In the beginning there was a simple girl. Under the rule of an aging, at the time, king and his odd growing family things were simple. Simpler then than they are now. And as far as Subin remembers, though she knows every fine detail of her life from beginning to what will be the end, that is all that really matters. Because she is older now than leagues of names that have been forgotten. Because the walls she knew even in her dying breath are long since gone now, returned to dust and built over with steel and concrete. So there is little use in remembering that, a girl who mattered to no one for long. She was young. She was married. She had children. These are the details, really, of the woman who was left as a dying bit of a corpse on a shoreline. It was news enough for a week on end, her siblings and parents in disarray because her body was bloodied and bitten into and cut to shreds. Who could do it, who?

Of course, he was never found. When Subin found herself waking up with a new fire in her belly the first thing she did was find him. That wasn't hard, everyone knew that the sailor Jeong was prone to one specific whorehouse more often than not. What came next was a travesty, one quickly taken away from any records of history because, well, no king wanted to speak about the whores and those who died in the chaos of some fire and animal attack. Beacuse that was all they could assume when Subin was done, tearing people to shreads before herself, letting candles fall and fires rage as she walked unharmed through it all. When finally it settled in her, crying against a tree as her arm wrapped around her stomach and she wondered what this was now, what any of this was, she found herself overwhelmed.

Death was everywhere. It was there since the beginning and it would be the last thing to go. She knew that, suddenly, in terms she didn't fully understand; she knew that the first turn of the world had brought the first need for death and she understood that if she played her cards just right she'd be there on the very last turn like some home owner tidying up the place once everyone had gone. Then she felt a warm hand on her shoulder that turned cold as she twisted to stare eyes at the man. A foreigner, someone, she learned, from the Bay of Bengal who came to her in simple clothes with a walking stick he looked much too young for. He spoke to her in her tongue and she replied, confused, before she heard the sounds they spoke aloud; they were in two different worlds with language but understood one another. And that, that was the first lesson.

Bayram was old. Much older than Subin had initially wagered. And he understood things. Like she, he had been lost upon his return. This was a new life, he told her, and all she could keep were the things she could carry with her. What good would it to rise the hearts of her parents, her husband, her children? They had done their mourning and had to be left to it now, left to live with the lessons she'd given because she was mother to a whole new sort now. She worried about things, about Jeong and the others she'd killed in her rage but Bayram told her it would pass; people had done much worse when they were first born into this walk of life. Babies, she had to remember, often screamed and cried the whole way through. It was only natural. Bayram himself had come from a great disaster a hundred years earlier, he told her, in time; and when he woke he remembered forcing the waters to rise once more just to smash against what remained. It was a trick Subin never hoped to emulate.

Life under Bayram's guidance was kind. The stories he told were old, too old for Subin to understand beyond the limits of her peeling life. The first of them, the first to touch the end of life and kiss the start of every new one after, came with the first death. It seemed beyond, too old and long ago to be real, but Subin felt it resonate in her heart. They were there for as long as it was necessary and that, that meant as long as there was life. Because what was anything without its rules, its laws? So, he taught her, as lessons had been taught to him ages ago, since before the parents' of Subin's own parents had been born. Taught her that the great time was nothing more than a moment; that people had to never fear them but trust them in their guidance, as they had to learn to trust themselves in their lives. Taught her, too, that they were nothing more than an ever changing illusion of life and death: constantly changing and therefore, in presence of a static world and finite life, definitely unreal. They had to respect that which was real, which was true, which was fact; they had to act not as the sole sage of all but the protector, the wise and just sun in an ever moving sky. It was underneath Bayram that Subin learned her control of her gifts best, being able to subsume herself into a form more fitting for the people she had to visit, to a shape and gift they better understood.

For the better part of two decades they traveled together with these learnings. He taught her to shift her tongue to match the hearts of those around him. He also taught her to change her guise; her face was kinder to those who needed it, her body less of a force. It was an odd life, traveling with one another, taking on odd jobs and learning the course of death itself. There were so few of them, he told her, but the balance was clear. They were there to make sure things happened as they needed to. Reading the lines became a gift he had to give her slowly, an understanding that every possibility laid out before them if they focused right enough and sometimes, people took the possibility that stole more time than it should have. This was their most dire moments, Bayram tried to teach Subin. Because an excess of time upset the even weight of the world, of this and the next. The balance could be changed now and again, shifted and altered, but in the end there would always have to be scales that could almost weigh the same.

Close enough that a feather or a heart could set it straight, he'd always said. It's a law Subin abides by even now.

