next to him.

Some gwishins came to meet the first line of the procession formed by Woon and Gyo Hui Seon, as well as the other gwishin-kings and queens who had led the southern troops. Dong Soo and Sa-Mo both listened carefully.

"The king had the gates opened," one of them said , after bowing to his leaders. "The troops gathered in the palace compound are meager and cannot stand up to our troops: they've just surrendered by Jeongjo's order. As you requested, we warned the ruler of the living that the entire city had been conquered and that the palace would be razed to the ground if he did not cooperate."

"He chose the path of wisdom," Jae-Ji observed. "He's preserving some of his military strength and power." She turned to Im Ji-Ho. "I told you he would surrender."

"He doesn't have the entire army of the country," Dong Soo heard the old man object in a pained tone. "Many soldiers are stationed in the country towns and along the coast. Surprising them was our best asset, but if Jeongjo had known earlier that we were approaching, he would have repatriated all his forces to Hanyang, and we would have been overwhelmed in turn. In fact, it is very likely that he has done so, and that he's stalling for time by opening a dialogue with us."

"Perhaps," Jae-Ji agreed. "But there is too much distance between Hanyang and the other cities, and we have dominated the troops occupying Suwon and the nearest towns. If we hasten the negotiations, and I think it will be easy, we will avoid confronting the rest of the army."

At the same time, the gwishin who had come from the gates informed them that the king had asked to receive only the leaders of the gwishins in the courtyard of the throne room, thus confining the rest of their forces to the outside of the palace and arrogating himself a relative safety.

"We can't blame him for playing the careful card," Gyo Hui Seon said casually. "The risk is that we would be vulnerable if he chose to execute us."

Her head turned to Jae-Ji and her peers to gather their opinions.

"If the palace is surrounded, it is unlikely that he will try anything," Woon said. "His priority is to ensure the safety of the kingdom and the living. The threat is too great."

"My opinion is the same," another gwishin-queen noted , and she had a splendid face, endowed with a long very fine nose, a pulpy mouth and high delicate cheekbones that framed her long white hair, tied up very simply in her back. "Moreover, this is also the occasion for us to show our good faith. Accepting the request of the king of the living would act in this sense, and would potentially make us more trustworthy."

"So be it." Gyo Hui Seon, giving her attention to the gwishin of the gates again, announced: "Let Jeongjo know that the gwishin kings and queens will come to negotiate with him as he has requested, provided he doesn't try anything against us. Warn him as well that failing to keep his word would make him responsible for the annihilation of Hanyang and its residents, but also for the monarchy of the country."

"It seems to me that he's already aware of such things," Jae-Ji pointed out with a smirk.

"A little reminder will do him considerably less harm than an oversight."

The gwishin returned to the gates, and Dong Soo saw him exchanging words with a soldier wearing the uniform of the royal guard, who had been disarmed to serve better as a messenger. The soldier disappeared behind the doors, and they opened wide with a loud, raspy squeak to let the leaders of the dead in.

Woon glanced over his shoulder at Dong Soo, while Gyo Hui Seon began to move forward with the other gwishin kings and queens, including those from the north. Dong Soo nodded in response, using the silent language they had resorted to years before, having developed it at the training camp and perfected it to the point where every head movement, every hand gesture, had come to mean something.

They had introduced Cho-Rip to it for a time, but he had never communicated with them in this way as much as the two of them had. In Woon's eyes, Dong Soo read, "Everything will be fine, just wait here". His own nod said, "Be careful, I'll wait for you". He wondered if Jeongjo would recognize Woon, what he would think when seeing him back in his royal home, dead and very much real.

"What do they want from the king?" Mago asked So-Ri.

"Did you not listen to the echoes in the consciousness?" The latter seemed surprised.

Mago shook her head, and added that she hadn't had time, citing the lack of interaction she and her master had perceived in the consciousness since their departure to Qing, their weak mastery of the deeper levels, and their inability to dive into the shared mind of the dead following their imprisonment.

