He stood frozen, staring at the pack of Wraiths waiting in the depths of the cave, only their red eyes glowing from the deep dark. His fingers twitched, eyes adjusting to the darkness when a glint caught his attention. There it was, under the aggressive protection of the Wraiths, his treasure was there. Even as deep into the mountains as they were, whatever sun peeked from behind the thick clouds overhead sparked on the edges of the crystals, as if they were teasing him from behind those big meaty claws.

The pack of Wraiths began to step forward, snarling jaws revealing razors and black gums in the thin sunlight. Their growling echoed against the cave, and Tao had no idea just how many there must have been from the sound of it.

With a deep breath, as if he meant to hold it under water, he snapped his fingers in front of the beasts and they froze, staring endlessly back at him. Watching them, eyes glancing back and forth between the few he could see, he made his way just a bit deeper into the mouth of the cave and towards the gathering of crystals just past the guard of the Wraiths. Firmly grasping them around the base, he attempted to rip them up from the rocks they sprouted from, though they didn’t budge. Standing up straight, he kicked at them. And again. And then once more. Still, they didn’t budge.

The longer he fought with the crystals the more he began to look over his shoulder, waiting for a pair of red eyes to be looking right back at him. Tao swallowed, suddenly out of breath. He threw off the jacket of his suit, a once orderly and clean ensemble now made tattered and dirty over the months of traveling and fighting. He’d forgotten that he’d been wearing a suit all this time to begin with. Tao always wore a suit, but suddenly it seemed so ridiculous to him. Strange that he thought of it so suddenly.

Rolling up his sleeves, he knelt back down closer to the cluster of crystals. Spending his time more carefully, he noticed the small glow that came from deep within them, the center almost like some sort of liquid. It reminded him of mercury and then suddenly of the illustrations he’d seen in an old tome at the library. An illustration that depicted the roots of the Tree.

Tao stood suddenly and began kicking into the crystals again, swinging his legs back and forcing them back into the gathering. His dress shoes scuffed more and more, one of the laces came undone. One of the crystals began to fall over. He kicked even harder, the end of his foot suddenly warm and then numb. One last kick, and it fell free. Swiftly, he bent over and picked it up, and then a pain in his calf had him fall into the palm of his hands.

He looked over his shoulder, and there stood the three or four Wraiths that had been still only moments ago. His pants were ripped from the knee down, and he struggled to free himself from the claws of the leader. He crawled away deeper into the darkness of the cave, struggling to stand as his right leg remained weak beneath his weight. His grip around the crystal grew weak. He grabbed his jacket at his feet, quickly shoved his arms back into the sleeves and then placed the crystal into the pocket, never taking his eyes off the pack of beasts closing in on him.

“ off,” he muttered, fingers shaking and voice weak. He went to raise his hand and snap them back into a still time, though no matter how many times he snapped, they remained moving. Still closing in.

“!” His voice cracked, and just before one of them lunged at him, he dodged and rolled beneath its leap and towards the opening of the cave, wincing with every step on his right foot. Their growls echoed viciously in the walls of the cave behind him, stopping his heart. He kept checking his pocket to be sure the crystal was still inside, throat raw as he tripped over his own feet. Another one of them had clawed deep into his back, sending him howling and warm blood dripping down his spine.

He began to slide down the steep drop of the mountainside, dust billowing up and catching in his eyes. Once at the bottom, he fell into a heap, hacking up the dirt that had caught in the back of his throat. Tao turned up, tears building in his eyes as he saw the three of them still chasing after. He quickly got up to his feet, running deep into the woods again, weaving in and out of the trees and fallen stumps.

Blood gushed from his lips and he felt more and more tired with every step as he continued to run towards the clearing. He knew, he remembered even after all these years. He prayed the Tree could grant him strength at the clearing.

The edge of the cliff was only a few feet from the opening of the forest, and Tao turned to face the beasts that would eat him alive. It was like looking into the eyes of every nightmare that had ever plagued him since childhood.

“I’d probably let you have your way,” he struggled to get the words out, spitting up blood, “But I have to live just a little bit longer.”

The Wraiths glared holes into his head, stepped closer and closer to him as he stood at the edge of the cliff. Glancing below, he could see the water crashing mercilessly against the rocks and the fallen trees. Beating into them like an unending torture. Had Time not been on his side, it may well have been his fate.

Tao turned back to face the demons, took in a weak breath, and then snapped once more.

Nothing.

There was an ache in his chest. He felt for the crystal in his pocket.

And then he jumped.

And the memories began to flood in.