What he taught her, he did well. Subin could master her gift, pass a soul through to the next world as anything: their mother, their first love, their greatest fear. The body she had was absolute, sure, but she was transient, a spirit changing in constant motion to live and breathe the power of all that laid beneath. It was her right and her duty. A necessity that she could not take a day off from, could not call in sick towards. And that was what it became: work. An endless job she had to toil away at forever. But the balance, she reminded herself, was necessary. It was what eventually had Bayram letting her go.

Even legends have their place and Subin learned her own. Not the myth, the fable of death that began to haunt countries and towns and families through words passed over time. No, she knew that her place was the skirts of life now. As she grew old enough to feel her children and their children fade she understood that destiny was about becoming a figure that would last when names and breath had already run out. So, she lived as well as she could instead. Every few years brought a new change: new hair color, new name, new eyes, new village and country. She traveled however she so pleased it; some years on ship, some years on foot, some years even just appearing here or there. The world rose and fell with every few dawns and Subin's life new nothing but change, change so constant that it became the only thing stable besides the sharpness of her blades and the careful scales.

Living was good and easy. A gypsy, a baker, a nurse, a whore, a bard, a waitress, a maid, a witch once in the outskirts of Shirakawa: Subin held a hundred little lives over the decades that came and went. Every time she was immersed in life, worked her way through crowds and people and things, and every time she eventually faded without much worry at all. Bayram had taught her well and she learned to hoard away her life. Money grew and things were simple that way; a quiet investor here, a silent backer there. She passed her hand over enough of the world that she always had a place to be, a person to see. Whether to kiss them on to the next world or to let them wander around this, angry and lost, until they finally came to terms with it.

But there were a few, over the decades, that struck through her heart like strong choirs of humanity that would not go ignored.

The first came in a pair, a set of lovers Subin met while working as a laundress in Saint Petersburg —The Sleeping Beauty had just premiered— who became good friends to her. It was a strange year throughout, a new shift in death spreading with ship wrecks killing hundreds and the first deaths by electric chair spreading through the world. So when it came, when some young thief broke into the Lukyanenko home and killed the young lovebirds, Subin's heart ached. It wasn't even a thought, really, as she touched them to grieve and ended up willing them to life; they returned to her and she understood, instantly, a trouble in their hearts. They were changed now, touched by death in the most literal sense, and forced into a new role. They didn't last long as solitude but they did grow to hate Subin for it; she hadn't it in her to speak about how the gift was born out of their own inabilities for independence. She bore the weight of their hate, said she was a witch and did it unto them and fled. Two years later, they died and were given back their normal lives.

Because even those touched by death are only serving a duty, for a short while. They are ageless, stuck in a static fold of living, until they meet their end as an aspect of Subin's own gifts. Then, they can have back the weight of the life she tried to give them, wholly mortal and free to live the rest of their time out in peace.

Since them, Subin tries rarely to let people come back touched by her gifts. Only when the situation seems most out of line, like time is still so full in their hearts and chances for change exist in their spirits does Subin even try to take them back from the reach of the nether. A boy in Chicago who died in a fire while trying to get his sister out: sacrifice, for six years. A mother who survived her children in a cyclone only to take her own life afterwards: madness, for twenty years. A military brat who passed before the world could teach him what it had to: emptiness for the past xx years. There came only one selfish shift, a lover Subin took named Jihan who was stabbed in a bar fight at the bar Subin was tending at; he was there only for her and the moment he came in she felt the change coming. Faulted, feeling at fault for his death, Subin thoughtlessly brought him back without a second guess.

Ji became destruction and is the only of the aspects to know that their roles, their touches, are born from who they were in life. He is also the only one to know that should he let himself die at some point he would get back his normal life, a life without her. But he doesn't want it; they fell apart four decades ago and he still lingers near her where he can just to make sure his woman is ever safe. It would be charming if not for all his tattoos and anger these days. He chooses to remain, though, and Subin is vaguely grateful for a constant in her own life, something that is not just illusion and shift. They rarely fall into one another beyond being confidants and Subin likes that even more; Ji was a man she loved with all she had and knowing he is able to be happy despite the burden of life she weighed into him makes up for a grand multitude of mishaps Subin would rather go on forgetting. They even travel together, sometimes, taking their names in different ages, jobs close to one another.

So, when a new death was born in Asia when a boy was tortured and killed for looking and acting too much like a girl in the wrong place at the wrong time, Subin packed her stuff up and came to Seoul to situate; she brought Minki home with her and began to teach him, as best as she could. Ji lives nearby as a tattoo artist and travels down to Busan to work as a dancer —Subin's sure he does more than that there but never asks what she does not need to know— and it is kind of like having a little bit of a family. With her little nihilist never too far off, too, Subin almost feels like a mother again, writing her obituaries to honor the nature of proper death in silence while Ren begins his work as a reaper and training with her and in Pyeongchang, Subin's life has settled into something ordinary for the time being.

. . . Until the next wind kicks up and her new life begins, again.