Aslan
Aslan
"You don't have to say it."
At Lee Hyun-woo's words, Angie's lips parted, then silently closed.
Lee Hyun-woo, glancing down with just his eyes, understood the height all too clearly.
A height where even Aslan's life would have been in serious danger.
A height where Lee Hyun-woo would have certainly died.
He would likely have died even if he'd fallen forward—and he had fallen backward.
"It was this high."
Lee Hyun-woo nudged the precarious railing and watched blankly as a piece broke away and fell. The clatter of its collapse drew a hollow, bitter smile.
A fragment of something he'd heard long ago surfaced in his mind.
'The place you fell from—that's eight stories up.'
The being who had appeared when Aslan was trying to put an end to his own mistakes had told him that. Lee Hyun-woo felt the truth of those words now, in his bones.
He wanted to return. But whether he could return at all, he had no way of knowing. A long sigh misted white in the air.
Was there even a body left to go back to?
And if there was, would it be whole?
The dizzying height implied a clear answer.
Lee Hyun-woo had slipped, become Aslan, and fallen into Geladrion.
With no clear understanding of who had sent him to Geladrion, Aslan had sometimes wondered whether everything he was seeing now was nothing more than a handful of dream.
All of it illusion. A dying man's hallucination.
Lee Hyun-woo stared into the abyss, then thrust a hand into his pocket.
"Aslan...."
When the girl spoke his name, Lee Hyun-woo answered in the Imperial tongue.
"This is why I clung to good deeds."
The language of another world, long since grown familiar. The girl flinched. The desolation seeping through that voice was too deep to fathom.
"I was never certain of my own continuity. I was never certain I was really me. Whenever I survived long enough to sleep, I always thought—"
He turned his head slightly. The girl's expression hovered somewhere near tears, taut with worry. Lee Hyun-woo looked at that face and closed his eyes into a smile.
"What if I'm not Lee Hyun-woo? What if I'm some other being who simply inherited Lee Hyun-woo's memories?"
She couldn't grasp the thought, but she understood the bleak emotion bleeding into her mind. Lee Hyun-woo saw the flicker of light across her face and gripped the intact section of the railing.
"Or what if everything you and I are seeing right now, all these memories and landscapes... are just fake. And only Geladrion is real?"
Memories are intangible. And because they are intangible, their reality can be doubted.
They say a madman doesn't think he's mad, doesn't doubt his own strangeness. When Aslan heard that, he had doubted himself. Paradoxically.
And in the midst of that doubt, the words spoken to Aslan by some unknowable presence—the fall had been from eight stories—had been enough to lighten one suspicion while planting another.
To Aslan, clutching at hope of return, it was as though that presence had asked him whether that hope was worth anything at all.
Earth exists. Lee Hyun-woo exists.
But whether Aslan could ever go home and become Lee Hyun-woo again—that he could not know.
He had no way of knowing.
"So I tried to show proof that I was Lee Hyun-woo. With goodwill and purpose that don't belong in this world, I tried to prove that I am myself."
Whether that had worked, he still didn't know.
Lee Hyun-woo braced himself against the railing, lifted the corners of his mouth, then squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.
"So... I have to go back."
He clenched the railing and let the vow spill out. In the ache of that low voice was a measure of courage, and something more stubborn.
Even if someone laughed and called it futile, even if the doubt about his own existence remained—the lonely obstinacy of a stranger determined to go home.
"Back where?"
Angie asked, not knowing where that stubbornness was aimed.
Geladrion? Or Earth?
Lee Hyun-woo knew: to return to Earth, he had to pass through Geladrion.
So he answered.
"Home."
Lee Hyun-woo hooked his foot onto the jagged stump of the broken railing. Wind from the abyss caught his collar and shook it.
There would have been no reason to show him a vision of this moment. Sending him back to the time before he fell into Geladrion—to the moment he might have died in the accident—that was no coincidence.
Whatever the reason, whoever had woven this illusion—
What that being wanted from Lee Hyun-woo was obvious.
To sink into a well-crafted fantasy and never claw his way out. Otherwise, why array such sweet illusions before him?
What that being would never want, Aslan guessed, was for him to retrace his memories and fall into Geladrion by the same act.
Time to act on instinct. The moment Aslan moved to step forward—
Bzzz— Bzzzt—
The pocket of Lee Hyun-woo's jacket vibrated.
A familiar buzz. Even after twelve years, the trace of it was vivid in his memory.
Lee Hyun-woo hesitated, then slipped his hand into the pocket and pulled out a smartphone.
The vibration was a call from someone.
[Mom]
"...Hard."
A name written in clear characters.
Lee Hyun-woo went dizzy at the sight of those letters. He squeezed his eyes shut and answered.
"...Hello?"
[Hey, my boy! Where are you?]
His mother's lively voice. Aslan bit down hard on his lip before answering.
"Just out with a friend for a bit."
[Oh, yeah? Well, it's your birthday—you should see your friends!]
Birthday?
Lee Hyun-woo pulled the phone from his ear a moment and checked the date.
September 12th.
He pressed the phone back to his ear just as his mother called out.
[—Happy birthday! What do you want to eat today?]
