You’re in the middle of picking out some herbs for the spell that you found in one of Siwon’s magical books when Krystal shows up on your right with a metal bowl in her hands. You glance up at her and smile. “Thanks,” you say. “I’m gonna be putting objects for sacrifice in it,” you add, pointing at the bowl.

“What are you going to put in it?” Krystal asks, sitting down on the chair next to yours and peeking at the book that you have opened next to your elbow. She reads the ingredients.

“Petrified wood?” she reads out loud. “Oh, crystals.”

You roll your eyes with a smile.

“We’re making an altar,” you explain. “The crystal aren’t for sacrifice, just for the overall…look. We’re gonna be burning wood, some golden coins, and something that represents Harmonia. Her attribute was actually a snake.”

“Are we going to burn a snake?” Krystal asks, raising a brow.

“No. But we do have some snake skin,” you reply. “There’s everything in that damn basement.”

“The gym’s basement, right?” Krystal says. “I know you guys go there a lot, but how did it even get there? Humans can’t get inside, yeah?”

“Yes,” you nod. “The gym building is owned by the Kims. It’s been empty for many years, but when Taemin came here and decided to live in the city, he decided to re-open it. He showed us the gym’s basement, too; the Kim family has gathered quite a collection of books and magical objects there. It’s super impressive. And it’s guarded from most magical creatures. At least the ones that aren’t goddesses.”

Krystal hums in wonder. You throw some ash to the bowl she brought you.

“Hey, Dal?” Krystal says, her voice a bit lower than before. You glance at her, sensing that she’s going to ask something delicate, or maybe tell you a secret. “I think that Siwon shielded himself from my powers.”

You frown at her. You forget about the ashes for a moment, surprised.

“Shielded how?” you ask.

“Not completely,” Krystal replies. “There’s times when his thoughts just get cut off suddenly. Not like when you’re thinking about nothing. It’s like there’s a sudden distortion in the flow of thoughts? Like. When you’re talking with someone and  suddenly lose the signal because you’re in a tunnel, or something.”

You try to remembers if he’s worn any new charms lately, but you don’t recall.

“Wait,” you say. “When do his thoughts get blurry?”

Krystal takes a deep breath at that, and holds it in. You brace for the worst, but you don’t know what to suspect.

“Not sure,” she says. “I haven’t found the pattern yet. But they did get cut off when Sulli brought up Father. Just a while back.”

You squint at her and blink owlishly. You lower your voice to  a whisper.

“You think he knows something about Father but doesn’t want us to find out?” you ask her. Krystal just shrugs.

“You know him better. I’m just telling you what I noticed.”

“Thanks.”

Baekhyun chooses that moment to enter the living room, carrying some lumber.

“So the neighbors gave me weird looks,” he informs you.

“Well, seeing as Kai doesn’t have a fireplace,” you say sarcastically. You point at the floor. “Put it there.”

Baekhyun complies, and then Krystal notices that the lumber looks a bit weird.

“Is that the petrified one?” she asks, standing up and walking over to Baek. You and him nod in unison, and Krystal pokes at the wood. “Whoa. It feels like stone.” She turns the piece of wood around and her eyes widen when she sees some literal crystals inside the wood. “This is dope.”

“Pretty, right?” Baekhyun asks.

“Thanks,” Amber says from the couch. “I know.”

Baekhyun rolls his eyes at her.

“Do you need anything else?” he asks you. You shake your head and send him a tight smile.

“Thanks.”

He nods and stalks away, heading for the bathroom. You look at the couch to see Amber sticking her head out and following Baekhyun’s movements; her eyes look a bit sad. She catches you staring, then, and tries to smile, but it looks a bit forced. When you look at Krystal, you notice that she’s looking after Baek, too.

Kai’s told you that he was there when that girl starved to death, but you were hoping that he’s better now. Apparently not. He did look super tired just now, and you don’t think you’ve seen him sleep. He did nap, though, or at least you think he did.

