The city hit the Dream Realm the way a corpse hits water.
Slowly. Messily. Forever. SPLAAASH… CRRRAAACK…
Aria walked through the wreckage barefoot, funeral dress shredded into ribbons that fluttered like dying moths. Every step cracked the inverted pavement beneath her. CRUNCH… SSSHHH… Golden blood dripped from her heels and refused to cool; it hissed against the ground, etching tiny halos that vanished the moment her foot lifted.
Seong-jun's shadow lived inside her now, curling around her ribs like a second, colder heart. When she breathed, it breathed with her. When she bled, it bled black.
Seoul had become Ground Zero. Skyscrapers lay on their sides like gutted whales. The Han River flowed upward in a perfect spiral, carrying corpses that still waved goodbye. Streetlights blinked in Morse code no one had taught them:
save us
save us
save us
She kept walking.
Past the convenience store where a cashier floated face-down in spilled ramyeon broth, apron still tied neatly. PLLOOP…
Past the elementary school where swings rocked empty, chains singing lullabies in children's voices that weren't children anymore.
She was looking for the place she had been born. The place she had never left until three months ago.
The Ashen Cathedral.
It waited at the center of the ruin, exactly where it had always been—only now the real world had fallen far enough to kiss its spires.
The cathedral was built from the bones of a dead god. Not metaphor. Actual bones.
Ribs the size of apartment blocks arched overhead. A spine formed the nave. The skull—missing its jaw—served as the dome, eye sockets weeping slow, constant tears of starlight. She had opened her eyes inside that skull nineteen years ago. Naked. Afraid. Loved beyond all reason.
The voice that raised her had been gentle then:
My sweet child. My perfect vessel. You will never be alone again.
She crossed the threshold. The doors were nailed-together halos, parting for her the way ribs part for a knife. CRRRAAAACK…
Inside, the air tasted of incense and childbirth. Rows of pews carved from petrified angels stretched into darkness. Their wings had been clipped and used as hymnals. Every seat was occupied by a version of herself—every age she had ever been, every death she had ever died inside these walls.
A three-year-old Aria sat curled in the front pew, knees bleeding, singing to a rag doll with its face burned off.
A twelve-year-old Aria knelt at the altar, wrists slit open, trying to fill the baptismal font with enough blood to drown the screaming.
A sixteen-year-old Aria hung from the vaulted ceiling by her own hair, eyes sewn shut with threads of gold, smiling because He had told her pain was how love was measured.
They all turned to look at her when she entered. Their mouths moved in perfect unison:
"Welcome home, sister."
Aria kept walking. Past every version of herself that had believed obedience was the same as love.
At the altar waited the thing that had worn God's voice. It had no shape anymore. Only presence—vast, warm, suffocating. It wrapped around her like childhood blankets soaked in gasoline.
"My daughter," it sang, and the notes peeled skin from her bones. "You came back."
"I never left," she answered. Her voice cracked like ice over deep water.
The presence pressed closer.
"Then why does your heart beat with another man's shadow?"
She felt Seong-jun stir inside her chest, wings unfurling against her ribs.
"Because someone finally taught me that love doesn't have to hurt to be real."
The cathedral shuddered. Every child-Aria began to scream. The presence recoiled, wounded by the blasphemy.
"You would choose a murderer of crows over your Father?"
"I choose the ones who never asked me to bleed for them," she whispered.
She reached the altar. Knelt. Placed both palms against the stone still stained with nineteen years of her obedience. And began to burn.
Golden fire erupted from every scar, every memory, every place He had ever touched her. It was not gentle. It was surgery without anesthetic.
She remembered:
Age four: being told that pain was how God kissed His favorites.
Age seven: learning that screaming was a form of worship.
Age thirteen: the first time she tried to run and found the cathedral had no doors.
Age seventeen: the night He whispered that the world outside deserved to burn so she would never be taken from Him again.
Each memory became fuel. She fed them all to the fire.
The altar cracked. The petrified angels wept blood. The presence howled—no longer gentle, no longer loving, only terrified.
"Stop!" it begged, voice splintering into a thousand dying choirs. "You'll kill us both!"
"That's the idea," she answered.
Seong-jun's shadow surged forward, wrapping around the golden flames until they became something new: black fire laced with gold. Regret and mercy braided together into a noose.
She stood. Walked into the heart of the presence. Let it try to embrace her one last time. And set it alight from the inside.
The Ashen Cathedral burned with a heat that remembered every prayer it had ever devoured. From the highest spire, a little girl's voice—her own, age five—cried across the ruins of Seoul:
"Daddy, it hurts!"
Aria did not look away. She held the fire until there was nothing left to hold.
When the last bone collapsed into ash, she was still standing. Naked. Whole. Alone.
Seong-jun's shadow peeled away from her skin, forming the shape of a man made of night and missing pieces. He looked at her with eyes almost human again. Then crumbled into a flock of crows that flew upward through the falling ash, scattering into a sky that no longer knew which world it belonged to.
One crow lingered. Landed on her shoulder. Pressed its beak to her cheek in something too soft to be a kiss.
"Thank you," it whispered, in a voice that used to teach children how to survive the end of the world. Then it dissolved.
Aria stood in the ruins of the only home she had ever known. And for the first time in her entire life, she was free.
Somewhere in the distance, the broken city kept screaming. She took one step toward the sound. Then another. Golden scars glowed across her skin like new constellations.
Behind her, Ground Zero cooled into silence. Ahead, whatever was left of the world waited for its last saint to decide whether it deserved saving.
She walked. Barefoot. Burning.