“You’re truly living,” she says in accented Korean. British, perhaps?

“And you’re…you’re dead,” he breathes, before the enormity of that fact hits him in full. Suddenly unable to move, Seokga fights to think past the roaring wave of grief as it threatens to consume him. She died. Before he could reach her, she died. How? How did it happen? How…He’s vaguely aware that she’s saying something else, but he cuts her off before he can think better of it. “When?” he croaks and grabs her right hand, the hand where the red string is tied. “When?”

Kisa blinks. “March twenty-fourth, 2018, eight-thirty p.m., Seoul,” she reports factually. “Cause of death: fatal fall from a rooftop.”

Seokga nearly chokes as he finally scrambles to his feet. The same day the Red Thread of Fate appeared. She was in Seoul. How did he miss her? How did he not find her? Why couldn’t he save her? It feels as if knives are tearing him apart from the inside.

Kisa climbs to her feet, as well. “The living typically aren’t allowed on this ship,” she says slowly. “I’m very curious to know how you’ve done it. Can you confirm my theory that Jeoseung’s plane of existence is merely a designated holding place for the dead: a sort of storage closet with a chute to reincarnation, if you will? Was there a door you came through? Can you confirm this realm could be hospitable to living organisms? Is there actually oxygen?” Her speech has become much faster by this point—Seokga can barely keep up with her. All he knows is that she’s using jondaemal, her words so formal that Seokga can barely breathe.

It’s really all gone, is all he can think, all the memories, all the love and friendship that had bloomed between him and Hani, erased and replaced by fucking jondaemal. An ache shivers through his heart, splintering into a sharp, bitter pain as Kisa continues to speak, addressing him as a stranger. He presses a shaking hand against his chest in a desperate, and thoroughly futile, attempt to keep himself from falling apart completely. “Is the realm’s physical or metaphysical structure able to be manipulated to support carbon-based, natural and biotic—”

As her line of interrogation continues, Seokga sucks in a small breath. You expected this, Seokga tells himself, but he’s beginning to think that he hadn’t, that he hadn’t at all. “Jeoseung is not accessible to regular living mortals, although it can be to creatures, if they know where to look,” he rasps after a long moment once she’s finished talking, his mind still whirring, still teetering on the edge of a magnificent mental breakdown. He is speaking automatically, the words fed to his tongue by the small part of his brain that isn’t muddled in shock, longing, and grief. “The pantheon, too. I’m a god.”