They moved on, not with eagerness, but with the heavy rhythm of people moving toward something they did not entirely understand, drawn less by curiosity than by gravity, pulled forward by the slow unraveling of something they could no longer ignore.
The fairground had begun to rot at the edges. Not visibly, not in the way wood splinters or lights flicker and die, but in the way a dream begins to lose its cohesion at the seams, the way laughter begins to echo too long, and familiar paths no longer loop back to where they should.
Somewhere behind them, a bell rang with the dull clang of an empty church, and yet they kept walking, following the crooked curve of a path that now seemed to bend away from the center of the fair and toward something forgotten.
The spinning teacups sat still in the hollow light of an aging lamp. The ride operator, a gaunt man with eyes too glassy to meet and hands folded neatly as though posed for a photograph, stood half-asleep beside the control panel.
His skin was pale beneath the jaundiced glow of a flickering bulb overhead, and his expression never changed as Taejun and Hyeonjae approached.
If he saw them, he made no sign.
If he breathed, the night made no space for it.
Without exchanging a word, they climbed into the nearest chipped porcelain cup, its floral patterns worn down to smears of color, its metal floor groaning beneath their weight like a creature protesting a memory it didn't wish to relive.
With a sputter and then a lurch, the ride came alive.
At once, the world began to spin, not gently, not playfully, but with a sickening determination, as though trying to shake loose some truth buried deep inside the bones.
The lights above bled into one another, red and gold and violet streaking together in a whirlpool of color, a carousel of forgotten joy smeared across the black canvas of night.
Taejun gripped the rim of the teacup tightly, his knuckles bone-white, his breath catching in his throat.
He let out a sound between a laugh and a gasp, startled by how the wind tore through his sleeves and whistled against the shell of his ears.
Beside him, Hyeonjae was laughing too, but his face was turned, not inward toward the ride, but outward, toward the treeline at the edge of the fairgrounds, toward the darkness that curled beneath the boughs like something sleeping, or watching.
When the spinning finally slowed, the air around them felt wrong, like it had been stirred too much, like something unseen had been pulled up from the ground and now hovered just beneath the surface of perception.
The teacup jerked to a halt. Taejun stumbled out and nearly fell, the earth swaying beneath his feet as though still rotating.
He collapsed onto a nearby bench, one hand clutching the cracked music box, the other pressed to his forehead, trying to remember whether the dizziness was from motion or memory.
"That was either exhilarating," he muttered, eyes half-closed, "or a warning from my vestibular system."
"Okay, yep. It's both," Hyeonjae continued, dropping beside him with a thud of rubber soles on wood. He tilted his head, watching Taejun with quiet focus. "Have you... You remember anything yet?"
Taejun's hand curled tighter around the music box. He stared straight ahead. "It's just… fragments. Feelings. Bits and pieces that don't make sense on their own."
"You'll remember more when it hurts. Do you perhaps want one more spin to go?"
Taejun blinked slowly. "That's not exactly comforting."
"I wasn't trying to be."
They sat without speaking for a while, the silence between them expanding slowly, comfortably, then uncomfortably, like a rubber band stretched too far.
The fair around them had emptied in a way that didn't feel like closing time; it felt like abandonment.
The carousel nearby had frozen mid-spin, one of its horses caught in a stuttering leap, its jaw open as if mid-scream, its glass eyes glossy with dust and age.
A popcorn bag fluttered down the main path like a wounded bird, eventually snagging on the twisted wheel of a stroller that hadn't moved in years.
The music overhead had begun to decay, not in melody, but in fidelity. It sounded as though someone had pressed rewind and play at the same time, warping the notes into something unfamiliar. A lullaby caught in its own throat.
Taejun tilted his head up toward the sky, expecting comfort from the stars.
But they offered none. The night sky felt painted rather than infinite, like a ceiling, like something that could crack.
"Have we come here before?" he asked, though the words felt strange on his tongue, as if borrowed from someone else's dream.
Hyeonjae didn't answer at first. When he did, his voice was quiet. "Yeah. I brought him. When you were small."
"...Jihoon?"