"I see. Forgive my ignorance," So-Ri apologized. "The demands of the dead have been listed for the past few years, while we were growing in number in the north. First, the king must allow us safe access to the beaches of Incheon, and guarantee us peace during our journey and once there, until we leave. We also demand that he admit we aren't enemies of the kingdom, and that he apologize to us and to all the living for the suffering we have endured since the day we came out of the grave. We also ask that he leave in peace our living allies, both those belonging to the Yeogogedam network and those who don't, and that he publish the second volume of the Encyclopedia of the Dead written by the Historian, as well as modify the first one so that we are no longer presented as monsters."

But one word had caught Mago's attention, and she quickly interrupted So-Ri in her enumeration.

"Our departure ? Our departure to where?"

"To our home," the dead courtesan replied in a soft voice. "To our land. We are leaving tonight for the Island of the Dead. That's why our kings and queens are negotiating right now to get to Incheon safely. That's where it appeared."

"There's an island for the gwishins?" The idea seemed to amaze and surprise Mago. "Since when did it appear?"

"Since last night. The living discovered its existence when we were already walking towards Hanyang. It belongs to us, and we will all live there together and safe. This is what the Eye assured us. This is our last demand: the king must agree to a non-aggression pact of the island and guarantee us safety and freedom of movement in case we have to step into Joseon territory again. He must recognize the existence of our lands and the authorities who will govern them, namely our kings and queens. In return, we pledge not to destroy Hanyang and its monarchy, and to stay away from the living once we will be settle on the island."

"Are you saying that the dead won't come back to Joseon?" Sa-Mo understood, with a glance at Cho-Sang and Dong Soo's mother, but also, more discreetly, at Dong Soo himself. "That they will stay forever on this island?"

"This is indeed the most likely possibility."

Silence fell between them as they began to wait with the rest of the gwishin, who had initiated more sustained conversations, some with living they knew who had come to join them. After perhaps an hour of waiting, Dong Soo's back began to ache, and he felt the desire to sit down, while not wanting to risk missing Woon's return at the same time.

The arrival of the eastern troops was signaled, and the four gwishin-kings and queens who led them, one of whom was an old man of about the same physical age as the shaman, moved at once to the palace gates as soon as they reached the procession of their congeners. The doors were closed on them, whereas they had remained open until then.

Finally breaking away from the soldiers he had been leading, Chun approached them, hand on the pommel of his sword. Sa-Mo hiccupped nervously at the sight of him. Woon's father wore the same expression as when he had seen his dead wife.

"Relax," the former Sky Lord temporized them by raising a palm in front of him. "I didn't come here to murder anyone. I'm a general now."

Dong Soo was about to ask him about his time in the camps, about his role in the gwishins takeover of the army of the dead, and hoped for a moment to ask him about his conversation with Woon in prison, about the absence Woon had mentioned, and perhaps about other more obscure and ancient matters that had to do with Heuksa Chorong, when the bloddy-colored doors of the palace whined for the second time, and opened on the leaders of the dead, who were returning accompanied by soldiers both living and gwishins.

Gyo Hui Seon was glowing, betraying the nature of the negotiations. Standing in front of the procession, lined up with her fellow kings and queens, Woon on her right and Jae-Ji on her left, she smiled triumphantly at them, and announced:

"The king of the living has accepted our conditions!"

b. The Isle of the Dead (and the sea opens)

A round, wide-brimmed jeollip, wrapped in a long tassel of gold and crimson to which had been tied a peacock feather, infinitely larger in size than those decorating Dong Soo's hats, and the center of which had been stamped with the royal seal inlaid in a jade medallion, was on the king's head when they had been ushered into the courtyard of the throne room. Each step that had made the dust grates crunch and that had pounded on the courtyard tiles had brought back memories of the time when he, Dong Soo, and Cho-Rip had joined Changdeok Palace as royal guards-to-be.

