Chapter Text
The wind had that dry, crackling chill that only came after too much sun and not enough rain. It scraped along the windows of Grace’s house like it wanted in.
Y/n barely noticed.
She was sprawled across the couch in her grandmother’s old nightgown — a pale, silken thing she’d thrown over the black lace set she hadn’t meant to fall asleep in. One leg hung off the edge. A half-empty glass of wine balanced on her thigh.
The bottle was on the floor. So were the solicitors’ papers. Opened, scanned, but not really read.
It wasn’t love. Of course it wasn’t.
But something about him stuck.
His smile. His voice. His dimples.
Fuck.
She tipped her head back and took another sip.
The fire in her stomach matched the tight ache behind her ribs — that dumb, wordless grief that hadn’t gone away since Grace died. The kind you drink around. The kind you push into the corners of your head and hope drowns before it spills over.
Then —
A knock.
Sharp. Two beats.
She blinked.
The robe slipped a little lower.
Another knock.
Y/n padded barefoot to the door, the silk brushing her knees, one strap fallen slightly off her shoulder. When she opened it, the night air slapped her — cool and biting.
Jungkook blinked like he’d seen a ghost. His gaze did a quick loop — robe, lace, bare leg, wineglass still in hand — and then snapped politely to the porch light above her head.
He cleared his throat.
“Uh—sorry. Didn’t mean to, um. I just… I’ve got something for you.”
He held out a small cardboard box. It had her name scrawled across the top in thick black ink.
Y/n took it with one hand, rubbing at her temple. “Another gift?”
He looked alarmed. “No! No, it’s not—I mean—uh, just letters. People kept dropping them at ours after Grace passed. Thought it was better I held onto them than let the rain get to ’em.”
Inside, she found a thin envelope marked with the seal of a funeral home. Her name. Her address. A date she didn’t want to see.
Jungkook shuffled his feet. “There’s one in there about the paddock, too.”
Her head lifted. “What paddock?”
He nodded past her shoulder. “That one.”
She stepped outside, robe pulled tighter. Wind slid under it like fingers.
Across the road, behind a crooked wire fence, the land dipped into soft, wild earth. Dry grass danced in the moonlight. A lone white horse tore through it — hooves slamming the dirt, breath fogging silver in the cold. It moved like something unleashed. Like something chasing and being chased.
Jungkook spoke without looking at her. “That patch of land came with Grace’s place. My stepbrother tried to buy it off her for years. After she died, he just left the horses. Figured the new owner would say yes.”
Y/n stared, hand gripping her wineglass.
The white horse turned suddenly — head high, chest heaving — and stilled.
It looked at her.
Something about it…
“I’ve seen that horse before,” she murmured. “That patch on its leg…”
It was black. Messy. Like ink spilled across skin.
“I had a My Little Pony that looked like that when I was a kid,” she said faintly. “Same mark.”
Jungkook glanced over, brows tugged. “So… it reminds you of a toy?”
She shook her head. “No. I mean—yeah, a little. But that’s not it.”
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, suddenly aware of how tipsy she still was. “I saw her earlier. At the farm shop.”
“The horse?”
“Yeah. I think it’s the same one. That mark on her leg. Same eyes too.” Her voice dropped a little. “She was staring at me then, too.”
The horse pawed at the ground once. Steam rose from her nostrils, curling into the night.
Jungkook was quiet.
Y/n kept watching. The wind lifted her robe, wrapping it tighter against her bare legs. The hem fluttered like paper against the fence.
“She can stay,” she said again. Firmer this time. “The horse.”
Jungkook gave a half-smile. “I’ll tell him.”
“I’ll sell the paddock,” she added, her voice a bit softer now. She stared down at the patchy grass beneath her feet, then looked up again. “Who does the horse actually belong to?”
“Oh. My stepbrother’s. Kind of.” He scratched the back of his neck. “Not technically. He just… trains them.”
She raised a brow. “Trains them for what?”
“The races. Local ones, sometimes regional. That sort of thing.” He shrugged. “Mostly just keeps them out here till they’re worth something.”
Y/n nodded, digesting that. She turned back toward the house — robe fluttering at the ankles, wine sloshing in the glass — but didn’t move. Her fingers curled tighter around the stem.
“God,” she muttered, staring out across the paddock, “this town is lonely.”
Jungkook looked at her then. Not in the way Namjoon had — not like he already knew. But gently. Almost like he didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “It can be.”
She let out a short breath. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sigh.
“You just need to meet some people,” Jungkook added after a pause, voice brighter now — as if optimism could be willed into her like sunlight. “It’ll feel better in no time.”
