Hyun: Illusion

There's a horse. A horse in the middle of the road in front of the hwarangdo studio. I nearly ran into it, but it doesn’t try to pass me by and it doesn’t rear up or anything: it just stands there.

What the fuck?

The great beast of a thing must be telepathic, because I swear it hears me, immediately locking eyes with me. A sick swooping feeling scoops out my insides, leaving only nausea. I've never seen a horse with black eyes -- all black, like the pupil had swallowed up the iris and sclera whole, save for two pricks of light winking out from the centre. It's unnerving and wrong -- so, so wrong.

Part of my brain also wonders if horses are normally that pale, or if this is what an albino horse looks like. If so, that just makes it look all the more like some kind of ghost-horse.

Said potential ghost-horse snuffs, shooting out a puff of smoke-like breath from its nostrils, and a hand comes down to stroke its neck. The sight makes my heart do a little cartwheel, before I mentally kick myself for not registering that of course where there's a horse, there's a rider.

And the rider is as strange-looking as the horse itself. She cocks her head at me, blinking rapidly with strange, pale eyes the colour of a 500 won coin from behind parted bangs. Are those contact lenses? Is this one massive cosplay? Her ash-coloured hair is pulled back in a high ponytail, and I don’t understand how she isn’t shivering even in the slightest, considering that besides the dark grey trench-like riding coat that flutters with each gust of wind, she’s not wearing much more beyond a pale button-down, tight riding pants, and knee-high riding boots. At least, I assume these are all for riding; I’ve never even ridden a horse, but her get-up sure does look like something out of a weeknight drama.

The entire image and situation is beyond surreal. I even look around for cameras and expect someone to yell, “Cut!” But we’re the only two people on this side of the road, and nobody else around us seems to notice the strange rider atop her equally strange, and slightly terrifying-looking horse. How does nobody else find this weird?

And that’s when it all clicks.

“Aish. Idiot,” I mutter under my breath. “Brain really outdid itself this time.”

My hands shake -- is it the cold or the adrenaline or both? -- as I reach for my athletic bag and manage to unzip the small pocket on its side. I pull out the white pill bottle, emblazoned with the name of my medication as well as the instructions beneath: TAKE AT THE FIRST SIGNS OF SCHIZOPHRENIA. Gotta love having emergency meds for acute onset of symptoms; I used to be on a whole cadre of medications, constantly swapping and adding and subtracting and adjusting dosages…what a mess. I know there’s a water bottle buried further in my bag, but don’t even bother with digging for it; I pop out a dose into my palm and dry-swallow the bitter pills. I shut my eyes and begin to breathe: in through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

My feet are on the ground. The ground is pavement. I am outside of the hwarangdo studio. It’s Saturday. I have my jacket and my athletic bag in my hands. I am breathing hard from running because I was a little behind and didn’t want to risk being late. That is real.

I focus on that while all the wonky neurotransmitters in my head begin to settle back into something resembling normalcy. I turn ninety-degrees to the right and walk forward, past the horse and rider. I walk into the studio and don’t stop until I reach the safety of my locker in the changing room. I don't look back. This is real.

“I was wondering when you were gonna show up,” snorts a voice to my right. Already half-changed into his dobok, Kim U-re ties back his shoulder-length hair with an elastic band. The black lightning streaks tattooed across his back in an upside-down ‘V’ ripple in the movement. I still can’t believe that U-re’s parents didn’t kill him, or at least kick him out of the house, after he dared to get a tattoo done, even if he and I are both legally adults -- hell, U-re’s technically a year older than me. But, according to him, all he got was a good, God-fearing lecture that apparently lasted close to an hour followed by a lot of tears on the part of his family. I guess that's what happens when you grow up mostly in America.

Like me, U-re is one of the few Catholics in our city: religious oddities to the place that houses Bulguksa and Seokguram. Unlike me, however, U-re wears a gold crucifix around his neck at all times, and I’m pretty sure it’s a Latin prayer he says before every match in which I’ve ever seen him compete. I also haven’t been to church in so many years, that I definitely don’t count as Catholic anymore. Not that I’d ever really wanted to be, but when that’s what the parents preach, it’s what the children preach. There’s no real choice in the matter, even if my parents aren’t around anymore to drag me to church.

People think I look strange, what with the random streaks of white in my hair that have never grown back to black, but I’ve got nothing in comparison to U-re: dyed blonde locks, back tattoo, and two-coloured eyes. I bet he scares the shit out of everyone who steps up to the mat against him. I know the first time I ever did, a freaking hiccup gave away my surprise.

Together, we’ve got to be the strangest-looking hwarangdo athletes in the country, and there aren’t too many of us to begin with, especially outside of Gyeongju. After all, hwarangdo was born here back during the Silla period, when rich young men could up and join the flower crew of the Hwarang – though I’m not too sure how many of them looked like actor-idols the way dramas would have us believe. I know for damn sure no one's mistaking either me or U-re for Park Seo-joon.

U-re’s jangbong and danbong lean against the locker to the right of him, the signature lightning bolts that he apparently carved into each of them himself with a wire-nib burner he borrowed from an art student stand out sharply against the lighter shades of the wood. Sometimes I wonder if he has a thing about lightning because of his name, or if he just constantly forgets things, so he draws lightning bolts on all his stuff to mark it as his.

Honestly, either of these scenarios are probable, and in all my years of knowing him, I’ve never found the answer. But at least I know he plans on focusing on mugigon today, and I’m glad that I store my own jangbong and danbong here at the studio so that I may join him. All the adrenaline of the past moment still twitches at my fingertips, and I could use a good weapons power-based spar to knock that down a notch…or several. Granted, at this point, I’d take almost anything if only to bury what just happened outside the studio deep into the back of my mind, and shake off this uncomfortable feeling of being watched.

“And miss out on knocking your ass to the ground yet again?” I manage to laugh and smile, swinging open my locker. “Even the devil himself couldn’t keep me from that.”