It’s as if Seokga is existing within a dream, a dream where Hani’s long-lashed wine-brown eyes stare at him as if he’s an absolute impossibility.

Thirty-three years.

Thirty-three years of desperate searching and she’s finally here. Hani. His Hani, his gumiho, with her sharp-tongued wit and cheerful, hot-chocolate-loving soul. There is no visible similarity but for the Korean heritage and wine-brown eyes, but—this is Hani. Undoubtedly, irrefutably Hani. He feels it in his soul, so powerfully that he trembles.

And she does not know him.

He has found Hani, his best friend, his soulmate, and she does not know him. It is in the way her touch is gently clinical, even when her fingers ran through his hair. Those beautiful eyes have no hint of recognition within them, only a growing puzzlement and something that looks remarkably like a ravenous curiosity.

You expected this, he scolds himself. How many times has he wondered who she might be, clutched by the fear that she’d be different, too different, than who she once was? In the thirty-three years he’s waited for her, he’s imagined her as hundreds of thousands of people. There was one particularly harrowing nightmare in which Hani’s reincarnation was an elderly man with a penchant for passing gas in his retirement home’s crochet group. Seokga had awoken screaming and drenched in sweat, the walls of his Okhwang palace shaking with the force of his cries. The explanation he’d muttered to a panicked Hwanin (and the army of fifty warriors the emperor had brought with him to Seokga’s residence) had somehow found its way into Godly Gossip the very next day.

Humiliating.

And so there is a terrible sort of common sense deep within Seokga, one that tells him that Kisa does not know him. That, really, he doesn’t even know her. But the trickster still cannot help hoping that as her small hands take his face, she is about to kiss him…

No. No, of course not.

Seokga bites back his disappointment as Kisa simply stares at him, brows furrowing, lip pulled in underneath one of her front teeth. “Fascinating,” she murmurs, tilting his head left and right, staring at the cut that will soon begin to heal itself over. “I wonder…Hajun,” she says suddenly to the boy who threw the paperweight. Normally, Seokga would make him regret being born—and assuredly, he will later—but he’s in too much of a daze to do anything but send the boy a withering sneer. It’s delightful to see how he pales. A sudden stab of envy cuts through Seokga’s skin. If they’re a couple…“You could have killed him.” Kisa passes the cloth to Hajun, who looks even more like he’s about to keel over.

“Well,” the boy says uncomfortably, “I didn’t think he was alive in the first place.”

Seokga holds his breath before her gaze returns to his.