Woon could still feel the blue silk of the uniform, the discomfort of a foreign, strangely sharp-edged fabric against his skin accustomed to coarser ones. His taste for refinement had always been present, but it had only been able to develop fully when he had acquired his own space at Heuksa Chorong, that is, as soon as he had been enthroned as Human Lord and had been able to gradually free himself from the limitations of dressing and decoration linked to his previous status as an apprentice assassin.

He had been careful with money, and had balanced his spending by putting aside most of his whims, unlike Chun, who had indulged his fantasies completely when he had become the Sky Lord, digging a hole into the guild's funds, the depths of which had only been filled thanks to a single, truly extraordinary order from a high Qing magistrate. Woon had nevertheless learned to spend after living a large part of his existence saving and not giving in to impulse buying. The golden dragon burner had marked a turning point in his financial habits, in that he had never before made such outrageous purchases, curbing his cravings in favor of security.

Even at the training camp, he had always been careful with the few resources they were given for the New Year's, and had never bought anything that seemed too expensive despite sometimes painful yearnings. That was why Dong Soo had stolen that book for him one day when they were strolling through the market in the town closest to the camp, the one with the crimson red cloth cover, glittering with gold leaves. Woon had seen it on a stall, had wanted it, but had recoiled after seeing its excessive price, that was so much more than his meager budget.

He had thought that no one had seen him bend over the book and revel in the ripples of gold on vermilion, not caring about its contents, but two weeks later, on the occasion of Seollal, he had found the book simply resting on his pillow, as if it had always occupied that place. Its gilding had blazed in the sunlight that was streaming into the dormitory in bright rays.

How did you get it? he had asked Dong Soo later. Dong Soo hadn't even needed to tell him that the gift was from him. Woon had known immediately. Dong Soo had shrugged, dodged the question, and instead had tried to find out if he liked the present. Woon had left the book with him the day he had returned to Heuksa Chorong. Dong Soo had kept it, as well as the letters, the burner, and Woon's ribbon, but he had put it in a more visible place, in his office.

He had read the book, had wished to have it near him. Woon had glanced at it years earlier, more by default than by real curiosity. It was just a story, about a princess abandoned by her parents, and forced to bear the children of a monster so that she could resurrect the former despite their evilness. The princess's name was Bari, he thought suddenly, as Hui Seon and the other gwishin-kings and queens were exposing to Jeongjo the requests of the dead.

He thought the king had recognized him, for he had frowned when he had seen Woon, no doubt remembering their last talk as vividly as Woon (you have my trust). The palace courtyard had seemed to him overcrowded, choked with ghosts, and not just visible, tangible gwishins. Through spies of the shadow world, he had received confirmation that the Minister of War had been beheaded, and that his body had been burned. He was not likely to return.

As a traitor, his corpse should have been thrown into a mass grave, but the Crown Prince himself had asked his grandfather for a funeral pyre, and perhaps he had had a intuition, a fear that the man responsible for his father's death would return, prompting him to destroy his body permanently. Nothing came back from the ashes, and they made any identification impossible. They erased everything. In doing so, Jeongjo had denied Hong Dae-Ju any recognition.

On the king's chest, another golden dragon roared, raising its five clawed legs high. The military clothes of the ruler complemented those of his bodyguard and the rest of the Hanyang army, consisting of a few archers, pikemen, and shields. Many wore uniforms with embroidery, signaling high hierarchical ranks. According to the Historian, most of the soldiers who had been requisitioned on the ramparts were or had been commoners.

On leaving the palace, Woon went to meet Dong Soo after Hui Seon's speech about the monarch's submission and their imminent departure for the Island of the Dead, which she had told him about shortly before reaching the courtyard of the throne room. As all the gwishins were following their leaders toward the beaches of Incheon, he told Dong Soo that the king had listened to their demands without blinking, while his men had stood perfectly still and silent, as well as harmless, holding their swords, pikes, and bows along their bodies.

