“Would you ever like to travel to another world?” Jongin’s voice cut through my thoughts, and I raised my head up from my phone. He wasn’t looking at me, but had his gaze fixed on one of the books on my desk, which was currently spread open. It was a fantasy novel; those were the only books I actually enjoyed reading. Fantasy, and action.

“What do you mean by another world?”

“Someplace new. That you don’t know about. The stuff you read in your books,” he replied, voice light, tilting his head in the direction of my desk. This was one of the odd questions Jongin asked; I couldn’t pinpoint the motive of asking them other than curiosity, though that was something Jongin truly didn’t possess. He asked them in random moments, completely out of the blue.

“Not unless I had a clear image of where I was going,” I replied, shrugging, turning my attention back to my phone. “After all, I wouldn’t want to be on the lookout all the time that someone was going to kill me.”

Chapter 5

When I finally opened my eyes, a gentle breeze was running invisible fingers through my hair, and there was a faint, clean smell of spring in the air. It had autumn, nearing winter, in Seoul -- but now, distinctively, there was a feeling of fresh growth in the air. Funnily, the huge city stretched in front of me wasn’t actually where my attention went first -- it was my hand, which was still clutching Kai’s tightly.

I wasn’t sure if he found it offensive or not when I let go of him like he was going to transmit some contagious disease, because apart from shifting his weight, he had no other reaction. I could feel my face turning to some sort of shade of pink. Thankfully, the other three were too busy talking with each other to notice.

“Welcome to Ignis,” Kai said, apparently unfazed by the whole holding hands thing, and I finally raised my head to take in what I was supposed to be currently thinking about.

The city, as Baekhyun had told me, could be translated into ‘beacon,’ or ‘light,’ in Latin. I could tell what he meant by that when I looked at it, now, even if I had thought it sounded absurd when he just said it. Apart from seemingly miles and miles of countryside spreading around it, Ignis shone -- quite literally. The sun seemed to reflect off its buildings and towers, making it glow in the afternoon light, almost too bright for me too look at. I turned to the nearest person to be -- which happened to be Kyungsoo now that Kai had moved away.

“This is where you live?”

He gave a nonchalant shrug, though his eyes were twinkling and he seemed to be holding back a smile at my reaction. “Impressive, isn’t it? The dimension itself took unfathomable amounts of energy to create, and the city itself… was it four decades? Five? Simply the wards and spells cast around it is hard to think about. It’s completely unbreachable.”

“Isn’t that what they said about the Titanic?”

Kyungsoo didn’t seem to hear me, but had turned to Baekhyun. They had started at a slow pace down the hill we were on, and when I looked back, the portal that had been there a minute ago had disappeared into thin air, leaving only a faint trace of purple behind. I stared at the empty space in wonder, though it wasn’t the only emotion. Fear, was it? I couldn’t tell, but it was possible. I had walked through a portal into another dimension, and now the doorway home was gone and I had no idea when I’d get back home. And despite what Kai said about Jinyoung, the whole ordeal still sent a cold, unwelcome shiver running down my spine.

“Mira, you coming?”

When I turned back to the small group, they had already trudged halfway down the hill. Kai had his arms folded over his chest, and he had stopped walking and was waiting, looking slightly impatient. “It’s afternoon, but we’ll have to have a lot of things sorted out before you get to sleep,” he called as I ran down to join them. “There’s a lot of people I need to introduce to you, too. And a meeting with the Council. So you better hurry if you want to go to bed anytime before twelve tonight.”

Quite frankly, the thought of sleeping in an unfamiliar place surrounded by unfamiliar -- not to mention dangerous -- people was rather intimidating, but I had already fainted once in front of Kai and once was enough to last a lifetime. So to that, I straightened my back. “Okay,” I replied, steeling every nerve. “That’s fine with me.”

I kept my gaze fixed on Ignis, the towers spiralling from it, the buildings built too elegantly to be built by human hands -- but in my peripheral vision, what I remembered the most was Kai, who had turned to look at me. If he had anything written on his face, then I couldn’t read it.

The walk towards Ignis -- which looked closer than it truly was -- was made in an awkward silence until Luhan spoke up. He slowed down so he was walking beside me, smiling in a friendly manner. “You look nervous,” he teased lightly, and I jumped back in surprise at the sudden noise.

“I’m fine, really!” If anything was an understatement, then that was.

