Chapter 3: Discovery

Permission to walk came on the morning of my fifth day awake.

"Only walk around inside the house, and hold on to the walls. If you get dizzy, sit down immediately. Got it?"

Only after making me promise three times did Vodianitsa step away from the bed. With one hand against the wall, I took ten steps to the stove. It was a little funny that those ten steps were the same number as the ten steps I had counted across the snowfield.

My feet still felt like they belonged to someone else, but they pushed against the floor. My knees trembled, but they did not buckle. When I reached the stove, I heard Vodianitsa clap behind me.

It was strange to feel beneath my soles the floor I had spent five days doing nothing but look down at from bed. The wood was colder and more uneven than I had expected, and only now did I think I understood what the footsteps Vodianitsa made crossing it every day had sounded like.

"See? I told you that you could do it. What did I say?"

Once I could walk, the house looked different.

When I had looked up at it lying down, it had been nothing but a ceiling and beams. Standing, I saw it was smaller than I had thought. There was barely room for two people to pass each other between the bed, table, and stove. It struck me anew that Vodianitsa had cared for me here, cooked for me, and slept on the floor in this cramped place for nearly eight days.

Her bedding was folded beneath the bed. I knew she had slept on it ever since the day she found me, and I had suggested changing places twice. She had refused both times.

I did not say it a third time. I had yet to decide whether not saying it a third time was cowardice or politeness.

At the window, I looked out through the upper section where the frost was thinner. The slope descended gently before meeting a lake frozen smooth and white as a slab far below. Beyond it, black forests and rocky mountains met the sky. Under a rock a little way off to the left, that dark mouth I had seen that night still gaped open.

Somewhere out in that snowfield was where I had lain face down. More snow must have fallen and covered it by now, and the only person who could find that spot was the one person who had carried me up here on her back.

There was no city in sight.

"That way."

Vodianitsa reached over my shoulder and pointed somewhere beyond the forest.

"You go around that mountain and keep going, and you’ll reach it. Two hours on foot—three if there’s a lot of snow. On days I go to the theater, I leave at dawn."

"The theater?"

"Mm-hm. I’m in a troupe. I’m a singer, so that’s why I practice singing. I’m still new, so I don’t get on stage much."

I caught how Vodianitsa sped up ever so slightly when she said she was new, but I did not ask.

Instead, I remembered it. Over the past few days, I had learned a few places where this person’s speech sped up. The word new was one of them.

"It’s a break from rehearsals right now, so I’m home. Otherwise, I would have had to leave you here alone. I have to start going back next week, so you need to be able to walk by then. Got it?"

I knew the words troupe and new. But I did not know the world they referred to. Listening to an unfamiliar world described with familiar words was all I did in this house.

Vodianitsa set two cups of tea on the table, and I tried walking the five steps from the window to the table without holding on to the wall.

For the first time since coming here, I sat in a chair. It was tea drunk sitting at a table, not soup fed to me while I lay down. That alone made me feel as though I had reclaimed a little of my humanity. Perhaps Vodianitsa noticed, because she sat across from me and propped her chin on her hand.

The tea was bitter. I could not tell whether it was boiled leaves or roots, but it was hot. Just cupping something hot in both hands brought a little feeling back to my fingertips.

"So where did you say you were from? Somewhere really far away?"

"...Yes."

"Are people from really far away all as quiet as you?"

"...Something like that."

Vodianitsa laughed as she drank her tea, then, as always, continued speaking on her own.

She talked about the troupe. About how cold the rehearsal hall was, how the principals got the earlier rehearsal slots, and how she would be in the back row of the chorus for the next performance. I let half of it wash over me as I drank.

Tuning people out was a skill I had learned in this house. Vodianitsa’s words were like a river: if I took in all of them, I would run out of breath. I could let them pass by, picking them up only when something caught on me. That day, something caught much earlier than I expected.

"Still, on performance days, the front of the theater is packed with people. Fatui come too. The important ones sit in the front seats."

My cup stopped.

The cup I had been about to bring to my lips froze just before them. I waited for Vodianitsa’s next words, but unaware that I had stopped, she continued.

"The Fatui spend quite a bit of money, you see. The troupe runs on it. Some funds come down in the Tsaritsa’s name too. So newcomers keep their mouths shut and stand in the back row."

