"Ah! Welcome, welcome, dearest guest of fate!" cried Hyeonjae, his voice swelling with theatrical grandeur, a twisted symphony of mirth and malice that reverberated through the very bones of the house.
He threw his arms open with sweeping exaggeration, a gesture that was part stagecraft, part invocation, as though summoning spirits or drawing curtains upon some long-awaited tragedy.
The posture he struck teetered unnervingly between mockery and martyrdom, shoulders flung back, chest arched forward, palms splayed wide to the ceiling like an actor basking in divine spotlight, or a saint caught mid-crucifixion, offering himself up not for salvation, but spectacle.
His grin was no mere smile; it was an architecture of madness carved across his face, stretched too far, too high, as if the muscles had been trained to remember joy but forgot how to feel it.
Teeth glinted like porcelain knives behind lips that curled with almost childlike delight, but his eyes, cold, luminous things, belied it all, glimmering with a heatless affection, like firelight on ice.
It was the kind of expression that welcomed and condemned in the same breath, a smile you might see on the executioner just before the axe came down.
And in that smile, behind its warped hospitality, Taejun felt it, the edge of something ancient and brutal, draped in charm but sharpened by purpose.
Taejun stood frozen, his body refusing every silent plea to move, as though some invisible thread had bound his limbs to the rotting wood beneath his feet.
His breath came in thin, ragged pulls, each inhalation a shallow echo of panic caught between disbelief and dread.
The edges of his vision trembled, not with tears, but with the fragile veil of terror pressed too tightly against the mind's eye.
Thoughts fluttered in and out of reach, fragmented and useless, half-formed prayers, flashes of remembered warmth, the phantom grip of a hand that once held his.
None of it helped.
The world had narrowed to the flickering darkness, the uneven floor, and the figure standing at its heart like a joke told by God in cruel taste.
The air itself clung to him like a damp cloth, thick with anticipation, as though the house, too, was leaning in to listen.
And Hyeonjae, dear, dreadful Hyeonjae, moved like a parody of grace, twirling once with a lightness so at odds with the weight of the moment that Taejun almost choked on the wrongness of it.
The soft tap of his shoes marked each step like a countdown, growing louder not in volume but in meaning, as though the sound itself carved intention into the silence.
"Ah, allow me the courtesy of a proper introduction this time," he purred, and the words slithered into the room like a lullaby dipped in poison, each syllable so smooth it almost felt kind, until it wasn't.
His voice carried the music of something nearly human: sweet on the surface, but lacquered with mischief, sharpened beneath by something that understood cruelty far too intimately.
"My name is Kang Hyeonjae, do try to remember it well, yes?"
His smile widened as he drew closer, too familiar, too pleased, too certain.
"And for heaven's sake, don't mistake me for that Richard Longford. He might be rich and dead-serious, but I, my friend, am far more handsome, more lively, and ever so slightly more unhinged, don't you think?"
His eyes shimmered with unnatural amusement, the kind that didn't fade when the laughter ended.
And then, that chuckle, quiet, restrained, almost polite but wrapped in something obscene, something that reached beneath the skin and whispered that the laugh was not meant to amuse but to disarm.
It crawled into the corners of the room and settled there like rot.
It was the sound of someone who had practiced sincerity long enough to wear it like flesh and discard it just as easily.
Taejun blinked once, then again, as if each act might wipe the vision from his eyes, might unsee what should never have taken form.
His pupils trembled in their sockets, dilated and panicked, fixed helplessly on the figure that stood so close, so obscenely close, his mere presence gnawing at the edges of reason like moths devouring silk.
His lips parted, though not willingly, it was as if the words were being drawn from him, peeled off his tongue like something sacred scraped raw.
"What… what are you?" he asked, but it was hardly a question.
It was the last whisper of someone reaching through fog for a lifeline that no longer existed, a cry not meant to be answered but to be heard by something that might still care.
But Hyeonjae's expression didn't flicker.
His grin remained while his eyes narrowed just slightly, the way one might admire a dying fire or the bloom of rot beneath a floorboard.
He tilted his head like a curious animal, and in that small tilt was something amused, something that mocked the very idea of fear while feeding off it all the same.
"Ah, that's the question, isn't it?" he purred, and his voice no longer sounded quite right.
It was too smooth, like glass that had never been touched by breath or warmth, and carried with it a chill that clung to the bones long after the words had passed.
"What am I? A friend? A trickster? A mirror held too close?"
He stepped around Taejun in a slow, deliberate arc, as though orbiting something sacred.
"Or perhaps… I'm just the part of you that never really left the nightmare."
And then he stopped, so near that Taejun could feel the air around him shift, a humid closeness that seemed to hum with restrained violence.
Hyeonjae leaned in, not enough to touch, but enough that his presence curled against the skin like invisible smoke.
Taejun could feel his breath: warm, but hollow in spirit, like something that had learned to mimic life through repetition alone.
And beneath that breath was something else, cold, clinical, the chill of an autopsy room dressed in perfume.
"Well then," Hyeonjae whispered, and this time his voice sounded less like a man and more like something wearing a man's voice as a costume.
It was soft, indulgent, threaded with the intimacy of a lover and the promise of dissection. "Shall we begin?"
He smiled again, not broader, but deeper, as though something behind his teeth had also been waiting for this moment, as though a door had just opened that would never, ever close.
Hyeonjae clapped his hands together with the giddy theatricality of a child unveiling a long-anticipated gift, only this gift had teeth, and the storm outside the windows seemed to rattle in rhythm with his glee.
Thunder cracked in the distance, not as sound but as punctuation, as if even the sky knew it was being summoned into witness.