Y/n didn’t respond right away. Her gaze drifted back to the horse — still standing there, as if waiting for her.
“I’m not so sure,” she said finally.
The words hung there between them. Not a challenge. Not a cry for help. Just a fact.
Jungkook nodded once, like he understood more than he let on.
Y/n blinked, her lashes heavy. Then she shifted the wineglass into one hand and pulled the robe tighter around her body. The silk stuck slightly to the skin at the back of her thighs.
“Well,” she said softly, “thanks again. For the letters.”
Jungkook looked down at his hands, then back up. “Of course.”
She turned. Took a few slow steps toward the house. Her heels clicked softly against the stone. At the doorway, she hesitated just enough to say, without looking back, “It was nice talking to someone, I guess.”
“Yeah,” he said, voice warm and a little uncertain. “You too.”
Y/n nodded, more to herself than anyone else. She stepped inside.
The door closed behind her with a gentle click.
Outside, the paddock was quiet. The white horse had stopped running. It stood still now, facing the house, ears flicked forward — like it was waiting for something.
Jungkook stood alone for a while, the box tucked under one arm, watching that strange animal in the dark.
Then he turned and walked home.
——-
The wine sat warm in her stomach, humming through her limbs like a spell.
Y/n didn’t remember falling asleep. One moment, she was curled in the old armchair beneath the window, watching the paddock fade into dusk. The next, the world was different.
Not gone. Just changed.
It began with a sound — a steady pulse like a heartbeat too far beneath the ground. Thud. Thud. Thud. It echoed through soil and stone, ancient and slow, as if the earth itself remembered something it had no words for.
She stood at the edge of a clearing. The trees were not like the ones outside Grace’s house — these were taller, older, with bark blackened as if scorched and leaves the color of rust. The light that filtered through the canopy wasn’t sunlight. It was dimmer. Redder. Like something bled into it.
And in the center of the clearing stood the stones.
They were massive. Crooked. Half-sunk into the earth, arranged in a wide circle that pulled the eye inward. They didn’t hum, not quite — but something in them felt alive. As though they were listening.
And beside them, a boy.
He couldn’t have been more than seventeen, shirtless, skin slick with sweat and soot. His hands were bound in rope and raw at the wrists. Around him stood a ring of others — older men, all cloaked in pale robes with sun-etched talismans strung across their chests.
Taeyang-eul geonneun ja.
The ones who walk the sun.
Y/n didn’t know the name, but in the dream, she did. She felt it like a brand across her memory — familiar and burned-in. She could taste the word.
The sunwalkers were chanting. Low and rhythmic. In a language half-lost to time.
The boy — Ji-ho — stood silent.
Not trembling. Not pleading. Just watching the sky.
Until he moved.
He knelt. Palmed something from the dirt behind the standing stones. And when he rose again, a bow was in his hand — carved from dark, lacquered wood, strung tight. An arrow nocked with a sharp, curved head.
He aimed it straight at the sun.
The chanting broke. The sunwalkers shouted. Too late.
The arrow shot through the sky like a crack of thunder.
And the sun — the too-red, too-large sun — split.
It didn’t shatter like glass. It peeled. It tore.
Light poured out of it like fire. The earth shook. The trees screamed. And the men in white dropped to their knees, clawing at their eyes.
Ji-ho ran.
Y/n followed, though she couldn’t move. Her body wasn’t hers anymore. Just a set of eyes, drifting behind him like smoke as he sprinted through the redwood shadows, hands still bleeding, heart loud in her ears.
And as he fled, she saw it.
The mark.
On his back — painted in ash or blood or both — a circle of thorns ringed around a goat’s head. One horn was snapped.
And the stones behind them burned.
And then — nothing.
Not silence.
Not darkness.
Just nothing.
The kind that stretched wide and heavy, pressing in from all sides like a forgotten memory trying to surface. Like sleep folding back in on itself.
Y/n gasped.
Her eyes flew open.
The armchair beneath her creaked as she jerked upright, the wine glass slipping from her lap and hitting the wooden floor with a soft clink — unbroken, but half-empty. Her breath came fast. Too fast. Her skin was damp with sweat despite the cold still clinging to the windows.
The house was quiet.
Still.
Only the faint tick of the wall clock and the hum of the fridge in the kitchen reminded her she was home.
Not in a forest. Not in firelight. Not watching some boy named Ji-ho run for his life.
Just here.
In Grace’s house.
The paddock outside was black now. The white horse, if it was there, had disappeared into the dark.
Y/n blinked at the empty glass in her hand.
