The Hourglass Thief

Prologue: The Scar of the Sky The winter of 1492 in Joseon was a season of ash and quiet dread. It was the night the sky tore open. Not with lightning, but with a silent, spectral white light that seemed to drain the color from the ancient pines and the blood from the face of the young woman standing on the precipice of Cheonma Peak. Seo-yeon was not a shaman, nor a noble. She was merely a weaver who held a forbidden secret: she could hear the whispers of time itself—the subtle grinding of the Cosmic Hourglass that kept the universe in rhythm. Tonight, the whispers were screams. A shadow—a thing of sleek, cold velvet and endless hunger—had been tracking her. It wasn't human. It was an Oblivion Wraith, one of the few beings that could actually consume time. He appeared not by walking, but by the cessation of movement around him. The falling snow froze mid-air. The wind died. He was the void that followed the light. His name was only ever whispered as Jeong-ho, the thief of moments. "You took it," his voice was a low, frost-bitten melody that promised centuries of isolation. "The shard of the Hourglass." Clutched tightly in Seo-yeon's numb hand was a piece of crystallized starlight—a fragment of the shattered celestial object. It pulsed with a desperate, faint blue light. "It holds the thread of Aura," she whispered, her breath misting into the still air. "The spark of every soul." "And I need it," Jeong-ho stepped closer, his shadow falling over her like a shroud. "I need the thread to weave myself back into existence. I was unmade by the first Celestial War. To live, I must borrow from the living. Give it to me, Seo-yeon, or I will take more than just a moment from you." Her eyes, pools of tragic determination, met his. "You cannot be unmade again, but you cannot steal this future. Not this Destiny." With a sudden, fierce cry that sounded like a broken bell, she didn't throw the shard. She pressed it, hard, into her own chest, right over her sternum. The pain was immediate, absolute. The shard of time didn't pierce her; it fused with her soul, sinking deep into the essence of who she was. A pulse of raw, blinding blue energy erupted from her, driving Jeong-ho back a staggering step. He looked at her, truly looked at her, and his eyes—the color of dying embers—widened in dawning horror. "You fool," he hissed, the first genuine emotion cracking his cold façade. "You haven't just saved it. You've sent it forward. Through your own bloodline. A single, powerful thread, woven into the deepest part of your descendants' souls. You’ve scattered the needle in the haystack of five centuries!" Seo-yeon sagged, blood blooming across her thin winter robes. Her lips curved into a final, heartbreaking smile. "Then you'll have to wait, thief. And you'll have to find her." And then, she fell, not to the frozen ground, but into the oblivion of a chosen fate. Jeong-ho stood over her, the eternal thief outsmarted by a mortal’s sacrifice. He looked up at the scarred sky. "Five hundred years," he vowed, his voice a promise of patient, meticulous vengeance. "I will wait for the thread to emerge. I will trace the bloodline. And when the Aura-Heart awakens, I will take what is mine."