Chapter Text
“We are huntress, voices strong,
Fighting demons with our song.
Fix the world and make it right,
When darkness finally meets the light…”
The words echoed in the training hall, fragile but focused — a child’s voice reciting something older than she could truly understand.
Rumi sat kneeling on the padded mat, legs folded under her, violet hair falling like a silken waterfall down her back. It shimmered faintly in the dim morning light filtering through the narrow windows, strands catching on the breeze from the cracked-open skylight above. The air smelled of dust, metal, and sweat — the scent of every morning.
Behind her, Celine worked in silence. Her fingers were strong and methodical, tugging Rumi’s hair into tight, disciplined sections. The braid she wove was not decorative. It was efficient. Functional. There was no pause, no softness in her movements. If it pulled, Rumi said nothing. She’d learned early that comfort was not part of the training.
“Again,” Celine said flatly.
Rumi took in a slow breath.
“We are huntress, voices strong—”
“Louder.”
She raised her voice.
“Fighting demons with our song—”
“Enunciate.”
Rumi pushed her lips harder around the syllables, biting them into the air.
“Fix the world and make it right—”
Celine tugged the braid tighter.
“When darkness finally meets the light.”
The final word hung in the air for a moment. Then:
“Again.”
Rumi’s shoulders tensed. She wanted to ask how many more times, but she already knew the answer: until it was perfect. Until she could say it half-dead and bleeding and still not miss a word. Until it wasn’t a song anymore, but muscle memory.
“We are huntress…”
Again and again.
By the fifth repetition, her voice was hoarse. By the eighth, her back had straightened on its own, less from pride and more from ingrained instinct — from knowing Celine was watching, always watching, with the gaze of a woman who didn’t believe in rest or excuses or mercy.
When Celine finally tied off the braid with a tight loop of black cord, she circled in front of Rumi and crouched. Her face was pale and sharp, not hard like stone — harder. Like steel carved into human shape. Her grey eyes took in Rumi’s expression as if searching for flaws in a blade.
“It’s not just a song,” she said.
“I know,” Rumi whispered.
“No. You don’t. It’s a weapon. A rule. A warning. You will learn it until it becomes your breath.”
Rumi nodded. Her throat burned. But something deeper than pain stirred under her ribs — uncertainty.
“Do… all demons have to die?” she asked, voice barely above a breath.
Celine stilled.
For a moment, the quiet was a little too quiet.
“Yes,” she said at last, her tone stripped of emotion. “All of them.”
Rumi frowned. “Even if they don’t try to hurt us?”
Celine’s eyes narrowed. “They will.”
“But… what if they don’t?”
A slow inhale. No answer. Not yet.
“And what if… I have patterns?” Rumi asked, almost afraid to look up. “You said I’m different. That I have to move different. That I’m not like the others. So does that mean… I’m dangerous too?”
Celine’s jaw tightened. She didn’t look away — didn’t flinch — but something behind her eyes sharpened like ice splintering under pressure.
Then, without a word, she reached out and gripped Rumi’s chin between her thumb and forefinger — firm, not cruel, but without softness. It wasn’t meant to comfort. It was meant to correct.
“Every demon must be killed,” she said again, voice low and ironclad. “That includes the ones wearing masks. The ones that cry. The ones that look like people. You don’t get to second-guess. You don’t get to hesitate.”
Rumi blinked, her breath catching in her throat. “But what if—”
Celine didn’t let go.
“That’s why you hide what you are,” she said sharply. “You never show your patterns. Never move the same way twice. Never let anyone predict you. If they can track you… they can loop you. And if they can loop you—”
“They can kill me,” Rumi whispered.
Celine released her chin. Stood.
“Good,” she said coldly. “Now get up. Training begins.”
No warmth. No praise.
Just another day in a life where softness was a liability.
Rumi rose to her feet in silence. Her braid was tight against her scalp. Her knees ached. Her throat still itched with the remnants of the song.
But she stood tall.
And as Celine stepped onto the mat, arms already loosening into fighting form, Rumi caught herself whispering the words under her breath — one last time.
“We are huntress, voices strong…”
But now, they didn’t sound like a song at all.
They sounded like a warning.
🦋
Zoey’s room wasn’t big, but it held two worlds.
One wall was covered in Korean picture books, their spines worn and colorful, stacked beneath a faded calendar pinned crookedly to the drywall. Each date was marked in red pen by her mother — in Hangul, which Zoey couldn’t read yet, not all of it — but she knew her birthday was in one of those boxes.
On the opposite wall, superhero stickers peeled off a plastic dresser. There were coloring books with English titles, and a poster of a space princess taped above her tiny desk, where her crayons lay scattered beside wrinkled pages full of drawings.
She drew a lot. Stick figures holding hands, or standing far apart, sometimes behind doors. A red house. A blue apartment. Sun and moon in the same sky. Her writing was a messy mix of half-learned English letters and Korean characters copied from cereal boxes. None of it spelled anything real. It didn’t need to.
That was the space she’d built: a soft middle ground where neither language yelled.
But the walls weren’t thick enough.
“You don’t even talk to her in Korean anymore! 어떻게 배울 수 있어, 이렇게 살면!”
“Because she lives here, Minji! She’s not Korean, she’s American!”
Zoey sat cross-legged between her bed and the wall, hiding behind her toy chest. She could still hear them. Every word hit her like a stone dropped into water, rippling until it filled her chest.
