I woke to the sting of a slap, my head swimming, breath caught somewhere between sleep and pain. Disoriented, I blinked up at the shadow looming above me.
Jang Mok.
He stood over me like a judge already bored with the verdict. The calm warmth he wore like a mask was gone what remained was cold disappointment, carved into every line of his face.
I knew then. This was the end.
I had disobeyed direct orders. I had let a spy go. I had betrayed the Cult.
Jang Mok's voice was flat. Final.
"This mission was a test. You failed miserably. Worse, you committed treason. Normally, you'd be executed on the spot. But… due to your background, you've been granted a final mercy."
"You and Seo Hyang will duel. One of you will walk away. The other will not."
I opened my mouth to speak to beg, maybe. But no words came.
Because deep down, I knew.
This was my fault. I should've killed that boy. Even if it made her hate me.
Weakness is always a choice.
And I had chosen it.
I don't know how long we sat in that cell beneath the Pavilion, hands still dusted with ash, silence heavier than any chain.
Seo-noonim didn't look at me.
And I didn't blame her.
It was easier to stare at the cracks in the stone wall than the ones splintering across my reflection.
But eventually, she spoke.
Her voice was steady, but hollow.
It was like she was reading a eulogy at the wrong funeral.
"My father was a man who chose mercy over victory. He died for it."
"The night our clan burned, I watched from the attic as flames climbed the walls. I was ten. We were poets, not warriors. The smoke choked out the stars… and something inside me withered."
"The world whispered a truth that night: Kindness is the mercy of the strong. The weak aren't allowed to possess it."
"The Cult didn't rescue me. They didn't save me. They took me in because broken things are easier to shape."
Then she turned to me. Slowly. Deliberately.
And her eyes weren't filled with anger.
They were filled with something far more dangerous.
Clarity.
The kind that carves deep.
"You want to know the truth, Woon? I didn't protect you because I believed in you."
"Not at first."
Her voice cracked but not from weakness. From force. Like a dam releasing what it had held back for years.
"I protected you because I needed to prove someone could survive the fire and still walk in the light.
You weren't my little brother.
You were my second draft.
I used you. I sculpted you.
I loved what you symbolised, not who you were."
She said it plainly.
She was a doctor diagnosing a fatal wound.
"My father. My brother. My first love.
They all died believing compassion could triumph.
And I needed to believe they weren't fools.
Then you came.
A boy with god-given talent… and a heart too soft for this place.
I saw hope.
Not in you. In what you could become."
"You weren't my salvation.
You were my substitute."
I couldn't breathe.
Some part of me still wanted to believe this was all a ploy something to make it easier when I raised my sword.
I opened my mouth to speak but she raised a hand.
"No. Listen."
A pause. Not silence.
A breath before the blade.
"I love you"
She smiled. Not gently. Not cruelly.
Just sadly.
"No… not really. I didn't fall in love with you, Woon.
I fell in love with what you meant.
With what you could have been."
"I poured every shattered piece of myself into you and called it love.
But it wasn't. It was survival. It was cowardice.
It was me trying to fix me by fixing you."
"The truth is… I don't even know if I ever truly saw you. Only the version I needed to see."
Then she said it like a closing hymn at a funeral no one attended
"And that's why… I will kill you."
"Not out of hate. Not out of mercy. And not for justice."
"I would be lying if I said this was about ideals alone. I want to live, Woon. I have to live. And if that means killing you. Then so be it."
That broke something in me.
More than the village.
More than the Cult.
This wasn't betrayal. Not exactly.
It was worse.
It was truth.
Twisted and bleeding, but true.
"But I'll also do it because… if you survive like this cold, broken, reshaped into what they want then it means I failed. Again."
"Once with my family."
"And once with you."
She knew what she had just done, shattered whatever image of her I had clung to.
She had killed the boy she created before the duel even began.
Her voice dropped to a whisper, soft as dirt falling on a coffin lid. I'll never forget this sentence as long as I live.
"I need to believe there's something in you still worth saving.
And if I can't reach it…
Maybe it's kinder to bury it.
To bury you.
Before they finish the job."
And her final words settled in my bones like frost.
"Without you, I would've never realised who I really am.
I would've kept stumbling in the dark.
But Woon… you'll live on in my mind.
As the kind boy who died tragically because this cult demands that even light must be bled dry."
Looking back, I see now what she was, not a traitor, not a villain, but a mirror held up to my own soul.
Her confession was not merely a breaking of ties but a cruel illumination of the truth I refused to see: that I was never me. Only a shadow cast by her desperate need to shape light from ruin.
She did not love me.
She loved the idea of salvation, of forging from ashes a champion worthy to transcend what she perceived as the Cult's rot.
But in doing so, she trapped us both in a spiral of delusion.
What she called mercy was a blade.
A test not of loyalty but of survival, survival at the cost of everything human.
And yet, the most brutal truth she spoke was the one I could barely hear then:
To be truly free, one must be willing to burn everything one loves, including oneself.
Her eyes, cold and clear, reflected what I feared most: that the self is a project, a relentless will to power sculpted, shattered, remade again in suffering and defiance.
I was a vessel for her will, a phantom of hope.
But in the end, hope is a dangerous illusion, a fragile flame in a world that demands blood.
Still, I must affirm it all.
The pain, the betrayal, the loss, they are part of my becoming.
The absurd dance between what is desired and what is demanded.
I have learned that meaning is not given, it is wrested from chaos with clenched fists and an unyielding spirit.
The world offers no justice, no mercy, no salvation.
Only the harsh necessity to rise again, to will oneself beyond the ruin.
Seo Hyang's words haunted me, but they also freed me.
If kindness is the mercy of the strong, then I must become stronger than this broken boy who once sought light in ashes.
I am no one's second draft anymore.
I am my own cruel and magnificent work of art, a testament to the power of suffering embraced.
And if I must kill the part of me she loved, I will do it without hatred.
Because in the abyss where hope dies, a new will is born, unyielding, unapologetic, and whole.