A voice he knew by heart. The answer came out before he could think.
"Lasagna."
Lee Hyun-woo's favorite food, the one he missed most. His mother's homemade lasagna. Laughter came through the phone at his low-voiced answer.
[Aww, that again? Alright, I'll have it ready—just don't come home too late~]
"I won't be late."
Lee Hyun-woo ended the call with a bitter smile and let out a breath. Even his birthday, then. The hand gripping the railing trembled faintly.
He didn't want to go to Geladrion.
But he had to.
Because that was the only road home.
And even if he never made it back, he felt it was something he had to do.
No matter what, he would return. Aslan set that thought in stone.
"Better not be late."
He steadied himself. Even if this was an illusion right now, he suppressed the longing to go home.
With his heart barely in hand, Lee Hyun-woo turned.
Even if he was not Lee Hyun-woo, but Aslan—
"If I don't do this, no one else can."
Aslan threw himself over.
And in the instant of the fall, what he saw was Angie.
Through the flickering scarlet light, Angie was watching Lee Hyun-woo with her golden eyes.
Those eyes held nothing but worry.
Without a word of answer, Lee Hyun-woo smiled gently and closed his eyes.
His eyelids dropped unconsciously. A crushing sense of acceleration tore through his body. His hair stood on end, and finally, he should have hit the bottom.
He never did.
The speed died from the very start. Lee Hyun-woo, registering that he had come to a complete stop, slowly opened his eyes.
And there was Angie. She had seized him by the collar, her other hand locked onto the railing, halting his fall.
Her golden eyes were narrowed. Lee Hyun-woo saw what was reflected there.
The place where Aslan had thrown himself had become an abyss.
And not just there—all directions were staining black.
Reality, shattered into pieces, was falling into the abyss like shards of glass.
Angie held him by the collar and spoke.
"I understand—that you want to go home."
She tightened her grip on his collar and smoothed out the frown.
All the currents of thought Aslan had carried—the girl had at last grasped them.
"I understand why you've fought so hard."
She understood Aslan, who had chosen to keep moving forward even through his fear.
"I understand why you had to become strong."
She understood Aslan, who had taken up a burden that was not quite a mission and fought to prove the reality of his own existence.
But.
"Then why are you trying to do it alone?"
His solitude—that, she could not understand.
A leap from a height that would not have endangered Angie, but could have killed Lee Hyun-woo.
He could have entrusted it to Angie. Yet Lee Hyun-woo had jumped himself.
That fact galled her.
So she pulled on the collar she held. Lee Hyun-woo's body was drawn forward until their eyes met.
"You said you needed a comrade to watch your back."
Words he had spoken when they first met. When he was recruiting her.
At the time, they had been nothing more than a line aimed at a quest objective.
An obvious lie. With their thoughts now shared, the girl knew the truth of those words perfectly well.
And though it must have wounded her, she met his eyes and spoke.
"Yeah. Other people obviously don't fight for reasons as desperate as yours, so of course you can't trust them. Even if you could, most people wouldn't be able to fight like you anyway. They'd break first. Or die. Or just collapse. So you figured you had to do it alone."
But! Angie shouted, and with the hand fisted in his collar she pulled Aslan down to the floor. The floor was stained with the black of broken fragments.
"You could've at least tried to use me."
She let go of his collar. She knew well enough that he didn't quite trust her. That was what rankled.
"You don't know me well, so you can't trust me. And I don't understand you. Why you only do good things. Why you want so badly to go home. I don't understand any of it. But."
Their thoughts were linked. Aslan could tell the words forming in Angie's mind were flowing straight out of her mouth.
Even though silence would have communicated just as well right now, the girl persisted in speaking aloud.
"I saw who you are. How you came here. At least I know this isn't fair."
Angie extended her hand. The same hand as the day she became his comrade.
"Tell me what you want to do. What you're trying to do. As for me—I'll tell you from now on."
That burning gaze. It held an honest will. The fierce declaration of someone who would accept no answer unless it was spoken.
"I'm Angela Tail."
She crooked her brow into a forced smile.
"I want to kill a god. What about you?"
Aslan looked at her hand, then at her expression. Flickering at the edges of that strained smile was a faint unease, a hint of fear.
Fear that he might not take it.
Fear that he might confess she wasn't really his comrade after all.
Aslan stared at the hand a moment longer, then clasped it.
"I'm Lee Hyun-woo."
Their eyes met. Somewhere along the way, his body had become Aslan's again. He spoke.
"I want to fix the world. And I want to go home."
Only then did the corners of Angie's mouth lift. Around them, the black space was slowly crumbling. The shattered abyss drifted like obsidian glass breaking apart and falling as rain.
Through the raining shards of absolute black, someone was walking toward them.
A veil over her head. A thin silk dress faintly revealing the silhouette of her body.
A widow with dried tear-tracks, black hair, black eyes, and white skin.
The widow halted in front of Aslan and Angie.
"Congratulations on passing the test... Lee Hyun-woo."
Aslan recognized her.
One of the Ancient Gods.
The last of them to die.
The God of Sorrow and Death.
A dead ancient god stood before him.