You feel a pang of nervousness. Sehun’s face pops up in your mind, and you can’t help but to feel guilty for not stopping Eris from taking over his body. You thought you’re going to help by coming here, but turns out, you weren’t able to do anything.

You shut your eyes, exhaling forcefully. Krystal’s hand suddenly lands on top of your own, startling you a little. Her fingers are cold. You look at her.

“It wasn’t your fault,” she says quietly. “You’ll get him back.”

*

It’s dark outside. Dark and quite cold.

You’re on the roof, and the entire pack is with you. Minjoon, Heejin and Eun stayed behind, though. Same goes to the Jungs – they all stayed behind. All except for Jessica.

She has a job of her own to do.

You finish painting a huge magic circle in the middle of the roof’s ground. It’s thick, and you had to use white paint to create it.

“We have to wait until it dries,” you inform your friends. “Let’s set the altar.”

You place everything you need a few feet away from the summoning circle. A bowl with ashes, herbs and dried flowers; crystals – mostly quartz – scattered around the bowl; and petrified wood. Then you motion for Kyungsoo to hand you a jar with snake skin inside, and you put it inside the bowl as well.

Siwon checks if the paint is dry, and once he decides that it is, he takes a clean brush and a bucket of clear fuel. You immediately feel bad for the boys for having to breathe in that smell; it tends to irritate their sensitive noses. Siwon dips the brush in the said fuel, and then starts covering the white outside lines you painted with it.

The circle has to burn. That’s why you need Jessica – in case anything goes wrong, she can control the fire and make sure you don’t accidentally burn down the entire building.

“Okay,” you say, taking a spell book from Yixing and opening it on the right page. “You guys should step back. And I apologize in advance for my broken Greek; it’s not my strong forte.”

Yixing snickers. You look up at your pack for the last time. They’re all ready to fight, you can see it. Seon, Myungsoo and Taemin have weapons on them, just in case. The boys’ eyes flash blue or, in Kai’s and Kris’s case, red, every now and then.

You stand in front of the altar, take a deep breath, and begin the spell. The language you’re using is ancient, and feels weird on your tongue, but you feel yout magic vibrate inside you when you speak the first words; it wakes up like it’s been asleep all this time, and it feels excited. If that’s even possible. You wonder if your magic somehow remembers the ancient times, if it comes from Earth, like your dad told you it does; you suddenly think of it as a being on its own, and for a moment, you think that it’s excited to hear a language it hasn’t used in a long time.

After a few sentences, you take a piece of paper with a few words written on it from your pocket. You light it on fire with your fingers and throw it into the bowl; the flowers and ashes inside it light up with a sizzle. The flames go up and disappear just as quickly as they appeared. The wind raises around you.

Still speaking, you walk over to the magic circle. Your voice is louder with every word; after a while, you feel like you know the spell by heart. You enter the circle to stand in the center. Still propping the spell book on your right hand, you use your left to flick your fingers and create another flame. It jumps from your hand and into the outside line of the circle; the fire catches on fuel. Flames shoot up around you, enveloping you with a familiar, whooshing sound.

You look up to see Kai looking at you, his eyes flashing red in the darkness. He sees you inside a circle of fire; you don’t want to know how he feels about that.

You look down at your book, continuing the spell, and the wind raises even more. Your ponytail smacks you in the face when a sudden blow of it hits you. Raising your voice, you finish the spell.

The flames surrounding you raise and a literal wall of fire surrounds you. You look up at it, shocked and a bit scared, and the fire gets hot around you. You hear someone calling out your name, and a second later, the fire disappears altogether.

You’re still inside the circle, frozen, not daring to move. Kai has taken a few steps towards you, and his arms are outstretched, as if he was ready to jump in and save you if necessary. Your eyes lock.

And then something pushes you out of the circle.

You actually get pushed out. It feels like someone just decided to push you on the back. You fall onto your hands and knees, your book flying away, and you breathe out in surprise; you look over your shoulder. You’re still inside the circle, but not in the center anymore. You notice some change in the air inside the circle, and you decide it's wise to exit it altogether. You crawl away from it, careful not to touch any fuel as you go, and Kai is beside you the second you’re out, his hand tight around your arm.

