Chapter 1
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[Seo Yeonwoo finds Shin Junho asleep on her rooftop. He opens his eyes. He looks at her like she’s something he’s been looking for.]
Seoul in autumn was doing its amber thing — turning everything nostalgic whether you consented to it or not.
She kept sticky notes everywhere. Her fridge was a gallery of small reminders, sketches, grocery lists, and one note that said ‘ask Junho about the ceiling thing’ that had been there for six weeks.
He had chosen the name Shin Junho and a story about freelance design work and he had arrived in the mortal realm with no luggage and no plan beyond finding the woman whose work had made him feel something he did not have a divine category for.
Seo yeonwoo’s apartment — a place that had been exactly right before and was now complicated by the presence of someone who understood it too well.
He brought her things without explanation — a coffee, a blueprint rolled up as a joke gift, a particular piece of cloth she’d mentioned once in passing. She kept all of them. She didn’t tell him she kept all of them.
He was close and she was aware of this and neither of them addressed it.
Being here again, he said nothing. He stayed anyway.
Haneul had been Shin Junho’s aide for four hundred years and had spent approximately three hundred and ninety of those years being quietly exasperated by him. The mortal realm was, somehow, making this worse and better simultaneously.
She wrote in her journal at midnight: *He is a god. He has been alive for three thousand years. He came to this specific city, this specific building, this specific apartment. Because of my work. Because of me. I don’t know what to do with that. I’m going to make tea and continue not knowing.*
He was in the kitchen and she heard him say something in a language she didn’t know — old and resonant, the kind of language that lived in mountains — and then her broken fridge made a soft sound and started working. She stood in the doorway. ‘The repair guy is coming tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Good,’ he said, not turning. ‘Belt probably need replacing.’
She had been staring at the spatial problem in her design for two days. He looked at it once — one look, three seconds — and said: ‘The load is wrong. Move this six centimetres east and the whole room changes.’ She moved it six centimetres east. The whole room changed. She looked at him. ‘How did you—’ ‘Experience,’ he said.
She had found the photograph in his jacket — not a photograph like a phone print, but something older, something that felt warm. The image was her apartment building as it looked three hundred years ago, before the street, before the neighbourhood. She stood there with it in her hands. ‘Junho,’ she said. He came out of the study. He saw what she was holding. He didn’t lie. He simply went very still.
She did not know he was a god. She knew he was impossible — the way he moved through a space as though he had designed it himself, the way he understood without being told, the way he looked at the world like he was seeing its bones.
She walked through Seoul afterward — the city doing its evening thing, loud and bright and indifferent to whatever was happening inside her chest. She loved it for all of it.
Haneul’s job was to keep Shin Junho from doing anything irreversible. He had been failing at this job since day four of the mortal realm assignment. He had made peace with this.
He watched her from the kitchen doorway with the expression he reserved for things he was learning: patient, precise, and just slightly undone.
He brought her things without explanation — a coffee, a blueprint rolled up as a joke gift, a particular piece of cloth she’d mentioned once in passing. She kept all of them. She didn’t tell him she kept all of them.
Seo Yeonwoo’s journal: *He remembered I mentioned my mother’s birthday six weeks ago and ordered flowers. He said he ordered flowers because flowers were appropriate. I asked how he knew the date. He said he remembered. He said it like it was normal. I sat down.*
