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The Honmoon is not a god, nor a demon, nor anything that can be explained by the neat little boxes of human language.
It does not love the way people love — it has no concept of longing or jealousy or the slow ache of unspoken words. But it loves in its own alien way. Its love is safety. A net. A song. The quiet hum of you are not alone threading through the marrow of its chosen. Its love is connection, and it shares that love through the three who mantle it every generation.
It weaves bonds like a spider spins silk — with infinite patience, wrapping each strand of fate around its hunters’ souls. These threads are meant to be unbreakable, a lattice of warmth and wordless understanding, a map of another’s heartbeat drawn under the skin.
But the Honmoon does not understand that the presence of love can cut in the same breadth it mends. It only knows that when the threads grow thin, when pain seeps through them, that the ache in its hunters can grow sharp enough to tear the tapestry it weaves. Its previously impervious threads begin to fray from something beyond its comprehension, and the whole of it threatens to unspool from a stitch come loose.
The Honmoon feels two of its hunters’ souls flinch at the sight of the third.
It does not understand nuance or forgiveness, trepidation or hesitation. To it, the sudden pull is a break, a rupture that threatens to spill pain across a fragile soul, the umbrella of its protection turned into a lightning rod for misery. Its hunter cries and it weakens the Honmoon, so much so that it cannot keep hold of the hunter it had chosen at first breath.
It tries, and it fails, and in that moment the Honmoon comes to know grief; the threads between three pulls, and it cannot keep the bonds from tearing, cannot keep this child from being cut loose from the tangle in its weave. The rejection of the other two bleed across the connection, shattering the one that stands apart from them.
The Honmoon cries, and from the blanket of its love slips the favored child into the fire.
Her cry echoes through the empty corridors, off the walls, and against the fraying Honmoon.
It’s horrible. Her voice, the one thing that kept her good, that gave her a chance to be better, betrays her.
Dual-colored eyes pull away from the ceiling at the sound of a tinkling chime. Over the curved blade of a starlight gok-do, the gaze that had always settled on her warmly has turned fierce, unforgiving. Sharp lines accent the betrayal that bruises brown eyes into something darker, and resigned determination is leveled at her alongside that weapon.
I don’t want to do this, is the whisper that comes across the bond, but I will.
The tie to Mira was once finicky; always strong, but prone to knots in the early days where stray-mentality Mira butted heads against perfectionist-teacher’s pet Rumi. Rumi had tried to describe it, once. A string (of fate! Zoey giggled) of gold that Rumi can see where they can only feel, looping around them and trailing into the light of their souls. It’s not an always present thing — it’s like a scent you become accustomed to until it fades from thought, only brought back into sight when she focuses.
It can relax, it can pull taut, but it never frays and never slips away from the person tied to the other end. In Rumi’s mind, it’s simply something that can never be undone.
This is why Rumi sucks in a breath, struck — because the tether between her and Mira goes tight, then slackens.
Mira, no, no, Mira, no, what did you—why did you—Mira, please, no, no Mira—
Her eyes follow what no one else sees. The golden string that had been secured to Mira goes loose, slipping from her. It trails down, in between the cracks of the Honmoon, and Rumi feels a feather-light tug before her own end follows it. In between the distraught ripples of the Honmoon, it unravels into nothing, starlight returning to dust. Care turned to apathy. Three become two.
Mira… Mira had cut the bond between her and Rumi.
Mira let her go. Mira chose to…
Mira. Mira. Mira.
Rumi curls in on herself. She is dangling, a mountaineer losing her foothold, plummet stopped only by one final thread.
“Zoey, please.”
Where the golden triangle of their bond once held firm, Rumi can feel the gap between her and Mira keenly, even more so as Mira’s tether with Zoey remains intact, a glaring statement.
Rumi goes cold when Zoey’s eyes shut at her plaintive whisper.
Zoey, no, please, Zoey, don’t, don’t—don’t leave me, too—don’t leave me alone—
Two shin-kal lift.
Rumi’s last lifeline droops and falls into the abyss.
Two become one.
And her world—
“There you are.”
Tilts.
A shuddering breath escapes her as her head lifts, gaze going unfocused. There is a glow, sinister and growing from her patterns, and a voice like hissing thunder drowns out the desperate mantra of her lost soulmates’ names in her skull.
“You’ve taken your time, but not even being a Hunter can save you from your shame.”
She takes a step back. There are shadows spilling across the floor in her own shape, twisting and elongating into horrid things, reaching for the one at her feet. Her mind’s eye searches desperately for safety, for threads she has seen since she first understood her own existence, but there is nothing to grasp. All that remains is Mira and Zoey, their raised weapons showing their faces in warped starlight, tense and aching. The glow of the line between them chases the shadows they do not see closer to Rumi. There is no light to spare for her.
Rumi is alone.
“Did you really think they wouldn’t abandon you?”
Rumi is a mistake.
“Did you believe, for even a second, that they wouldn’t turn on you the moment they learned what you are?”
She is untied. Untethered. Unwanted.
“Did you think they’d still love you?”
Rumi’s hands are in her hair, tearing through her braid, gasps scraping out of her.
No, not hands. Claws. Monstrous, demonic claws. The sharp edges of her fingers bump into a growth that splits her skull with white-hot agony. There is biting twinge in her mouth that ferments the taste of iron, the press of teeth too long and thick curling up from her jaw and out from between her lips.
“Rumi!”
