The fifteenth rejection letter arrived on the day her mother died.
Yuna stared at the envelope in her hands. Crisp white paper, embossed seal of the Hanseong Academy for Resonance Studies, her name printed in perfect sans-serif.
Professional. Impersonal. Final.
She already knew what it said. They all said the same thing.
Her mother's breathing rattled in the next room. Shallow. Wet. The hospice nurse had said it would be soon. Maybe hours, maybe a day.
Yuna had stopped asking for timelines three weeks ago. The numbers didn't matter anymore. Her mother was dying, and no amount of counting hours would change that.
She opened the envelope anyway.
Dear Ms. Veylan,
Thank you for your application to Hanseong Academy. After careful review of your Resonance assessment scores, we regret to inform you that your baseline measurement of 2.1 falls below our minimum threshold of 7.5 for admission.
We recommend exploring alternative career paths more suited to your aptitudes.
We wish you success in your future endeavors.
2.1.
Not even close.
Yuna folded the letter once, twice, three times, creasing it until it fit in her pocket. Fifteen schools. Fifteen rejections. Fifteen variations of the same polite dismissal.
She knew the math. 2.1 Resonance would never reach 7.5. Twenty years of global magic hadn't changed that fundamental truth for people like her.
But the academy websites all said the same thing: Resonance can grow with training. Keep trying.
So she had. Fifteen times. Fifteen failures.
Her mother called it determination. Yuna called it delusion.
Most people lived perfectly normal lives without magic: accountants, teachers, doctors. 7.5 Resonance put you in the top fifteen percent of the population. The rest of humanity managed just fine.
But working a normal job, filing papers or teaching math or anything else that didn't involve dimensional rifts and manifested power, felt like giving up on the only dream she'd ever had.
So she kept applying. Kept hoping. Kept bashing her head against a wall that would never break.
Insufficient.
The word didn't need to be written in the rejection letters. She heard it anyway.
"Yuna?"
Her mother's voice came through the thin apartment walls. Barely a whisper, but Yuna heard it.
She crossed the tiny living room in four steps and pushed open the bedroom door.
The hospital bed took up most of the space. Medical equipment crowded the nightstand: pill bottles, oxygen monitors, a morphine drip that beeped every thirty seconds.
Yuna was twenty-four. Old enough to have tried fifteen academies. Young enough to still hope the sixteenth might say yes.
The walls were bare except for a single photo. Yuna at twelve, grinning with a gap-toothed smile, her mother's arm around her shoulders.
Back when her mother still had hair. Back when "cancer" was a word that happened to other people.
"I'm here, 엄마." Yuna knelt beside the bed and took her mother's hand.
The skin was papery, translucent. She could see every vein, every bone.
"I'm here."
Her mother's eyes opened. Just barely. Brown eyes, like Yuna's, but faded now, clouded with pain and morphine and the slow dimming that came before the end.
"The letter?" her mother whispered.
Yuna's throat tightened. "It doesn't matter."
It does matter. It always matters.
"Yuna..."
"It doesn't." She squeezed her mother's hand gently. "I'll try again next year. There are other schools. I'll figure something out."
"Stop."
The word cut through the hospice quiet. Not loud. But firm.
Her mother had always been firm, even when she could barely speak.
"엄마, please..."
"You can't save me by fixing yourself."
Her mother's grip tightened. Barely perceptible, but Yuna felt it.
"I'm proud of you. Do you understand? I'm proud."
Yuna shook her head. "I'm insufficient. That's what they keep saying. Insufficient Resonance. Insufficient potential. Insufficient everything."
"You are enough."
Her mother coughed. Wet, rattling. Blood flecked her lips.
"You've always been enough. The world just... doesn't see it yet."
The morphine pump beeped. Thirty seconds. Another dose.
Her mother's eyes fluttered closed.
Yuna sat beside the bed for three hours.
Held her mother's hand while the breathing grew shallower, slower, until finally it stopped altogether.
The machines beeped their warnings, but Yuna didn't move. Didn't call the nurse. Just sat there, feeling the warmth fade from her mother's fingers, watching the woman who'd raised her alone slip away into nothing.
You are enough.
The last words her mother ever said.
Yuna didn't believe them.
The hospice nurse came eventually. Found Yuna still sitting there, hand in hand with a cooling corpse, staring at nothing.
"I'm sorry for your loss," the nurse said.
Yuna nodded. Said thank you. Let the woman do whatever needed to be done.
Paperwork. Phone calls. Arrangements.
Her mother's body would be cremated. There was no money for a funeral. Barely money for the hospice bed.
Yuna signed forms she didn't read and walked out into Seoul's evening air feeling hollowed out, scraped clean, like someone had reached inside her chest and removed everything vital.
The rejection letter was still in her pocket.
She pulled it out. Stared at it under the streetlights while taxis honked and pedestrians flowed around her like water around a stone.
Insufficient.
Alternative career paths.
We wish you success.
Yuna laughed.
It came out broken, somewhere between a sob and a scream, and a couple walking past gave her worried looks.
She didn't care.
Her mother was dead. She had 2.1 Resonance in a world that demanded 7.5. She had no job, no prospects, no future worth living.
