The moon died on a Tuesday.
Seoul never noticed. Neon bled across the sky like open veins, smothering the stars into silence. Only the crows noticed.
KRRA-KRA-KRAK!
From every rooftop, every rusted railing, every forgotten alley, they rose. Tens of thousands. Black scraps tearing the night open with wings. SQUAWK! SQUAWK!
Yi Seong-jun stood on the roof of Hanseong High School. Cigarette trembling between his fingers. Wind tasted of iron and coming winter. Below, the city breathed—oblivious. Its next exhale might be its last.
A single crow landed beside him. Its eyes were wrong. Too human. Too old.
"Teacher."
The voice belonged to a girl who had died eleven years ago, throat torn out by something wearing her mother's face.
"The Dream remembers your name."
Seong-jun closed his eyes. Smoke curled from his lips like departing souls.
"I know."
He stepped forward.
Seven stories of empty air yawned beneath his shoes.
He fell.
The ground never came.
Night folded around him like paper over flame. Concrete turned to ash. Streetlights to dying candles. Traffic roared—then thinned into screeeeeaming… endless screaming…
Then: silence.
He landed on his feet in a place that had forgotten daylight.
Ash snowed from a sky bruised and raw. Seoul hung upside-down above him, skyscrapers rooted in clouds like the teeth of some buried god. Between him and the inverted city drifted a cathedral made entirely of bone and regret. Its doors yawned open.
CLINK… CLINK… CLANG!
Inside, something moved.
Seong-jun walked. Each step left black fire refusing to die. Crows followed, silent now, wings dripping shadows that writhed like oil.
The chain led him to an altar of cracked marble.
A girl knelt there.
Nineteen. Twenty, maybe. Silver-white hair spilled over shoulders wrapped in funeral cloth. Golden sigils crawled across the stone beneath her knees, drinking the blood dripping from her wrists. Every drop bloomed into tiny suns… then guttered out.
Faceless saints circled her, mouths sewn with starlight threads, halos bleeding rust.
She lifted her head. Eyes the color of mercy pierced him.
"You're late," she murmured. Voice soft enough to break bone.
Seong-jun stopped three paces away. The cigarette floated with him; ember the only warmth in the cathedral.
"I wasn't coming back."
"Liar."
A faint smile touched her bloodless lips.
"The crows told me you still teach children how to survive the end of the world."
The chain around her throat pulsed. Fresh blood welled… became fire.
Seong-jun stepped closer. Faceless saints turned their erased heads in unison.
"Name."
"Aria."
She tilted her head, studying him like a child staring at a wound.
"They call me the Ashen Saint. Daughter of the Final Night. The key that opens the last door."
A pause.
"I don't like any of those names."
Another drop of blood hit the altar. The cathedral groaned like a dying whale.
Seong-jun flicked the cigarette. Black feathers erupted where it landed.
"How long have you been here?"
"Always."
Her smile widened. Gentle… terrible.
"I was born the moment the first Saint chose to stay behind. I opened my eyes inside the corpse of God, and He told me I was loved."
Chains pulsed. Faceless saints pressed harder. Bones CRACKED… SNAP…
Seong-jun's shadow peeled away, becoming a murder of crows. Wings flapped. Screams echoed. Each bird carried a dead face in its eyes.
He raised a hand.
The nearest faceless saint exploded into ash.
"Wrong answer," he muttered.
Crows descended. Feathers → blades → fire → memory.
The cathedral reverberated with every failure he had ever endured.
Aria watched, unshaken. Chains shattered. She rose. Blood still poured, but now droplets hovered as a halo of liquid gold.
"Thank you," she whispered.
"Don't."
Seong-jun's voice cracked like old ice.
"I didn't come here for you."
"I know."
She stepped down. Bare feet left no prints.
"You came for the girl who vanished from your classroom this morning. The one who screamed your name when the Nightmare took her."
His jaw clenched.
"She's already dead."
"No."
A golden ember floated above her palm.
"She's becoming the seed. If the second Descent finishes inside her, the Veil tears forever. No more cycles. No waking world. Only the Final Night."
It drifted toward him. He didn't move. It settled over his chest—over the heart that had forgotten how to beat. Warmth spread through dead tissue. For the first time in eleven years, Yi Seong-jun felt something alive.
He crushed it beneath his fingers.
"Where is she?"
Aria pointed upward, to the inverted city.
"Past the River of Forgotten Names. Beneath the Throne of the First Saint. Inside the cradle that was never meant to open again."
Black wings unfurled from his shadow, blotting out the sky.
"Then we're going for a walk."
Her smile: small, sad, luminous.
"Together?"
He stared. Crows screamed voices that weren't theirs.
"Don't get used to it."
Ash fell harder. A distant bone-bell tolled seven times.
The Black Moon had only just begun to bleed.
For the first time in thirty-three years, a Saint walked willingly into the Dream that had already taken everything from him.
Behind them, the altar cracked. From the fissure rose a whisper older than sin.
"Welcome home, my beloved regret."
Seong-jun didn't look back. He took her hand—skin burning like forgiveness—and stepped into the falling ash.
The night opened its mouth and swallowed them both.