Banished Divinity: Learning to be Human

She was petite. Her hair was the color of ash, but purple ash, like someone had dipped the moon in lavender and let it drip dry. Her eyes were silver-green, bright as new coins, bright as the moment before lightning strikes.

Her skin was pale. Not pale like sick people, not pale like milk. Pale like moonlight on snow. Pale like something that had never been meant to stand under the sun.

She wore a suit that looked like liquid night—black and flowing and alive, moving across her body like it was breathing. And in her hand, she held a sword.

The sword was the same. Black and liquid and alive, pulsing with a light that matched her eyes.

The sword was moving.

Like it was made of smoke. Like it was made of water. Like it was made of something Minjae didn’t have a word for.

“It’s moving,” he whispered.

The girl looked at him.

Just for a moment. Just a glance.

But in that glance, Minjae felt something he had never felt before.

He felt safe.

Not spoke. Not shouted. Hissed, like animals, like snakes, like things that had forgotten how to be human.

“Leave him alone,” the girl said.

Her voice was soft. Low. The kind of voice that didn’t need to be loud to be heard.

“You filthy peasants. He is but a child.”

“Who the hell are you?” Taeho demanded. His hand was still holding the cleaver. His knuckles were white. “This doesn’t concern you. Get lost.”

“We need him,” his mother said. “We need him for a ritual.”

The girl’s eyes flickered.

“A ritual?”

She said it like the word tasted bad.

“And what, in the name of the seven hells, do you mortal peasants want with a ritual?”

“We heard about a man,” his father said. His voice was shaky now. Less confident. “The Unmarker. They say he can grant wishes if you do the ritual right. They say—”

“They say,” the girl interrupted, and her voice was louder now, sharp at the edges, “things that will get you killed. You mortal peasants shouldn’t meddle with forces you don’t understand.”

She pointed her sword at Soojin.

"Especially you.”

Soojin giggled.

It was the same giggle from before—high and sweet and wrong. But now, hearing it again, Minjae noticed something he hadn’t noticed before.

The giggle didn’t match her face. It was too old. Too knowing. Too hungry.

“You,” the girl said. “The Unmarker’s servant. You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t be in that body.”

Soojin’s smile widened.

“But that’s the fun of it,” she said. And her voice was different now—deeper, rougher, like something else was speaking through her throat. “These humans are so easy to manipulate. So easy to convince. They actually believed that a naked child—splayed out, entrails removed—would grant them wishes from the Unmarker.”

She laughed. It was not a human laugh.

“They believed everything I told them. Every lie. Every promise. Every beautiful, bloody word.”

Minjae’s stomach turned.

“So,” the girl said, her voice cold now, dangerously calm, “the Unmarker’s creature has a name, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” Soojin—or whatever was inside Soojin—said. “You may call me Vexis. Keeper of the Unmarked. Harvester of the Corrupted.” She tilted her head, and her neck crackled in a way that necks should not crackle. “And you, little celestial... what are you doing here? This world doesn’t concern you.”

“This world concerns me when creatures like you start possessing humans and convincing them to murder children.”

“Murder is such an ugly word. I prefer... transformation.”

“You’re not transforming anything. You’re consuming. You’re destroying. That’s all your kind knows how to do.”

“And your kind knows how to do what, exactly? Float around looking pretty while the universe burns?”

The girl’s grip tightened on her sword.

Taeho lunged.

It happened fast—faster than Minjae could follow. One moment, Taeho was standing ten feet away, the cleaver raised above his head. The next, he was screaming, his hand falling to the ground, blood spraying across the rooftop.

The girl’s sword had moved.

Minjae hadn’t even seen it.

“I was ordered to kill a demon and I am not supposed to kill humans,” the girl said. There was something in her voice that sounded almost like... sadness. “But such humans as you... such filthy, low-life humans should be killed.”

She looked at the blood on her sword. She turned to look at Minjae.

Her silver-green eyes met his.

And for a moment—just a moment—he saw something in them that he didn’t understand. Not pity. Not disgust. Something else. Something that looked like... an apology and sadness.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. To him. Only to him. “I’m sorry you had to see this.”