“What—“

Something white crawls out of the circle. It looks a bit like smoke, a bit like something fluid. Mostly, it just looks like bright light, and it slithers past you so fast you don’t get to react. There’s just a quiet swish, then someone lets out a gasp.

You turn back to see Sulli drop onto her knees. She’s wheezing, and the boys are standing around her, shocked, looking around in search of something.

Sulli is staring at the ground, her fists clenched, wheezing.

“Sulli?” Baekhyun says, crouching down in front of the girl.

“Sul,” Amber says quietly. She looks at you. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” you shake your head. “Sulli, talk to us.”

Sulli raises her head to look at you.

Her eyes are completely white.

There’s no irises in them. It’s like her eyeballs turned around, or as if she just went blind. She stops wheezing, and the boys take a few steps away from her when she stands up.

Wait.

“Harmonia?” you ask loudly.

Sulli snaps her head up at you. Her expression is blank, mouth closed. She slowly looks down at her hands. Her movements are as slow as Eris’s. She speaks up then.

Her voice…it’s not Sulli’s. It’s similar to Sulli’s, but it’s laced with something you’ve never heard before. Like…birds chirping. Thousands of them. You actually cringe at the sound, your ears echoing with the screech. The boys move away from Sulli and begin to join your side, and Sulli follows their movements, still moving very slowly, merely moving her neck a little. She opens slightly.

“Sulli’s inside, right?” Amber asks you, whispering, her eyes not leaving Sulli’s body. Harmonia is still staring at you all, her hands raises slightly, because she’s been looking down at them just a few seconds ago.

She says something, and her voice sounds surprised. You can’t understand her, though; not when she’s using Greek.

And then, suddenly, she speaks up in Korean.

“What time is it?” she asks. Her voice is so weird it’s mortifying. None of you moves.

And then Chen looks down at his wristwatch.

“Almost ten in the evening,” he replies.

Jessica squints and blinks repeatedly before giving him a weird look. Half the pack gives him a weird look, actually, and Harmonia’s lips suddenly quirk up. Slowly, but they quirk up.

“But what year?” she asks, visibly amused.

“Oh. Twenty sixteen, dude,” Chen replies with ease. At this point, half the pack is trying not to laugh, and the other is confused.

“After Jesus, I take it?” Harmonia asks, looking around the city in a very slow manner. Some of you nod. “Mm.”

She looks at the sky and stares at it for a few seconds. Then, slowly, she closes her eyes. You wonder why you can’t sense her presence. She’s a goddess, she should feel like one. Is it because she’s inside Sulli? Why is she even inside her? If she wanted a vessel, why didn’t she choose your body, which was closest?

“These are not peaceful times,” Harmonia says quietly. Her voice still echoes with chirps and flutters of wings. Now that you take a closer look, something else changed in Sulli when Harmonia took her body – her skin is lighter. It seems to glow. “But you’ve had it worse, I suppose.”

“Your aunt is causing mayhem,” you speak up. Harmonia opens her eyes again, and very slowly lowers her head to look at you. She looks freaky with her eyes entirely white. A shiver runs down your spine.

“My aunt?” she asks in confusion.

“Goddess of Chaos,” you say, afraid to say Eris’s name. “She took our friend.”

“Ah. Aunt.”

Seeing as Harmonia is said to be the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, and Eris is Ares’s twin sister, it makes Harmonia Eris’s niece. It’s quite ironic.

“Mm, I see,” Harmonia mutters, closing her eyes again. “I see.”

And then, suddenly, you feel an electric wave wash through you.

As on cue, everything around you goes black. All the city lights go out, followed by a deep, dull sound. At the same time, Sulli’s body disperses into pure, white, bright smoke, and it pools around your feet as everything around you shakes and vibrates. If it weren’t for Kai holding you, and you holding Kai, you’d both be on the ground by now.

You hear a loud whoosh. Then another, and another, and then your eyes pick up on some movement. Black smoke flies right in front of your face, then another one, and another one behind you.