The Fatui and the Tsaritsa.

I set down my cup. My hand shook, making the bottom of the cup tap against the table twice. Vodianitsa raised her head at the sound.

"What’s wrong? Are you dizzy?"

"No."

"You look pale."

"...I always do."

Someone who had quit Genshin Impact after Liyue did not know much, but I knew the Fatui. In both Mondstadt and Liyue, they had always been the ones plotting behind the scenes. I also knew which nation they came from.

In the game, they wore masks, spent money, and traveled around collecting Gnosis. In Mondstadt, they took the Anemo Archon’s. In Liyue, they made a deal with the Geo Archon and took another. I had quit the game without knowing what happened afterward.

Snezhnaya, the land of ice. It was ruled by the Tsaritsa, and the Fatui were her hands and feet.

That was all. Those three things were all someone who had only played through Liyue knew about Snezhnaya. I did not know that water nymphs lived there, that it had theater troupes, or that its lakes froze over.

One of those three things was right in front of me now. Snow lay in every direction, frost covered the windows, and the lake was frozen. I had seen all of it for five days without connecting it to those three facts even once.

"Um."

"Yeah?"

"Is this... Snezhnaya?"

Vodianitsa stared at me over her teacup.

"You didn’t know?"

"...I wanted to make sure."

"Of course it’s Snezhnaya. Where else would it be, with this much snow?"

Vodianitsa said that and returned to talking about the troupe. But after that, every word she said drove into me like a nail.

A merchant from Liyue sold tea in front of the theater. Mondstadt wine was so expensive that only the principals drank it. They were short on Mora, so they would have to cut back on firewood this month. One of the theater guards had a Vision, so everyone watched their step around him.

Liyue. Mondstadt. Mora. Visions.

They were all words I knew. And they were all exactly as I knew them—in Korean.

I leaned back in my chair and watched Vodianitsa’s mouth. It moved without stopping, and every word that came out was Korean. Mixed naturally into that Korean were names I had only ever seen through a monitor.

Whenever I saw those names on a monitor, I was always alone. I would come home from work, eat ramen, and open my laptop. The names would be there, choices available to me, and they would disappear when I shut the laptop.

Now those names came from the mouth of the person sitting across from me. There was no lid to close.

It was Genshin Impact.

The sky with too many stars, the characters I did not know, the fin-like ears—they all connected into a single line now. At the end of that line was the game I had quit years ago.

It took less time than I expected to accept it. After seeing the ears of something that was not human, I had little strength left to be surprised by most things. More than that, my mind had already moved to the next question.

Why Korean?

If this was Genshin Impact, people in this country should have spoken this country’s language. Yet Vodianitsa spoke like someone from Seoul, and Fatui, Tsaritsa, and Mora were all exactly the Korean words I knew. That meant this world had been Korean from the beginning.

There were only two Korean-language versions of Genshin Impact. One was the Korean version of the game I had played. The other was the novel I had written.

I clenched my hand beneath the table. The novel I had written every night for months had been Korean from beginning to end.

I had taken the Fatui, the Tsaritsa, Mora, and Visions from the game’s Korean version. Then I had absurdly buffed up the Four Shades and placed them on top of it all, while a man who resembled me wandered among them.

I did not want to recall what I had done with the Four Shades. I had made the four who ruled death, time, space, and life into beings endowed with power borrowed from another game—beings who could do whatever they wanted to an entire world with a flick of the hand. Then I made all four of them fight over one man. If this was that novel, then those four were somewhere beneath this sky as well.

I stopped thinking there. If I went all the way through with it, I would have to confront whom that man resembled. I did not have the nerve to go that far.

The night I deleted that novel was the night I fell here. It was the night I pressed the delete button, turned off the light, and lay down. Until now, I had never placed those two things side by side, but once I did, they were too close together to be coincidence.

When I pressed the delete button, there had been a notice saying it could not be restored. I had read that notice and pressed it anyway. Then I opened my eyes here. Whether that warning meant the novel could not be restored or I could not be restored, I could not tell now.

