Chapter Text
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
On the twentieth day of the tenth month, a great wind rises. It’s called the Wind of Sondol, named so after the unjust death of a ferryman. It has been many years since she heard this story told, and she only remembers it in fragments, but when the gusts tear through the palace that night Kim Soyong finds herself thinking about it.
Strange, she thinks, the things that come to us as we are about to die.
According to the legend, ferryman Sondol bore King Gojong over to Ganghwa Island. Sondal expertly steered the boat past a dangerous strait, but the suspicious King Gojong ordered his execution, and Sondol was thrown into the black waves. Thanks to the ferryman’s aid the king and his men reached the island safely, but poor Sondol was already rotting away by then, waterlogged with his eyes flung open. Therefore, the nursemaid had whispered dramatically, eyes bulging, each year on Sondollal the ferryman’s wrathful energy is roused, causing a terrible wind to strike through the land.
On a night like this, it isn’t difficult to believe the story. It is eerily familiar: the well-meaning Sondol unable to convince the king of his good intentions, and the unending resentment bleeding out from that wound. And if Kim Soyong, too, is to become a water ghost, dragging passersby into the murky depths of the lake, then so be it. She has already decided on the lake, because it is the only death she can think of without degrading her body. Slitting her throat will leave too bloody a corpse, and she wants to give her father the dignity of burying his daughter with her body intact. Better she float ashore, pale as freshly fallen snow.
The water, when she dives in, is freezing. Behind her stands Jo Hwa-jin, gaping in horror, before she flings her overcoat past her wind-stung cheeks and runs. Kim Soyong sinks fast into the lake. The first few seconds are peaceful. She has imagined it to be like this: restful, soft, like being cradled to sleep by the silent dark. Not until she is close to passing out does she draw breath, flooding her mouth and nose with searing lakewater and her mind with panic. It hurts everywhere, like her lungs have been lit on fire, and she claws desperately around her. The moment stretches on and on, the worst agony she has ever felt.
But then, just as suddenly, the pain is gone. It isn’t that she can breathe again, but rather that she no longer needs to. The relief is indescribable. Soyong thinks that she must be dead. She can move unencumbered in the water, push forward easily, even though she has never learned how to swim.
She sees a strange man floating ahead, although when she blinks it is herself she sees. She blinks again, and the man is back. He is dressed very conspicuously in dark silk, with his hair shorn around his head like a newborn.
But that is not all. She should already have reached the bottom of the shallow lake by now, but she can’t even see it anymore. Water spreads all around her, down and up and to the side, as if they are not in a lake but an endless ocean.
Kim Soyong thinks that her mind is breaking down. If she is not already dead, it cannot be far off. Perhaps the man can yet be saved, however. He is bleeding viciously from his head, and blood trails out behind him like a crimson mist. They don’t have much time.
She swims up to him with forceful strokes, reaching for his face. He looks panicked, his eyes wide open even though they must be stinging. He grabs onto her with both arms, and she feels him cling to her with the mindless desperation she lived herself only moments before.
Soyong has plenty of breaths to spare: she feels like her entire body is remade into air. She presses her lips to his and breathes into his mouth, and the moment their lips touch everything blackens, and she sleeps.