[CONTENTID1]Caution[/CONTENTID1][CONTENTID2]The World is Dead[/CONTENTID2][CONTENTID3]

[/CONTENTID3][CONTENTID4]

In the spiritual light of the moon, Jaejoong surveys his son's cold, empty bed. He has sensed trouble brewing long before tonight. Children have gone missing in the village and he can already guess what had become of them. How pitiful. As he makes his way back, his steps are quick and soundless like a phantom shadow. He must make sure she is sound asleep before he confronts his son's wrong doing. Jaejoong opens the door, approaches the bed, and bends down on one knee. He observes his wife's sleeping form. Her breaths are slow, relaxed, and well regulated. The subtle smile on her lips tell him she is have a beautiful dream. It makes him wonder. Will she smile still? If she knew the truth, it would surely break her heart. Hence, she must never find out. Never. And this fact must be made known to his restless son.

Jaejoong entrusts his wife to her sweet dreams and quits the room. In long, measured strides, he crosses wide hallways and kempt gardens in the direction of the abandoned courtyard standing just beyond the green lawn. He knows his son is hiding among the ruins of overgrown ivy. He can smell the stench of death in the air. It lingers like a heavy cloud.

"Zitao. You've had enough fun. Reveal yourself, son, and I will be lenient." Jaejoong catches a faint stirring of dried leaves but nothing more. "I know you took Isabella. Why, Zitao? Where is she now?" Jaejoong takes a step forward. There is a bloody pulse coming from across the courtyard where an old sun room stands in all its ancient glory. He walks towards the entrance and forces the rotten door open. It screams a chilling welcome.

The boy has a good laugh. "You always find me, baba!" To him, this is merely a game.

Jaejoong looks up to the cracked ceiling and finds his son swinging upside down from an antique light fixture covered in dead leaves and thick cobwebs.

His son is such an able boy. "Zitao..."

"She wouldn't play with me anymore, baba. So I gave her a good reason not to."

Inevitably, it comes down to this. The girl is dead. "Where is she, Zitao? Where did you leave her?"

Zitao gives his father a boyish grin. "Why, with the others, of course."

The others...

What is life? A simple game... A distraction... A diversion...

And death, on a whim, becomes a child's amusement.

... a demon child's.

[/CONTENTID4]