And she was standing in Hangang Park, seven blocks from the hospice, with a rejection letter in her hand and absolutely nothing left to lose.
The sky tore open.
Not metaphorically. Not gradually.
One moment Yuna was standing in the park, staring at the letter. The next moment the air above her head split apart like someone had taken scissors to reality itself.
Violet light poured through the tear.
Not earthly light. Not any color that belonged in Seoul's smog-gray evening.
This was wrong, a color that made her eyes water and her brain itch just looking at it.
People screamed.
Yuna looked up.
The tear in the sky was twenty feet across. Maybe thirty. Growing. The edges flickered and sparked like a broken television screen, and through the gap she could see...
Nothing.
No.
Not nothing.
Everything.
Colors that didn't exist. Shapes that bent in directions that weren't physical. Patterns that made her stomach lurch and her head spin.
She tried to look away. Couldn't.
The violet light wrapped around her like hands, like chains, like inevitability.
Pulled.
Yuna's feet left the ground.
She tried to scream but no sound came out. Tried to grab something, a tree branch, a lamp post, anything, but her hands passed through air.
Up.
Higher.
The park fell away beneath her. Seoul became a map of lights. The river twisted like a silver snake through the city grid.
And the portal swallowed her whole.
The sensation of crossing was indescribable.
Like being turned inside out. Like every cell in her body trying to occupy the same space simultaneously. Like reality couldn't decide if she was matter or energy or something in between.
Yuna's mother had once asked her what she was most afraid of.
She'd said: "Being told I'm not enough."
Now she knew the real answer: not existing at all.
The portal crushed that fear into her bones and dragged her through.
She fell.
Not through air. Through something else. Something thick and wrong and full of angles that shouldn't exist in three-dimensional space.
Her lungs tried to breathe but there was nothing to breathe. Her eyes tried to see but sight didn't work here. Her brain tried to process but this place, this between, didn't follow rules her brain understood.
Time stretched. Or compressed. Or stopped altogether.
Seconds might have been hours. Hours might have been heartbeats.
Yuna couldn't tell.
All she knew was pressure and wrongness and the terrible certainty that she was being unmade, that whatever this place was, it was dissolving her particle by particle and soon there would be nothing left.
And then...
Snap.
Reality reassembled around her with brutal suddenness.
Air flooded her lungs. Gravity grabbed her. Light burned her retinas.
She was falling again.
But this time through real space. Actual physics. The kind where falling meant hitting the ground and hitting the ground meant death.
Yuna's eyes adjusted.
Sky.
Not Seoul's gray evening. This sky was violet, deep, pulsing, wrong in a way that made her head hurt.
And hanging in that impossible sky...
Three moons.
Red. Silver. Gold.
Three moons where there should be one.
Where am I?
The ground rushed up.
Mountains. Jagged and black like broken glass. Ash drifting through the air like snow.
Yuna opened her mouth to scream.
Heat exploded between her shoulder blades.
Not painful. Not exactly. But intense, like someone had pressed a branding iron against her spine and set it on fire.
The heat spread. Down her back. Across her shoulders. Into her arms.
And then...
Light.
Silver light erupted from her back.
Yuna twisted in mid-air and saw them: wings.
Not physical wings. Not feathers or bone or anything that made sense.
Just light shaped into the idea of wings, translucent and flickering and barely there.
But they caught air.
Her fall slowed.
Not stopped. Not gentle.
Just slowed from certain death to probably going to hurt a lot.
Yuna hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from her lungs and send pain shooting through her left shoulder.
She rolled. Tumbled. Came to a stop face-down in gray powder that tasted like copper and ash.
The wings vanished.
Yuna lay there, gasping, every nerve ending screaming.
But alive.
I'm alive.
The thought felt impossible.
She pushed herself up on trembling arms, looked around.
Ash. Mountains. Alien sky. Three impossible moons.
And in her pocket, somehow still there despite everything...
The rejection letter.
She pulled it out. Unfolded it with shaking hands.
Insufficient.
Yuna stared at the word.
Then she started laughing.
Because she'd just survived dimensional transit and crash-landed on an alien world and apparently manifested wings made of light, and the rejection letter was still telling her she wasn't enough.
The laughter turned to sobs.
She sat in the ash under three moons, holding a piece of paper from a dead world, and cried.
You are enough, her mother had said.
Yuna didn't know what she was anymore.
But she was alive.
She was here.
And somewhere in the distance, barely visible through the ash, golden light flickered.
Artificial light.
People.
Yuna folded the letter and put it back in her pocket.
Not because she believed what it said.
Because it was proof. Proof she'd existed on Earth. Proof her mother had existed. Proof that three hours ago she'd been someone with a name and a history and a life, even if that life had been insufficient.
She wiped her face with her sleeve, stood on shaking legs, and started walking toward the light.
One foot in front of the other.
The same way she'd walked out of the hospice. The same way she'd walked to fifteen academy interviews knowing she'd be rejected.
One more time, her mother had always said.
"Okay, 엄마," Yuna whispered to the alien sky. "One more time."
And she walked into Valdris, insufficient and alone, with nothing but a rejection letter and the impossible silver wings that had saved her life.
[END CHAPTER 1]