Legend speaks of a man with crows in his hair and stitches in his lips who will teach you his greatest trades. Some call him a monster. Most call him the Needle-Mouthed Man. But only the shadows know his true name, and they call him Master.
As one...
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The stars have teeth.
Minseo knows that. He'd known that when the Touched had ripped his mother apart, nothing left of her but the echo of bones crunching between jagged teeth and the blood pooling over their kitchen floor. He'd known that when his sister had been torn out of his hands, the light fading from her eyes as men thrice her size had dragged her to a dark corner and shattered her spirit like glass. He'd known that when they'd come back for him, yanking him out of his own mother's blood and taking him for the first time under a starry midnight sky.
He knows that now, as he drowns in scarlet and sin, throat hanging out of his skin and elegantly draping over the ground. Death is beautiful, a black-haired lady dressed in white as she kisses the warmth from Minseo's cheeks and lets the last drops of his lost life stain the world crimson.
What a waste.
Every breath is agony, scything through his chest as oxygen whistles past his slit neck---too busy with its daily routine to give him even a lick of air. Minseo's fingers scrabble at the dirty floor in a nervous twitch, feeling nothing but grit and gore, all that's left of the boy he used to be.
What a waste.
He is blind, eyes open but never seeing, blackness filling the space behind his pupils with an aching vengeance. But he feels, still. He feels the lady in white, feels the emptiness in his chest, feels the stars and all their ivory claws. They watch him as he dies in the bare backyard of the whorehouse, a boy made of blood and bone.
What a waste.
It could be worse, Minseo thinks as the edges of his mind pop like an overheated lightbulb. At least I'm finally dead.
But he doesn't die.
The lady in white bends down to kiss his forehead. Her lips are soft and she holds him like he's made of crystal, like he's something precious, revered, loved. As if he is not an orphaned whore with a slit throat, bleeding out beneath the stars. The scent of jasmine and mandarin envelops Minseo in an embrace he hasn't felt since his mother died, and Death presses her halcyon finger to his ruined throat.
"Not yet," she whispers, each word a death sentence in Minseo's head.
Minseo feels it as she walks away. He knows it before she leaves.
It starts off as a stabbing pain in the base of his throat as his skin stitches itself back together, shattered hips forcing themselves outwards and in. There is a strange pulsing in his gut, the sound of blood sloshing around his organs rising to his ears, a grotesque geyser of death flowing back into his body and rumbling in his veins. He can feel bent nails, broken from clawing at his attacker, straightening themselves in their little pink beds as they reach for the iron-bladed knife left on the dusty ground. His vision rushes back full force, the haze in his mind imploding all at once. And as his heart starts beating once more, Minseo is flung to his feet like a marionette on its paper-thin strings. But he is no puppet. He would prefer it if he were.