In the consciousness, he had heard a whisper from Jae-Ji, as fleeting as a flash of lightning during a storm (something's wrong). It had persisted after Jeongjo's decision to accede to all their conditions, expressed in a brittle nod, and had spread among the other kings and queens, to the point that even Hui-Seon seemed more nervous despite their apparent victory.

The marching pace of the procession, which had been relatively confident when they were making their way to the palace, became more jerky and hurried. There was just under three hours on foot from the capital to the eastern beaches, and the gwishins had come without horses or carioles. But if their condition allowed them to move forward without getting tired, the problem arose for the living who, having found relatives in the procession, showed a desire to follow them to Incheon so that they could bid them farewells.

Seizing the opportunity, one of the gwishin-kings suggested that the presence of living among their group would tend to limit the risk of attacks by the army in case Jeongjo finally decided to break his promise. He was the most imposing of all, whom Hui-Seon had introduced to Woon as the former King Daejoyeong, and whose striking resemblance to some of the portraits he had seen in some of the books that had occupied his time at the Spring House he had noted.

In these, the founder of Balhae was unmistakably massive, with shoulders as broad as the columns supporting the gates of the royal palace and a crushed, but combative face. As a gwishin, he moved with a slightly awkward heaviness due to his bulky build, but Goh Dae-Seong and his wife, who had come to meet him as soon as they had seen him among the other kings and queens of the gwishins, both looking genuinely happy to meet him after Sokcho and asking him about his trip to Qing with Mago, had both assured him that the man, once on the battlefield, was full of ardor and as swift as if his body had been composed of nothing but air.

His strength was colossal, but Ran Gyeong-Ja had said that he was not "primitive" and that his temper outside of battle was light-hearted and good-natured, inspiring sympathy and confidence. He was also a good commander, and his experience in leading the country made him extremely valuable.

"But didn't he try to take back the power after his awakening?" Woon, surprised, asked to the gwishin couple.

They had said Daejoyeong had tried to assert his authority as supreme during the first few days he had spent near them in the northern mountains, but that a meeting with old Jae-Ji had seemed to extinguish in him any ambition to possess the absolute regency once again.

None of them had known exactly what she had told to him, but they had all noted that he had then submitted himself entirely to the distribution of hegemony among the gwishin-kings and queens already present there, and had not since raised any protest against this organization or sought to gather forces to seize power. The collaboration between him and his counterparts had therefore become peaceful, and he had been the instigator of the division of the gwishins into several troops to besiege Hanyang.

The road to Incheon led through the forest and between vast hills, which looked tragically bleak in winter. Woon stayed with Dong Soo, Sa-Mo and their parents. He refused to speak to his father and did not dare to turn to his mother, not knowing what to say, mainly because there were too many things he wanted to talk about and he did not know where to start.

Sa-Mo on the other hand was less shy, and conversed with So-Ha (mother) for most of the trip. His intervention did not completely loosened her up, but it did manage to briefly divert her from her resentment she felt towards Woon's father, while the latter did not utter a word during the walk, or answered Sa-Mo's few questions in monosyllables.

Mago, who did not hide her joy at having seen Woon return from the palace without a scratch, plunged herself into a deep conversation with the little So-Ri and Min-Su, as well as another gwishin who was holding the latter's arm. Woon heard her ask them at length about the island of the dead, its attributes, its appearance and what the dead had done in the north before the siege of Hanyang.

Earlier, when Hui-Seon was dragging him and the rest of them towards the royal palace, Im Ji-Ho had interrupted her talking to ask Woon about the location of Na-Young's father's house. Once Woon had told him, the old man had slowed down and left the procession for a moment with a small group of gwishins, to whom Woon had seen him gesture in the direction of the house and who had walked away after bowing to him.

