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Celine took better to the violence than her Sisters did, which made sense to her. She knew she was hard-edged and battle ready, knew there was a rage and hatred in her heart, a bloodthirsty desire to make someone pay for the wrongs of the world. It even reflected in what the Honmoon gave them.
Mi-Yeong got a sickle, she had always been the cultivator, the one who could make people grow and bloom, the one who could take even the smallest seed of goodness and nurture it into something beautiful.
Bitna got a thick woodcutting axe, she was the architect, the one of them who built bridges, who tore down the walls between them, who could make any space or any group into a home with her blunt exuberance.
Celine got a pair of curved hwando. Weapons, not tools, she didn’t make things like them, she was built for war, and took to their secret one like she’d been born for it.
Her Sisters tried to soften it, they would laugh about their steadfast bodyguard, their shining knight, but Celine knew what she was, and so had their teacher.
Celine was their soldier, their attack dog.
Celine existed because her Sisters, her precious, kind, good Sisters, hearth and garden tenders, might hesitate. So to survive not just demons, but the industry, they needed someone who would not.
But that’s not what’s deciding this fight.
Celine can only use one of her swords for this, her other arm clutching the bundle that is all that remains of their Mi-Yeong close against her chest. Celine is facing down the other half of her heart, eyes stinging with the lack of new tears to shed. Celine’s head is pounding with two lost nights of sleep and two days without a meal.
These things aren’t going to change the outcome.
Bitna is rested. Bitna can use her full range of motion. Bitna isn’t fighting her Sister, not really. Bitna is fighting the thing in her grip. Bitna has a target she only has to hit once, then it will vanish like every other demon, and there will be nothing left to remind her of how her Sister betrayed them.
And Bitna is losing.
It’s not the training Celine always excelled in that’s winning the fight, it’s not her ruthless efficiency, it’s not her speed or strength. It’s not even that she has more to lose.
They are both living their worst nightmares, their stakes weigh the same.
Celine is going to win, because she has gone numb. Because none of this feels real.
How could Bitna, shining, brilliant, smiling Bitna, their Makane, who hangs on Mi-Yeong’s every word and playfully wears at Celine’s careful professionalism with endless jokes and puppy eyes, be looking at their Sister’s infant daughter with such disgust? Where has the warmth of the hearth she built for them gone? How could there be a real world where Bitna’s eyes are so cruel?
Bitna is going to lose, because she has caught fire, and all of it is too real.
There is nothing but pain beneath her skin, and she knows dutiful, dependable Celine will try to make her live with this. Will make her wake up every day with their Sister’s abandonment toddling through the home she built for them, burning away at the foundations until not even her memories are safe from it.
So Celine is letting her instincts move her, the vicious creature in her gut that years of training normally help her control.
So Bitna’s every strike is a desperate hailmary, a screaming plea for the world to just stop.
And yet, Celine is still exhausted, she knows she will flag before her Sister does, and even though she would never hurt her, that savage instinct is searching for an opening.
There, axe lifted high, the moment that has spelled death for a hundred club-wielding demons. The blade snips out, and the grind of bone instead of a whisper of ash against her sword makes the world real again a moment too late to save Bitna’s arm, but just in time to spare her throat.
For a long moment, neither move.
Bitna knows it hurts, distantly, but the script flipped when she brought down her arm and everything below the elbow was gone, the flames doused by the impossible thought that Celine, shield as much as sword, her protector, their Unnie, dutiful and true, just turned the blade on her.
Celine’s world is teetering on a sliver of stone, she can feel herself on the edge, the plummet is on either side, and both are unforgivable. She should dismiss her weapon, should wrap the wound, she should gut herself for daring to turn against her Bitna.
The bundle in Celine’s other arm shifts, Rumi’s cries intensifying.
Her grip on the hwando tightens, pressing starlight against the one person left in the world she had thought would help her keep that child safe.
And Bitna only realizes the depths of her own betrayal as she watches the light leave her Knight’s eyes.
“Cel-”
“Leave.” Celine gasps. “Leave, and if I ever see you again, you die. If you ever come near Rumi, you die. If anything ever happens to this child, I will kill you.”
Yet, as tears finally come back to her eyes, as Bitna's breath catches and shudders, it’s still Celine that flees, leaving her last Sister weeping in her wake.