Behind her, Soojin—Vexis—had moved to Taeho. She knelt beside him, her hand hovering over his severed wrist.

And then she touched him.

His hand grew back.

New skin. New bone. New blood. It just... appeared, growing out of the stump like a flower blooming in fast-forward.

Taeho stared at his new hand. Turned it over. Flexed his fingers.

And then he laughed.

“This is why I possess a human,” Vexis said, standing up, her smile sharper than any blade. “You can’t kill me while I’m in this body, can you? You celestial beings and your precious rules. You can’t harm humans. And as long as I’m wearing this one...”

She spread her arms wide.

“You’re helpless.”

The girl’s jaw tightened.

“Now,” Vexis said, “get out of my way.”

The four adults advanced.

Minjae pressed himself against the wall.

The girl stood her ground.

She breathed in.

Slowly. Deeply. Like she was drawing something from the air itself.

And then she spoke.

The words were not words.

The words that left her mouth did not belong to any human language.

They were clicks and hums and tones that seemed to bypass Minjae’s ears entirely, vibrating instead in his bones—in his teeth, in his sternum, in the deepest hollows of his chest. This was the language of something older than language itself. Something that had existed before the first star was born, before light learned how to travel, before time decided to move in only one direction.

“Aequitas est iniustitia.” - To be fair is to be unfair.

The air around her shimmered, bending like heat rising from summer asphalt.

Minjae understood the words even though he had never heard them before. They pressed against his mind not as sounds but as meanings—raw and unfiltered, the way a thought feels before it becomes language.

“Aequa esse est iniqua esse.” - To be equal is to be unequal.

Her sword blazed brighter, the liquid darkness of its blade igniting from within.

The shadows at her feet began to move. They twisted. They rose. They reached toward the night sky like roots seeking water, like hands seeking something to hold.

“Debiles protegere...” - To protect the weak...

Her eyes were burning now—silver and green and something else, something that looked like the heart of a star compressed into two small, terrible points of light.

“Est fortes interficere.” - Is to kill the strong.

The shadows around her grew taller. Hungrier. They were not just shadows anymore—they were something else, something that had been waiting in the dark for a very long time.

“Etiamsi homines sunt.” - Even if they are human.

Her voice dropped to a whisper, but the whisper was louder than any scream.

“Ergo... ad infernum cum legibus.” - Well, then. To hell with the rules.

He was just a kid—twelve years old, bleeding from a dozen cuts, hiding behind crates on a rooftop while monsters trying to kill him. He had never studied ancient languages. He had never been initiated into celestial mysteries. He had no right to comprehend words that predated human speech.

But his mind was linked to hers.

He didn’t know how. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was the light that had brought her here, spilling across the rooftop like liquid grace. Maybe it was the way her presence pressed against the fabric of reality, making everything feel thinner, more permeable. Maybe it was simply that she had looked at him—really looked at him, not with pity or disgust but with recognition—and in that look, something had opened between them.

Whatever the reason, Minjae understood.

He understood what she was about to do.

And his blood ran cold.

To protect the weak is to kill the strong.

Even if they are human.

To hell with the rules.

She was going to break something sacred. Something that had governed her kind for longer than humanity had existed. She was going to sacrifice her principles—maybe her very nature—to save him.

A twelve-year-old fat kid who cried too much and ran too slow and had never been worth saving before.

“Wait—” he gasped.

But before he could say anything else, before he could tell her to stop, before he could find the words to say that he wasn’t worth it, that no one had ever chosen him before and she shouldn’t start now—

She turned.

Her silver-green eyes found his in the darkness.

“Close your eyes,” she said. “And don’t open them. No matter what you hear.”

“But—”

“Close them. Please.”

He closed them.

Not human screaming. Something worse. Something that sounded like the world itself being torn apart.

He heard wet noises. Crunching. Tearing.

He heard something that might have been laughter.

He opened his eyes.

Just a crack. Just a sliver. Just enough to see.