He ran back into the house screaming, dragging his ankle behind him. His mother stood up, gasping. “Tao!” His father came running into the room from the back door. “What happened, baby, what happened?”

His parents gathered around him, tears gushing from his eyes and leaving trails on his dirty cheeks. “I fell from the Dragon’s Back!” he sobbed, falling into his mother. “It hurts, Mama! It hurts!”

His father set him on his lap, his mother pulling back the leg of his pants. “Shh, baby, shh, it’s okay. Let me see, let me see.” She cautiously moved it from side to side, “It definitely looks broken.”

Tao let out as big a wail as his tiny body could manage as his mother tried to move his foot from either side. His little heart was beating so fast, and when he looked down and saw the blood on his ankle, he began to scream and scream.

“Honey, you’re gonna be okay!”

“Tao, please!” His father called.

“It hurts! It hurts!” He screamed. And he screamed and he screamed louder and louder. And then it seemed as if the house shook. As if an earthquake had just ripped through the island.

Tao opened his eyes when his father’s body began to shift. His parents were stiff. Their expressions remained frozen. Then their wrinkles faded and the gray hairs began to disappear. “Mama?” his voice was but a whisper.

He fell from his father’s lap, glancing back and forth between them as they grew younger and younger before his eyes. In moments they were his size, then smaller. And smaller. And fetal. Their limbs disappeared. And then they were nothing.

“Mama? Papa?” He sat upright, looking back and forth in the house, breathing growing heavier and heavier. Then he screamed. “MAMA! PAPA! WHERE ARE YOU?”

“Jonghyun, you open the door,” Donghae said, expression suddenly serious.

“What, you scared?” Jonghyun smirked.

Donghae shook his head. “This island just gives me the creeps, that’s all. Nobody’s answering the door, something’s wrong.” He trailed off, waiting behind Jonghyun to meet with the home-owners.

Smirk fading, Jonghyun slowly opened the front door of the small house at the bottom of the woods. The door creaked loudly and it was dark inside. “Hello?” he called, but there was no answer.

Donghae flipped on the lights, and laying dirty in a heap on the floor was a little boy with messy blonde hair, crying quietly to the floorboards. Jonghyun and Donghae listened hard, approaching the child with caution. “I’m sorry,” he whispered over and over again between tears.

The floor creaked, and the child sat upright and turned to face the Legends. “Go away!” he yelled, eyes pooling up with tears. “Mama and Papa,” he sobbed, “Go away or I’ll hurt you!”

“What happened to them?” Jonghyun asked, Donghae slowly approaching. “Where’s your mama and papa?”

The child cried harder and harder, panicking as Donghae came closer. “I just want to see,” Donghae said softly, kneeling down to the boy’s level. “Let me see.” He reached for the boy’s hand and then searched his head for the memory. It wasn’t hard to find.

Donghae opened his eyes, holding onto the boy’s hand with both of his know. “This is definitely the Time Force we’ve been tracking, Jong.” The boy continued to cry quietly, exhausted and uncomfortable, shifting his weight over his ankle. “Tao, it’s gonna be okay. I promise, Tao,” Donghae said. He kept his eyes on him. “Jonghyun, could you transform into something comforting? Please, just… do it now. Fast.”

Without arguing, Jonghyun shifted into a long-haired white cat and stepped his way toward Tao’s fragile body, rubbing up against him and mewing softly. Donghae lifted Tao and Jonghyun into his arms, carrying them back out of the house.

“We were too late, Jonghyun. We were too damned late.”

Tao felt the waves crashing into him, throwing his body back and forth, smashing him into rocks and suffocating him. And yet, all he could do was remember everything.

“I don’t wanna, I don’t want to, I don’t!” Tao shouted back at Donghae, leg in a cast at his side on the bed. “I don’t wanna be with people, I don’t wanna be a Legend, I don’t wanna be here!”

“How are we supposed to help you then, Tao? Huh?”

“I don’t know!”

“I know you’re scared, but we won’t let that happen again, okay?” Donghae knelt down, looking eye to eye with the child. “We have lots of books and researchers and scientists from all over the world here. On your own, you might never gain control.”

Tao sniffled. “I don’t even know why it happened.”

“It wasn’t on purpose.”

“I never did it before.”

“We don’t know a lot about Time yet, but with you here, we can learn. We can make sure that never happens again, alright? Please, Tao, work with us. Let us help you.”

“I wanna die.”

Donghae froze, staring back at the boy. A child. A five year old who wanted to die.

“No, Tao. No.”

“I killed… I, no, I dunno what I did. Are they even with the Tree?” Tao sobbed. “Where are they? Where did they go, what happened to them?”

