Epilogue
On the eightieth day of my life as Mina Yang, I walked along the Bulgwang stream hand in hand with Yejun, who was carrying my absurdly heavy school bag.
It was November and the trees were stripped bare, the sky an empty white.
As much as I missed the blue days of fall, I didn’t mind the empty sky all that much.
It felt clean and new, like anything could happen.
Yejun hadn’t left my side all day, going so far as to peer in the window of my history class.
He had a whole slate of activities planned for us today—everything from an escape room in Gangnam to pancakes in Itaewon to renting bikes along the Han River.
I told him it was too much to do in one afternoon, but he insisted.
He hadn’t explicitly said why he was so determined to keep me busy today, but I had a pretty good guess.
We’d only just finished our first stop of the afternoon—the restaurant between dimensions—and I already felt too full to go anywhere else.
It turned out that Hong Gildong was now a dishwasher at the restaurant for all of eternity.
Otohime and the Korean Dragon King had determined that Hong Gildong had been too impactful to the timeline to fully erase without causing a thousand unintended ripple effects, so they’d dropped him in the restaurant and destroyed his yeouiju, leaving him stranded in the only place that existed outside of any timeline.
He was powerless, now at the mercy of the dozen elderly Korean women who worked in the kitchen.
Hyebin hated the idea. She said she could sense him glaring through the kitchen window whenever she sat down to eat. But the gods had consoled her by promoting her to Hong Gildong’s position, so she stopped complaining pretty quickly once she got to take his office.
Hyebin had adapted surprisingly well to her new position. It helped that the timeline ran a lot smoother without Hong Gildong intentionally poking holes in it. Leadership—or rather, authority—seemed to come naturally to Hyebin. No one ever dared to question her.
In the first week of her position as head of the Korean branch of descendants, the first thing she did was take down all the creepy dragon statues and paintings in the main hall.
In their place, there were now photographs of everyone who had been erased.
The photos were stark and serious—they came from their ID photos after all, the only remnants of those people we had.
Now, since everyone had to walk through the hallway, we were forced to look at their faces every day.
They were so familiar at this point that they felt almost like coworkers.
I memorized all their names and greeted them every time I went to headquarters.
Sometimes, I lingered by Hana’s photograph before I headed into the scrying room, wanting to reach out and touch but not wanting my fingertips to leave a mark on the glass. It was all I had left of her, and it wasn’t enough, but it was something, and I’d have to be content with that.
I still felt her here at times, even though Hyebin said it was impossible.
Sometimes I rolled over in bed in the morning and I could almost see Hana in the sunlight streaming through my window.
I felt her presence, the same way I could feel rain or snow or sunlight on my skin.
Her love for me was not something that even the most powerful dragon in the world could completely destroy.
It lingered like the scent of smoke in the air long after a fire is extinguished.
“Is it illegal to bring pine cones to Japan?” Yejun said, scrolling on his phone with his hand that wasn’t currently holding mine.
I glanced at his phone screen, where he was zooming in on a photo of a red squirrel with pointy ears.
“Don’t feed Korean pine cones to Japanese squirrels,” I said, for what felt like the hundredth time.
My dad had invited Yejun on our family trip to Hokkaido over winter break, and ever since I showed him a picture of an adorable Ezo red squirrel—a species with catlike ears indigenous to Japan—squirrels had occupied his every waking thought.
I was surprised my dad invited him, but then again, everyone—from my parents, to Hyebin, to Otohime herself—was conspiring to make our relationship as convenient as possible.
Most dragon descendants married humans these days because marrying among descendants always carried a risk that you’d fall in love with your cousin.
But because Yejun and I had different dragon ancestors, that wasn’t an issue.
It probably also helped that Yejun had already laid the groundwork for making my parents fall in love with him by bringing them cheesecake at every opportunity.
“Hey, there’s your friend!” Yejun said, pointing to the other side of the stream.
“My friend?” I said, squinting through the glare of the sun to see who he was looking at.
There, across the stream, Jihoon stood frozen as if Yejun had pointed a gun at him.
“Stop tormenting him,” I said, elbowing Yejun. I felt bad enough for leading Jihoon on without Yejun making it worse.
“I’m not!” Yejun said. “He’s with a girl.”
Sure enough, a girl—Im Daeun, from our calculus class—peered around Jihoon and waved, smiling at us.