But my novel had been set in Mondstadt. Mondstadt was as far as someone who had only played through Liyue could write. I knew nothing of Snezhnaya beyond the name, so I had not written even a single line about it. Yet the place where I had landed was Snezhnaya of all places.

If this was my novel, why had I fallen into a land I had never written?

If it was the original game, why did Korean work here?

The two questions erased each other. Whenever I tried to believe one, the other caught at my ankle. Whenever I tried to believe the other, the first rose again. I sat between them, unable to set foot on either side.

Neither answer was good. If it was the original game, I was someone who had fallen without reason into a world entirely unrelated to me. If it was my novel, I had fallen into the middle of something I had deleted. Even choosing which was less bad was more than I could bear.

"Sang-hyeon."

When I looked up, Vodianitsa had stopped talking and was looking at me.

"You haven’t been listening to a word I said, have you?"

"...I’m sorry."

"That again. No, forget it. More importantly, are you really okay? You’ve looked strange for a while now."

I was not okay. To explain why I was not okay, I would have to bring out everything—the game, the novel, the delete button, and the snowfield that night. If Vodianitsa heard all that, she would probably think the fever had done something to my brain.

"I’m fine. It’s just that I know where this is now."

"You only figured it out after five days?"

"Yes."

Vodianitsa looked at me for a long time, then shook her head.

"Where in the world did you really come from?"

I did not answer. Not because I had no answer, but because there were two possible answers, and neither could leave my mouth.

Instead, I chose a question.

"What kind of person is the Tsaritsa?"

Vodianitsa’s hand stopped over her cup. It was only for an instant, and it moved again soon after, but in that instant something drained from her face. When she spoke again, her voice was lower than usual.

"I’ve never met her. How would I know? Everyone just calls her the Tsaritsa."

"...I see."

"Let’s not talk about that."

I nodded. Vodianitsa soon returned to talking about the troupe, and that was how I learned there was one more place beside the places where her speech sped up: a place where it stopped.

There was a stack of Vodianitsa’s papers in the corner of the table. They were the song lyrics that had scattered that night before being put back in order. I looked at the writing on them again, but I still could not read a single character.

Understanding every spoken word while knowing not one written character took on a slightly different meaning now.

Had I ever looked closely at the writing in the game? I tried to recall what the letters on signs and in books had looked like, but I could not. I had not written a single line about writing in my novel, so I had no way to tell whether the writing on these papers was from the game or not.

Writing in the game had always been background. Signs were pictures, books read themselves aloud, and I had never once seen those characters as actual writing. Now that background stood on the table, blocking me.

The clearest fact among all the things I had learned today was that I had no way to tell.

It was Vodianitsa who suggested I learn to read.

That evening, when she saw me staring at the stack of papers again, she came over with a ladle in hand and took them from me.

"Staring at it like that won’t make you able to read it. You don’t know how to read, do you?"

"...No."

"Not at all?"

"...Not at all."

Vodianitsa fell silent for a moment, then wore the expression of someone arriving at an entirely obvious conclusion.

"You really are from the absolute countryside. Are there places that don’t even teach letters? That’s why you can’t tell me where you’re from. If you did, it’d be somewhere I wouldn’t know."

I did not correct her conclusion. Correcting it would require offering a stranger conclusion. Living as a country bumpkin was easier in every way, and Vodianitsa took my lack of correction as agreement.

The word countryside was convenient. Not knowing how to read, being quiet, and being unable to say where I came from all fit inside those two syllables. Vodianitsa did not try to pull out and inspect the things tucked inside them.

"Then you need to learn. You can’t do anything here if you can’t read. You won’t be able to buy theater tickets or read shop signs. I’ll teach you. It’s not like you have anything to do when you’re alone anyway."

I looked for a reason to refuse. Learning to read seemed as though it would keep me in this house longer, and staying longer seemed as though it would increase what I owed. Yet I did not refuse, because standing in this country unable to read was more frightening than learning.

And so, beginning the next morning, paper and a piece of charcoal replaced the soup bowl on the table.

Vodianitsa wrote out characters one at a time on the back of her song lyrics. Charcoal scratched against paper. The characters were crooked, but their shapes were clear. Once she had written them all, she pointed to the first with her finger and sounded it out.

