Chapter 12.11

It wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t just a legend passed down by word of mouth. She gasped for breath like someone pulled from water, rubbing away her falling tears. Her hands trembled; her shoulders slumped.

“This, this…”

The cathedral in her dream was Saint Arzep Cathedral on the hill behind here. She had visited it yesterday for mass, and just as in the dream, holly berries grew and snow covered the ground.

Suddenly, as if the pain she’d swallowed was coming up, her throat burned and she ran to the sink, vomiting everything. What she spat out was washed down the drain. Trying to cool her fever with cold water only made her more feverish. Staring blankly at her blotchy, wet face, she mumbled like a madwoman and searched for the rifle.

The hunter. His bride. The bride’s older sister. She had killed the demon. And the rifle that fell to the ground. That rifle was with her. With trembling hands, she searched for the item she’d deeply stored away, opening every drawer.

“Where… Where is it?”

She couldn’t remember where she’d put it, and her heart tightened with anxiety. She had to find it. Why? Her hand, poised to insert the key into the safe, stopped.

Why did she have it? How did her mother pass it down to her? The questions opened the door to forgotten memories, memories that didn’t exist for her.

She collapsed under the hailstorm of violent memories, unable to defend herself. The fragments of her dreams fit together, and the lost memory settled perfectly into place.

They were memories of her previous life. The taste of blood from her bitten lips. The wetness at her eyes smeared on her fingers. Now was not the time to cry. Hadn’t she heard that one must face unbearable truths with composure? With hands no longer trembling, she opened the safe. The erratic heartbeat pulsed to her fingertips.

The rifle was there. No one had stolen it. It had always been hers. And the tale recited, performed, and passed down—the story of the hunter’s bride.

‘Have you ever dreamt of a lover?’

‘No, never. Why?’

It was all their past. He always said he dreamed. To keep dreaming, he kept taking Manghyangcho, punishing himself. Betrayal and anger burned inside her. Why had he lied? She’d been fooled by his d*mn lies again.

But it didn’t matter. Now, he had no choice but to tell the truth.

She stood, threw a shawl over her chemise, and tucked the rifle with the trigger open into her deep pocket. She lit a lamp and went down to the first floor, deep in darkness, to the room where he, drugged, slept soundly.

She turned the doorknob. With a click, the door creaked open.

He lay asleep atop the gloomy violet bedspread, without even a blanket. He was facing the window. The wings, catching the faint dawn light along with the moonlight, rose and fell with his even, inaudible breaths. Weakly. Very slowly.

She should have smelled the oil lamp and the stale air, but what filled her nose was a dizzying fragrance she’d never smelled before or after. Shock struck her, and her feet moved.

Drawn by the bouquet-like scent, she approached him as if hypnotized. Raising the lamp close, she fell into a deep abyss at the sight of him. The angels painted endlessly by artists were slender and beautiful, but the dried blood and scorch marks on his ragged wings were not whole. Only the flesh covered by the wings was beautiful, as if sculpted from moonlight.

What Aurelia saw was his essence, his soul.

There was a reason for his beauty. Was this what he looked like as an angel? Or was he even more beautiful? She bit her lip at the thought that the scripture’s line about being blinded at the sight was meaningless.

“……”

She simply watched his wings tremble as he breathed with his eyes closed. The feathers, pure white, were charred in places, and the tip of the left wing was cut in half, covered in dried, dark blood and rough scars.

It was the trace of being cast out from paradise, fallen to earth. Even though he’d left her, why did he bear such wounds? Why was he like this? She could not know, limited to her own perspective, so she shook him awake.

“Hilli?”

Lily. Completely different voices overlapped into one. The vibration shook her heart like a tremor through her eardrums.

“Why are you crying?”

The question, coming after a pause, was sorrowful.

“Hilli…”

“Can you see it too?”

Awakened from sleep, Idris tried to stand and approach, but his legs stiffened. Even standing on both feet, he was like an incomplete bird. She asked him,

“Idris. What did Manghyangcho show you?”

His mottled eyes wavered. How was she supposed to handle someone who cried so much that his eyes were swollen, without shedding a single tear? She wished he wouldn’t show her this side of himself. If he had any conscience, he shouldn’t have treated her this way.

“What were you trying to see, ruining yourself like that, doing those things?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“……”

A voice she missed. The words he sometimes spoke to her in dreams. Even after just three years, it felt so distant; seven years ago, the memory should have faded. Why did she feel so close to him? Was it because she still loved him? Or was it because their lives had been intertwined since previous incarnations?

“You remembered.”

“What…?”

His innocent expression, not understanding what she meant, made her head hot. He called her by her name. He was wrong from the beginning, so why try to hide it?

“You called me Lily.”

Moonlight poured down. Her stiffening facial muscles showed clearly under the sun, and the white feathers trembled with his emotions.

He noticed the focus in her eyes and narrowed his gaze. But his truly confused eyes resembled Aurelia’s, so she couldn’t bring herself to say anything harsh.

“No. It’s fine if you don’t remember.”

They said honest confessions could move forward, but for them, the end was a cliff. She wished he wouldn’t stand there.

The woman always died in his arms. Her face, pale as dawn, had no warmth of the living, and her limbs were like burnt logs. With blue-gray lips, she whispered something, and only after her death did he follow her. She didn’t know what kind of punishment he received. But she didn’t want him to suffer.

Even the one before her now.

“Hilli. I’m sorry my understanding is suddenly lacking. If you explain a little more…”

She could remember, but wished he wouldn’t. She didn’t want him to hurt.

He was the first creation of God, not the last-made human. Even if he was punished by God and born to earth in human form, his essence could never be human. How could he recover what was lost? She had asked for love from someone who could never have it; it was her fault again.

“Idris. Listen well. Honestly, I resented you a lot. I tried to write nice things in letters, but the things you said stabbed me, pressured me, hurt me, and I wished you would hurt too. But I didn’t want to see you hurting like this. I wish you would hurt just a little and stop. Was it such a great love?”

“…Hilli.”

“But thinking again, maybe I didn’t really love you. I loved your beauty. Just as you felt desire looking at me.”

Idris’s face turned paler and paler. If she pushed him toward the window, he’d fly up to the sky.

“We’re the same, but I put my feelings first and didn’t consider you, so I ran away. Sorry for making it hard. I came to apologize because I felt sorry, but I was cold too. I’m sorry for everything. So you should tell me too. Honestly.”

After a while, his voice trembled.

“You really don’t love me?”

“I did, back then. Now I know that desire, pity, and longing are all kinds of love. I think I did love you, I truly did.”

Her dry voice relaxed her, though her throat tightened.

“How about you?”

Now she wanted to hear his answer. But no matter how long she waited, he didn’t speak. Maybe he had nothing to say. If he couldn’t even remember, maybe that was for the best.

It should end here. For their future. To end the repeating nightmare. To finally break their persistent, tangled fate…

“Idris. We’re ill-fated. You may not believe in cycles, but I still believe Amelie’s words. You were unhappy in your past life because of my stubbornness, and you are now, too. I’ll never fully understand you, and you won’t understand me, so let’s really part here.”

The green eyes looking at her were vacant.

‘Let’s end this tiresome fate.’

The words she tried to utter were flattened by the door bursting open.

“Madam, Madam! Your Grace, something terrible has happened! Miss, Miss Aurelia has disappeared!”