"You were proud of him because of something. I forgot it," Hyeonjae said. "You're too proud, maybe. You kept holding his hand like it was made of porcelain. You thought if you held on tight enough, nothing in the world could ever touch him."
Taejun exhaled, but the air didn't go far. It sat heavy in his lungs, thick with something like guilt.
"I dropped his hand, didn't I?"
"Yes, you did. But why are you asking these questions?"
The pause that followed was so long it might have been permanent.
"But," Hyeonjae added softly, "you were the only one who ever held it."
The words settled around them like snowfall, quiet and unspokenly cold. There was no accusation in his voice. =And perhaps that was worse.
Before the silence could fester into something unbearable, Hyeonjae stood, brushing the dust from his knees as though waking from a dream.
He stretched once, back arching like a cat's, and then looked down at Taejun with something between mischief and sorrow.
"One last game," he said, gesturing toward the far edge of the fair, where a rusted arcade booth blinked lazily beneath a canopy that had long since lost its color.
Taejun followed him, each step slow, like walking deeper into something he wouldn't be able to leave.
They stopped in front of the coin pusher machine, a rickety thing with a cracked glass pane and shelves inside stacked precariously with coins that hadn't moved in years.
The machine was humming faintly, like something dreaming of electricity.
A single dim bulb flickered overhead, casting strange shadows on the coins.
Hyeonjae reached into his pocket and held out a single coin. It was old.
The face had been worn smooth, its edges almost soft. Taejun took it without a word.
"This one's different," Hyeonjae said. "They always are."
Taejun hesitated only a moment before dropping the coin into the slot.
The machine gave a mechanical groan, the shelves shuddering with what sounded like strain, like something not built to move had been forced awake.
The coins shifted slightly. Something beneath them flashed, not the glint of silver or the edge of plastic, but something darker.
A glimpse of skin. An eye, wide and staring, trapped beneath the glass.
Taejun stepped back quickly, breath catching in his throat.
"I saw—"
"I know," Hyeonjae said, his voice almost a whisper now. "They always look back."
Taejun turned toward him, but the question in his throat never made it out.
"Was this really just a carnival?" he asked finally, almost afraid of the answer.
Hyeonjae didn't smile exactly. His lips curved, but it wasn't joy, it was resignation, grief layered beneath years of silence. He looked up at the broken lights.
"No," he said. "But we made it one. For a little while."
The music faltered, then faded entirely.
The lights dimmed until they were only ghosts of themselves.
And the night took a long, slow breath.
The machine still trembled faintly, as if it had not yet finished digesting the token.
Taejun's breath caught in his throat, eyes locked on the glint beneath the glass, the afterimage of that eye burned in his vision like a smear across his memory.
He stood stiffly, knuckles white around the edge of the machine, while beside him, Hyeonjae pulled another coin from his jacket pocket.
He examined it in the flickering light: clean, too perfect, like it had never been touched by human skin.
Then he dropped it in.
The coin vanished with a clink, sliding down the chute and striking the precarious shelves inside. The pile of metal disks shifted with a sigh, a few tokens slumping forward, but nothing fell. Not a single coin.
Instead, from the sliver of darkness near the bottom tray, something else began to curl upward. It moved slowly, almost shyly, like the unfurling of an underwater creature, thin strands of ink-colored nothingness creeping up the machine's interior glass.
Taejun blinked, trying to be sure of what he saw. But Hyeonjae didn't seem to notice. Or rather, he did, but he wasn't surprised.
"Do you remember what you used to say?" Hyeonjae asked, voice too soft for the brittle quiet of the abandoned fairground. "Those games were the safest place in the world, because they had rules. Start and end. Winners and losers. Everything's in its place."
Taejun gave a shaky laugh. "Yeah. Maybe because I was dumb."
"No, you were trying to survive." Hyeonjae's eyes flicked sideways. "You always were."
As he reached to press the flashing button, just a harmless final act, Taejun noticed something.
The shadow had found him.
Tiny strands, like smoke, like soot, barely wider than thread, had begun to coil around the tips of Hyeonjae's fingers.
They weren't obvious. They moved like the illusion of movement, so subtle the mind wanted to dismiss them as tricks of light. But Taejun's gaze didn't waver.