We need these maps, he had specified while returning near them, they're absolutely vital for where we're going. The small brigade had joined them in the meantime, and they carried since long wooden tubes in their backs, which contained most certainly the completeness of the sketches realized by Na-Young.

The inclusion of the living in the procession of the dead had forced them to delay their departure a little in order to find horses and carioles to carry the most fragile among them. Entire families seemed to have joined their march, and unlike their arrival in Hanyang, the discussions were much more animated this time, punctuated by laughter and embraces.

Among the living were soldiers of the Joseon army, some of whom had initially been taken prisoner after the capture of the various ramparts, but who had been reunited with relatives or friends. They had left their colleagues inside the capital, reassured by the king's promise to the leaders of the dead that they would not force any negative repercussions to those of his people who supported and loved the gwishins.

Not all had been convinced, however, and some of the living had not dared to cross the border of the Heunginjimun gates to the east of the capital. Woon had looked for Jae-Bum in the crowd and had not found him, but Hui-Seon had assuaged his concerns by telling him that Jae-Bum had necessarily joined them, either on his own or after being discovered by gwishins scouts, and that there were simply too many of them for him to be spotted easily.

He had wondered if Ji-Seon (why are your eyes so sad?) and Na-Young's father had been brought to safety: he did not doubt the word of the gwishin he had awakened, but feared that circumstances might have singularly hindered him in carrying out his mission. He hadn't got any news from them, and he had spied the direction of the barracks before passing the palace gates, hoping that Jin-Ju would make an appearance, but she had never shown up. Dong Soo hadn't seen them either.

Chun had been with him when Woon and the other kings and queens had emerged from the palace, and although he had since moved away, getting closer to the soldiers he had led as a general but not talking to anyone, Woon had felt a hint of irritation lodge in his throat when he had seen him near Dong Soo (I should have recruited you both).

"He didn't say much," Dong Soo told him on the way to Incheon. "He didn't have time. But he seemed very happy with his new position."

"Just like Hui-Seon," Woon observed. "According to her and other gwishin-kings, he has done wonders at the camp of the army of the dead."

"And you're worrying about it."

It wasn't a question. Woon looked up at him, saw the water in the bathtub, the sinews of his arm muscles pressed against the wood, his bare shoulders, the desire he sometimes had to cling to them, to dig his nails or teeth into them, and Dong Soo's voice from then formulated the old fears again, in a low voice.

(you think he knows)

"Yes," Woon admitted, as Dong Soo was giving him a sharp look. "I'm beginning to think it was Hui-Seon who brought him back, or that she sent another king or queen to do the job for her."

"Did you talk to her about him?"

"Not in detail. But she knew of his existence, and his functions before..."

(the fields) Dong Soo nodded, notifying Woon of his understanding.

"Let's say she did bring him back," he continued. "Why would she do that? Without going so far as to say that his mastery of martial arts isn't exceptional, it seems to me that it's no more than that of other fighters who died before or even after him. Is that why he is not a gwishin-king?"

"I don't think so. The status of gwishin-king or queen is distributed according to a logic that even Jae-Ji doesn't quite understand. But Chun led Heuksa Chorong in the past, and Hui-Seon may have felt that his former status as a Sky Lord would make him fit to lead troops. Or maybe Jae-Ji told hze to do so, after seeing something."

"Unless...," Dong Soo hesitated.

"Unless what?"

"I don't know. She might also want to use hil in connection with you, against you, or to get information about you that you refused to share with her."

The sky was getting darker, slowly moving towards the darkness of the night, and the road had become gentler, less steep. In the smoky sky were the outlines of birds, and their white feathers were identified as that of seagulls, announcing the approach of Incheon and its beaches.

Woon evaluated Dong Soo's hypothesis, and its potential validity displeased him greatly.

"Yes," he replied. "Maybe."

