The fifteenth rejection letter arrived on the day her mother died.
Yuna stared at the envelope in her hands—crisp white paper, embossed seal of the Hanseong Academy for Resonance Studies, her name printed in perfect sans-serif.
Professional. Impersonal. Final.
She already knew what it said. They all said the same thing.
Her mother's breathing rattled in the next room. Shallow. Wet. The hospice nurse had said it would be soon—maybe hours, maybe a day.
Yuna had stopped asking for timelines three weeks ago. The numbers didn't matter. Her mother was dying, and no amount of counting hours would change that.
She opened the envelope anyway.
Dear Ms. Veylan,
Thank you for your application to Hanseong Academy. After careful review of your Resonance assessment scores, we regret to inform you that your baseline measurement of 2.1 falls below our minimum threshold of 7.5 for admission.
We recommend exploring alternative career paths more suited to your aptitudes.
We wish you success in your future endeavors.
2.1.
Not even close.
Yuna folded the letter once, twice, three times. Creased it until it fit in her pocket. Fifteen schools. Fifteen rejections. Fifteen variations of the same polite dismissal.
In a world where Resonance measured magical potential—where 10.0 meant power and 1.0 meant nothing—2.1 was a death sentence.
You're not enough.
The words didn't need to be written. She heard them anyway.
"Yuna?"
Her mother's voice—barely a whisper, but Yuna heard it through the thin apartment walls.
She crossed the tiny living room in four steps, pushed open the bedroom door.
The hospital bed took up most of the space. Medical equipment crowded the nightstand—pill bottles, oxygen monitors, a morphine drip that beeped every thirty seconds.
Yuna was twenty-four. Old enough to have tried fifteen academies. Young enough to still hope the sixteenth might say yes.
The walls were bare except for a single photo: Yuna at twelve, grinning with a gap-toothed smile, her mother's arm around her shoulders.
Back when her mother still had hair. Back when "cancer" was a word that happened to other people.
"I'm here, 엄마." Yuna knelt beside the bed, took her mother's hand.
The skin was papery, translucent. She could see every vein, every bone.
"I'm here."
Her mother's eyes opened—just barely. Brown eyes, like Yuna's. But faded now, clouded with pain and morphine and the slow dimming that came before the end.
"The letter?" her mother whispered.
Yuna's throat tightened. "It doesn't matter."
It does matter. It always matters.
"Yuna..."
"It doesn't." She squeezed her mother's hand gently. "I'll try again next year. There are other schools. I'll—"
"Stop."
The word cut through the hospice quiet. Not loud. But firm.
Her mother had always been firm, even when she could barely speak.
"엄마, please—"
"You can't save me by fixing yourself."
Her mother's grip tightened—barely perceptible, but Yuna felt it.
"I'm proud of you. Do you understand? I'm proud."
Yuna shook her head. "I'm insufficient. That's what they keep saying. Insufficient Resonance. Insufficient potential. Insufficient—"
"You are enough."
Her mother coughed—wet, rattling. Blood flecked her lips.
"You've always been enough. The world just... doesn't see it yet."
The morphine pump beeped. Thirty seconds. Another dose.
Her mother's eyes fluttered closed.
"엄마?"
No response.
"괜찮아," Yuna whispered, voice breaking. "It's okay. I'm here. 엄마, please—"
The heart monitor's steady beep became a wail.
Yuna didn't remember calling the nurse.
Didn't remember the woman in blue scrubs rushing in, checking vitals, shaking her head with practiced sympathy.
Didn't remember signing papers or accepting condolences or walking out of the apartment building into Seoul's autumn evening.
She remembered the rejection letter in her pocket.
She remembered her mother's last words: You are enough.
And she remembered thinking: Then why does everyone keep telling me I'm not?
The park was empty.
Yuna sat on a bench beneath a dying oak tree, leaves falling like ash around her. The city hummed—traffic, voices, the distant wail of an ambulance.
Life continuing, indifferent to the fact that hers had just shattered.
Fifteen rejections. One death. Twenty-four years of existence, and what did she have to show for it?
Nothing.
Not enough Resonance to matter in a world where magic had emerged twenty years ago. Where academies trained users to fight dimensional tears. Where power was currency and she was bankrupt.
Not enough money to afford the treatments that might have saved her mother another year, another month, another day.
Not enough time to say all the things she should have said.
I love you. I'm sorry. I should have tried harder. I should have been more. I should have been enough.
