What should I do?
How can I survive?
The diviner gazed at the dancing tooth fairy, lost in thought while tracing circles.
He pondered and pondered, his eyeballs spinning and a headache creeping in from the effort.
But no answers appeared.
The likelihood of survival seemed bleak, and it felt as if the evil grin reflected in the torchlight from Crom Cruach’s symbol was saying there was no other path than sacrifice to him. The fabric fluttered as if dancing, twisting into fins that mimicked Crom Cruach’s movements.
With a powerful rhythm, the symbol of Crom Cruach danced as if alive, writhing in a joy that seemed to embody the madness of primitive religion as it twisted and turned, transforming in the torchlight.
Shadows rise, shadows vanish.
The figure looked as if it was turning sideways and spinning around.
It was like watching a dancer perform ballet on stage, I thought.
The tooth fairy twirled as if enhancing the lead role.
It bent backward into a ‘ㄱ’ shape, performing movements of worship by raising and lowering its pincers, hopping while lifting its suckers to the sky, and sometimes crawling with its multiple legs, showcasing bizarre contortions.
If a human danced in madness, wouldn’t it look something like this?
While the diviner was lost in thought, the mystical atmosphere created by the second part of the Spring Festival, ‘Le Sacrifice’, the second movement, ‘Cercles Mystérieux des Adolescentes’, was coming to a close. The melody of the flute and clarinet gradually faded, transitioning into sounds of percussion and brass that howled as if possessed by madness.
The third movement, ‘Glorification de l’Élue’, began.
The primal madness of ancient religion, the unified collective consciousness of the heathens, and the deep, dark emotions that seemed to howl not from the throat but from the soul poured out without filter. And in resonance with those emotions, the tooth fairy’s dance became ever more bizarre, displaying movements that looked less like dancing and more like writhing.
“Ugh!”
Amidst the terrible cacophony, the diviner felt his heart racing rapidly.
His heart was pounding abnormally fast, as if it might burst at any moment, trembling so violently that the vibration could be felt in his ears.
Would you believe that because of the oscillation, he felt nauseous and could barely stand?
This vibration, which influenced the body rather than merely stimulating the spirit like other religious vibrations, reminded him of berserker magic that turned a person into a blood-crazed killer.
Yet the diviner could not even fall.
Whenever he felt like he was about to topple forward in nausea, an unseen hand seemed to pull him back, making him lean back. Whenever his knees buckled, it was as if a puppeteer stood him straight up. When he swayed, it felt like someone was there to steady him, and when he tried to retch, his mouth was forced shut and his head thrown back.
It looked much like him dancing madly, just like the tooth fairies.
The diviner finally accepted his fate.
He had already become the center of this horrific ritual.
No matter what he did, he could not escape death.
He could only face the fact that there was no future for him but to die without becoming a hero.
‘Why?’
Why did it come to this?
The diviner didn’t desire much.
All he wanted was to become a hero.
When he realized in his childhood that he was different from others.
Sexual identity, another personality that often surfaced. And the illusions he saw before his eyes.
He regarded all those as trials.
Just events necessary for his completion as a hero.
So he had run tirelessly, thinking of everything he went through as trials to become a hero.
The tales of the heroic Gale warriors he read in children’s storybooks.
The stories of those who were both heroes and gods.
‘I…’
He wanted to be a hero.
So he tried to accumulate good deeds.
If sacrificing a person for the good of many isn’t virtue, then what is?
Sacrificing a person to enrich the land.
Sacrificing a person to receive the sun’s grace,
Sacrificing a person to give wings to talent,
And through that process, he gained virtue, drawing one step closer to the path of a hero.
Yes.
He had only gotten closer.
The diviner, unable to become a hero, was now dying.
“Ah.”
In the distance, dawn was breaking.
Weak light burst forth, tearing apart the darkness.
Sparks flew, setting leaves ablaze, igniting trees, and eventually lighting up the whole mountain to illuminate the world.
Crom Cruach’s sun was finally rising to collect its sacrifice.
The heat emanating from it grew crops, nourishing everyone in exchange for only the diviner as its meal.
A pair of round eyeballs, gradually rising as if peeling back the night sky, illuminated everything within their reach, and facing the light, the diviner realized it was time.
How monstrous it is to accept one’s death.
Yet, at the end he must reach, there lay a sliver of tranquility that brought resignation instead of rage.
Boom—!
The sound of a massive timpani resonated.
And with that, the sunlight descended upon him, filling him with heat. That heat boiled his blood and split his eyeballs, fiercely coursing through him, starting to kill him. The diviner, like a stepmother wearing scalding iron shoes, began dancing, hopping wildly.
In a horrific situation where his body was cooking alive and his nerves were fraying, he felt no pain, driven only by the singular urge to expel the heat within. He bounced up and down madly in place. Hopping on one foot, jumping with both, reaching for the sun as if pleading for it to take the heat away, tilting his head back and forth, he moved in desperate, mad convulsions.
And in response, the tooth fairies whirled around him in a frenzy.
Splash.
At last, when the diviner collapsed onto the ground, steaming, the tooth fairies all stretched their arms like bamboo, lifting the corpse up. They hoisted it into the sky as if offering something precious and presented it humbly like an offering.
And the moment they raised the corpse, the song came to an end.
The glory of spring.
The grace of the sun.
The fertilizer of abundance.
The mystery of primitive religion.
The diviner became a sacrificial offering that embraced all those things.
With the death of the sacrificial offering and the conclusion of the song, the frenzied ritual came to an end, and Crom Cruach’s symbol burned in the sunlight, reducing to a handful of ashes. Just like burning firewood, the diviner’s corpse also burned away alongside Crom Cruach’s symbol, and the remaining ashes floated away like dandelion seeds in the sky.
It conjured an illusion that the true evil being known as Crom Cruach was present, stretching out its hand to collect the diviner’s soul. Especially the way the ashes transformed into black smoke, floating away accompanied by that eerie appearance, evoked thoughts of a grim reaper leading the diviner’s spirit to Crom Cruach.
“Om Mani Padme Hum (ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ).”
Jinseong chanted an invocation, presumably to pray for the deceased diviner’s soul.
Then he saw Ella, who was writhing in agony on the altar, engulfed in overwhelming pain.
“Like a dying flame.”
Ella’s condition was dire.
Had she bled too much? Her already pale skin was now taking on a hue reminiscent of a corpse, and cold sweat soaked the entire altar, pooling beneath her. Moreover, her body continuously twitched, looking as if she could go into shock at any moment.
Jinseong placed his hand on Ella’s chest, feeling for her heart’s rhythm.
The heart was beating, but whether it was from the excessive blood loss or another reason, it was laboring to move. The energy in her body seemed to have been squeezed out, making the heart struggle, and it felt like it could fail at any moment.
With his hand still resting there, Jinseong looked up to the sky.
The sun hadn’t completely burned away the darkness; it strained to dye the world in light, and amid this mixture of light and dark, a spotlight made of the highest-grade ruby was making its presence known.
As if to distinguish itself from the red light emanating from the sun, he exerted all his effort into radiating his own red light.
“O Sun! Young Sun!”
Jinseong drew a dagger made of obsidian from his waist.
With a thrust!
He plunged it straight into Ella’s chest.