They reached Incheon at nightfall, when the gibbous moon had just appeared, uncovered by a cloud. Unlike Sokcho, which had gradually seen a growing population resembled within it, Incheon had more of a village feel to it, and was infinitely smaller than other coastal cities located at a much more extreme distance from the capital.

Most of the subjects of the kingdom of Joseon had found it wiser to move to Hanyang than to remain near the sea and the Qing Empire, a powerful enemy whose broad chimera continued to loom and worry despite a century of peace. Incheon therefore consisted of only a few closely clustered houses, the majority of which had straw roofs, and the total population, mostly fishermen and a small handful of bureaucrats and soldiers, did not exceed five thousand.

As in Hanyang, they stood on the thresholds of their homes, along the narrow streets, watching the passing gwishins with an eye that was both bewildered and suspicious. Conversation had died down in the procession, and the silence in which they walked to the shore soon swelled with dejection and sadness as the farewells between the living who had accompanied the dead were about to take place.

We can't stay in the territory of the living, Hui-Seon had told Woon earlier, we'll always be a threat to them as long as we walk on their land and live near them. He had just asked her while thinking about his departure four years ago, and the embrace of Dong Soo's arms around his waist, the touch of his nose and lips on the hollow of his neck (I just want you to be okay).

"Are you worried about him?" Hui-Seon had guessed. "It seems to me that he's doing much better since he was informed of your resurrection, despite your separation."

Woon hadn't answered. He had been walking along the banks of the Han River again, with Dong Soo at his side, and Dong Soo was saying, "I put us aside". Woon had done the same for years, pushing the "us" away, keeping it outside the walls of Heuksa Chorong. Regularly, however, it had crept in, slipping through the gaps in the windows or doors, in a painfully tender draught that weighed on his nights, awakening the painful burn of the gashes on his side and cheek, evoking the touch the red cover of the book that Dong Soo had laid on his pillow at the training camp and the satiny of its gilding.

The recurrence of forced departures had long since lost all its charm, and was now only grueling. Woon knew the verses by heart (I have to leave but I don't want to leave stay I have to I'm asking you but I know you can't). He had stopp likinged the poem since ages, and thought he had never liked it in the first place. He glanced at Dong Soo, who looked down at the same time. The smile Dong Soo gave him was frighteningly unconvincing.

The gwishins massed on the shore like a white anthill made all the more valetudinarian by the pale moonlight and the darkness of the night. Their procession had been followed by curious residents of Incheon, as well as some soldiers and officials belonging to the city. Before them lay the sea, its waves rolling tirelessly along the sand, languid and unperturbed in their regularity.

They made the same noise as those of Sokcho, but Woon had seen the latter in broad daylight, and the darkness gave the rolls of the waves of Incheon a more hostile look, accentuated by the black horizon on which they opened. In the distance, and despite a thick fog floating over the water, Woon managed to make out the craggy shape of the island mentioned by Hui-Seon.

He did not see any boat docked to transport the gwishins, and pointed it out to Dong Soo, while behind his back, Sa-Mo was making the same comment to his parents and Dong Soo's mother. Uncertainty caused Mago to tear herself away from her conversation with the dead courtesans, and return to his side.

"Maybe a ship will come to pick us up, and we're just waiting for it to approach," she suggested, watching the horizon with an anxiety that reflected the weakness of her argument.

On the beach, they saw Jae-Ji come forward, isolating herself from the rest of the procession and the other gwishin-kings and queens. Her feet kicked up sand with every step she took. She stood facing the waves and their lazy back and forth, almost in the center of the beach where the gwishins had stopped. Their numbers having grown thanks to the troops from the east, they now formed a semicircle around the shore, all behind each other, studying the Eye's conduct without uttering a word.

A tension was rising from them, in invisible but pervasive smoke. Jae-Ji, after standing still before the expanse of the western sea, raised both hands above her head, before dropping to her knees in an attitude of reverent submission, bowing to the waves as to an omnipotent monarch. She was imitated by Hui-Seon, then by the Historian, then soon by all the other kings and queens of the gwishins, and finally by all of the gwishins.