“Your shoulders are all tensed up, like this--” Luhan scrunched his own shoulders, “--and your hands are clenched.”

Immediately, I relaxed, uncurling my fists, that really had unconsciously clenched. Embarrassed, I felt myself turn away, but I couldn’t deny it either -- I was nervous, very. Scared, too, of so many things that could go wrong. In shock, of everything that had happened. But when I looked back at Luhan, his expression wasn’t mocking, simply… understanding.

“More of us Athanatoi go through what you are than you think,” Luhan continued, gesturing at Ignis. “There’s a handful of families there that have been descended down, and have always lived here, with children growing up in this environment, but many of us were taken in by the elder Athanatoi from places around the world. Even more have suffered because of their abilities -- rouge Athanatoi are dangerous if they don’t have control over their powers, and sometimes their parents don’t understand what’s wrong with their children. A lot of us have been abandoned, some left to die -- things like that. Athanatoi blood and powers are passed down, but not everyone with it show their powers, so there’s times where the child shows their powers and their parents are normal human beings.

“Kyungsoo, for example -- he grew up at an orphanage until one of the elders discovered his aura and took him in, when he was around ten. They took him in at one of the safehouses in Incheon after he almost killed himself with his powers and trained him there. Baekhyun and I grew up in Ignis -- our ancestors have lived here for as long as we could remember, though one of the few. Lots of others go through tragic, even traumatizing events as children because of their nonconformity with others around them.”

I glanced at Kai, who was walking a couple paces ahead. I jabbed a finger in his direction. “What about him? He never said anything about a family, so I assumed he just wasn’t on good terms with them before… but...”

Luhan followed my finger, and froze -- quite literally, he paused his step for a moment -- and frowned. “Kai? None of us are sure, and he never told any of us, not even Kyungsoo, and Kyungsoo’s closest to him out of all of us. He never really talks about his past, and none of us ask him about it anymore. It’s a sensitive topic. Those who aren’t born here -- most of us, apart from Chanyeol, Baekhyun, Yixing and I -- don’t visit Ignis too often, since they don’t have family there. The rest of us stay at the safehouse in Seoul, since it’s our district we keep watch in.”

Kai didn’t look back at us, but I had a distinct feeling that he had heard the whole conversation. I wasn’t sure how I noticed -- I was nowhere as observative as him, or at all, in fact -- but his shoulders seemed to tighten slightly. The question about who the others were died in my throat.

This time, when the silence took over, Luhan didn’t try to start up a conversation again. I tried to think back -- I had had quite a normal life compared to others. To Luhan and Baekhyun who grew up with the acknowledgement of the existence of monsters and magic, to Kyungsoo who had been abandoned as a child, and most likely to Kai, whose childhood had left him unable to talk about it. My dad had passed away when I was at such a young age that the only thing I knew about him was from pictures, and my mom died in a car crash when I was seven, so I didn’t remember her that well, either. Jinyoung had taken care of me since I was ten, and everything had been normal. I had never shown any sign of possessing any powers whatsoever, and even now, it seemed the impossible that I did. Impossible that I had a golden aura, like Kai had said. 

By the time we reached the gates of Ignis, the sun had begun to set. The city -- streets, buildings -- lay stretched before our eyes, bathed in a lazy late afternoon sunlight. Kai had said that one day equaled an hour back in the real world, but it was such an impossible thought to wrap my head around that I resorted to imagining Jinyoung getting ready to kill me when I finally returned.

Baekhyun was the first to stop walking, though Kyungsoo and Kai halted half a second later. Luhan was the only one who continued, and he stopped too, a couple paces ahead of Baekhyun. The words why did we stop? was lingering on the tip of my tongue, but before I could say them, Luhan lifted a hand.

For a second, it seemed like he was telling me to stop talking, but when I looked closely, he looked more like he was resting it on something, though there was nothing in front of him that I could see. Just as the thought was crossing my mind, however, the air around him flickered violet again. In a split second, the air all around Ignis was burning a brilliant white colour, shooting up towards the sky. Like its name. Beacon. The radiance was so bright that I couldn’t look anymore; to the point where the white was imprinted everywhere I turned. My spine tingled; though not in a bad way.

As sudden as it came, the white flash disappeared into oblivion. Luhan’s aura faded to a lighter lavender, then completely disappeared around him, and he turne