Taeho and his mother and his father were on the ground.

They weren’t moving.

Their heads—

Minjae couldn’t look at their heads.

He looked at Soojin instead.

She wasn’t Soojin anymore.

She was something tall. Something black. Something with too many limbs and too many eyes and a mouth that opened sideways instead of up and down. She was crouched over the bodies, her—its—mouth buried in—

It was eating.

Eating their brains.

Vexis was eating their brains.

And she was getting bigger.

The girl flew through the air.

Her sword blazed like a falling star—a streak of liquid light cutting through the darkness, leaving trails of silver and purple that burned against Minjae’s retinas long after they faded. But the sword was only the beginning.

She began to chant.

The words poured from her mouth like water from a breaking dam—not the slow, deliberate incantation from before, but something faster, fiercer, more desperate. The celestial language spilled out of her in waves, each syllable crackling with power, each phrase building upon the last like verses of a song that had been sung since the beginning of time.

“Ignis de caelo!”

Fire erupted from her free hand—not ordinary fire, but something ancient and hungry. Balls of molten light streaked toward Vexis, exploding against the creature’s dark form in bursts of orange and gold. The rooftop lit up like midday. The heat was so intense that Minjae had to shield his face, had to turn away from the blinding glow.

“Fulmen dei!”

Lightning answered her call.

Bolts of electricity arced from the sky—not the wild, random lightning of a storm, but precise, targeted strikes that she directed with flicks of her wrist. Each bolt slammed into Vexis with a crack like the world breaking in half. The creature screamed and staggered, its too-many limbs flailing, its too-many eyes blinking in rapid, disoriented succession.

“Ventus virtutis!”

Wind rose up around her—a cyclone of power that whipped her purple hair into a frenzy and sent debris flying across the rooftop. The wind wrapped around her like armor, like wings, like something that had been waiting its whole existence to serve her.

Fire. Lightning. Wind. She wielded them all.

It was terrifying.

It was beautiful.

Minjae had never seen anything like it. The girl who had saved him was not just a warrior—she was a force of nature. A one-woman apocalypse wrapped in pale skin and purple hair and eyes that burned with the light of dying stars.

She hit the creature—Vexis—with the full force of her body, driving the blade deep into its chest while fire still danced along her arms and lightning still crackled in her wake.

The creature screamed.

It was not a sound that belonged in any world Minjae understood. It was too high and too low at once, a frequency that bypassed his ears and drilled directly into his skull. The scream shattered the clay pots lined against the rooftop wall. It cracked the concrete beneath their feet, sending spiderwebs of fissures racing toward the edges of the building. It made Minjae’s ears bleed—warm trickles running down his neck, unnoticed until he felt them drip onto his collar.

The girl and the creature fell together, tangled, slashing, burning. Their forms blurred into one another—light and shadow, wings and claws, sword and teeth. The roof shook with the force of their collision.

And then—

Nothing.

The light vanished.

The sound stopped.

The world went quiet in a way that felt wrong, like the silence after a gunshot, like the pause between a held breath and a scream.

Minjae felt his body growing limp. His legs would no longer hold him. His arms hung useless at his sides. His eyes were closing on their own, heavy as stones, and no matter how hard he tried to keep them open, the darkness kept creeping in from the edges of his vision.

Not now, he thought. I can’t pass out now. I have to see—I have to know if she’s—

But his body had already made its decision.

Before everything went dark, just as the last sliver of light was fading from his sight, he thought he saw something.

Something small.

No larger than his thumb.

Green and fluffy.

It was floating above him, wings fluttering so fast they were barely visible—a tiny, translucent thing that caught the dying light and scattered it like broken glass. Its eyes were wet, weeping, swollen with tears that had been crying.

And he felt little hands pressing against his face.

Small. Warm. Trembling.

They pressed against his cheeks, his forehead, his eyelids—as if trying to hold him together, as if trying to keep him from slipping away.

A sound reached him, barely audible over the ringing in his ears.

A single, soft, heartbreaking syllable.

“Moo...”