Under his legs, Woon felt the touch of the stone, the crunch of the grains of sand. The living who had come with the dead, unsure of what to do, looked at each other before kneeling down. No prayer passed Jae-Ji's lips, no word came back between the gwishins, but the consciousness started to boil, to swell, like the bloody cloth that Woon's mother had placed around his waist.

(we're here we're here we're here the portals have been opened Hanyang has been submitted the Eyes the Eyes the Eyes)

The thunder rumbled, and with a crash of water and wind, before the dazed and terrified eyes of the living and the dead, as if obeying the pleas of the gwishins and submitting to the will of Jae-Ji, the waters suddenly receded and then rose violently into the air, splitting into two immense walls drawn towards the sky, and opening a path of earth and rocks towards the island, while the old shaman, at the edge of it, looked tiny and fragile.

The waves, titanic, curved outward like a fan, and yet continued to move, wetting the faces with drops of water. Woon, amazed, had never seen anything like it, struggled to believe it (it's impossible impossible impossible impossible the sea has risen the sea in two it's impossible), and the consciousness soon filled with a single instruction, an anguished and comforting at the same time murmur, which whispered and shouted "the way is open open open come my children my dead the way is open".

"It can't be," Sa-Mo murmured, and the word was written on the features of each of them, along with the term "miracle".

Dong Soo's lips were twisted into a frightened smile. The faces of the procession expressed a horrified admiration, a restless glare at the immense columns of water erected before them, without any of them being able to understand or explain it. Looking around, Woon saw in the eyes of his peers an impatience mixed with fear, a desire to move forward and to stay put, terrified that the waves could finally close in on them and drown them all.

Some of them stepped back, giving their counterparts frightened looks. Jae-Ji, now standing with her back to the path dug into the sea, looked at them. Woon saw Hui-Seon stand up and walk towards the path with confidence. She passed Jae-Ji, stepping almost without hesitation into the darkness of the sea tunnel. She was soon followed by the Historian and the Herbalist, and then by the other kings and queens, although a few, including Daejoyeong, showed more reluctance.

The motion of their leaders led to the movement of the entire procession of gwishins, and soon the path was overrun with the dead. It was dark in the water tunnel, causing some gwishins to light torches to see more clearly. Those who had been accompanied by the living allowed themselves a little more time on the shore to say their goodbyes. There had been no discussion of returning to Joseon territory, or even of visiting.

Jae-Ji was still standing in front of the gaping path, obviously waiting for the last of the gwishins to slip through so that she too could enter it. From the corner of his eye, Woon saw Sa-Mo hugging his father, and he noticed the latter returning the embrace, while looking genuinely alarmed at the thought of crossing the sea and then being left alone with his former wife and son.

Dong Soo's mother was colder, and bowed slightly to greet them, including her son. Dong Soo didn't try to hold her back, or even say anything to her. He answered her in the same way, with an unconcealed stiffness, and when his mother walked away towards the path, he did not follow her with his eyes. Woon's father was the second to leave. Mago wanted to wait for him, and a sincere emotion crept into her thanks to Dong Soo for hiding and helping them.

"I hope Seung-Min is okay," she said, lowering her eyes to the ground.

"I will do my best to find him," Dong Soo assured her.

His promise seemed to reassure her, at least partly, and she then went to Sa-Mo, with whom So-Ha (mother) was exchanging a few words. She too also seemed to have decided to wait for Woon. Dong Soo turned to him. The beach had emptied, and only they and the living who had followed the procession were left, plus a handful of gwishins who were still talking to their loved ones.

Woon had the feeling they were back four years ago, when he and Dong Soo had passed through the gates of Hanyang and said goodbye to each other, but also nearly fifteen years earlier, when he had come to him after his meeting with the king, to warn him that he had to go into exile after the dismantling of Heuksa Chorong (I thought we could live together again).

