It was Tae Pyung’s turn to snicker at her question, thus earning a more hostile glare from Eon Jin.
“Fate, you said? Like destiny?” he asked, a challenge evident in his voice. “Like you just happened to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time? Is that your excuse?”
Eon Jin paid no heed to the mordacity in his question. Rather, she focused her attention to craft an explanation that would be faithful to the lore and at the same time, somewhat believable to his mortal ears.
“Life is a collection of a multitude of predetermined events to begin with,” she began in a somber voice. “Imagine a beautiful tapestry: the holistic design is composed of several patterns, while the patterns are made of countless intertwined threads, and the threads are weaved and cut in a pre-established manner.”
“Every strand exists for the purpose of completing the tapestry’s design. In the same way, mortals live — from their beginning to their end — in accordance to the course planned out by the god of Fate.”
“However, for some reason, the powers that be decided at one point that mortals should be gifted with consciousness to act of their own volition,” she continued. “The mere existence of this freewill threatened to disrupt Fate’s intricate design, which — in turn — may affect the other facets of life such as Time, Death…”
“You do know how even the tiniest pebble thrown into the wide ocean can cause a tidal wave on the other side, don’t you?” she asked him.
“A ripple effect,” Tae Pyung uttered as he started to get the picture, earning a nod from Eon Jin.
“In the end, the foundation of reality has its laws, and that law requires order,” she concluded as she finally shifted towards Tae Pyung’s direction to look at him.
“That, Kim Tae Pyung, is the reason why I am here.”
A minute or two passed between them without any word or movement. It was just Tae Pyung trying to fully comprehend the complex premise she imparted to him, and Eon Jin granting him all the time and space he needed to come to terms with it.
“Based on what you have told me, it seems that you have been in charge of” — he paused, having second thoughts on the plausibility of everything — “fate.”
“I am.”
“Is that why I’ve always met you during unfortunate circumstances?” he asked as he turned to face Eon Jin.
“Yes.”
“Including that night when we were chasing after Kang Myeong Suk?”
“It was the night when you caught me, yes,” Eon Jin confirmed.
“The third time we’ve met by chance, right?”
“Didn’t I tell you that ‘third time’s a charm’?” she reminded him with a wink, which only made him shake his head in disbelief.
“And how long have you been doing this, Eon Jin?” he asked her moments later.
She shrugged, “A while.”
Tae Pyung raised a brow at her and probed, “Care to expound on how long that ‘while’ has been?”
“Three hundred and seventeen years,” she said, dragging out her answer in a long and weary sigh.
At the corner of her eye, she saw Tae Pyung respond to her by gulping back his bewilderment.
When he recovered a little, he told her, “You do know that all these things sound —”
“Preposterous?” Eon Jin finished the sentence for him.
He noticed how emptiness momentarily cast a shadow on her petite face before it vanished.
“At first, it seemed preposterous to me, too,” she proceeded to tell him as she tightly shut her eyes, her brows knitted together tightly as if in deep thought. “Only until such time when I had to take on my first task that I was able to accept this new reality.”
Eon Jin slowly opened her eyes and leaned sideways to place the half-empty mug on the table beside the settee. Then, she gracefully rose to her feet, and the elegant pleats of her flowy, gray chiffon square pants swirled with her slightest movement.
“As much as I would like to go on, I’m afraid we will have to postpone this conversation until later. Anyway, you will probably understand everything that I just told you in thirty minutes or so,” she assured him — in vain, apparently, as Tae Pyung only regarded her with a confused expression just as she expected him to.
She slightly bowed her head to thank him again for the things she could not further elaborate on — for the creamy and sweet coffee, for letting a stranger like her into his home, for taking time to listen to what she had to say — before she headed towards the door.
He also stood up, intending to follow her with his gaze until she was gone.
“By the way, I liked that last memory,” Tae Pyung casually confessed to her.
“What memory?” Eon Jin asked as she slipped each of her feet back into her white pumps.
“That one summer afternoon at the beach,” he clarified. “It warmed my heart when I was freezing in the middle of a cold, dark night by the river a couple of days ago.”
She smiled and admitted, “I liked it, too.”
“Anyway, in case you were wondering, you have that memory to thank for making me decide to lay my cards on the table tonight,” she segued.
“Thanks to that memory, then,” he agreed. “And thank you for saving me, Eon Jin.”
His words took her by surprise. She was so convinced that he was oblivious to what she did for him that night since she left as soon as he opened his eyes.
Even so, she flashed the same smile that he sorely missed over the past few days, then quickly turned her back on him to head out of his unit.
“Don’t forget to bring an umbrella, Officer Kim,” Eon Jin cautioned him as she lingered at the front door without bothering to look back. “It’s going to rain tonight.”
Exactly thirty minutes from the time Eon Jin set her foot out of his home, Tae Pyung received a call from Kyung Won as he sat on the sofa, informing him that a young woman fell to her death from the rooftop of an industrial building by the nearest subway station.
At the same time, raindrops began to pour from the sky, trickling down the glass of the tall window of his living room and gradually obscuring his view of the city night lights.
Photo by Mathew Schwartz on Unsplash
Comments (0)
See all