The stairs creaked under Hwan's weight, each step heavier than the last.
The light in the hallway flickered, a weak yellow pulse that barely reached the ceiling. The air smelled of rain and old wood wet, tired, and full of silence.
He wasn't bleeding. Ghostblade hadn't killed him, just left him hollow. Cut him open with words sharper than steel. Now every breath burned with that memory.
His hand trembled around the cleaver, the handle slick with sweat. Rage had once kept him upright. But now it was gone, burned away and replaced by something brittle and thin, confusion, shame, and the faint, unbearable sense that he had already failed.
He reached the second floor.
Room 2-B.
Raiden's room.
Hwan stood there for a long moment, staring at the number as if the brass plate itself were mocking him. The hallway was silent except for the faint hiss of rain on the roof.
Then he moved.
The cleaver came up, and the door went down. Wood splintered. Hinges twisted and screamed. The corridor swallowed the sound and spit it back as silence.
But there was no one inside.
The curtains shifted in the breeze. The bed was unmade, the pillow indented with a head that had long since gone cold. Raiden was gone.
Hwan stood in the doorway, chest rising and falling in uneven rhythm, his face pale under the flickering light.
"Gone…" he whispered. "Gone again."
Something in him buckled.
He stepped forward, slow and unsteady, as if drawn by gravity. The air in the room was colder, heavier. He could almost hear the faint hum of a different place, the soft chatter of a small radio, the smell of barley and fresh soap, sunlight slipping through thin paper curtains.
And then he saw it.
A small shape sitting on the bed. Legs swinging, hair falling over his forehead. Dong.
The boy looked up, eyes bright, the same way he always had before laughing. "Appa," he said softly, as if no time had passed at all. "You're late again."
Hwan froze. The cleaver slipped from his hand and struck the floor with a dull thud.
His throat worked. No sound came. Only breath, shallow, broken breath that didn't belong to him anymore.
Dong grinned, waving a small wooden toy soldier in the air. "You promised we'd go to the market today. You always forget."
Hwan felt his heart twist. He took a step closer, careful, like approaching a frightened animal. His voice, when it came, was barely more than air against his teeth.
"I didn't forget."
He stopped. The words hung in the space between them, incomplete and desperate.
The boy's smile widened, innocent and cruel in its perfection. "You always say that. Mama says you work too much. She says you'll miss the good parts if you keep chasing bad ones."
Hwan's hand lifted, fingers trembling, reaching toward that small, familiar face. For an instant, he thought he felt warmth, real warmth, beneath his fingertips.
Then
A shout from downstairs. The innkeeper's voice, angry, muffled through the floorboards.
The sound tore through the illusion. The air shifted, light cracked, and the smell of barley vanished. The bed was empty again. Only shadows remained.
Hwan stood there for a long time, staring at the space where his son had been. His hand was still raised. It took effort to lower it.
The silence pressed in, so heavy it almost bent his back.
When he finally breathed again, it sounded different. Sharper. Colder.
He wiped his face with his sleeve, once, deliberately and straightened. The motion was mechanical, as if his body had learned to move without permission from his mind.
He looked around the empty room. At the overturned cleaver on the floor. At the indented pillow that had never held his son at all.
His jaw tightened.
Raiden.
The name was a blade sliding into place.
He bent down, retrieved the cleaver. His grip was steady now. His knuckles were no longer white, they had gone past white into something bloodless and absolute.
He turned toward the door.
Outside, the rain had grown heavier. The harbor lights shimmered across the puddles, blurred and trembling. Hwan didn't look back.
He pulled his coat tight, lifted his collar against the wind, and walked into the hallway.
By the time he reached the stairs, his footsteps no longer creaked. They fell with the weight of something that had already decided its ending.
He descended into darkness, and when he spoke, his voice carried no emotion at all:
"This time… I'll end it right."
The rain swallowed his words and the night swallowed the rest.