The threads pulsed once, then retracted, vanishing into Hyeonjae's sleeve like they'd never been there at all.
Yet something about his hand had changed. The veins beneath the skin looked darker.
Taejun stepped closer. "Hey, Hyung... you're bleeding shadow," he whispered.
Hyeonjae didn't look at him. "It's fine," he said, pressing the button. The machine jerked violently.
A row of coins slid forward, and all at once, the machine let out a low, grinding groan. The lights above it sputtered and then turned a deep, meat-colored red.
The pushers inside didn't stop. They kept moving, grinding the coins into themselves like they were chewing them down into something smaller.
Behind the glass, the eye returned. But this time, there were more. A pair. Then three. Then too many.
Taejun took a step back.
"Why are we still here?" he asked, voice thin. "Why are we doing this?"
Hyeonjae's shoulders rose and fell. "Because I needed to see if you'd remember before it's too late."
"Too late for what?"
The answer didn't come.
Hyeonjae's hands hung loose at his sides, and now the shadows were threading between his fingers more boldly, sliding in and out like leeches, wrapping around the joints like silk ribbon tied by something with too many hands.
It was beautiful in the worst way, slow, and somehow mournful. Hyeonjae didn't flinch.
"I can't leave this place anymore," he said finally, his voice barely audible over the distorted carnival tune spinning from the speakers overhead. "But you can."
Taejun stared at him, heart tightening. "What do you mean?"
"I tried to go back before," Hyeonjae said. "I thought I could. But the door doesn't open for me anymore. It only opens for the one who forgot."
The wind picked up. Or perhaps it was not wind at all. Something stirred at the far edge of the fairground, a ripple passing through the carousel horses, causing their heads to jerk ever so slightly as though waking from slumber.
The laughter from the funhouse, laughter no one had ever recorded, hiccuped in the distance and then cut out entirely.
"You're saying I can get out," Taejun said.
Hyeonjae nodded.
"But you're not coming."
He didn't answer.
Taejun stepped closer, reaching out, but Hyeonjae recoiled, not sharply, but with a weary gentleness, like a man backing away from the warmth he no longer deserved.
His hand was almost black now, and not from dirt or shadow alone; it was the color of ink soaking into parchment, of time pouring into flesh and eating it from within.
The tentacles had vanished beneath his sleeves, hiding their grip, but their presence remained, an unseen chain anchored deep in the unseen dark.
"I stayed behind," Hyeonjae said, "because someone had to guard the lock. But now it's open again, because you're here. Because you still have it."
Taejun looked down.
The music box.
Still clenched in his fist.
Still humming its sick lullaby.
"I never let it go," Taejun murmured.
"That's why you were able to come back," Hyeonjae said. "And you have to leave. Before they come through."
A distant chime echoed from deep within the funhouse, a high, hollow bell, like something had been announced.
The lights across the fairground flickered in sequence, blinking once, twice, then dimming to near-darkness.
The eyes behind the coin machine were no longer peering, they were watching, wide and unblinking.
They are eyeballs. Taejun flinched.
Taejun's throat tightened. "Tell me this isn't goodbye, yet. Not like this."
"I wish I could," Hyeonjae said, and for the first time, his voice cracked. "But the game's ending. And we don't get to choose how. But now... I have lots of fun because of you. And all I wanted to do now was to say 'Thanks'."
For a heartbeat, neither moved.
Then Taejun threw his arms around him.
Hyeonjae stood still.
Then, slowly, he raised one of his tainted hands, so carefully, and placed it on Taejun's back. The contact burned with cold.
"Go," he whispered. "They didn't notice yet, at least some of it. Now go! Leave me where I should be, Taejun."
Taejun staggered back, choking down the sob that threatened to split his ribs. Behind him, the path to the exit shimmered faintly, only visible to him, just as Hyeonjae had said.
The shadows were gathering fast now, climbing the walls, crawling across pavement, sliding down poles like ink bleeding from the seams of the world.
Something was coming, and it was hungry.
He ran.
And behind him, he didn't look back, not even when the music box stopped playing.