The Light of a Strange World
The light descended quietly upon the altar.
In the center of the temple, before the great statue of the goddess, a pure white pillar opened above the circular altar. Like a door long sealed finally swinging wide, the light quietly forged a path before the Saintess.
She lightly gathered the hem of her travel robes.
Behind her stood the priestesses.
No one wept aloud.
Yet one voice broke briefly while reciting a blessing, and another laid a hand upon the Saintess’s shoulder only to withdraw it in silence.
Earth’s language. Its basic institutions. The procedures of the Settler Management Bureau. The laws by which divine power weakened.
Night after night the Saintess had followed those sentences. She had turned the thick volumes detailing the Bureau’s procedures, and beneath every line that spoke of divine power fading she had drawn underlines again and again.
Her marks remained on every page.
But what set her fingertips trembling now was not the writing.
It was the knowledge that beyond that light truly lay an unfamiliar world from which there would be no return—and that somewhere in that world was the Hero.
Standing before the light, the sentences she had memorized could not still the shaking of her hands.
The Elder Priestess approached and carefully enclosed those hands in her own.
“Saintess. The Goddess has opened the way.”
The Saintess pressed a little more strength into the hands that held hers.
The words resonated softly inside her chest.
The name she had set down only at the end of her prayers for three long years now waited beyond that light.
The radiance washed forward until it touched the hem of her robes.
Her fingertips trembled, yet her feet did not retreat.
She lifted her gaze one last time to the statue of the goddess.
As always, the goddess was silent.
Then a single shaft of dawn light, filtered through the stained glass, brushed the corner of the goddess’s eye.
The silver gleam skimmed past the statue’s gaze and settled slowly upon the altar.
The Saintess bowed her head deeply before it.
She did not say, “I will return.”
No one yet knew how far that path would lead.
The temple’s altar and corridors, the room where she had lingered so long, the warm hands of the priestesses—all of it remained quietly at her back.
In place of a promise, she offered gratitude as farewell.
She turned and bowed deeply to the priestesses.
“Thank you. For everything.”
One of them bit her lip. Another struggled to finish the blessing to its end, yet her voice wavered, just slightly, on the final phrase.
Before those faces the Saintess drew one more steadying breath.
The people who had raised her.
The people who had taught her.
The people who had kept vigil with her through every night her resolve had faltered.
Some of those faces would still remember the day she first stumbled over a prayer.
Some of those hands had held her cold fingers for a long time on the night she returned from the battlefield.
She was leaving those hands behind.
Before those faces, the breath she had held to the last caught in her throat.
“May the Goddess’s love remain here, and in the place I am going as well.”
She laid her hand one final time over her own heart.
There still lingered the night’s prayer, and the quiet trembling that rose whenever she thought of the Hero.
That trembling beat again beneath her palm.
The pillar of light brightened once more.
If she looked back, she would weep.
The room where she had learned to pray, the desk where she had read Earth’s language night after night, the corridors she had walked alone at dawn—all of it stood behind her.
The three years she had endured while swallowing the Hero’s name remained there.
She steadied her breath so she would not turn, and walked into the light.
In that instant, every sound in the world fell away.
The temple bells, the priestesses’ breathing, even the sound of her own footsteps vanished.
The light was warm.
It was not a force that shoved her forward, but something soft—like arms that gathered her trembling shoulders close.
The Saintess folded both hands before her heart.
Strength gathered between her fingers.
Hero.
The name did not leave her lips as sound.
Yet inside her chest it rang clear and true.
In that moment the light went out.
And the world poured in.
The Saintess opened her eyes.
Sound arrived first.
The rush of cars. Footsteps of people. Music spilling from somewhere. Short, sharp mechanical tones. Advertising voices cascading from electronic billboards.
Between them the language of this world pressed in, layer upon layer.
A few words caught in her ear.
Words she had studied, without question.
In the textbooks the sentences had been broken into neat lines.
Here on the street, one voice had not finished before another overlaid it.
Before she could seize the meaning, the next sound and the billboard’s voice buried it.
She had seen battlefields. She had heard the weeping of refugees. She had walked through healing halls thick with the groans of the sick.
