Are All The Boys Out Here The Same?

Chowon had expected a man.

That was the thing no one warned her about — not the summoning ritual itself, which she’d found courtesy of her unnies, and not the three days of failed attempts before the candles finally held their flame. No one had warned her that when the air in the center of the room went cold and thick, like the inside of a walk-in freezer, what stepped through the stillness would be a woman. A woman in a suit, mind you.

She was striking in a way that made Chowon’s eyes want to look away and couldn’t. A tar black suit, cut sharp at the shoulders. White hair swept back from an almost elegant face — would have been, fully, if not for the two small horns pushing through at the crown, blunt as thumbs and deeply out of place. Her eyes were the color of a brake light. She reminded Chowon a bit of herself in all honesty.

“Oh,” the entity said, with a smile that arrived before the rest of her expression caught up. “You must be Chowon.”

Chowon nodded. Her throat had closed.

“Don’t be shy, darling.” The woman tilted her head, amused. “I’m not here to frighten you. I’m here to help.”

“Help me.” Chowon found her voice, thin as it was. “You can actually — you can help me debut?”

“I can.” She said it the way someone says of course — like the question was almost too small to deserve an answer. “But I want you to understand something before we go further. This life you’re hungry for? It doesn’t come free. Not from your agency, not from your trainers —” she paused, smoothing the lapel of her jacket before shrugging it from her shoulders, draping it over the back of the chair nearest her — “and certainly not from me.”

Beneath the jacket was a deep red sweater, neatly tucked into a black pencil skirt that stopped at the knee. Red stockings. Black boots. She moved through the room as she had always lived in it.

Chowon swallowed. “What’s the cost? I’ll do anything.”

The entity — Asmodeus, the post had called her, Asmodeus, the one who answers ambition — let the silence sit between them for a beat. Then she smiled again, fuller this time, and extended one hand.

“Come here.”

Chowon moved without deciding to. That was the part she would try to remember later, in the moments she was still capable of remembering: that her feet carried her forward on their own, like a word she hadn’t meant to say out loud.

Asmodeus was close now. Closer than comfortable. The cold that had filled the room seemed to be coming from her, or maybe from the space just behind her eyes.

“Little Chowon.” Her voice had dropped, low and deliberate, each word placed with care. “To receive everything you lust for, you must take what I’m offering. Willingly. That’s the only rule that matters.” She lifted Chowon’s chin with two fingers. “Are you willing?”

She should have asked what everything meant. She should have asked what the offering was. She should have asked a great many things.

“Yes,” Chowon said.

Asmodeus kissed her — and the world didn’t go dark, which somehow made it worse. Chowon stayed present for all of it. She felt the change moving through her, not like fire, not like cold, but like something being quietly removed. Not from her body. Deeper. From some chamber of herself she hadn’t known existed until it began to empty.

When Asmodeus stepped back, Chowon’s legs gave out. She caught herself on her hands and knees against the floor, breathing hard, blinking at the carpet.

“Rise.” The voice above her was almost gentle. “You’re not the same thing you were sixty seconds ago. That’s worth something.”

Chowon looked up.

Asmodeus was watching her the way you watch a door you’ve just unlocked — patient, certain, already knowing what’s on the other side.

“You are evolved,” she said. “Rejoice in your unholy ascendancy.”

Years Later

The cinnamon roll had been sitting in the B4 slot since Tuesday.

Luard knew this because he had been thinking about it, off and on, since then. It was Friday now — cataloguing reasons not to buy it, losing the argument with himself incrementally over the course of an eighty-hour workweek, until here he was at 4:30 in the morning staring at his own reflection in the vending machine glass like a man on trial.

His weary reflection nearly drowned the light out of the little machine. The reflection confirmed it without editorial comment.

He pressed B4, fed the machine its dollar fifty, and listened to the mechanical arm release the thing he’d been negotiating against for three days. Some victories felt like losses. This was one of those.

He was reaching into the tray when something touched his hand.

Not a brush. Not a draft from the air conditioning. A touch — fingertip-light, and cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature. He pulled his hand back and looked around the empty break room. The lights hummed. The machine beeped once, satisfied with itself.

He grabbed the roll and walked back toward his office.

It happened again in the hallway. The same featherlight contact at the back of his wrist, followed immediately by a wave of warmth that had no business being there — thick and disorienting, the kind that sits behind your eyes and makes the walls feel closer. He stopped walking. He looked at the ceiling, then the walls, then the carpet, in that order, the way a person does when they’re not sure what they’re looking for.

He opened his office door. Reached for the light switch.

Before his hand found it, something moved near the printer.

The shape was feminine — aggressively, architecturally so, the kind of silhouette that seemed designed with intent. It stood perfectly still, facing away from him, cast entirely in shadow even though there wasn’t enough darkness in the room to cast that much shadow.

Luard looked at it for a moment.

“Who goes there?” he said in the flat tone of someone who has already decided they’re too tired for whatever this is. “You. By the printer.”

The shape made a sound — a yelp, short and genuinely startled — and spun toward him.

“You can see me?” The voice was young. Alarmed. “Oh no. Oh, that’s — I’m so sorry, you’re not supposed to be able to, there’s a whole protocol about this, this is against code —”

Despite the fairly obvious implication that an entity explaining code violations for being seen in his office at 4:30 AM was not a great sign, Luard mostly felt bad for her.

“It’s alright,” he said. “Just tell me why you’re here.”

The shadow resolved itself.

She stepped into the light in stages — edges first, then the full picture — and Luard found himself looking at a woman who was, unmistakably, a K-pop idol. She had that specific quality of grooming that only comes from years of professional maintenance. Also: small horns at the crown of her head, blunt and pale. Eyes the color of a stoplight. And a tail — black, long enough that it pooled briefly on the floor behind her before she seemed to become aware of it and tucked it aside, self-conscious. Everything about the woman screamed nervous, compounding Luard’s desire to protect and overriding his self-preservation drive.

She stared at him.

He stared back.

“You’re a K-pop idol,” he said.

“Yes.” She straightened slightly, with the composure of someone defaulting to a rehearsed register. “I’m Chowon. Of LIGHTSUM.” A beat. “And you are?”

“Luard Pendragon.”

Something shifted in her expression — briefly, genuinely charmed. “That’s a very knightly name.”

“Thanks.” He set his cinnamon roll on the desk. “What are you doing in my office?”