There were about as many characters as the combined consonants and vowels of Hangul. Their shapes resembled neither; rounded forms, angular forms, and shapes with holes in their centers were all mixed together. Vodianitsa read them aloud as though singing.

The sounds were Korean.

What came from Vodianitsa’s mouth were sounds I knew. The writing those sounds referred to had forms I had never seen. The two met at the tip of one finger, and as I watched that finger, I felt yesterday’s question rise up again.

The language was understandable, but the writing was not.

If something somewhere inside my head was translating speech, it was changing only the sounds and leaving the writing untouched. Whether that was a rule of the game, a rule of my novel, or neither, I still could not know.

"What are you staring at? Try it."

I did.

The charcoal was harder to grip than I expected, and my fingers quickly turned black. The first character barely resembled Vodianitsa’s. She examined mine, then burst out laughing.

"It’s a worm. It looks like a worm crawled across the snow and froze to death."

"...I’m sorry."

"Why are you apologizing for writing badly? Again."

I wrote it again. On the third attempt, the worm straightened out a little. On the fifth, Vodianitsa nodded. By around the tenth, one character managed to look like a character.

My hands learned quickly. They had held pens for thirty-one years, so copying shapes was not difficult. I copied the entire line of characters Vodianitsa wrote for me that morning. The problem was not the shapes, but their sounds.

Vodianitsa found that strange. She said my hands were much too practiced for someone seeing letters for the first time. I told her I had handled a lot of documents, and she asked whether people wrote documents even in the countryside before deciding herself that they probably could and moving on.

Looking at a shape did not make its sound come to mind. When Vodianitsa pointed it out, I knew it, but when I saw it alone, it was simply a picture. Turning pictures into sounds was something my head had to do, not my hands, and it did not seem like something I could accomplish in a day or two.

If Vodianitsa pointed them out ten times, I understood them ten times. But when I looked at them by myself on the eleventh, they became pictures again. I wanted to believe it was not because I was stupid, but what I wanted to believe and what I could believe were different things.

So I wrote the sounds beside the characters in Hangul.

The tiny Hangul I wrote in charcoal looked even stranger next to the Teyvat characters. Vodianitsa tilted her head when she saw it.

"What’s that?"

"...I wrote down the sounds so I won’t forget them."

"That’s writing? The writing from your hometown?"

"...Yes."

"I’ve never seen writing like that. You really must have come from far away."

Vodianitsa stared at the Hangul for a while, then did not ask anything more. Quietly, I took note of that fact.

Hangul was writing Vodianitsa had never seen. That meant there was no Hangul anywhere in this country. If so, the translation in my head was attached not to this world, but to me alone.

If the translation was attached to me, it meant I could communicate wherever I went. At the same time, it meant that the writing I used would not be understood anywhere. I was someone who could speak but could not leave anything behind. Once I thought that, the Hangul on the paper looked different.

In the end, I could not decide which of the two questions that fact supported.

Around noon, Vodianitsa took a bottle from the shelf.

"Read this."

Two characters were written on the scrap of paper stuck to the bottle. They were among the line I had learned that morning. I pointed to each character with my finger and sounded them out.

"Salt."

"That’s right."

The bottle was empty. It was a new bottle placed where the one I had broken that night had been, and there was nothing in it yet. Somehow, it seemed fitting that the first writing I read in this world was the name on an empty salt bottle.

Perhaps Vodianitsa also found it funny that the person who broke the salt was the first to read the word salt. She laughed for a long while, and I thought I would never forget those two characters for the rest of my life.

"Good job. I’ll go into the city and fill it up soon."

Vodianitsa said that as she put the bottle back on the shelf. Watching her back, I stored away one more thing in my head.

In the afternoon, we read the song lyrics.

Vodianitsa pointed to a line and read it aloud. I followed the sounds while my eyes tracked the characters. The lyrics were about water, waves, the sea, and something that would not return. When she read those lyrics, Vodianitsa spoke more slowly than usual.

Words read in a singer’s voice were closer to singing than reading. As I followed the sounds, I felt I could see a little of the order in which characters became sounds. I did not know whether Vodianitsa had chosen lyrics as teaching material because she knew that, or because they were the only paper she had in the house.

"Is this the song you were singing in the cave that night?"