"Wonderful!" he cried, voice bright with a joy that didn't belong in any sane room. "I knew you'd understand eventually. You're so good at pretending not to, but deep down, you always knew this was coming. Didn't you?"
He stepped closer with a kind of reverent flair, hands pressed together in mock prayer, and leaned just slightly toward Taejun, close enough for shadows to stretch and clutch around his frame, close enough for the scent of something burnt and sweet to linger like incense at a desecrated altar.
"We have so much to do tonight," he continued, his voice softening now, growing intimate, as if confiding secrets not meant for ears but for souls, "and time, my dear Taejun... ah, time is such a jealous little thing."
He paused then, eyes narrowing with mock sympathy, the smile on his lips still carved with that bladed joy. "Always running, always dying, never waiting for anyone... unless, of course, you grab it by the throat and make it bleed."
The last word hung there, twisted and obscene, as if spoken not from his mouth but from something crouched just beneath his skin, watching through his eyes.
And in that moment, Taejun could feel it, that truth beneath the words.
This was not a game. This was not a conversation.
This was an invitation written in dread and dressed in ceremony.
Whatever Hyeonjae had planned, it had already begun the moment he smiled.
He turned with a sudden flourish, a spin too graceful for the rotting wood beneath his boots, arms stretched wide like wings mid-flight, if wings could belong to something that circled carrion instead of sky.
His voice echoed through the long-abandoned halls of the house, bouncing off broken plaster and crawling down the narrow corridors like a child's forgotten song warped by time.
Dust stirred at his heels, rising in lazy spirals, clinging to the stale air like the ghosts of laughter that had once been real, innocent, maybe, before being buried beneath years of silence.
"First," he declared, spinning to face Taejun once more, his eyes glittering with a kind of manic affection, "I thought we might play a little game of hide-and-seek!"
His smile widened until it seemed to stretch the very corners of his face, revealing not teeth, but something behind them, something deeper.
"You hide, I seek. And don't worry," he added, his tone softening into a mockery of comfort, "I promise not to tear you apart when I find you."
A pause.
Then a slow, sweet giggle slipped from his lips, a sound too innocent for the filth it danced through, like a lullaby hummed in a morgue.
"Not unless you want me to," he added coyly, his voice sinking to a whisper thick with suggestion and threat.
The house around them seemed to hold its breath. Floorboards creaked with no footsteps.
The walls listened, and somewhere beneath it all, the house itself began to watch.
Taejun remained frozen in place, staring at the man who stood before him like some parody of grace carved from nightmare.
His chest rose in shallow, stuttering heaves, his lungs unable to draw more than a whisper of breath as if the air itself had thickened to syrup.
Fear clung to him like wet cloth, and every survival instinct screamed in his ears, demanding he flee, fight, do something but his body betrayed him, legs heavy and bloodless, rooted to the floorboards not by will, but by something older, something colder, as though the house had already decided to keep him for its own.
His fingers twitched.
His heart pounded. His eyes refused to blink, caught in the glittering trap of Hyeonjae's gaze.
And when he finally found the courage, or maybe the madness, to speak, his voice emerged thin and broken, more breath than sound, like a breeze rattling through bones left too long in the sun.
"I'm not..." He swallowed, and the motion hurt, like trying to swallow back the terror rising in his chest. "I'm not playing anything with you."
For a moment, silence followed, dense and absolute, like the calm before a scream.
Then Hyeonjae tilted his head ever so slightly, and the corners of his smile quirked with something unreadable.
Disappointment? Amusement? Hunger?
Taejun could no longer tell.
The air tasted of dust and iron, and behind the silence, the house listened, walls flexing with secrets unsaid, the floor beneath him warm in the wrong way, like the breath of something waiting just below.
Hyeonjae paused mid-step, arms still lifted in theatrical flair, frozen like the final beat of a conductor's performance poised at the brink of crescendo. His grin remained, sculpted and bright, but now, a hairline fracture ran through its polish, a subtle distortion that curdled the charm into something strained.
It wasn't disappointment that flickered behind his eyes, nor anger, at least not yet.
It was something stranger, something thinner, like the tension in a marionette's string just before it snaps.
"Oh?" he breathed, the word curling through the air like incense smoke. "You don't want to play games? No curiosity? No take back, alright? No little spark of wonder at this grand old house and the stories buried in its bones?"
He resumed walking, slow and unhurried, the rhythm of his steps unnervingly deliberate.
Each thud of his boot against the warped floorboards felt like a drumbeat from beneath the earth, a funeral march echoing not just in the hallway, but in Taejun's chest.
The sound was deep, as if Hyeonjae's presence dragged something behind it, something vast and ancient and chained just out of sight.
His cloak flared faintly with each step, stirring the stagnant air, and as he drew nearer, so too did the pressure in the room, like a barometric drop before the storm breaks.
"You wound me, Taejun," he said, placing a hand delicately over his heart as if in mourning.
"I offer you wonder, and you offer me refusal? I open the stage, and you won't even step into the light? Tsk."
He clicked his tongue once, softly, a sound that somehow carried louder than it should have, like a pebble dropped into a well that never ends. "But perhaps it's not your fault. Maybe you're afraid. And that's why you should be."
He stopped mere feet from Taejun now, his form casting no shadow even as the room darkened around him.
His face still smiled, but behind that smile, behind the silvery gleam in his eyes, something shifted, a stillness that didn't belong to the living.
"No one ever enters here without cost," he whispered, tilting his head. "You've already paid part of the price, Taejun. That splinter in your palm? That's just the receipt."