Golden Time
In the same hour, a mistake and a promise were made; time eventually learned to numb them both.
Seven years before the incident, three children—Tang-Ji, Kazami, and Hoyeon—found one another in a field near a mountain summit. Their parents, colleagues and partners at the nation's largest game studio called it a "business holiday". The valley called it something else: a long afternoon that wouldn't end.
They stayed three months in the vast green cut of Iya. Trails dipped and rose like breath. Flowers turned the slopes into soft constellations; each change of weather brought a new scent, a new colour, as if the hill itself kept cycling through save files.
They were easy friends—game-born, screen-bright. Devices out on the porch, then back in pockets when someone shouted dinner. Worlds overlapped. They cleared dungeons after breakfast; they cleared bracken after dusk, pretending the understory was a map and the map would never lie.
Under a great tree below the ridge, roles snapped into place because children like rules. Kazami played the holy knight, Hoyeon the priestess, married in the guild's lore; Tang-Ji ran gunslinger routes alone until the other two called her in for bosses. Their parents rationed screen time but winked and handed over early builds—little masks of the future—because they were makers and wanted their children to touch the work.
"Kazami-kun, help! A strong monster just appeared, and my mana is low. "Ji-chan, where are you?" Hoyeon yelled playfully. A boyish voice screamed. "Tang-Ji, our gear's durability is low; we need to retreat!" Kazami shouted. "Guys, this is getting too real," said Tang-Ji, giggling at their antics.
Curiosity filled the hours that excitement couldn't. Laughter travelled the slope like a flare; sometimes it sounded farther away than it was, sometimes so close you could feel it on your wrist like warm breath. And other times they lay on the grass until the world felt buoyant—not falling asleep so much as drifting, as if the valley were water and we were the things it chose to carry.
One evening at the summit they said it together, the way children do when they believe saying is building: one day we'll make a world that holds what we love and gives it back—not an imitation but a replay that feels like waking in the middle of the same golden hour. Kazami teased Tang-Ji about studying. Tang-Ji pouted and swore she read sometimes. Hoyeon, eyes bright, said she meant it more than any wish she'd ever made. The hill kept their voices.
I remember the weight of that vow like a warm coin in the mouth—sweet metal, hard to spit out. I was small, and the future felt obedient. I loved how their laughter made the grass lean. I loved that I believed it would always be this easy.
They did not yet know what promises cost.
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Dimmed Time
Sometimes stormlight gathers without rain. Hoyeon grew thinner in her voice before she did in her body. The digital corridors—vast, careless—made space for other people's pain, and she stood in that space too long. A hundred small confessions lodged under her skin. They came to her like little red threads, tying themselves to her wrists until lifting her hands felt like work. She called it kindness, but it fed on her.
Kazami saw it first and badly. Tang-Ji felt it and looked away. Their love for her turned blunt in their hands: persuade, scold, then pretend not to notice when she switched off the lamp and stayed in the blue glow.
A night of thin stars, the air brittle enough to snap. Kazami's anger, always coiled, misfired. The chair flew. The bruise flowered on Hoyeon's forearm, a small, terrible proof. Parents rushed in; doors closed; something split that would not be mended by morning. That was the hour Tang-Ji learned the shape of Kazami's temper and the size of his shame.
"Why, Kazami? Why did you?" she pleaded.
"Because you're an idiot, letting someone else's pain sink its fangs into your own life. You are allowing yourself to crumble under his selfish scorn and problems. SNAP OUT OF IT!" He screamed desperately.
"You're so selfish; you know that," she muttered.
I hated him for that snap and hated myself more for knowing how the snap grew. My chest felt hollowed with a spoon. I wanted to be kind enough to hold her sorrow and strong enough to refuse it—and I was neither.
After, the house developed new silences. From behind a wall, Hoyeon cried in a key that didn't travel far; it just soaked.
They were running out of valley and of time, and all three knew it without saying: if there was a way to help, it had to be now, before everyone scattered back to cities where promises become homework and homework becomes forgetting.
I stood in the doorway of my own courage and didn't step through. It is a small cowardice that ripples for years.
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Dark Time
Red sky through lodge windows; the kind of evening that makes even careful people hurry. Kazami climbed towards the conference room, and the voices were already spilling from it.
Hoyeon's father—ragged, decisive—insisted there wasn't time. A system existed, experimental and dangerous; he would use it. Kazami's mother called it unthinkable. His father said millions could be harmed for a chance measured in "perhaps". Another woman—Tang-Ji's future made older—said 'crime' and 'humanity' in the same sentence. Hoyeon's name moved between them like a spark.
Kazami stepped down the stairs and took the heat with him. The phrase that anchored in him was simple and heavy: Hoyeon will die soon. It nested under his ribs and would not shift.
By morning, Tang-Ji woke with salt on her face, a dream already thinning. She found Kazami small in a corner, knees to his chest, the way boys try to hold their own shadows. She pressed, and he told. The truth shook her; it shook the cups in the cabinet. They decided they would confront the adults tonight. They decided something else without knowing it: they would not tell Hoyeon. Protection confuses itself with secrecy when you are eleven.
Outside the kitchen window the world sped, the valley itself had hit fast-forward—clouds skating, insects stitching the air, a clock that couldn't be trusted. Memory later would call this an omen; for now it was only a feeling that the reel had slipped.
I felt time slope under my feet. Fear makes the future tilt; I kept sliding towards the version of myself that doesn't speak in time.
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Time's Up
The valley darkened in a colour that didn't belong to weather. Somewhere above the cabins the moon hid its face. Tang-Ji counted the chimes until the hour turned hard.
A long table, plates that might have been beautiful if anyone had looked at them. Parents on one side, children on the other; the air seemed too crowded for breath. The wind pawed at the windows; the wood answered with small shudders.
Tang-Ji felt the room tilt, a pressure behind the eyes like a storm trying the glass. She looked up and caught Hoyeon's father's gaze; something passed between them that did not belong to either. After, Tang-Ji would name it only as a stain—the moment a smile flickered at the edge of a face and the world came apart along that seam.
A knock—not loud, but final. Heat arrived without moving. Fire took the dining room in a single glance, and then the scene did what scenes do: broke into unkeepable pieces. Some escaped. Some didn't. Kazami's parents did not. Hoyeon's father vanished into rumour and ash. Tang-Ji woke on stone outside, cold and marked, with a photograph torn and left in the dew.
I remember the fire as taste before light—the copper of panic, the sweetness of smoke. I remember the exact second I became two: one body shivering on rock, one self hovering just above the ruin, sick with the clarity of losing.
Elsewhere—nowhere—another Tang-Ji watched the red reflection of a ruined house ripple in water that hadn't been there a moment before. She felt the separation with a clarity that excluded grief: one self falling back into a body, one hovering above it, both already moving in different directions.
The hill kept their voices anyway.
And I keep them too. That is my work now: to hold what burned and what didn't, to love them from the seam where I was split. It hurts. It is also the only thing that still feels honest.