It was supposed to be a standard shoot.

Bright lights. Smoke machines. Fake cherry blossoms glued to scaffolding. And Jeon Jungkook, standing barefoot on a glass platform in a hanbok that cost more than his first car, being told to look "mysteriously celestial" while a wind machine tried to blind him with his own hair.

"Again, from the top!"

Someone clapped a slate. The music rolled in.

Jungkook blinked against the spotlight and tried to summon his inner tragic deity. He lifted his chin, let the silk sleeves fall like waterfalls from his arms, and reached out with both hands toward the sky, or rather, toward a poorly rigged moonlight rig hanging from a crane.

He held the pose.

He held it longer.

"Don’t blink, Jungkook-ssi!"

He blinked.

The director sighed so loudly it echoed. "You need to emote! You're the last prince of a star kingdom, mourning your lost lover! Channel that!"

Jungkook lowered his arms slowly. "I’m literally standing on a floor made of plexiglass above a fish tank. My lover is a boom mic."

Makeup rushed in to reapply gloss.

A stylist steamed the hem of his hanbok midair.

The assistant director whispered, "Fifteen minutes until the storm rolls in. We need to wrap this shot."

Jungkook stepped back from the platform and peeled the flower petals off his sleeves.

Rain tapped lightly against the studio skylight.

"We need celestial melancholy, not existential sarcasm," the director muttered into his headset.

Jungkook wiped his face with a towel and gave a tired laugh. "You want the vibe of a heartbroken alien prince? Try hiring someone who slept more than four hours this week."

No one answered.

His manager jogged over with a phone. "You’re trending again. Dispatch posted that old photo from the VR opera launch. People think you're actually doing a period drama."

"I'm doing a sandwich and a nap. That's what I'm doing."

"They say you looked... haunted."

Jungkook paused.

"Haunted?"

His manager rotated the screen. There it was, a still frame of Jungkook from the last scene. Moonlight on his face. Eyes just barely unfocused. Like he'd seen something that wasn't there.

"That's just me trying not to sneeze. The fog machine had mold."

But still. He couldn’t look away.

There was something odd about that expression. Not rehearsed. Not calculated. Like it had been pulled from somewhere else. Not a character. Not a role.

Him.

But not now.

He frowned and handed back the phone.

"I'm going to step outside."

"The storm—"

"Five minutes."

Outside, the studio smelled like rain and paint and pavement.

The fake cherry trees looked sad now, drooping in their buckets.

Jungkook pulled the hanbok tighter around his shoulders and wandered down the alley, past the loading dock, past the trailers, toward the edge of the property where the fencing was half-collapsed and tangled with ivy.

There was a strange stillness in the air. Not quiet, waiting.

And that’s when he saw it.

A paper flyer. Pinned to the side of a rusted power pole. Damp but intact.

One symbol.

Two stars intertwined.

Beneath it, handwritten:

YOU ARE NOT WHERE YOU CAME FROM.

No date. No website. No logo.

Just that.

Jungkook reached out and touched the paper.

And for a split second, the wind stopped.

The neon hum from the studio flickered. The rain paused in the air like the world had forgotten to move.

His fingers buzzed. Just faintly.

Then it was gone.

A voice crackled over his headset. "Jungkook-ssi? They need you back on set."

He tore the flyer down and tucked it into his sleeve.

"Yeah," he said softly. "Coming."

But his eyes lingered on the spot it had been.

Like maybe it had found him.

Not the other way around.

The flyer sat in Jungkook’s jacket pocket like a magnet. Even hours later, after he’d changed out of the hanbok and into a hoodie and joggers, he kept reaching for it. Crumpled, ink slightly smeared, it still pulsed with something he couldn’t quite name. Not just curiosity. Something older.

The message: YOU ARE NOT WHERE YOU CAME FROM.

He looked it up, of course. He wasn’t reckless. (Okay, he was. But only sometimes.) A quick image search led to a rabbit hole of folklore forums and buried blog posts, mostly written by history majors with too much time. One post in particular caught his eye: a blurry photo of a moss-covered altar in the woods of Gangwon-do, with the exact same star-knot symbol. The caption just read: “The Star Shrine. Not on maps. Not on GPS. You find it when it finds you.”

Obviously, Jungkook packed a bag.

He drove two hours east.

Rain turned from drizzle to downpour just past Yangyang. His phone lost signal halfway up the mountain, and the wipers were squeaking against the glass like some old horror movie. Still, he followed the vague directions posted by a Reddit user named “historian-420”: turn past the deer statue, count five telephone poles, stop when the road ends.

There was no signage.

Just an overgrown trail leading into the woods, half-blocked by a fallen log and a very judgmental raven.

“Great,” Jungkook muttered, slipping on his waterproof boots. “If I get murdered, I'm haunting the Dispatch offices.”

He left his phone in airplane mode and tucked it deep into his bag. No GPS, no distractions. Just intuition. And maybe mild delusion.

The path narrowed quickly, curving uphill under dense pine. The air smelled like moss and wet bark. His hoodie soaked through almost immediately. Raindrops clung to his eyelashes.

He slipped twice. Cursed both times. Then apologized to a passing squirrel.

He was starting to think this was a mistake when the trees suddenly parted.

And there it was.

The Star Shrine.

