Let me begin by saying that what I am about to write may or may not be a work of fiction, and that the amount of truth in this story is up to your interpretation and personal judgment. I am, however, a journalist, for what it’s worth. And when I am finished with this documentation of possibly fictitious events, I will be turning in my resignation letter. So that’s that.

In the past few years I was, to put it quite honestly, a grown man in his mid twenties scurrying all over the city chasing after other men. Except they were artists, were famous rock stars, and I was just a man with a camera, a voice recorder, and the ambition of selling their stories to the public.I think this is a good time to say that I truly meant no harm in anything that I had done, that I was only a reporter and writer who worked for the biggest media company in Seoul, not that it makes me any less guilty for the death of Hankyung and Kim Heechul.

Yes, the main characters, Hankyung and Heechul of the rock band Mars, die in this story. But then again this is as much their story as it is mine, and yours as well, and we are all going to die one day anyway, so you can find some comfort in that, I suppose.

I wanted to be a writer all my life, wrote notebooks full of short novels and bought a typewriter because it was okay to be a little pretentious at that age. When I realized I couldn’t be a novelist without having to starve, I moved to Seoul and turned to journalism. I somehow landed a job at Seoul Metro, SM for short, but back then I never thought it would be a place for monsters. The rest of my life until now had revolved around Mars, the most famous rock band in Asia at the time.

There were five of them, five beautiful faces to make up for what they might have lacked in talent, which really wasn’t very much. I swore they walked through a crowd like they owned the world. Probably because they did. Although I had never heard them sing live, never been a fan, I knew what they were. They were gods of the industry.

Kim Heechul was the lead singer, got this voice that was average but there was something about it that shook the world. I called it soul. To this day, I think that’s what it was. His voice was good for haunting. At the end his songs, when he drags out his last note and everything fades to silence, everyone that was there would realize that they had tears in their eyes. Everyone except Kim Heechul himself.

Heechul was the leader, and his flamboyance was by far the most popular. But Hankyung had always been the one I liked out of the five of them. He was from another country and rumored to have a criminal record, but we later found out that those were just made up pretenses, stereotypical personalities that fans would come up with to explain his rebellious silver hair and tattoos that covered both his arms. He was the bassist, a really, really good one. The best. And he never talked much, probably didn’t know much Korean, but the man had charisma.

The other three members were known as the Lee brothers: Hyukjae the drummer, Donghae the lead guitarist, and Sungmin the keyboardist. They weren’t really brothers, just knew each other long before Mars was even formed. They screwed around a lot; Donghae got in a lot of trouble smoking in public and Hyukjae getting kicked out of nightclubs drunk. Sungmin had a different girl under his arm every week. They were young and liked to play and kept a lot of critics on their feet, but when they were on a stage, when they got their hands on an instrument, no critic could deny that it was goddamned art.

So it begins with this, the five gods of the industry at the top of their world, and I, who, with the help of the world, tore gods to pieces.