No Dogs Allowed

Go and Whisper For the End of the World

(ty for reading :) this book got featured on a Wattpad Ambassadors' AsianFantasy Cultivation Month recs ! which i am so very ecstatic about :D so the little star is grateful for your presence. [this chapter has cheosnun but for context, it's pronounced 'cheotnun', just for ease of reading.] now let's see what this chapter holds)

Cheosnun is first snow. Nun. Snow. Nun. Eye. A strange coincidence, if you will.

My mother held a plate of leftover rice, a plate of kimchi beside it. Our dinners, especially in the winters, were never much to behold, usually nothing but old banchan and stale leftovers since my father's people didn't like to travel through the snow to deliver food.

I sat propped up, facing the window, my little hands against the glass, my face pressed up against it. White flakes fell in droplets to the ground, pasted themselves on the window. I pressed my thumb against one. A perfect crystalline beauty. I smiled. I saw it in the reflection; my mother's face.

"What are you doing?" she said behind me.

"Umma, look," I said, pointing outside. White dusted the ground outside, the Han River freezing at its edges from the cold. The world was pale, ashen, a gray nothingness. Empty and beautiful. Sleeping soundly to the slowing beat of Incheon's heart. "Look outside."

She set the food down on the seat and sat beside me. She pulled her blue cardigan tighter over her body, winding her bones and thin skin up in the wool. Her face glowed under the white scenery outside. "Cheosnun," she said, pulling me into her lap.

I touched my eye. "But I have two eyes."

She laughed. "No, no. First snow." She touched my eye, her fingertip brushing my lashes. "It's confusing though."

"Cheosnun," I repeated.

She smiled. She turned her face towards the window. I stared at her instead. "My mother told me that they did that on purpose., 'eye' and 'snow'. She said she thinks it's because the first snow means it's winter, things are going to change soon, that everything is going to look very different, very quickly. Like you're seeing the world for the first time." She smiled, brushed the bangs from my face. "Everyone says things change in spring, huh? But I say that it's in winter. I think that's when you really see the world differently."

"Why?" I asked.

She shrugged. "Sometimes, the end is far more honest than the beginning," she said. "So, cheosnun." She pointed out the window. "Beautiful, isn't it?"

I stared out. I watched the snowflakes spin and flutter, dance to the beat of an unknown song, the winds carrying them far away where I couldn't ever go to follow. The world was different, was new, was the end and the beginning all at once. And all I could do was watch from behind the glass, letting the world go on as it was without a trace of me to witness it.

I blinked in the gray light of it. Felt the chill kiss my skin with a frigid, dying tenderness.

"Yeah, Umma," I murmured, hugging onto her arm, the plush blue wool soft on my cheek. "It's beautiful."

You have survived, despite what everyone and everything has determined. You have always found a way to survive. You have always found a way to win, even in a world that does not want you to.

Don't fear something more than you want it, Echo.

So my mother and I sat nestled together in the cold of our final snow and watched the world end in white nothingness, waiting for the day we could see it begin anew.