"You heard it?"

"...I did. I thought I was hallucinating."

Without saying anything, Vodianitsa pointed to the next line.

I learned ten more characters a day. Vodianitsa had a talent for teaching. Having a talent meant laughing when someone got something wrong, without laughing at them. I copied characters as I listened to that laughter.

I always made mistakes in the same places. Every time, I mixed up two characters that looked similar. Every time, Vodianitsa laughed at the same point. By the third day, I could correct myself just before she laughed.

While copying, I could not think of anything. My hand moved, charcoal scratched paper, Vodianitsa laughed and told me I was wrong—and in between those things, neither the game nor the novel could intrude.

Only later did I realize that was the first time in this house when I had doubted nothing.

It had been the same when I organized materials at work. While copying down numbers, I thought of nothing. That was why I had hated the work but also been good at it. What my manager had meant by saying I was someone who organized documents had taken on a slightly different meaning here.

That evening, while Vodianitsa went out to fetch firewood, I sat alone at the table looking at the papers.

Black charcoal dust stained my fingertips. The black marks that had remained beneath my nails no matter how much I washed for three days were the first traces I had acquired in this world. I did not know whether they suited hands that used to handle paperwork.

There was one line of Teyvat characters and one line of Hangul beside it. I was the only person in this world who could read this paper. I still did not know whether that was lonely or safe.

The knock came on the afternoon of my third day learning letters.

It was the first time anyone had knocked on the door from outside since I came here. At the sound, Vodianitsa dropped her charcoal. Before I even thought of the charcoal, I remembered the faceless someone I had imagined a few nights ago.

"Who could it be? No one should be coming."

Vodianitsa adjusted the cloth around her head once and went to the door. When it opened, a small figure stood there amid a rush of cold air.

"Odette!"

"...Can I come in?"

"Of course. What brings you here? It’s not like you were passing by."

"I stopped by."

The person who entered was at least a head shorter than Vodianitsa.

Ice-blue hair spilled over her thick coat, streaked through with white. When she removed the coat, the body beneath was small and straight, but something about the way she stood differed from everyone else.

Her hands moved quickly as she removed her snow-covered boots at the entrance and changed into the shoes she had brought inside. Those shoes were slim, with a golden gleam to their heels, entirely unsuited for snowy roads. Yet only after putting them on did she seem to stand properly.

Her back was not merely straight. It was as though a single line had been pulled taut from her toes to the crown of her head. That line did not waver in the slightest. Holding that posture, she swept her gaze across the room once before stopping at me, sitting on the bed.

Her eyes were violet. Their centers were purple, blooming into pale pink toward their edges. She did not blink once while looking at me.

It was a face that should have made me think beautiful first. But that word did not come to mind. I thought instead of certain eyes that had watched me in classrooms, and certain eyes that had watched me in interview rooms—eyes that placed me somewhere and measured me.

"Oh, right. Let me introduce you. This is Sang-hyeon. I found him collapsed by the lake. Sang-hyeon, this is Odette, my colleague from the troupe."

"I’m Odette."

"...Kim Sang-hyeon."

Odette inclined her head very slightly, and that ended the greeting. She neither asked further questions nor smiled. She hung her coat on a nail in the wall and set the bundle she had brought on the table.

In the meantime, I started to stand, then stopped. The office worker’s habit of standing to greet someone had begun to lift me, but the instant Odette’s eyes followed that movement, I felt it would be better to remain seated. I half-raised myself awkwardly, then sat back down.

"Salt and dried fish."

"How did you know? I was going to buy some tomorrow."

"You said you were running out last time."

"You remembered that?"

Rather than answer, Odette untied the bundle and slid the bag of salt toward the shelf. Vodianitsa hugged the bag, smiling as she poured the salt into the empty bottle. All the while, Odette’s eyes were not on the shelf, but on me.

Vodianitsa’s hands were excited as she poured the salt. She smiled to herself while watching the bottle fill, and even after capping it, she picked it up once more. I had never seen someone so happy over a bottle of salt. The person who had brought that salt was not looking at her happiness. She was looking at me.

More precisely, she was looking at my hands.