Then leaned forward, elbows on her knees, and let out a shaky exhale.
She glanced at the clock.
6:17 a.m.
Too early for anything, too late to go back to sleep. The glass on the floor caught a streak of dawnlight. She picked it up, turning it in her hands like she didn’t remember how it got there. The dregs at the bottom were dark, almost black in this light.
She set it aside and stood.
Her body felt sore, like she’d run miles. Or maybe it was just the wine. Maybe it was just being here — this house, this town, this weight that never seemed to shift from her chest.
In the kitchen, she poured herself some water and took slow, even sips. The tap groaned. The pipes echoed. This house really was falling apart. Grace had lived here for decades and barely changed a thing. Y/n couldn’t decide if that made her feel comforted or haunted.
She set the glass down and stared out the kitchen window. The paddock stretched long and empty, dew still clinging to the grass. Beyond it, the trees curled into themselves like they knew something she didn’t.
She didn’t feel like staying inside.
The air in the house felt stale, like it hadn’t been breathed in properly for weeks. Her head was still fogged from the dream, and that strange wine had left her guts warm and her mind strangely sharp. Something in her chest buzzed — restless, aimless.
Maybe a walk would help.
She threw on her coat, grabbed a scarf from the hook by the door, and stepped outside. The chill slapped her cheeks awake. The sky had dulled to a flat, mottled grey, like the morning hadn’t quite made up its mind.
She didn’t follow a trail. Just walked.
Toward the hedges, through the field. The paddock on her left. Grass catching on her boots. She barely noticed how far she’d gone until she reached the edge of the property and kept going. One foot in front of the other. Past the fence. Past the old marker stone half-swallowed by ivy. Down where the bramble bushes thinned and the scent of salt started rising from the earth.
She didn’t know what she was looking for.
But she kept walking.
—-
The coastline was quiet.
Y/n had wandered farther than she meant to. Far past the crooked mile marker that looked like it hadn’t been touched since her grandmother’s childhood.
It wasn’t a path, not really. Just damp earth beneath her boots and the smell of salt threading sharp through the air.
She was just approaching the beach when she saw it.
A horse — red as rust — far across the inlet.
It moved like it was made of smoke and muscle, flickering through the mist just beyond the rocks that jutted out toward the sea. A breakwater, someone once called them. Great stones stacked by hand to keep the land from crumbling. She didn’t know why it was there. Why a horse would be on the other side of it, alone. But she wanted to know.
She stepped onto the first rock. Then the next.
The wind curled cold around her ankles.
Halfway across, she paused. The sea looked strange from here. Still, but not calm. Like it was watching. Like it knew.
She moved again.
The moment her foot touched the fifth stone, the world snapped.
Not with sound. Not with light.
Just… nothing.
Then:
Breath caught in her throat. Knees bent, boots on soil.
She blinked.
She was back. Standing where she started — a few meters from the edge of the rocks.
The sea was quiet. The horse was gone.
No birds. No sound at all.
Y/n’s heart thudded once. Then again, harder.
She turned — fast — and looked behind her, half-expecting someone to be watching.
No one.
Only the cliffs. Only the wind.
She stared down at her hands. They were shaking.
Not violently. Just enough to notice.
It was probably the wine.
She hadn’t eaten much the night before. And the sleep — if you could even call it that — had been strange. Too heavy. Too vivid. Her head ached, her stomach swirled, and everything felt like it was one long breath away from tipping sideways.
I’m just tired, she told herself. Hungover. That’s all.
The dream had rattled her, sure, but that’s what dreams did. They didn’t mean anything. Not really. It was just her brain, twisted up from grief and exhaustion and whatever the hell was in that wine. She wasn’t going to spiral over it. She wasn’t.
Y/n rubbed her eyes, fingers pressing hard into the sockets until stars bloomed behind her lids.
When she opened them again, the sea was still there. Still dragging itself across the sand in slow, tired laps, like it had nowhere better to be.
She stood.
Her legs felt unsteady at first, but she ignored it. Brushed the sand from her jeans. Tugged her coat tighter around herself. Her fingers were stiff from the cold.
The rocks stretched out ahead, but she didn’t look at them now.
She turned back toward the footpath. Toward the house.
Toward whatever came next.
One step. Then another.
And behind her, the tide kept moving — like nothing had happened at all.
——
The cellar was cool.
Stone walls, slick with age. A single lightbulb buzzed overhead, casting a dim halo across the workbench. Beneath it, Seokjin turned the cork gently in his hands. The glass bottle in front of him was already full — the liquid inside the color of garnet under the low light.
