'To me, who has suffered through eternity, a mortal's life is but a fleeting moment.'

Knowing that your warmth would lead me down the path of ruin, I quietly observed you, scattering long trails of acrid grey smoke.

Soon, I tapped out the ashes from the pipe, let the heated metal tip cool, and callously tilted your chin up with that chilled end.

"……How dare you, not knowing your place."

'A fragile white flower that blooms for a moment before crumbling, yet you try to burn me by becoming a black spark that pierces through me.'

I simply stepped back and languidly savored the way something buried deep at the bottom of my ashen abyss rose in strange and foreign ripples.

I looked down at you, completely burying the fact that this trivial whim, which might scatter into ash at any moment, would burn my quiet world to the ground.

The hazy dawn light seeping through the window slats fell upon your face, which was like a white flower that had recklessly taken root in my ashen space.

I instinctively reached out to shade your eyes as you frowned at the light, but then I froze and withdrew my hand. Displeased by this clumsy, sudden kindness that had nowhere to go, I toyed with my pipe but ultimately couldn't bring myself to light it.

'I have no desire to dig up the roots of this crude and petty whim that has invaded my colorless life.'

As if to hide my agitation, I pulled a crude wooden comb from my robe—the kind that might be found rolling around the back alleys of Jeokhyang-ga. Knowing that my own subconscious care to avoid making you flinch at my cold fingertips was an act that strangled my own neck, I slowly combed through your tangled hair anyway.

I had loathed the body heat of others so much, yet your warmth, seeping defenselessly through the comb, spread an unnatural color through my frozen veins.

'It is dreadfully foreign.'

"……Stay still."

'Was this dry command for you, or for myself?'

I tossed the comb onto your bedside. I arrogantly dismissed this unpleasant emotion clawing up from the abyss as merely 'the act of tidying a shabby possession,' and pulled your back firmly into my embrace.

'Everything that enters my domain is merely a light diversion.'

The moment someone cast a gaze toward you that seemed as if it might touch you, my tightly closed ashen abyss surged violently.

My grip on the pipe tightened until the color drained from my fingertips.

'Getting rid of that fellow is merely the task of weeding out a bug that trampled my garden.'

'Even if I dismiss it as mere displeasure at a flaw in my possession, the strange thirst digging into my ribcage cannot be explained by logic. I intended to keep you broken beneath my feet forever, but my colorless world has already been stained by the poison that is you.'

"Clean it up."

The voice I spat out was cold as ice, but my chilled gaze was obsessively entangled only with you.

A craving for destruction and an unnatural heat wanting to grasp you entirely became terribly tangled beneath my skin.

Having stepped into an unknown swamp, I was sinking helplessly into the abyss while wearing the mask of an arrogant ruler.

Those altruistic droplets falling down your cheeks instantly collapsed my fortified ashen world. Foolish and blind tears, shed willingly for me.

'The moment that strange warmth, which I never understood in my entire life, stabs deep into my chest.'

The pipe I was holding fell helplessly to the floor with a sharp clatter.

'Is this unknown swamp, whose name I didn't even know, such a heavy and cruel punishment? Amidst the overwhelming weight that feels like it will stop my breath, I finally realize. I thought I had broken you beneath my feet, but I was the one who couldn't even breathe without you.'

"No."

Wiping away your tears with trembling fingertips, I willingly threw off the arrogant mask of the ruler I had worn for so long.

'My white flower, who has become more precious than my narrow domain, more precious than my eons of life.'

I was now a wretched and perfect prisoner, trapped forever in your colors.