I was holding my cup, and Odette was watching that hand. Her gaze lingered not on my face or body, but on my fingers and palm before slowly falling away. I assumed she was checking whether my hands had been damaged, like my frostbitten feet.

"Want some tea? Sit, sit."

Vodianitsa pulled over a chair. Odette sat in it, and with three people seated in the small room, our knees nearly touched. Even at that distance, Odette was still looking at me.

Vodianitsa filled the silence herself. She poured out the story of how I had walked on my fifth day, how I had not lost even a single toe, and how I was learning ten letters a day. Odette listened, occasionally nodding. Even as she nodded, her eyes remained not on Vodianitsa, but on me.

The way Vodianitsa spoke to Odette was slightly different from the way she spoke to me. It was faster and higher, and every so often she tapped Odette’s arm. Odette did not avoid it. I could see time I did not know about piled up between the two of them.

"He couldn’t read?"

It was the first question Odette asked Vodianitsa.

"Yeah, not at all. He must really be from the absolute countryside. But he learns quickly. His hands are fast. He says he handled a lot of documents. Look. Sang-hyeon wrote this."

Vodianitsa pushed my paper toward Odette.

It was a line of Teyvat characters, with a line of Hangul beside it. Odette studied the paper for a long time, and I could tell she was looking not at the Teyvat characters, but at the Hangul.

The way Odette held the paper differed from Vodianitsa. She grasped only its edge with her fingertips, held it so it would not wrinkle, and did not move even one finger while examining it.

"What is this?"

"He says it’s the writing from Sang-hyeon’s hometown."

"...I’ve never seen it before."

"Me neither. So he really did come from far away."

Odette lifted her eyes from the paper and looked at me.

"Where are you from?"

"...Somewhere far away."

"Where?"

"You would not know it even if I told you."

"I suppose not."

That was not agreement. Those words could mean, I do not believe you. They could also mean, I will not ask any further. Either way, it was clear there was no place for me to insert myself.

Vodianitsa cut in between us.

"Hey, stop staring at him. You’re going to freeze Sang-hyeon solid."

"I’m not staring."

"Then what are you doing?"

Odette did not answer and lifted her teacup.

I set mine down.

Vodianitsa’s words always passed straight through me. Because they did not wait for an answer, I could hide beneath them. Odette’s words were the opposite. Every time she spoke, her words came precisely to me and stopped. Then silence followed, waiting for my reply.

Normally, I would have said anything at all to fill that silence. But this was not a kind of silence I could fill. It felt as if, should I open my mouth to try, those words would go directly into this person’s hands. So I kept my mouth shut.

Instead, I decided to lean on Vodianitsa’s words. While Vodianitsa was talking, Odette’s silence was slightly less audible. I had never known chatter could be this welcome until coming to this house.

"Could you hand me that bottle?"

Odette pointed to the shelf. It was the bottle Vodianitsa had filled with salt. Vodianitsa started to rise, then realized Odette was looking at me and sat back down. I rose from the bed and walked to the shelf without touching the wall.

Six steps. Over those six steps back with the bottle in hand, I could feel Odette’s gaze rise from my feet to my knees to my waist. Those were not eyes worried I might fall.

They were eyes measuring something. I did not know what they measured, but I knew they were measuring. As I put the bottle on the table, I tried not to let my hands shake.

On the way back, I had tried to walk straighter than usual. That was the problem. My legs only grew stiff, and stiff legs probably looked stranger. Those eyes saw all of it.

"Thank you."

Odette took the bottle, did not even open its cap, and simply pushed it into a corner of the table.

She had not asked for it because she needed it.

The moment I realized that, a chill ran down my spine. It was the same kind of suspicion I had felt when I first opened my eyes in this house, only pointed in the opposite direction.

Then, I had been suspicious of Vodianitsa. Now, someone was suspicious of me. Standing on the receiving end of it, I understood for the first time just how frightening a position the person doing the suspecting occupied.

"I’m going to get some firewood. Just a moment."

Vodianitsa went out, and when the door shut, the two of us were alone. The snapping firewood in the stove filled the space between us. As though she had been waiting for that sound, Odette spoke.

If I could have avoided being alone with her, I would have. I had wanted to say I would fetch the firewood, but Vodianitsa had gone out before I could. Sitting on the bed, I watched Odette’s straight back. Though it did not face me, it felt as though it saw all the way through me.