There is the short, barked sound of a name that used to mean something more, that used to belong to something other than this thing she’s becoming, but it hits her ears like an accusation, and it hurts; she can’t think past the pain, the noise of a thousand self-flagellations that once came from her own mouth humming under the croon of the Demon King’s voice. She presses deeper until the light of his brand is cut through with the blood along her cheeks, slipping down from her horned forehead.
“You’ve always belonged to me, child. Let this be your homecoming.”
The shadows choke hers.
The starlight winks at her.
And the Honmoon groans under her scream.
They did not mean to reject her, but their minds and bodies answered the threat they were trained to believe patterned things posed, and they did not stop the stars from solidifying in their hands. The defense is instinctual, a reflex honed by generations of hunters taught to fear the demon blood they barely understood.
Staring into the light of their blades, Rumi goes still, and two silent threads stretch taut, screaming unseen by them in protest.
And then Rumi is untethered, adrift in a void where love once was.
The creature in front of them used to be familiar.
The untamed rope of violet once formed a tight, elegant braid. The tusked snarl is shaped by lips that once smirked cockily, or paradoxically allowed a shy, overly awkward smile to grace them. The jagged length of claws used to be slender fingers, holding aloft their own, painting amateur designs they cooed over regardless. Skin that had seemed unmarred is lanced through with burning patterns, an angry bright pink that prompts their hackles to rise, and grays disconcertingly, leeched of the warmth prevalent in living things.
The hunched, bowed shape of the patterned body is familiar, though. The sight of Rumi curling in on herself as she was prone to, when her guard slipped and the insecurities showed in her body when her voice failed to reveal them, splinters their resolve.
A tail lashes low behind the creature that is Rumi. Two eyes of gold settle on them. A single horn juts from the crown of Rumi’s head, the base lacerated by her claws; their voices had cut across to her in alarm, then, because no matter how hurt they are, they still can’t stand the sight of her bleeding. It hadn’t stopped her from tearing herself apart.
“Rumi,” Zoey’s voice breaks out, a wet hush when Rumi’s own emits a raw, guttural rumble. “Don’t do this.”
She can’t tell what Rumi’s feeling, if anything at all. She can’t guess her next move, how to follow, intercept, when the bond between her and Rumi has been pulled loose. Her bond with Mira shivers, reverberating with the horror of a choice that hadn’t been entirely conscious. It’s a lot like losing a limb or a sense; where there was Rumi, there is now nothing, even as she stands in front of them.
Miraculously, the sound cuts out as quick as it started.
Hellishly, Rumi’s head tilts, and Rumi’s voice, layered with another’s, masculine and cruel, crawls out of her throat. “Don’t do what, Hunter? You think I’d bother to have her hurt you when I’ve already won?”
A chuckle resounds at their mute, horrified stares.
“What…?”
“Who—?”
Rumi only laughs again; no, something laughs through her. “You’ve already done the worst you could do to yourselves. To think, after an era tearing at the Honmoon, it would be the Hunters themselves who tore it and themselves down for me.”
“Who—” Mira begins to demand again, stepping forward firmly where her gok-do trembles minutely in her grip.
“Gwi-ma,” Zoey is the one to answer her, cutting in with a horrified gasp. “You’re the Demon King. How are you doing this? What are you doing to Rumi?!”
“Clever girl,” Rumi’s too-wide grin flares out under the hollow gold of her eyes. “You should then know that all things with patterns belong to me. However, are you clever enough to understand what you have done?”
“She made a deal with you. Rumi,” Mira hisses tightly, ignoring the question and the ache it brings. The absence of the bond she tore apart hangs over her, a phantom weight trying to drag her blade down. “What did she want? What could she have possibly wanted that’s worth giving up everything we’ve worked for?”
“She made a deal?” echoes the Demon King carelessly. “I don’t recall.”
“Bullshit!”
A shrug, Rumi’s body made to sway without a care. “If the deal was her being born, then yes, but you could argue it was her mother who gambled her soul to me. After all, she made the decision to bed one of my wayward puppets.”
Mira rocks back.
Zoey’s eyes flicker in dawning realization. “Born? You mean, Rumi was born this way. As a demon...” Zoey swallowed, and Rumi’s incidents of modesty reveal themselves to be deeper, darker. “All along, Rumi was…”
Our faults and fears must never be seen.
We have to turn the Honmoon gold.
Seal all the demons away for good.
I was thinking, after, that we could… go to the bathhouse together? All of us?
A demon with no feelings don’t deserve to live, it’s so—
“Obvious,” Zoey chokes out, reliving the moment the lyrics she wrote had caught in Rumi’s throat and led to their leader crumpling under a club, to Rumi being buried beneath the horde of Faceless, smaller and more vulnerable than she would have ever allowed them to see her.
“No, don’t listen to this crap,” Mira snaps out beside her, knuckles whitening around the shaft of her gok-do. “He’s messing with our heads. There’s no way that’s true because Rumi didn’t have patterns. She wasn’t a demon!”
“You’re right. She wasn’t. She was a half-demon,” Gwi-ma corrects idly, sighing like a teacher losing hope in his class. He then taps Rumi’s patterned shoulder with her own claw, careless of the prick that prompts blood to bead there. “When was the last time you’ve seen her shoulders?”
Never, is the answer.
“… If she didn’t make a deal,” Mira says, slow, with reluctant understanding twisting her features sourly. “How the hell do you have control over her?”
And how do we get her back? goes unasked.
The Demon King stares at them through Rumi’s eyes. Rumi’s tusked smile stretches wider, sharper, to an extreme only found in exaggerated Hahoe masks, and the severed bond yawns accusingly between them, Zoey and Mira standing across from the girl they once thought they knew.
“You haven’t realized? You gave her to me.”