Page 29 of Reign of the Talon
This is most unusual.
And I am not pleased by it in the slightest.
I open my eyes in the Wyusan Wilderness, curled against Sonagi’s flank. Cold suspicion hardens the edges of my thoughts as I sit up, glaring at the ruby-red bond between us.
Where, exactly, has the emperor of the Dokkaebi gone?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Prisoner
He comes and sits with me in the cage.
He does not say much, this time. He just…he enters through the door and sits quietly on the cold floor of the cell. Far away from me, yet at the same time, so close.
Rui’s eyes are bruised with purpled shadows of exhaustion. He is again dressed in war garments, and his hair looks so uncharacteristically mussed, as if he has not gotten a chance to comb it in a very long time.
He looks so different from the Dokkaebi I once knew, the Dokkaebi who dressed in jewels and arranged his hair in painstaking perfection. The sight of him nearly breaks my heart.
Nearly.
The Aglyeong, as always, is standing outside of the cell, keeping up a steady stream of rasping malignance. Rui shoots it a glare as it chants “monster” and urges me to “come here” over and over and over. Yet he does not say anything, not until what could either be minutes or hours have passed, until I have reluctantly begun to relax in his impossible presence.
And his tone is so strangely conversational—casual, as if we’re speaking over cups of steaming gyepi-cha—that it takes me aback. “A lovely companion you have here, little thief,” Rui murmurs, tilting his head at the Aglyeong as it rasps about sucking the marrow from my bones and other such pleasantries. “It has been a while—centuries, really—since I heard of its kind. Tell me, Lina.” His eyes glitter almost desperately. “Do you know, exactly, what sort of being your chatty little friend is?”
I blink at him wearily. My sleeps have been dreamless, fitful, with no more visions of Eunbi. I am beginning to think I imagined it, imagined that moment of connection.
When I don’t reply, Rui’s mask of amused indifference cracks right down the middle. Grimness tightens his lips, the skin around his eyes. A muscle in his jaw flexes. “Do you know, Lina?” he asks again, and this time his voice is a shadow: dark and quiet, slipping through the cracks in my defenses, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
It is an Aglyeong, I reply reluctantly. There is no word for it in the Quiet Language: I must spell it out with individual letters. Rui tracks my hands intently. Each movement suddenly feels ominous.A demon. The Prophecy sent it to guard me.
A contemplative tilt slants Rui’s mouth. “I do not think that the Prophecy summoned this creature to you,” he says slowly. “I do not know how she would. No, these beasts—these ancient bottom-feeders—are attracted to despair and misery like flies to spoiled fruit. Their hunger drives them. They listen to nothing but their appetite, filling their victims with even more hopelessness until they’re ripe for the taking. This creature came, I think, of its own accord. Drawn by your helplessness. But you are right that it is a type of Aglyeong. But do you know what sort?”
Slowly, I shake my head.
Rui’s throat bobs. “It is a Dalgyal Gwisin,” he tells me, each word soft.
An egg ghost.I blink, unsteadily looking at the Aglyeong where it stands half in shadow, keeping up its steady chant of “monster.”
I suppose the name makes sense: its cracked, faceless visage is like a ruined shell of an egg. Yet I do not understand the fear lacing Rui’s tone. And despite all my knowledge of my continent’s myths and stories, I have never heard of the Dalgyal Gwisin.
And there is very, very little I’ve not heard of. Very little that my appa deigned too frightening for my ears.
“Brave words, Dokkaebi, for one who knows what I herald,” the Dalgyal Gwisin had hissed to Rui the last time he visited me. Foreboding slithers down my back like ice.
What does a Dalgyal Gwisin herald?
Rui’s eyes shine in the darkness of the cell. “The sight of a Dalgyal Gwisin is a harbinger. To lay eyes upon it is a sure omen. You need to know this, little thief. For we have seen it. And it means only one thing for the both of us.”
It is almost as if we’re back in the library in Gyeulcheon, the fire crackling as Rui tells me tales of the gods of old. Yet this story is none too pleasant.
“When one sees a Dalgyal Gwisin,” Rui breathes, “it is a sign that the day of their death nears.”
…
For a moment, I can only stare at Rui, my lip slightly parted. His fear of the Dalgyal Gwisin, the way he paled when he laid eyes upon it for the first time: the blood draining from his face, his body flinching back as though he could erase what he had just done—looking at the demon with his own eyes.
I have looked upon it more times than I can possibly count.