"What did you do for work?"

"...Document work in an office."

"Documents."

Odette took in that word and looked at my hands again. This time, she did not hide it. Under that gaze, I looked anew at what my hands were like. The fingers that held pens and the fingertips that tapped keyboards were pale and smooth, with no calluses anywhere.

I did not know what hands without calluses meant in this country. I only knew that Odette’s eyes stayed on those hands longer than anywhere else, and that length did not seem to mean anything good.

"I see."

"...Yes."

"Vodianitsa trusts people easily."

Odette said it while looking at the stove, her voice not rising even slightly.

"I do not like people who take advantage of that."

That was all. She asked nothing more and said nothing more. Odette lifted her cup, took a sip, then returned to that upright posture. I could not answer her words.

I could have simply said I was not taking advantage of her. But when I opened my mouth to say it, everything Vodianitsa had given me rose up at once, along with the fact that I had repaid none of it. In that state, saying I was not taking advantage of her would not have been a lie, but it would not have been something I could say with a clear conscience either.

And if I said something I could not say with a clear conscience in front of this person, it felt as though she would see directly through it. Words I could hide behind in front of Vodianitsa had nowhere to hide in front of her. That was the greatest difference between the two.

"...I’ll repay her."

At the words I barely managed to produce, Odette turned to look at me. The eyes that faded from violet into pink narrowed for an instant, then returned to normal. Her next words were shorter than before.

"See that you do."

The door opened, and Vodianitsa came in holding firewood.

"What was that? What did you two talk about? Odette, you spoke to him first? What a surprise."

"Nothing."

"Liar. Sang-hyeon looks pale."

"He says he always does."

Vodianitsa burst out laughing. Odette did not laugh. Caught between the two of them, unable to decide where to look, I looked at my teacup.

After that, Odette spoke only with Vodianitsa. They talked about the troupe and next week’s rehearsals. A principal’s name came up and passed, and when Vodianitsa said her rehearsal slot had been pushed back again, Odette’s teacup stopped for the briefest moment.

"I heard."

"You heard, so that’s enough. What can I do about it?"

"...Right."

There seemed to be something more after that right, but Odette did not bring it out, and Vodianitsa accepted what she did not bring out as natural. I guessed that naturalness was like an old promise between them.

Then Odette’s eyes reached the folded bedding beneath the bed.

"You sleep there?"

"Yeah. Sang-hyeon’s using the bed."

"With just one blanket?"

"It’s by the stove, so it’s not cold."

Odette did not answer. She did not take her eyes off the bedding either. Only after a long time did she speak briefly.

"I’ll bring you blankets next time."

"You don’t have to. It’s far."

"I’ll bring them."

Vodianitsa did not try to stop her further. She had the expression of someone who knew there was no point. And I realized Odette knew why that bedding was spread on the floor.

Odette stood before the sun had begun to set.

Her hands were quick as she put on her coat and gathered her bundle. Even when Vodianitsa urged her to stay longer, she only shook her head. The words she spoke to Vodianitsa when she turned at the door were brief.

As she changed back into her boots at the door, Odette did not touch the wall even once. Her posture, standing on one foot while putting on the other shoe, did not shake at all. It was then that I first truly felt she had the body of a dancer.

"See you next week. Don’t be late."

"I know. You don’t be late either."

"I’m never late."

Then Odette looked at me.

"Take care of yourself."

"...Yes. Thank you."

Odette’s eyes rested on the papers on the table one last time before falling away. The door closed, and the sound of footsteps crunching through snow receded.

The room suddenly seemed wider.

"She’s always like that."

Vodianitsa said it as she fed wood into the stove.

"She doesn’t talk much, so she seems cold, but she’s not a bad person. She treats me better than anyone. Who remembers one little thing about me running out of salt and carries it all the way here?"

"...Right."

"Were you scared?"

"...A little."

"Everyone is at first. That’s just how she is."

Vodianitsa offered no further explanation, and I asked no more. It was not because I lacked the right to ask, but because I did not think anything I heard would erase those eyes.

Dinner passed quietly. Vodianitsa put the dried fish Odette had brought into the soup, and she used more salt than usual. For the first time, the soup tasted like proper soup. As I ate, I thought about who that flavor had come from.

