The nearby city swept Kkotji beach in a tired glow of artificial light.

Usually, due to the vast light pollution, heaven's stars would be obscured from his feeble eyes. That night, it was not the case. Perhaps, as he inched closer to his return to Earth, in his final plethora of minutes, he saw life - nature - as it is: raw.

The veil thinned to a constant dance between heaven, hell, and earth.

He absentmindedly traced Yeosang's name in the sand.

Was he worth it?

As he thought about this, a gentle smile spread on his lips, a welcoming laugh, a deep breath of the smooth atmosphere.

He would be an entirely different person without Yeosang. He would have been worse than an only child: he would have been the child who lost his closest companion.

And, for better or worse, he felt he would have failed his core purpose of existence.

At ten, it would have been impossible to comprehend a life where Yeosang left him. As the brothers aged, however, he attempted coming to terms with the idea that he was not required to lay down his life for Yeosang.

But even though it was not required, he regretted nothing of his trade.

Well, he thought, here we are.

With every second the clock ticked down, his anxiety seeped farther away from his chest. Fear of the future traveled away from his body, dripping off his limbs as if sweating out a disease.

I thought I would be more scared to leave, filled with regret and longing. The peace is nice, though, so different from life.

He supposed this calm is the pay-off of an intentional end.

But after a moment, he cried. It was hard. Agonizing to leave the wonder of life which he had just begun to appreciate, hard to leave behind the people which he knew and those he would never meet. He missed them to his core, those people he would never meet.

The depth of his soul dripped as deep-born water into the sand. He did not realize the way his tears turned to crystals.

He thought of the letters he had written a mere few hours previously. He was glad the one to his father would never be read, for it seemed trivial, now, to hold such a strong amount of enmity. But this feeling of peace, it only arrived once the pain of life released  its grip on his heart.

A stranger passed by in the sand; he reminded him of Yeosang.

"Excuse me!" He called out. "What time is it?"

"23:56." The young man answered through the dark. "Sir are you okay? Aren't you cold?"

But, "no," he answered, because his chest felt only warmth. To him, in that late November night, it felt to be as in the height of summer.