Donghae stood, looking away from the boy. “I’ll tell you this much, you’re a smart boy, Tao. Very smart. You didn’t kill them, they weren’t in pain.”

“Are they with the Tree?” Tao’s bottom lip quivered, waiting on Donghae’s reply.

Donghae didn’t respond.

Then, he shook his head. “No, Tao… I don’t think they are.” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

He watched the other kids from far away. Baekhyun was really funny and Lully was really kind. Tao was almost excited when he heard about Chanyeol, another little boy who couldn’t control his powers at all. He thought Chen was really cool and wanted to talk to him more, and the three brothers that entered towards the end were so interesting. He wondered what it was like to have brothers.

To have family.

Every time one of them came close, he felt his heart beat hard against his chest, felt his breath skip away. That day was like a ringing, like a screaming in his head, behind his eyes. He couldn’t forget it. He never would.

During recess, Lully came up to him with a flower crown. Her hair was short then, just below her chin. The flower crown in her hands was almost too big for her to carry, and fragile, something that might fall apart if not carried just right.

“Uhm, Tao?” she started, her little voice barely audible, “I made something for you. I hope you like it. Will you come play with us?”

She held it out for him, Nana standing close behind. The two of them had been really close from the moment they met. Nana told all the boys to stay away from her.

He looked down at the mess of flowers in Lully’s hands. He wanted to take them, but he could only see that day only a few years ago. Could only see the nightmare replaying over and over again.

So he pushed her over. “What would you bring that ugly thing over here for? And I don’t wanna play with you stupid, ugly kids. Go away, and don’t come back!” He stared long and hard at her, shoulders heaving up and down. He saw the tears build up in her eyes and felt an emptiness grow in his chest when she began to wail.

“You big stupid jerk, Tao!” Nana yelled back, helping Lully back to her feet.

Baekhyun, Chen, and Kai ran over to the girls.

“What’s your problem, Tao?” Chen yelled, little nose scrunched up.

“He pushed her over, she was just trying to be friendly to him!” Nana snarled. “I oughta kick his .”

“You’re all annoying, go away!” Tao turned his shoulder, preparing to walk back to the dorms when Chen grabbed his shoulder, turned him around and punched him directly in the face. He toppled to the ground, nose bleeding.

“Don’t worry, you won't’ have to ask again,” Chen replied, turning back towards Nana and Lully who was still crying. “Are you okay?”

Kai bent down towards Lully. “I think it looks real pretty, Lully. Will you make me one?” Nana nodded, encouraging Lully to wipe away her tears and follow the boys to the other side of the courtyard.

He didn’t let them see it, he held it back until he was back in his dorm. But Tao cried and cried and cried. He wanted to take the crown. He wanted to be their friend. But he knew that he couldn’t. It was only right.

The waves washed him up on the shore, beating him down into the sand as if it might pull him back far below the depths of the ocean. As if the Dragon wanted to swallow him up whole. He coughed up water, the wounds on his body catching up with him. Reminding him that returning to the others would only be hell. It was getting harder and harder to breathe.

“Being alone is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” the words struggled to come out of his mouth as he battled his own weight, slowly getting up on his hands and knees and pulling himself from the reach of the waves. “We have to get back. We have to get back,” he kept saying, coughing out the words as he finally stood and began to limp back towards camp.

The memories were still playing vividly.

“Everyone returns to the Tree when they die. That is a part of the great cycle of Life. Death is only the retiring of the body, but the consciousness continues on within the Tree. We, as Forces, return our gifts to the Tree. It’s a comforting thought, really,” Master Leeteuk said, leaning into his desk as he admired his illustration on the board.

Tao had grown long and skinny, legs poking out from under his desk. He stared at the board, at the image of the people within the Tree, the lines that showed their fate, their connection to the Tree and to the world and all living things. He looked back down at his book and began flipping through the pages. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting to find, but whatever it was, there was no answer for it in sight.

He’d doomed his parents to a non-existence.

Tao was all alone.

The dorms were empty. Everyone had gone to the Grand Hall for the Switching of the Moons ball. “You should at least go,” Jonghyun said to him, standing in the doorway. “You can’t keep punishing yourself for something you couldn’t control, Tao.”

Tao looked out the window, at the lights that glowed in the streets in the near distance, at the gathering of people in the middle of town dressed the nicest he’d seen

them in a long time. “There’s too many people.”

“Tao.”

“Besides, I have a reputation to consider.”

“Making them hate you won’t protect them. It won’t protect you, either.”