“그건 당신 생각이야. 내가 낳았어, 내가 책임져.”
“We had her! This isn’t just about you! Jesus—do you even hear yourself?”
Her mother’s voice was fast and slicing — like a glass breaking just out of sight. Her father’s was heavy, rough, rising like waves trying to drown everything else. The sounds overlapped, tangled. English slammed into Korean, neither side slowing down, neither understanding.
Zoey didn’t know which parts to hold on to. Her name came up again and again, sharp and jarring.
“Zoey는 한국에서 더 나을 거야!”
“No. No, she’s staying here. You are not taking her.”
“엄마가 필요해! 가족이 필요해!”
“She has family. Right here. With me!”
Her fingers curled into the carpet.
They were talking about her like she was a puzzle piece, something that could be picked up and dropped into a different box depending on who shouted louder.
She stared at the floor. Her violet crayon was lying under her foot. She picked it up, turned it over in her hand, pressed it to a blank corner of a crumpled paper — but she didn’t draw.
She couldn’t.
The room around her trembled like it might split down the middle. Her Korean books on one side, her English toys on the other. Her parents pulling her from opposite walls with voices like ropes.
She covered her ears.
Not hard at first. Just enough to muffle.
The yelling didn’t stop. It got louder.
“당신은 날 뺏으려 해.”
“I’m trying to protect her!”
“거짓말이야! 넌 날—!”
She squeezed harder. Closed her eyes. Her palms pressed so tight she could feel the blood in her fingers. Her heart pounded in her throat.
And then, a sound — quiet and cracked — slipped out of her mouth.
A hum.
Not a tune she knew. Not a song she’d learned. Just a sound, soft and low, like she could build a wall with it. A blanket of noise over the storm.
She rocked in place. Back and forth. Her breath hitching, but the hum didn’t stop.
She imagined it getting bigger, like a bubble she could crawl into. Maybe it could cover the calendar, the posters, the yelling, the pulling, the choices.
Maybe if she kept humming, she wouldn’t have to choose a side.
Maybe the noise in her head would finally go quiet.
🦋
Mira had always been too much.
Too fast. Too loud. Too wild.
Her knees were always scraped, her palms stained with sap or chalk or someone else’s blood. The world never told her who to be — it told her who not to be. And she defied it, fists clenched, hair tangled, eyes bright with something no one could name.
She was six when she bit another kid for the first time.
The boy had pushed her little brother in the schoolyard — shoved him hard, twice, mocking him with the kind of smile only mean kids wore. Her brother just stood there, red-faced, shoulders hunched, not saying a word.
So Mira lunged.
No one saw it coming. One second she was watching. The next, she was on top of him — biting, punching, growling like an animal. She didn’t stop until two teachers dragged her off, kicking and spitting like her body was still stuck in the fight.
Now, the boy sat on the nurse’s bench with a frozen sponge on his hand and teeth marks on his shoulder.
And Mira stood alone.
“You can’t just attack people, Mira!”
“He was twice your size! What were you thinking?”
“You bit him! Do you know how serious that is?”
Her parents were furious, faces flushed, voices sharper than usual. Her father loomed with heavy footsteps and big words. Her mother paced behind him, muttering too fast to follow, disbelief hanging off every syllable.
Her brother stood off to the side, clean and quiet. He didn’t look at her. He didn’t say she was protecting him. He didn’t say anything.
“Why can’t you be more like your brother?”
“He thinks before he acts. He doesn’t cause scenes.”
“Why can’t you just be normal?”
That one hurt worst.
Mira didn’t yell back. She didn’t cry.
She ran.
Out of the office. Out of the schoolyard. Past the broken gate and into the woods behind the fence where no one ever followed her.
She climbed the nearest tree, fingers scraping bark, legs aching as she hauled herself higher and higher. The wind tugged at her shirt. Branches snapped underfoot, but she didn’t stop until she reached the thick, high limb that felt almost like a throne.
The trees didn’t tell her she was too much.
They just let her be.
And so she sat. Legs pulled close. Arms looped around the branch. Heart still hammering from the fight, the shouting, the silence from the one person she thought would stand beside her.
She tilted her head back. Closed her eyes.
And then — quietly, shakily — she hummed.
Not a tune she’d learned. Not anything from TV or lullabies. Just a string of notes that tumbled out of her mouth like leaves in wind. A sound to keep her company. A sound that matched the ache in her chest.
The wind caught it, carried it through the trees. A wild, wordless melody that didn’t need permission to exist.
Down below, the shouting started again.
“Mira! Mira, come down!”
“This is not funny, Mira!”
“You’re going to fall! Get down now!”
She didn’t answer.
She kept humming.
Her voice wove between the branches, softer now, but steady. A thread in the wind.
“Why can’t she be like him?”
“What’s wrong with her?”
Their voices mixed with the rustling of leaves, swallowed by the sky.
When they gave up — when their footsteps crunched back down the path, leaving her alone again — she finally opened her eyes.
The sun was slipping behind the treetops. Her hands were cold.
She climbed down slowly. Carefully. And when she touched the ground, she turned and hit the tree with her palm. Not out of anger. Just to feel it. Just to make sure something in the world was still solid.
Then she walked home.
She didn’t speak to her parents. Didn’t glance at her brother.
She went straight to her room, pulled the blanket over her head, and hummed one last line before going silent.
And no one came in.