Act I: The Boy

His town of Aster is a quiet one where nothing really ever happens. It is two hours by car to the nearest city, and on Wednesdays old Kim arrives in his bumping silver truck with medicine and books and toys. They grow their vegetables and raise their livestock and mind their own business. It is a peaceful way to live, he hears a fruit seller muse to the vegetable stall by him amidst the throng of the morning market, unassuming and routine. Aster is a town of neither surprises, nor anomalies.

Well, except for him.

He is Jinwoo, nine-years-old and yay tall, Aster's little ghost boy. He is an orphan and no one will tell him whose. Sweet Mrs Jan who runs the flower shop has raised him as long as he can remember, out of the goodness of her kind, frail heart. All day she sits in her flower shop on the skirts of town, grey-white hairs twisted loose into a low bun at the base of her curved neck, spindly fingers picking and arranging at stems. 

Jinwoo's job is to pull thorns off the roses; his guardian's eyes are too poor to see and her wrinkled flesh easily cut but not healed. Jinwoo is pink-cheeked and bright-eyed, hands soft but he is still of the age where everything can be fixed with a colourful plaster. There is nothing much else to do and so they talk, amiable and light, Mrs Jan teaches him the language of the flowers as they converse in their own. Peonies for marriage, lavender for purity and grace... 

On weekday mornings he goes to school with the rest of the children. It is a shabby, red-bricked affair with a clock tower that hardly tells the correct time. During lunch he sits alone; while other children have always been able to exchange soft biscuits with pink icing in the middle and pastries with marshmallowy insides, Jinwoo has a modest metal tin with rice and pickled vegetables, and sometimes a sliver of canned fish. In the afternoon he will return to the flower shop and thank Mrs Jan for the food, and explain to her that his scuffed elbows and knees are from playing too wildly with his friends again.

Sunday morning, Mrs Jan is at the local church service with her friends and Jinwoo has time for himself. Tomorrow it will be his tenth birthday and he thinks it would be nice if he could make them flower crowns to wear as they have the humble apple pie she always makes for him. 

He makes a game of it, he finds some daisies by the playground, where most of the grass is well-trampled from the bare soles of childrens' feet. Some baby's breaths by the school gates, amidst the spiny brown weeds tumbling out of the planters from years of neglect. As it is a Sunday, everyone is inside having a warm lunch of roast meat and potatoes with their families; except for Jinwoo, and the streets of Aster are his, at least for the moment.

He wanders merrily, palms blackened and dirt clinging under his nails, small watering can stuffed gently full of picked flowers in his small hand. Past the town square as the bell chimes three and the corner bakery belonging to the family with the big twins who hold his arms back.

Now, Jinwoo has never been the cleverest at directions. The streets of Aster are kept clean but not necessarily well-kept; signs are never replaced or repainted because no one new ever comes by to need them. The town is old-fashioned and winding, several paths spiralling into dead-ends and others leading into rounds and rounds. 

It is this particular flaw of his that leads him down an awkward turn some distance from Huckle's Inn and a sharp left around the corner from the small grape orchard and winery. There is a neat row of doors embedded into the peeling brick walls, uniform tiled stairs and white-painted curved banisters. Jinwoo has lived in Aster as long as he can remember and has wandered its streets all by his lonesome more than he can count, and he's never seen these homes before. 

Curious, he ambles down the stretch, worn sandals on cobblestone. There are dull brass numbers on each door, 442, 443, 444, 445. There is dust on all four doors but the numbers on unit 444 seem to glint just a tad brighter than the rest. 

At the end of the stretch there is a tall, tall fence, painted a deep brown and peeling in places to reveal light-coloured splintered wood underneath. At a day from ten-years-old, Jinwoo is not yet particularly tall and so he is able to glimpse, right at the edge of the base of the fence, a crack where a board has come loose and tilts outwards.

He kneels, the loose gravel scraping into his scabby kneecaps and pries at the board. Almost as if leaning into Jinwoo's touch, the plank gives, snapping completely save for a few thin sinewy strands of wood that cling resolutely. Like a little mouse, Jinwoo peers into the hole he's just made only for thick, tall grass to tickle across his face and make him sneeze. 

Children don't often practise either discretion or caution, and Jinwoo, the little flower shop boy, although he may not have treats to share in the schoolyard, is no different in this aspect. So belly-down, pushing his watering can of flowers ahead of him, he crawls rather like the clumsy imitation of a snake until his entire body is out in the open, and that's when he looks up. 

Wow. 

He's hit the jackpot; everywhere he looks there grow flowers enough to make crowns for himself, and Mrs Jan, and the rest of the townsfolk three, four times over. He makes a faint gurgle of glee in the back of his throat and giddily picks fistfuls of marigolds. His battered watering can is halfway full before he even thinks to stop and take stock of his surroundings. 

He's in someone's backyard. Or rather, no one's backyard. The home that sits in front of him is yellow with mildew, weeds clawing all the way up the walls and huge sprawling cracks in the paintwork. He doesn't think it's been occupied for a long time. He glances up and from what his childish height can afford him he thinks there might be a row of four houses just like from the front doors. 

He inspects the yard and suddenly, out of the corner of his eye he spots a bold, luscious flash of red. He scrabbles over clumsily and sure enough, by the fence adjunct to the next house, there peeks a red rose through the disintegrating wood. 

Jinwoo is curious as to how roses might have grown wildly, they are finicky little things and need mighty pampering. Unthinking, he wriggles his fingers through the cracks and seizes the stem and pulls-- only to yelp as a thorn pricks his thumb. 

on the oozing wound petulantly, Jinwoo thinks that if he could get to the other side he would be in a far better position to retrieve the roses. He sizes up the fence. It is peeling in places and missing in some, Jinwoo is used to clambering up the rough bark of apple trees and thinks, it cannot be much different. 

With the ingenuity and imagination only a child could possess he weaves the handle of his watering can to the belt loops of his pants with the long strands of dry weeds. He hops up, feet slotted into the first foothold, fingers curled tight around a knobbly protrusion of wood above his head. The metal watering can clatters against the fence but Jinwoo goes up, up, higher. He's at the top of the fence and peering over, surprised. The roses haven't grown wildly at all, and there are instead two dozen or so of them, neat in planter boxes.

That's when it occurs to him that he hasn't quite thought about how to get down, neatly. Very literally, Jinwoo is caught, perched precariously high for a boy his age. He thinks of coming back the way he came, but the beautiful roses would look wonderful twisted into a wreath with the yellow marigolds and so Jinwoo gingerly leans his weight forward--

BARK! 

He's tilting! Falling--

Flying. 

He's hovering two feet above the roses he would have crushed and he gasps, frozen. 

Someone clears his throat. 

It's a boy, about his age, tall. Sharp eyes and hair chopped into a blunt fringe, wand glowing green and pointed right at Jinwoo as a skinny dog prances skittishly round his ankles.

Hello. he says, regarding Jinwoo with a gaze so piercing that Jinwoo finds himself looking down bashfully. Who are you?

His name is Seunghoon. He is tall, sharp eyes and hair chopped into a blunt fringe and house number 444 belongs to his family. Jinwoo doesn't ever recall them moving into town but it seems like they are the secretive sort; Jinwoo only really speaks to Seunghoon's mother once and she is a tall, thin lady with red rouge and red cheeks and red eyes, and she gives him nothing more than a tight-lipped nod.

Seunghoon is about his age, just four months younger. He doesn't go to school like the rest of the children, Jinwoo learns. Instead he spends most of his time in the house, far bigger than it seems on the outside. They have an expansive