celestial strings | h.js

two.

You paused your movement, the chanting falling off your tongue. You forced yourself to clear your mind so you could think, your clueless eyes gazing forward without a cloud of feelings. Gears and logic turned in your head, calculating and analyzing, and suddenly your shoulders collapsed with your weight. Your torso fell forward, and your mouth hung open in a defeated gasp. As much as you hated to admit it, he was right. This would be much worse than last time when you saved Jisung from the car crash. It was only one wrong string spaced out on one arm that time. This time you've got a variety of colors tightly packed across both, and you were already bleeding from them. Not to mention your opponent was massively stronger than a moving car.

Exhausting yourself to heal him would result in utter failure. But you still had to help him somehow. You still had to heal Jisung somehow. You had to keep him alive somehow. You just needed one more string. You needed to deal the final blow.

This was the legacy your family left you.

Bringing your hand up to Jisung's cheeks, you forced a small smile onto your face. "Hang on here, okay?" you told him, leaning down to kiss the corner of his mouth. "I'll come back and fix you right up. Just hang on for a moment."

You could taste metal mixed with dusty bitterness and salty tears, in your mouth. There was nothing you wanted more than to take a hot bath, and as you stood up with your back facing the councilman, you fantasized about sinking into a pool of warm water and relaxing into a deep slumber. You fantasized about the life you could have had, leaned into the vengeance and the anger you have accumulated throughout the years, leaned into the pain and the fear you had felt for your friends who had been alone when they met the councilman.

Your strings glowed in their respective color, zapping a lightning bolt up to your skin and causing a scorching heat in your bloodstream. Your blood had nowhere to run but to be let out through the pores of your skin and used for your revenge plot. Everywhere in your body was dead-end. You could not begin to explain how relieved you were to feel anything at all. It was precisely that kind of energy you needed to cast a spell as strong as the one you were about to do.

You could barely remember it. Your knowledge came from a few years ago when you crept back into your abandoned home after sneaking into the city to visit your uncle.

You have done that in hopes of being able to research spells that could wake him up, and you had come across it hidden in a grimoire of dark magic spells, which you learned when you were young were off-limits. Those spells only existed to test the potentials of spell casters, not to be used by them. It was at the top of the bookshelves in your father's office; it seemed like he did try to hide it from your younger self, but you were much older now, and he never got the chance to find a better hiding spot.

The councilman sighed in exhaustion. He did not anticipate this level of exertion. "I am glad to see you standing."

You turned around; your expression was suspicious and unenthusiastic. There was only one thing you must do: break the first physical rule of a spell-caster. You were not necessarily confident in your ability to accomplish the task. Still, it was either this way or the highway, given that this way wasn't equivalent to the highway already.

When you were within arm's length of the councilman, you lunged forward and quickly stumbled when your knees gave away. He rolled his eyes at your futile attempt and grabbed you by your hair, yanking you up from the mid-fall so he could sneer down at you in contempt for wasting his time. "If only I had more time training your combat skills."

You laughed. "That was a bluff."

"Was it?"

"Yeah."