That night, I could not sleep for a long time.

Vodianitsa fell asleep quickly on the floor. Listening to her breathing grow long and even, I counted the ceiling beams. There were still seven, exactly as there had been on the day I first opened my eyes. They were the only things that remained the same.

A few nights ago, I had imagined a faceless someone opening the door and coming in. That image had been frightening because it had no face. Today, someone had truly opened the door and come in. She had a face, and that face had measured me.

I never found out what she was measuring. She had looked at my hands, my walk, and my writing. I could not even guess what the three became when combined. I only knew none of the three could have received a good score.

I could not determine whether she had come to see me or Vodianitsa. The salt was real. The way she looked at her friend was real too. But the eyes she had turned on me between those things had also been real, so I could not tell which of the three had been an excuse.

There had been no such person in my novel. I had not written even a line about Snezhnaya, so naturally there had been no ballerina from that country. If so, Odette was someone I had not created. Someone I had not created, in a land I had not created, was measuring me.

But Vodianitsa had not existed either. There had been no water nymph, no lake, and no house in my novel. That meant I had yet to confirm whether there was even one thing I had created in this world made entirely of things I had not created. Nor did I have any way to confirm it.

Once again unable to decide which of the two questions this fact favored, I brought the paper from the table and picked up a piece of charcoal.

Beneath the sounds I had written in Hangul beside ten Teyvat characters, I added another line in Hangul.

Odette. Watches hands.

Writing it in words only I could read in this world was the only precaution I could take now. Though I knew that precaution might be completely useless, I did not erase the line.

=========

The road back to the city took two hours, and Odette did not slow her pace even once during those two hours.

Snow had piled up to her ankles, but her steps remained steady on it, like they were onstage, and her breathing did not falter. In her mind, the things she had seen in that house were finding their places one by one.

A man with no identity records or known origin had been found by the lake and taken into the isolated home of a water nymph.

That report had come down from the Fatui three days ago. In this country, words like that did not drift around for long. If they entered the right person’s ears while they drifted, what came next was predetermined. Odette, who worked for the Fatui, had wanted to see for herself before that predetermined sequence began.

It was not a lie that she had stopped by because she worried about her friend. It was simply not the whole truth.

There were no calluses on his hands. They were not hands that had gripped a knife or drawn a bow. Other than places cracked by cold, they had not been damaged. His claim that he dealt with documents suited those hands.

His walk was clearer still. Over the six steps to the shelf, the man had been half a beat late shifting his weight from one foot to the other. His shoulders moved first and his feet followed. It was not the walk of a trained body, but of a body that had spent its entire life sitting at a desk.

And then there was the writing. Pretending not to know a single character of this country’s script was possible. But there was no reason to pretend by writing unfamiliar characters on paper. A spy would not leave a trace pointing to his origins out in the open on a table like that.

It was sloppy. Everything was too sloppy for a spy. If that sloppiness was an act, then it was an act more skillful than any Odette knew. Yet she could find no reason for a person with such skill to be copying letters in charcoal at a water nymph’s isolated home.

When she emerged from the forest, the lights of the city came into view.

Without slowing down, Odette composed the wording of her report in her mind. The man found by the lake cannot read, shows no signs of having handled weapons, and appears to be from a distant region.

No danger.

She did not hesitate in writing those two words. But she needed to be clear whom those two words were for, and as she walked, Odette made that clear to herself.

They were not for that man.

If she reported an unregistered man as a spy, the water nymph who had taken him into her home would be included in the report.

It would become a matter of a fairy hiding a human. In this country, that would not end with one man. Odette did not need to picture what would happen to Vodianitsa afterward to know.

Therefore: no danger.

Whether the man truly posed no danger was another question. His hands, gait, and writing said he was not a spy, but they said nothing about where he had come from.

What did not reveal itself had to be watched. Odette decided that she would continue watching the man beside Vodianitsa.

Passing beneath the city’s first streetlamp, she raised the collar of her coat.

The report would be submitted before the night was over. It would say no danger. And the man would never know what kind of night those two words had meant for him.

Comments (0)

Please log in to leave a comment. Login or Register