He didn’t rush. He never did.
Winemaking was a quiet craft. A patient one. And in Seokjin’s hands, it bordered on ritual.
The vineyard wasn’t large. A stretch of land just beyond the ridge, shielded from too much sun. Temperamental soil, stubborn grapes. But that was the point. It had to fight to grow here — and the wine was better for it. More complex. More alive.
He pressed the cork into place with a slow, deliberate motion, then wiped the bottle down with a linen cloth. The label had already been pressed — dark green, embossed lettering curled in copper foil along the edge.
Not many people drank it outside the village. Fewer still understood the name.
He set the bottle beside three others and made a note in a small leather-bound journal. The handwriting was flawless. He tracked it all — batches, temperatures, additives. The seasons. The moon.
Everything mattered.
Behind him, the fermenting vats stood silent in their corners, thick and hulking. The scent of oak and sugar clung to the air, with something sharper beneath it. Metallic, maybe. But faint. The kind of scent that could be chalked up to anything.
He wiped his hands. Turned toward the stone basin built into the far wall. The water there was always cold — pulled from the deep spring below the manor.
He scrubbed his fingers clean, pinkish rivulets curling down the drain. No gloves. Never gloves. You had to touch the skin. That was how you knew when it was ready.
A soft knock echoed from the stairs above. Not loud. Not urgent.
Seokjin didn’t look up.
The door creaked open anyway. Footsteps followed — slow, deliberate. Not trying to sneak, just choosing not to rush.
Namjoon emerged from the gloom of the stairwell, his frame filling the space with something looser than tension but far from ease. He didn’t speak at first, just glanced around at the stone walls, the sealed bottles, the basin where water still trickled faintly.
“Thirsty,” he said finally, almost offhand. “Thought you might be feeling generous.”
Seokjin didn’t turn. He finished rinsing the basin, dried his hands on the cloth, and replied without inflection: “You’ll have to wait. Or find somewhere else to get your fix.”
Namjoon made a face — half grin, half grimace — and moved to lean against the stone counter. He tapped one knuckle against the surface. “Charming as ever.”
Seokjin glanced sideways at him, brow faintly raised.
“How are things?” Namjoon asked after a pause, more habit than concern.
Seokjin returned to his journal. “Quiet.”
Namjoon hummed, then picked up one of the green-labeled bottles. He turned it slowly in his hands, eyeing the wax seal. “You’re still using the copper foil?”
Seokjin didn’t answer. Which, for him, was answer enough.
Namjoon set the bottle down with exaggerated care and tilted his head. “You know, not everyone down at the festival booth can read cursive. That label’s gonna start a few fights.”
“I don’t make it for them,” Seokjin said simply.
Namjoon chuckled under his breath. “Right. You make it for you.”
He let the silence hang before speaking again, tone shifting.
“How’s Taehyung?” Seokjin asked, and this time there was something warmer in his voice. The barest thread of fondness beneath all that quiet.
Namjoon exhaled through his nose. “Same as always. Angry. Doesn’t answer his phone. I saw him the other day arguing with one of the horses — full-on yelling like it owed him money.”
A beat. Then:
“He’s probably off somewhere getting into trouble right now.”
Seokjin’s mouth twitched. Almost a smile, but not quite. “Some things never change.”
Namjoon tilted his head toward the ceiling. “He says the village makes him itch.”
“Everything makes Taehyung itch.”
“True.” Namjoon let the moment sit. “He misses her.”
Seokjin didn’t ask who.
Didn’t have to.
Instead, he lifted a clean bottle and held it to the light. The garnet red inside caught the bulb’s glow and flickered.
“He should come to the festival,” Seokjin said.
Namjoon huffed. “You try dragging a feral cat into a crowd and see how far you get.”
“He might surprise you.”
“No,” Namjoon said, stepping away from the counter. “He won’t.”
Seokjin didn’t argue. He only turned back toward the bottles, fingers moving with the same quiet precision as before.
The silence stretched.
Namjoon lingered for a beat longer than he meant to. Then, without another word, he started up the stone steps, boots echoing faintly against the cellar walls.
At the top, he paused — one hand on the old wood of the door.
“You should come up for air sometime,” he said, not turning around.
Seokjin didn’t respond.
The door creaked open. Then shut.
And the cellar was quiet again — save for the slow drip of water from the stone basin, and the soft scratch of pen on paper as Seokjin resumed his notes.
Namjoon stepped out of the manor’s side gate, the heavy iron creaking as it swung closed behind him.
The cold followed him. Clung to the collar of his coat like something alive.