Yuna pulled out the rejection letter. Unfolded it. Read it again, even though she'd memorized every word.
Alternative career paths more suited to your aptitudes.
Translation: Give up. You'll never be what you're trying to be.
She laughed—sharp, bitter, breaking at the edges.
"Okay," she said to the empty park. "Okay. I give up. You win."
The wind picked up.
Yuna looked up.
The sky was wrong.
Not sunset-orange or twilight-purple.
Violet.
A sick, pulsing violet that spread across the sky like a bruise, swallowing stars, swallowing light.
The air tasted metallic. Ozone. Blood.
The ground beneath her feet trembled.
"What—"
The oak tree behind her screamed.
Not wind through branches—an actual scream, wood tearing, reality ripping.
Yuna stumbled backward, fell, scrambled to her feet as the air in front of her split.
A tear.
A wound in the world.
Light poured through—not white, not gold, but silver, blinding and cold and impossibly bright.
Yuna raised her hand to shield her eyes, but the light reached through her fingers, reached into her chest, wrapped around her ribs like a fist.
No.
She tried to run.
Her legs wouldn't move.
The light held her, pulled her, dragged her toward the tear in reality. The park dissolved—bench, tree, city—everything blurring into violet static.
"No!" Yuna screamed. "I didn't—I don't want—"
The light didn't care what she wanted.
It swallowed her whole.
Falling.
No ground. No sky.
Just light and pressure and the sensation of being unmade—every cell vibrating, every nerve screaming, her body stretched across dimensions it wasn't built to comprehend.
Yuna couldn't breathe.
Couldn't think.
Could only feel the crushing weight of wrongness, of being somewhere she wasn't supposed to exist.
And then—
You are enough.
Her mother's voice. Impossible.
Her mother was dead. Her mother was—
The world just doesn't see it yet.
The light changed.
Silver to gold to something iridescent, something warm.
The pressure eased. Yuna gasped, sucked in air that tasted like petrichor and ash, and realized she could feel her body again.
Hands. Feet. Heart pounding.
She was still falling.
But she could see now.
Below her: land.
Not Earth. Not Seoul's concrete and glass.
This was—
Mountains. Jagged black peaks clawing at a violet sky. Ash drifting through the air like snow.
Three moons hanging overhead—one red, one silver, one gold—casting impossible shadows across a landscape that looked like it had been shattered and poorly reassembled.
Where am I?
The ground rushed up to meet her.
Yuna screamed.
And something inside her chest answered.
Pain.
Yuna hit the ground and every bone in her body should have shattered.
She felt the impact—ground like concrete, ribs cracking, skull splitting—
But then: warmth.
Silver light erupted from her back.
Not the portal light. This was hers.
She felt it ignite between her shoulder blades, felt it spread like wings, felt it catch her fall and slow her descent from death-velocity to merely bone-breaking.
She hit ash-covered rock and rolled. Tumbled. Stopped.
Lay there.
Breathed.
I'm alive.
Yuna pushed herself up on shaking arms.
Her body screamed in protest—bruised, battered, but whole. She looked down at her hands.
Normal. Human. Still her hands.
But her back—
She twisted, looked over her shoulder, and froze.
Wings.
Silver. Translucent. Flickering in and out of existence like a dying lightbulb.
Not physical wings—no feathers, no bone—just light shaped into the suggestion of wings, barely there, already fading.
"What..." Yuna reached back.
Her hand passed through the silver light. It rippled, dimmed, vanished.
Gone.
Yuna knelt in the ash, alone beneath three moons, in a world that wasn't hers.
The rejection letter was still in her pocket.
She pulled it out. Stared at it.
We regret to inform you that your baseline measurement of 2.1 falls below our minimum threshold.
Yuna laughed.
It came out broken, jagged, teetering on the edge of hysteria.
"Insufficient," she whispered to the alien sky. "I'm insufficient."
The violet sky pulsed. The air tasted like copper and ash.
Somewhere in the distance, something howled.
Yuna stood.
Legs shaking. Body aching.
But standing.
Her mother was dead. Earth was gone. She was alone on a world she didn't understand, with wings she couldn't control, and a rejection letter that meant nothing here.
You are enough, her mother had said.
Yuna folded the letter. Put it back in her pocket.
"Okay," she said to the three moons. To the ash. To the howling distance.
"Let's see if you're right."
She started walking.
[END CHAPTER 1]