I smiled and waved back. So that’s why there were still Yakult bottles in the trash, even though Jihoon stopped giving them to me, I thought.
“He’s not going to marry her,” Yejun whispered, even as he smiled at them.
“You read his file?” I said, tugging his arm to make him keep walking.
“So did you!”
“Yes, because it was relevant to me once,” I said. “You’re just nosy.”
“And you’re just”—he paused, letting go of me and stuffing both hands in his pocket—“shit.”
“I’m just what?”
“No, not you,” Yejun said, spinning around and looking back at the path we came from. “My wallet fell off my phone.”
I groaned. “I told you the MagSafe wallet was a bad idea.”
“It’s okay, it has a tracker,” Yejun said, tapping his phone screen. After a moment, his shoulders drooped. “Which doesn’t work.”
“You probably dropped it in another decade, that’s why,” I said.
We’d been going on a lot of missions together lately, our twenty-year leash extended to fifty years. I was excited to go back to ancient Korea one day, though less so ever since Hyebin had given me the rundown on how many ancient diseases I could catch.
“Oh, I know where it is!” Yejun said, grabbing my hand and pulling me toward the Eungam station elevator. “September thirtieth,” he said. I sighed and let him drag me along. Who knew having a boyfriend came with so many errands?
As the elevator descended, Yejun stood behind me and wrapped his arms around my stomach, resting his chin on top of my head. “Are you doing okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, setting my hand on top of his so that he held me tighter.
It was true—I was fine for now. It was easy to stay grounded in the present when Yejun was there.
Time magic began to tangle between our fingers, violet light illuminating our reflections in the glass as we slipped back in time.
“I thought about getting a cake,” Yejun said, “but I didn’t know if you wanted today to be more of a celebration or…”
“Or a funeral?” I said, turning my head to face him.
He winced. “We can also just go home if you want.”
I sighed, shaking my head and leaning back against him as time magic fully tangled around us both.
Today was Hana’s birthday.
She would have been twenty years old today, if she still existed.
I couldn’t stop wondering how we celebrated her last birthday before she was erased.
What kind of cake did she like? What did I buy for her?
What did she wish for when she blew out her candles?
Sometimes, late at night, those kinds of questions drowned me.
Yejun squeezed me a little harder, then let go as the elevator doors opened two months in the past. A crowd of grandpas were waiting to board the elevator, so we let them in and decided to take the stairs back to the top, rather than risk their wrath.
We emerged from the station on a dark, smoggy night. Yejun hurried over the bridge, past the fruit market, and into the alley near my apartment.
“Slow down!” I called as he jogged ahead.
“I can’t!” Yejun said. “What if someone steals it?”
“Then you go on ahead,” I said, stopping in the parking lot and waving him forward—I didn’t really want to vault a fence in my school skirt after inhaling a gallon of kimchi jjigae for lunch. Yejun climbed over it easily and ran down the side street.
“I see it!” he said. He bent down to pick it up, pulling out his yeouiju, which had already started glowing blue.
Careless, I thought, smiling and shaking my head. He didn’t even bother to check the scene.
Suddenly, Yejun froze. He looked toward the end of the street, at something I couldn’t see on the other side of the building.
“Mina?” he said.
I’m over here, I thought. What are you …
Then I realized, all at once, who he was looking at.
Yejun was wearing half a school uniform and a black mask, just like the first day I saw him. When I actually met him in the café the day after, he denied ever seeing me there. He hadn’t been lying after all—he just hadn’t met me yet.
The Mina on the other side of the building had no idea that this was just another beginning.
I was very good at beginnings, because I’d had so many of them. I was an expert at lying and sneaking and burning my old life behind me.
But this time, for this beginning, I was no longer worried about the ending.
Yejun glanced at me, then back at the other Mina. He shrugged apologetically to her, then ran back toward me and clambered over the fence.
I took his hand once he reached me, and we traveled back to the present. I knew that when the other Mina chased him around the corner, both of us would be long gone.
We landed in the shade of the parking lot outside my apartment complex, this time in daylight.
“You really should look before you start shooting blue light out of your hands, you know,” I said, poking him in the ribs.
He smiled. “What fun would that be?”
Then he put his arm over my shoulder as we walked down the stream, under the hazy blue sky of the place I was lucky enough to call my home.