not birthed. it’s a strange concept– the mother, the birther, she who plotted and planned around the sheer ability of her womb and worked it as a virtuoso with the most unique of instruments. junseok wonders, should it have been obvious? to her, to others. perhaps those with the glassy eyes focused elsewhere already knew. minsoo, who slaves over her reach into the minds of others. her stomach knots with such a concept. a distant itch ( like paranoia ) that someone close may have known and not spilled those words from their gooey lips.
awakened, she thinks. brought out from something or somewhere, drawing memories of old legends like golems stirred from their unnatural slumber. and then, of H E R . seolmundae who lives and breathes through her children even as she dies and sleeps. but no. junseok refuses to believe it could ever be her.
and therefore, she does not know who. shifting slowly from side to side, her arms crossing in a position far more kin to seyoon than herself. their childhood was benign of gods. of creators. relations with china– shamanism prosecuted when the joseon period swallowed korea and the yi family ruled.
she knows that they know this. perhaps they even know more, and refuse to say. she has no right to make them. only her truth.
“people are dying.” junseok says. steps forward, closer. “people i protect in my territory, people outside of it. humans too, in droves– but it’s those who are supernatural kin that die strangely. they’re mad, if they’re alive. oedipism and tongue removal. …i’ve never seen it. and i don’t know how to stop it.”
the deaths have little to do with them, save for a slight jarring sense like a splinter buried under the tongue. a faint imbalance, crackling at the edges, where their hands hold the void. they blink, silent, listening, their inhale timed with the pitch, swell, ebb of the core’s magma.
its heat has never reached them. too close, still, the beyond icy grasp of stars that tipped their claws. -- time is a human creation. arbitrary. illusory, and transient. yet they remember something resembling a half-formed infancy, no speech but the clicking shriek that bore the first wound and shattered ear drums for miles.
intelligible language seems so petty and meaningless by contrast, the words on their tongue not expressing what they want. the gulf between sense and desire frustrates, irritation like the legs of a thousand termites skittering up their back, down their legs. language is always impotent. they wonder how long junseok could withstand it, were they to lean more on the voice that needs no vocal cords. how long she could last, before her ears, too, began to bleed.
an almost dispassionate, almost scientific curiosity, though one to which they do not give sway.
when their silence, finally, tears asunder, there is only one question remaining from among the millions plausible :
‘ are you asking for our help? ’