You reach out, creating light with your palms. Sadly, that’s the moment the pain decides to come.

You yell, feeling it spread in your body. Your knees go weak and Kai catches you in the middle to stop you from falling over. The white smoke disappears from under your feet, and you see it bright as the moon in front of you. It tears apart, multiplying.

A black shape throws itself right at you.

In her vision, Sulli saw a black shape – just like this one – attack a girl. Then it starved her to death. And one of Eris’s children is Hunger.

These are her children. The shapes, the smoke flying around you, they’re her children, and if any of them touches any of you, you might as well be dead.

You make a move to get a silver dagger out of your belt, but your movements are too slow.

The blackness is inches away from your nose when brightness hits it from the side.

“Hide!” someone shouts.

You’re still in pain when Kai drags you away. Right above your head, a battle is happening; there’re as many white shapes as there are black shapes, and they’re fighting. They mix, they roll around, blackness tries to catch the whiteness, and vice versa. Every time one of them meets another, a vibration goes through the sky, and it echoes with loud, gong-like sounds.

Kai pushes you away from the scene, and the pack follows. The pain disperses from your body, slowly but surely.

“In, in, in!” shouts Kris, pushing you all inside the building again. Or at least inside the booth on the top of the roof that leads to the staircase. Once you’re inside, you can see the walls shaking from vibrations.

“People are freaking out,” Tao informs you, listening into the sounds in the building.

“Should we evacuate them?” Suho asks, looking at you and Kai.

“No,” you say. “Let’s hope they stay inside.”

“What’s even going on out there?” Luhan asks. “That looked like that scene in Harry Potter, when they went to the Ministry of Magic and Aurors fought Death Eaters.”

“Dude it does!” Chen shouts.

“The black smoke was Sehun, right?” Suho asks, looking at you. You’re in the middle of creating some balls of light to light up the corridor.

“I’m not sure,” you admit. “But he must be somewhere there.”

“What if Harmony kills him?” Baekhyun questions. “What if she kills Sulli?”

“She’s supposed to help and bring peace, not death,” Chanyeol points out.

Something heavy hits the door and you all jump in surprise.

“We need to help somehow,” says Chen.

“One of these things touches us, we might die,” you say. “If they’re Eris’s children flying around them, like in Sulli’s vision, we might starve to death or freak out.”

“So we’re grounded?” Seon asks, frowning.

“I have no idea what kind of magic may work on these things,” you say, shaking your head with nervousness.

Something hits the door again, and this time tears it off its hinges.

A black shape falls into the booth, and the first person it meets happens to be Luhan. Luhan is standing behind Kyungsoo, and Kyungsoo – right in front of you.

The shape pushes Luhan into Kyungsoo, and then Kyungsoo’s face comes very close to your own, and his head hits yours. You get pushes back, your back meets the stair rails, and since the impact is very strong, you feel your whole body tilting back, over the metal bar.

Someone grabs your hand. Another person grabs your leg. Someone shouts.

“Hold him!” Kris screams.

You get pulled back up, but as you go, you see the black shape plastered onto the ceiling. It looks like a cat that’s about to pounce, but it has no eyes. One listen to Luhan’s moans, and you decide that whatever it does, it’s freaking painful.

You reach to your belt and find a silver dagger. One flick of wrist and it flies at the ceiling, piercing through the shadow. It starts hissing and trashing around, pinned to the ceiling with your dagger.

You look down at the floor to see Luhan in pain. His face is tense, his muscles, too, and he’s purple in the face; he looks like he’s having an epilepsy attack, or something similar, and everyone around him is freaking out.

And then a white shadows falls into the booth, whooshes past him, and Luhan goes completely limp. He drops, exhaling forcefully, tears dripping down his cheeks, looking exhausted.

You look outside the door to see what’s happening on the roof, and your eyes widen automatically at the sight.

The sky is lit up with white shadows chasing the black ones. There’s dozens of them; at this point, you’re not sure if the black ones are really Eris’s children, or just parts of her. Every time they meet, there’s the weird gong-like sound, and there’s also light erupting around them now, too; it looks like a storm, where Eris’s shadows are the clouds, and Harmonia’s – the lightning.