Amid all those sounds, for a long moment she could not even find her own breath.
No one was crying, yet the street moved without a single pause for air.
The sky was sliced apart by buildings.
She tried, without thinking, to look higher, but her gaze kept snagging between glass walls and signs. The glass threw back the light; the signs blazed as bright as night even in daytime.
People on the screens laughed larger than any real person.
Unfamiliar names streamed past in colored light.
Sound and letter kept overlapping.
The characters on the signs and the voices from the billboards, the laughter that brushed past and the brief tones of phone calls—all of it came at her from different directions at once.
People slowed as they passed her. Some lifted their phones. Some nudged one another with their elbows.
Small lenses turned toward the Saintess.
Only then did she become conscious that she was still wearing her Saintess robes.
“What’s that over there?”
“Is it a shoot?”
“Did you see that light just now?”
One by one the phone lenses rose in her direction.
She tried to step back, then froze as a car horn blared behind her. Through the thin soles of her shoes she felt the hard, smooth pavement.
A ground utterly unlike the temple floors—cold and sleek, the earth of Earth.
This is it.
She steadied her breath and lifted her head.
This is the Hero’s world.
The moment the thought settled, even beneath the overwhelming flood, one corner of her heart grew warm.
She could not yet stretch out a hand and touch him.
But they now stood beneath the same sky.
Somewhere in the heart that had been closed for three years, a small door opened, just a fraction.
She lowered the fingertips she had been about to fold in prayer and looked around.
She had memorized the procedures, yet the direction her feet should take was buried beneath the noise of the street. She knew that upon arriving on Earth she must follow the Settler Management Bureau’s process. But no record had ever described what it felt like to stand alone among so many people after the light had vanished.
Then people in black suits cut through the crowd toward her.
Two of them stepped to either side of the Saintess, holding back the gathering onlookers, while the woman at the front raised an identification card.
Black jacket, white blouse, a neat and measured voice.
“Settler Management Bureau.”
The Female Agent spoke in clear, deliberate Korean.
“We have confirmed you as a transferee affiliated with the Order of the Goddess of Love. This is an exposed location. You will need to come with us.”
The agent’s identification was held out before the Saintess.
Settler Management Bureau.
A name she had heard again and again during her preparations.
Behind the card, the people in black suits kept the crowd at bay.
She had been taught that the procedures began here.
The Saintess steadied her breath and answered.
“I understand. I will follow the procedures.”
The ending of the sentence was a little stiff, like a phrase taken straight from a textbook.
The Female Agent only gave a short nod.
The Saintess added at once,
“However… there is someone I wish to find.”
The agent’s fingers moved across a document terminal.
“That will not be possible here. We will proceed with identity verification at the agency and confirm it together.”
The Saintess bit her lip lightly.
She wanted to ask right now.
Where he was.
Whether he was safe.
Whether he still remembered her.
But behind the Female Agent stood the people holding back the crowd, and at the edge of the road the lights of a black vehicle already approaching were visible.
She pressed her lips together and accepted the agent’s words.
The agents cleared the surrounding people, and the black vehicle pulled in at the roadside.
The moment the door opened, Myeongdong’s light and throng surged toward the Saintess once more.
The glow of signs. Glass windows. The crowd. Phone cameras.
Everything pressed in at once against her shoulders and close to her ears.
Inside the car it was dark, yet the noise outside still pushed against her.
Her toes paused briefly before the open door.
Only moments ago she had passed through the Goddess’s light.
Now she had to step into Earth’s black vehicle.
Beyond the open door waited a dark seat.
Dark and unfamiliar.
A cold, strange path.
Yet only by entering it could she ask for his name.
It was the road that would bring her closer to the Hero.
The Saintess smoothed her skirts and lowered herself into the car.
When the door shut, the city’s noise receded by a single layer. Beyond the glass, electronic billboards and the faces of people flowed past like a current.
Too fast.
Too strange.
Too cold a world.
And now the Saintess sat inside it.
While the billboards streamed past the window, she folded both hands upon her knees.
Somewhere in this world was the Hero.
With that single truth alone, she could clasp her hands more firmly upon her knees.