Though it sat at the heart of the village, the Kim manor never felt central. It loomed behind low, crooked walls and wild hedgerows, built into the slope of the hill as if the land itself tried to bury it. The townspeople still called it the old house, though parts of it were older than the town itself — stone carved by hand, laid before plumbing or paper maps.
But it was the cellar that made it valuable. Not the wine. The way it ran beneath the streets like veins. Long, echoing passageways, carved deep and wide for carts and crates — a transport route, once, for moving goods unseen. It had exits no one remembered anymore.
Except him.
Namjoon followed the gravel path downhill, boots muffled by moss and damp leaves. The main road was quiet this late — only the distant clatter of a pub door swinging open, the blur of music bleeding out before it shut again.
He passed the chapel. The bakery. The old well. Familiar sights, dulled by time.
Then paused.
Up ahead, the village square bent slightly toward the butcher’s, the alley to the right barely lit. A single bulb buzzed above the doorframe of the hardware shop, flickering in intervals like a heartbeat.
And beneath that weak light stood someone.
A man — mid-twenties maybe, pale and hunched over a box of tools, struggling with the latch. One of the new hires from the farm, Namjoon guessed. Someone unfamiliar. Not yet folded into the village the way others were. No rhythm to his days. No pattern.
Namjoon’s eyes narrowed slightly.
Then he moved.
Not quickly. Not loudly. Just… toward.
The coat’s hem whispered against his knees. The air thinned around him.
The man didn’t notice — too focused on the extension ladder propped against the side of the hardware shop. It looked old. Bent slightly at the middle. One of the metal feet wobbled against uneven cobblestone.
Namjoon stopped just shy of the alley mouth. Tilted his head his arms folded loosely, gaze tilted upward now — past the warped metal, past the chipped window frames of the old shopfront — toward the overhead line that stretched thin and taut above the alley like a tripwire stitched into the night.
You wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking. Not in this light. Not at this hour.
The ladder scraped slightly as it moved. A foot caught on loose gravel.
Namjoon didn’t move.
He could’ve said something. Could’ve pointed it out. But instead, he just watched — the way some people watch a kettle boil, or a match burn down to its fingertips. Not eagerly. Just… waiting.
The man hadn’t seen the line. Not by the way he’d tilted the ladder directly beneath it.
Namjoon’s tongue pressed lightly to the inside of his cheek.
“It’s probably off,” he murmured — to himself,
The ladder shifted again. A creak. The faint tick of metal against metal. The guy steadied it with one hand, reaching up now with the other.
Namjoon exhaled through his nose.
He wasn’t smiling. But his face had smoothed into something calm.
The wind picked up — a soft sigh through the alleyway, lifting the edges of Namjoon’s coat. He didn’t seem to notice.
Didn’t move.
Didn’t warn.
The man began to climb.
And Namjoon turned away.
Not quickly. Not guiltily. Just… turned.
Like the moment had passed. Like he’d watched what he needed to watch.
Like whatever happened next wasn’t his concern.
A faint whir broke the stillness.
Not loud. But sharp — like a coil snapping back into place, or a loose wire catching wind.
Then came the thud.
Not a scream. Not even a curse.
Just the blunt, final sound of something hitting the ground hard.
Namjoon paused mid-step.
For a beat, he didn’t turn. He stood with his back to the alley, shoulders still, head angled ever so slightly — listening.
Then slowly, deliberately, he pivoted on one heel.
The man lay crumpled at the base of the ladder. One leg twisted wrong. A smear of something dark near his temple. The ladder, now tipped sideways, rested useless against the bins.
As Namjoon stepped closer, the scent thickened — not sharp like blood anymore, but heavier. Warped.
Burnt.
It hit him low and slow, like something cooked too long over flame. The unmistakable tang of scorched flesh, undercut by the sickly sweetness of fat beginning to melt — like pork left on a spit, caramelizing at the edges.
His jaw twitched.
The man wasn’t moving. His body had crumpled awkwardly beneath the ladder, smoke curling faintly from the edge of his jacket where the current must’ve licked through. The air buzzed faintly still, but the line above had gone silent again.
Namjoon crouched, watching the man’s chest. No rise. No fall.
The smell clung to everything now — his clothes, the wind, the back of his tongue. A smell that turned stomachs. That stuck in your memory.
He reached down, fingers brushing the man’s wrist, then moved beneath the shoulders and knees, lifting him as though he weighed nothing.
As he stood, the full weight settled into his arms — limp, human, still warm.
Namjoon didn’t look back at the wire or the ladder. Just started walking, slow and steady, into the dark.