You hear a loud sound that reminds you of in a lot of air very fast, and sudden brightness makes you squint. The shadows disperse, and in exchange, Sehun appears in the center of the roof.

He’s looking straight at you, and even though he’s far away, you can somehow feel the anger he’s oozing, and feel threatened. His eyes are still black. Eris’s inside him. His arms are covered in cuts, some of which are deep enough to bleed, and he’s not healing like he’s supposed to, being a werewolf.

He opens his mouth and says something. It’s full of anger, of malice, it sounds toxic; his voice is laced with sounds of thunder, squeals, and screams. It echoes, and it doesn’t sound human at all. Doesn’t sound like anything you’ve heard before. The fact that you don’t understand a single thing she’s saying doesn’t make it better.

Eris starts walking towards you. It’s not slow like before; this time she looks like a predator. She opens – well, Sehun’s mouth – and a piercing, angry yell erupts from it. The boys all have to cover their ears because of the intensity of it, and you can hear your own ears hurt because of it.

He’s a few meters away when Sulli appears right in front of him, and there’re bright wings on her back.

You all freeze. What happens next lasts maybe two seconds, but it gets stuck in your head like nothing ever did. The wings on her back are white and bright like light itself. They don’t have a specific shape, and as they go up from her back, they begin to fade, until they’re not visible at all.

Harmonia reaches out towards Eris. It looks like Sulli is opening her arms out for Sehun. Sehun falls into her embrace, his face still angry, and Harmonia envelops him whole into her wings.

And then both Sulli and Sehun drop onto the ground, Harmonia’s wings disappear, and the lights all around the city come back. Suddenly, quickly, with a silent flick.

You’re all still standing in the booth on the roof, not believing not fully understanding what you just saw. Amber is the first one to move.

She jumps out of the booth and runs to Sulli first. Then the rest of the pack follows, all except for Luhan and Kris. Luhan rolls onto the side to be able to see if his friends are okay, and his face is still contorted in pain. Kris is next to him, propping him up.

Amber rolls Sulli onto her back with Baekhyun’s help. Chen drags Sehun away from her, so that they can both be lied down next to each other. Once that’s done, Baekhyun and Chen both listen into Sulli’s and Sehun’s heartbeats and breathing.

“They’re okay,” Chen informs, looking up. Baekhyun collapses next to Sulli, breathing out in relief. You fall onto your knees, relief washing over you together with tiredness. Your muscles are twitching with pain after using magic, but you’re fine. The whole pack just plops down, except for some who have to walk off the stress.

“Let’s take them in,” Kai says, sounding exhausted.

*

The Jungs, Heejin, Minjoon and Eun are all waiting in the corridor when you enter. When they see Sehun and Sulli, they erupt in happy screams or react with relieved sighs.

“Are they okay?” Heejin asks, trying to peek above Minjoon’s shoulder.

“They’re fine,” says Xiumin. “Let them through.”

Baekhyun and Chen carry Sulli to the couch, while Kai and Chanyeol carry Sehun upstairs. You watch them do it, and you look up after they walk past you.

Your eyes land on Krystal.

Her face is full of fear, and her eyes are pinned to Sulli.

The boys around the room must’ve felt a sudden spike of fear in Krystal, because as on cue, everyone looks at her.

“Krystal?” Myungsoo asks, stepping out of the group and instinctively reaching out for the girl. But Krystal is watching Baekhyun and Chen, as they lower Sulli’s body down onto the couch.

“She’s not dreaming,” Krystal says. “Sulli’s not in her body.”

Aaaah! It's not the end!!! Aaaah!!!!!

So a lot of new people started following me on instagram. That's why I have a favor to ask of you: if you follow me because you know me from aff, please let me know! Your usernames are often different on IG and AFF and I want to know who I'm actually following back :)

Also, I'll be attending a wedding this weekend, so I'll reply to your comments a bit late!

Love you pistachio macarons <3