"I'll never get used to it," Dong Soo suddenly said, interrupting his trail of thoughts and his almost desperate search for new words to punctuate his departure, while at the same time he was realizing the difficulty of the task and the fact that there had been too many farewells between them for there to be any unexplored ways of expressing them. "I know this isn't the first time, but still."

Neither do I, Woon thought, and the weight in his throat, already there four years before, had returned to its quarters mercilessly. He took a step forward, embraced Dong Soo's shoulders, and Dong Soo's arms brought him close to him, belly to belly, cheek to cheek. Woon felt his skin, the muscles in his arms contracting, the water soaking the long curls of his hair.

Come with me, he almost conjured, caught in a rush of selfish weariness and aching tenderness, I'm tired of putting us aside, I'm tired of it, tired of it, come with me, be my dragon forever. When he had left Hanyang, the possibility of contacting Dong Soo and returning was then conceivable, but he was now heading for the opposite situation, where maintaining contact was by no means guaranteed, and looked highly unlikely.

He gently bit Dong Soo's cheek, causing him to shudder. It's not fair, he thought, just like before, in the fields, it's not fair.

As Dong Soo was stepping backwards with deliberate slowness, and Woon was hesitating to kiss him on the lips, despite the presence of the others, especially Sa-Mo who was waiting a little further away, the ground began to vibrate wildly. Woon heard the hooves of horses galloping on the ground, and they were numerous according to the trepidations he perceived. He was not the only one. The gwishins and the living who were still on the beach turned a worried expression toward the approaching sound, and Jae-Ji's voice called to them, urging them to reach the tunnel.

Go, Woon-ah, Dong Soo said anxiously, pushing him forward toward his mother, Mago, and the wave walls, and as Woon allowed himself a backward glance once he reached the entrance to the path, he saw a large number of horsemen rushing toward the beach, screaming and brandishing swords and flames. His mother and Mago pulled him fiercely by the arm, as the last of the gwishins ran between the sea and Jae-Ji withdrew in turn.

"The king betrayed us," she hissed, her face tense with anger, as she was urging Woon, his mother and her student to hurry up, pushing them in front of her. "He broke his word, he refuses to leave us in peace. The pact is broken."

They ran as fast as they could, without stopping or turning to look at the beach. The path was saturated with high, sharp rocks, which they climbed, helping each other, while the riders also progressed between the walls of waves, catching up with them, coming closer and closer. As they neared the end of the path, which led to the island's shore, Jae-Ji turned around, raised her hands in the air for the second time, and bowed again.

The docile waves then immediately fell back down, a hellish cascade resuming its rights, and took the soldiers by surprise, crashing down on them while the old shaman hastily got up and joined Woon and Mago on land, before contemplating, along with the rest of the people of the dead, the sea that was returning to its natural state, and the walls of water that were coming together.

The shore pf Joseon was now only dimly visible, and Woon failed to see the silhouettes of Dong Soo or Sa-Mo. His mother's soft, foreign hand rested against his shoulder.

Hui-Seon appeared between the immobilized gwishins on the beach, looking furious.

"What happened?" she asked, and her voice was twitching with rage.

"The king of the living sent his soldiers to us," Jae-Ji replied. "The pact is broken."

A heavy silence fell over the assembly of the dead.

"Are we at war, then?"

Jae-Ji gave the Historian, who had just voiced the question and the common fear of the gwishins, an abominably cold look that was not hers, framed by the mass of her white hair.

"We have no choice," she said.

A horse neighed in the distance, probably on the other side of the sea.

"Master," Mago called him, her voice full of concern. "Do you think the king will go after the living who helped us? Do you think he will punish them, after breaking his promise?"

Woon did not answer. He was looking at the waves. Under the moonlight, they seemed to have taken on a sharp appearance, like the blade of a sword.

(the war)