Prologue

September, 2003

Eight-years-old Taehwa clutched her head—a crown of dark cascading locks—as she pulled her knees up to her chin. Her eyelids suddenly felt so heavy and she couldn't seem to fight it open. But despite her drowsy mind, her heart pounded so ferociously, so wildly. Pa, Ma... I'm scared. It was as if her body was no longer hers and she'd retreated behind the petite shell as it raced into a vacuum of images of people and places she couldn't recognize. 

It felt like forever when something finally tore open beneath her and she landed on dark soils and dirt. 

The Eight-years-old shielded a hand over her eyes against the beams of light cracking through the forest canopy. What happened? Her brothers used to (and still did) bully her into watching horror movies but this wasn't one of the scenarios. Even an ordinary kid in those kinds of movies doesn't just get a terrible headache and teleported into an unfamiliar place. Alone. Scared. 

She didn't even like Alice in Wonderland.

Plus, it felt too real—the fear—to be a dream. Or a Nightmare.

'Hello?' cried Taehwa as she pulled herself from the ground. Do not cry. You're not a kid anymore; she heard her oldest brother Taeho's whisper in the back of her mind. She bit her lips, brushed away the dirt on her skirt and tugged away her fingers back inside the sleeves of her sweater. I will not cry. 

She ventured into the trees, returned in a circle, and then finally arrived at an open field.

There were numerous tents and weapons and horses and foods and... people.

At the time, the first instinct that came to her mind when she saw humans wasn't to walk to them and ask for whereabouts but to hide. 

She decided that they looked too strange from the way they dressed. Observe first. Action later, she remembered an action film that Taesung made her watch with him on one Saturday Afternoon. 

The people looked like they'd just walked right out of a historical show—long robes and gowns and headdresses. Yet she still had no clue what was going on. 

A little further away in a more open area, her eyes found an arrow that pierced through the air and struck close to the center dot. 

She let hang open, her gaze stumbling back to its owner, the young boy in a golden robe—probably not much older than she was—with hard eyes and dark hair. Older people around him applauded and smiled but no one touched him or patted his head and he looked so distant. 

Not that he’d spared them a glance in the first place; his eyes still fixated upon the target and he craned his neck. Picking up another arrow, he drew back the bow and the atmosphere fell silent. 

Thud. 

This time, it bore itself right into the heart of the wooden target. Bull's eye, her father would say when he struck the dart right in the middle of the innermost circle. 

There was a brief moment of stillness before the people erupted into polite cheers and applauses. 

She felt herself clapping her hands and smiling until the young boy whipped his head—how could he see me?—in her direction. But before she could meet his eyes, her body was suddenly jerked back into the woods. 

There was a hand wrapped around her wrist. She traced her eyes from the firm finger to the form of a boy in blue and silver silk robe. He had gentler eyes than the previous boy, yet they bore the same vacant expression. He looked younger and had the same dark hair and fair skin. Could they be brothers?

He opened his mouth to talk and began in something that sounded like—Chinese?—before switching back to strange Korean that she made a little better sense of. "You don't look like you belong here." He eyed her up and down, from her head to her feet, and slightly flushed when he stopped at her legs. She tilted her head. The boy coughed. "Who are you?"

She didn't reply, because by the time she could open to speak, the image before her was already blurring into sounds. There was a ruffle of noises before another voice emerged. 

"Who was that?"

"No one, brother." 

Later that day, she was gently awakened by her father when she was tugged out of the corner of her room and into his arms. 

It must've been a dream. 

But little did she know, her little journey back in time had begun a web of fates, of destructions, and of Love.