The Eyes That Never Forgot
The moment the word “joke” left his lips, the hand that had been gripping her waist loosened and slid away. As if by magic, the breath that had been crushed from her lungs returned, and she could breathe again.
Yeo-won let out a heated sigh and bit her lip hard.
Right. He had been scaring her.
Throwing out the question of whether she could handle him.
‘No, even if I died and came back to life, I still wouldn’t be able to handle him.’
The moment she admitted it so quickly, an inexplicable stubbornness began to rise inside her like smoke.
It would have been so easy to just say she understood and let it go. She couldn’t figure out why she felt so irritated.
After a brief moment of hesitation, Yeo-won decided to simply acknowledge the truth.
This discomfort probably came from the feeling that he didn’t trust her.
She was curious. Did he still see her as overlapping with that child from the past? Had he never shown his true form to that child either?
The miserable questions racing through her mind finally forced her mouth open.
“Then… half.”
At her words, he lowered his head. Yeo-won paused for a beat to suppress the emotions threatening to burst out, then spoke again.
“Wouldn’t it be better if you released even half? I think I could endure that much.”
He stared at her with a distinctly surprised expression.
Her reason was screaming at her to stop even now.
But borrowing Shin-wol’s own phrasing, humans were inherently foolish creatures who sometimes made choices they could never take back.
Yeo-won grabbed the front of his robes tightly and said,
“You said you’d let me touch your tails.”
She had no idea. That the words she had just spoken had burned away every last scrap of hesitation that had remained in Shin-wol.
For a moment, Shin-wol looked at her with an expressionless face. Countless emotions flickered in his eyes before sinking back beneath the surface.
The moment his once sparkling eyes lost their light and darkened, Yeo-won flinched.
[Haha.]
He laughed out loud.
At that laughter—so different from his usual tone—the shame she had forgotten came rushing back all at once.
Only then did she realize how childish her jealousy had been.
Overcome with embarrassment, she hung her head low.
“I-I’m sorry…”
The refreshingly clear laughter made Yeo-won cautiously lift her head.
He chuckled for a long time before letting out a low sigh and sweeping his hair back.
His face looked strangely relieved.
Without warning, Shin-wol lifted Yeo-won and set her down on the bed in front of them.
Shin-wol took a step back and emphasized,
“Do you really have to threaten me like that? The Mountain God just showed me without any fuss.”
Yeo-won, sitting primly on the bed and listening attentively, opened her mouth cautiously only to close it again.
Seeing her hesitate as if she wanted to say something, Shin-wol waited politely.
He had decided that if she said she didn’t want to see even now, he would stop here.
She still didn’t know that his offer not to show his true form had been an act of consideration.
Since she would have to stay by his side for all eternity, he didn’t want her to live the rest of her life trembling in fear.
She seemed to have expectations after seeing Mu-ho’s form, but Shin-wol’s true appearance was slightly different from what humans imagined.
The spirits of today simply took the exact forms of the animals they had once been, but in the distant past it had been different.
The form before animals had devolved.
He had preserved the exact appearance from the primordial beginning of time.
One reason he didn’t want to show it and earn her hatred was that, but there was one other trivial reason.
Spirits of mountain god rank or higher did not easily reveal their true forms.
The public reason was that doing so felt like wearing shackles, suppressing their power and making it easier to maintain balance.
But from time immemorial, when spirits showed their raw forms to one another, it was proof that they trusted the other as a mate.
That trust eventually became a promise, and the promise became a marriage vow.
Mu-ho probably didn’t know because he was young, but when spirits held their wedding ceremonies, they proved that their outer and inner selves were the same by appearing in human form during the day and in their true form at night.
They showed their mate their original appearance without any sorcery, proving they hid nothing, and then swore an eternal, undying vow.
That was why one’s true form should only be shown to one’s mate.
Shin-wol briefly considered telling her this, then curved his lips in a cool smile.
He had warned her several times. The fact that she still wanted to see was her choice.
And choices always came with responsibility, like a tag that could never be removed.
While Shin-wol was lost in thought, Yeo-won seemed to have finished her internal debate. She glanced at him cautiously and spoke.
“…What about you, Shin-wol?”
At those words, Shin-wol clenched his teeth. It was clearly a question asked while conscious of someone else.
“Have you ever shown it to anyone?”
He already knew she had been conscious of Mun-a for a while. The reason he hadn’t bothered to explain was simply that he hadn’t felt the need.
If that made her come closer to him, it would be nothing but a joyous thing.
“Ah…”
For a brief moment, faint relief and joy crossed Yeo-won’s face.
At his firm declaration, Yeo-won flinched and asked again.
“I’m the one who asked to see, so it feels wrong to say this, but… shouldn’t you choose more carefully?”
His eyes grew cold and then blazed with heat at the same time.
At those words, a strange chill ran down her spine.
Shin-wol smiled with his usual gentle expression and took a step back. A chilly fog rose from beneath their feet, and the surroundings slowly blurred.
“Where are we?”
He only gave a faint smile and did not answer. Every time Shin-wol stepped backward, a gale swirled around them.
The fierce wind gave Yeo-won a strong sense of déjà vu.
It reminded her of the first day she had met Shin-wol.
The sharp wind stung her eyes. Yeo-won raised her arm to cover them. When the wind finally stopped and she slowly lowered her arm, the world before her had turned completely pitch black.
“…Shin-wol?”
Surrounded entirely by darkness, Yeo-won called out to him pitifully, but no answer came.
“What is this? Stop playing around.”
No matter how she turned her head, everything she could see was dark.
Dark places always triggered her trauma.
Yeo-won shot up from her seat only to let out a sharp cry and collapse again.
“Hik!”
The sensation under her feet was strangely slick. Still seated, Yeo-won whipped her head around frantically.
“Shin, Shin-wol-nim—no, Shin-wol, Shin-wol, Shin-wol!”
With a deathly pale face, she shouted into the empty air. Like a terrified child calling for her mother, Yeo-won kept crying out his name.
Then, a few seconds later, the floor seemed to tremble. What she had thought was darkness slowly opened its eyes.
When Yeo-won lifted her head, exactly four eyes were looking straight at her.
Long, vertically slit pupils. Every iris glowed a brilliant golden hue, illuminating the surroundings in an instant.
Yeo-won muttered as if in a daze.
“Shin-wol?”
At his answer, Yeo-won looked around once more. What she had thought was slickness was all his fur. Unable to believe the sight, she clenched and unclenched the hand that had been braced on the ground, touching his fur again to confirm it was real.
“…Just how big are you?”
There’s no one who could measure me anyway, he added, but the stunned Yeo-won didn’t hear it.
At his question, Yeo-won slowly raised her lowered head.
All she could see were four eyes. They were so enormous she didn’t even know which one to focus on.
Even if she wanted to look elsewhere, she couldn’t make out what anything was.
Still, she thought it was different from when she had seen Mu-ho. In some ways, this sight was even more bizarre and terrifying, but perhaps because the voice belonged to Shin-wol, it didn’t feel the same.
In this absurd situation, Yeo-won couldn’t help but laugh.
“Just how big do you have to be for everything around you to look completely black…”
She muttered to herself, bending over as she laughed, then suddenly straightened up with a sharp breath.
Not a single one of the four eyes she had never seen before felt unfamiliar.
His eyes were as clear as the bottom of a transparent lake and sparkled like jewels.
And every one of the four irises before her undoubtedly belonged to him.
“Did I ever tell you?”
“That your eyes are so beautiful I could recognize them even from far away.”
Yeo-won answered with a bright, pure smile. Because there was not a trace of fear or terror in it, the things that filled the floor and walls trembled violently for a moment.