“Would you leave me alone, Jonghyun.”

“Legend Jonghyun, Tao. Legend.”

“Whatever.”

Jonghyun shut the door, leaving Tao alone in the darkness of his dorm room, staring between the cracks of the blinds at the outside world. At a world he would only ever be able to look at from the outside. A world that hated him.

He sat there for an hour, and then his loneliness ripped him away from the edge of his bed and he found his legs moving ahead of him to the Grand Hall. As if he were possessed by something.

He made his way into the side hallway, and out from the ballroom, Lully came bursting through the doors crying. He froze, a million questions circling in his mind though he was somewhat certain as to what was troubling her. When she glanced back at him, he froze her still. “This is why I shouldn’t have come. I shouldn’t have even stopped her, what am I doing?”

Looking back and forth through the hallway, he made up his mind. He wiped a tear away from her face. “Don’t cry so much about it. He likes you back.” He took a breath and darted his way back out of the hallway before his Force wore off, leaving Lully standing there unsure if she’d seen anyone at all.

He’d made his way away from the shore and into the wastelands just outside of the forest. Tao was so close now, but his legs were wobbling beneath him and his lungs could hardly catch any of the air he was struggling to breathe. He was getting dizzier and dizzier. “We have to get back to Sehun. We have to,” he said again and again, looking up at the sky. “Let me get back there, please.”

Lay had Sehun in his arms, leaning into him as they continued to walk back towards the mansion. Xiumin, Tao and Kris followed closely behind.

“I wonder if Luhan’s woken up yet?” Sehun said, voice quiet as they continued on.

“Kai will know, he’s already on his way there,” Lay replied.

“Luhan’s tough, baby bro,” Kris said, “I’m sure he’s awake by now.”

Sehun chuckled quietly to himself. “If only I weren’t so weak.”

“He’s your big brother. He does what he needs to to take care of you,” Xiumin added, adjusting his cloak as the wind began to pick up.

“That would probably die for me if given the chance. I’m a waste of time and energy, to be honest,” Sehun trailed off.

The boys fell quiet, only the howling wind crying out to them in the barren plains of the Capitol countryside. The mansion wouldn’t be too far off now. Kai should have already been there.

Tao stopped. “Wait.”

The others turned and looked at him, and then the ground began to shake.

From behind them, black clouds of dust began to stir up from the ground and reaping Wraiths formed from them, red, beady eyes staring back at them. Lay stayed close to Sehun, keeping their bodies close. Sehun shoved him away. “I’m not gonna be dead

weight, let me fight, Lay!”

Kris took high ground in the sky, Xiumin raising ice from the small bits of water he could pull up from the ground or from high in the sky. Tao stood and watched.

Sehun shot a small whirlwind at one of the beasts, sending them flying far out into the distance. He doubled over, struggling to catch his breath. Xiumin struck a second one, killing it instantly. Kris returned to the ground, prepared to kick the final one in its head when it began to charge at Tao.

Tao glanced from the others to the Wraith.

“Tao, stop it!” Kris yelled, the rest of them too far from Tao to do anything.

Tao stood there. He looked back at them again and back at the Wraith. His fingers twitched, but his mind kept flashing back to that day.

“Tao!”

He took a breath, braced for impact.

The beast howled, screeched, and suddenly its cries sounded farther and farther away. Tao turned and saw Sehun collapse down to the ground. He prayed he was still alive.

He fell down to his knees, reaching for the crystal back in his pocket, head turned back up towards the sky. “Why did this happen?” His bottom lip began to quiver. He could barely see straight ahead of him, could barely hold his head up anymore.

Tao dropped his head, taking a shaky breath. “Sehun, please find me. Tree of Life, please find me, I’m so sorry. Damn it!” He held tightly onto the crystal. Falling over, his weight now in his hands. Propped up on his knees and his one arm. Staring back at a dry, cracked ground.

“I can’t feel my legs anymore,” his voice cracked.

He took another breath, lips shaking and eyes shutting tight. “Looking back on it now, I’ve always, always been alone. It’s only natural that now,” he chuckled and it turned into a sob. “And Mom and Dad won’t be there to see me. I’m gonna be all alone forever.”

Tao couldn’t hold them back anymore. His cries echoed up towards the Dragon’s Back to the North. His arms shook and he began to cough with every sob, strength weakening. His head fell closer and closer to the ground. “I don’t wanna die. I’m scared. I’m so scared, I’m so scared, I’m so scared.”

He let his head rest into the dirt, eyelids getting heavier and heavier.

“Let them find me, please.”

And he closed his eyes. And everything was dark.