Ancient stone. Overgrown but not forgotten. Four pillars, one collapsed, the others leaning like tired sentinels around a central platform. Ivy wrapped the walls. Moss softened every edge. The rain shimmered as it fell through the clearing like it, too, recognized something sacred.

At the heart of the shrine stood a weathered slab carved with two interlocking stars. One pointed outward. One curved inward. A balance.

Jungkook stepped closer.

Something in his chest tugged. Like a string being pulled.

He reached out—again, not gently. (What was it with him and touching mysterious objects?)

The stone was warm.

Rain pattered around him, but none landed on the altar. It was dry. Humming faintly. Almost vibrating.

He blinked. The air blurred.

A whisper? No. Wind. Maybe. He couldn’t tell.

He turned, scanning the trees. No one. Just him. And the shrine. And the sudden, unnatural stillness that made every hair on his arms stand up.

He looked back at the stone. Hesitated.

Then, slowly, he pressed both palms flat against the twin stars.

It hit like thunder.

Not around him, through him.

A low, bone-deep tremor. The kind that vibrated in his teeth.

The sky cracked open with a flash of lightning so bright he staggered back, blinded. A roar of thunder swallowed the forest whole.

Then silence.

The altar glowed.

Jungkook stared, breath caught.

Light poured from the star symbol, lines of it snaking like veins across the stone, across the ground, into the roots. The trees pulsed. The rain froze in midair.

He couldn’t move.

Couldn’t breathe.

Something shifted beneath his feet.

Like the earth had exhaled.

He opened his mouth to call out, to who, he didn’t know, but before sound could form, the world tilted.

Not forward.

Not backward.

Inward.

Colors smeared. Sound twisted. His vision narrowed to a single white thread, pulsing like a heartbeat.

He fell.

Not down.

Not through.

Elsewhere.

His last thought, before everything turned to starlight, was:

This isn’t the first time.

Then:

Nothing.

There are many ways to wake up. A warm bed. A phone alarm. The smell of pancakes. A bird screaming existential poetry at 5 a.m.

Jungkook woke up to the sensation of floating.

Not the peaceful kind, like in a hot spring.

The “I have lost all contact with gravity and may now be dead” kind.

“Okay,” he said aloud, which was hard because his voice came out like a weird echo of itself. “Okay. Okay? What the actual—”

His words stretched, bounced back at him in distorted waves.

The world around him was… nothing. But also, not nothing. A space that was dark but not black. More like the inside of a quartz crystal, if the crystal had been dipped in moonlight and sprinkled with static.

Glitching stars blinked in and out across the sky. They didn’t twinkle, they shuddered, like someone had uploaded the galaxy on dial-up.

Below him, if it could be called ‘below’, a surface shimmered, reflecting his body like liquid glass. Or maybe it was a mirror. Or a memory. He couldn’t tell.

Jungkook turned midair. Or maybe the world turned around him.

“This is… new,” he said slowly, blinking at a constellation that resembled a rice cooker.

From nowhere, a voice replied:

“You’re early.”

He flinched. “WHAT.”

No one there.

Just the vibrating hum of the static-sky, and the unsettling sense that someone, or something, was watching through a very old screen.

“Not your fault,” the voice continued. It sounded like a whisper made of thunder. Ancient and echoing. Genderless. Tired.

“It’s broken. Has been for centuries.”

“What’s broken?” Jungkook asked, trying to rotate toward the sound, even though there was no clear up or down.

“The seal. The stars fell too soon. The gate opened too wide.”

“You’re really bad at giving answers,” Jungkook muttered.

There was a sound like a sigh. A cosmic, earthquake-sized sigh.

“You weren’t supposed to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“Him.”

Suddenly, a flash.

An image.

Dark eyes. Sharp cheekbones. A mouth just about to smile, and then not. A prince in navy robes. A painting he’d sketched without knowing why.

Taehyung.

The name hit him like a drum.

The memory crashed behind it.

The whisper grew louder, like wind turning into a scream:

“YOU WERE NOT MEANT TO ARRIVE THIS WAY.”

And then,

Boom.

The sky cracked again. Not like thunder like glass. A clean fracture split across the stars. Light poured from the break.

Jungkook shielded his eyes. His body jolted.

“NOPE,” he yelled to no one. “I WOULD LIKE A REFUND ON THIS DREAM SEQUENCE.”

“Too late.”

He was falling again.

Only this time, he saw the world twist beneath him, lush forests, wide rivers, winding palace walls.

He was no longer floating in void.

He was plummeting toward something green and ancient and real.

Then,

Nothing.

-×-×-

When he opened his eyes, he was lying face-down in a rice paddy.

In the rain.

Surrounded by very startled farmers.

And one goose.

The goose screamed at him.

Jungkook screamed back.

The farmers screamed third.

One of them, an elderly man with no teeth and perfect comedic timing, said, “Did the gods just fall out of the sky again? That’s the third time this decade.”

Jungkook sat up, drenched and dizzy.

“Where...?”

The goose hissed.

A teenage farm boy stared at him and whispered, “His robe is glowing.”

Indeed, Jungkook’s soaked hoodie shimmered faintly, still humming with leftover static.

The old man poked him with a stick. “Are you the star bride or the war general?”

“I’m an idol,” Jungkook croaked.

“Same thing,” the old man muttered.

Jungkook passed out.