The bathroom mirror cracked.
Not visibly, Ha Ria pressed her palm against the cold glass and felt it whole, but something deeper had fractured. Her reflection wavered like she was looking up from the bottom of a well, and behind her own dark eyes, something ancient stirred.
Not again.
Her pulse hammered against her throat as the familiar dissolving began. Jin's tears from this morning still echoed in her chest. Mom's worry about the electric bill sat heavy in her stomach. Dad's exhaustion weighed down her shoulders like a coat made of lead.
She was disappearing, piece by piece, swallowed by everyone else's storms.
"Ha Ria?" The voice drifted through the door, warm honey over steel. Halmoni's voice, which always seemed to come from somewhere deeper than just her throat. "The tea is ready."
In the kitchen, steam rose from two cups of jasmine tea like tiny spirits ascending. Halmoni sat with her back straight, her weathered hands wrapped around porcelain painted with blue dragons. She looked up as Ha Ria entered, and her dark eyes held that particular brightness,the kind that saw through skin and bone to whatever lived beneath.
"Your edges are blurring," Halmoni said quietly.
Ha Ria's breath caught. "You can see it?"
"Child, I've been seeing since before you drew your first breath." The old woman's smile was small but fierce. "The question is: do you want to keep dissolving into other people's weather, or do you want to learn why you were born with a serpent's spine?"
The words hit Ha Ria like electricity. She sank into the chair across from her grandmother, the wooden seat solid beneath her. For the first time all day, something felt real.
"I don't understand," she whispered. "When Jin cries, I cry his tears. When Mom worries, her thoughts become mine. I can't find where I end and they begin."
Halmoni leaned forward, her eyes glinting. "Because your golden serpent is sleeping."
"My what?"
"Close your eyes." The command carried the weight of mountains. "Feel the base of your spine, where your tailbone meets the chair."
Ha Ria obeyed, pressing her back against the wood. At first: nothing. Then, like tuning a radio between stations, she became aware of warmth. A subtle pulse, deep and rhythmic, beating with a tempo all its own.
"There," Halmoni breathed. "That's where she begins."
She?
"The golden serpent that lives in your spine. She's supposed to coil down, down, down through the earth's layers, all the way to the molten heart of the world. When she's properly anchored, no storm can pull you from your center."
Ha Ria's eyes snapped open. The warmth in her lower back was spreading, becoming something almost visible in her mind's eye: a shimmer of scales, a whisper of ancient power.
"But she's been floating free," Halmoni continued, rising to touch her collection of succulents on the windowsill. Her fingers found a jade plant, thick and stubborn, its roots gripping the pot with desperate strength. "Like a kite without string. Every time someone near you feels something powerful… whoosh." She made a pulling gesture. "Your energy flies toward theirs."
From the living room came the sound of Jin building toward a tantrum,his favorite truck had lost another wheel. Ha Ria felt the familiar tug, that automatic urge to let his frustration flood through her veins.
But something was different now. The warmth in her spine pulsed once, twice, like a heartbeat made of liquid gold.
"I can feel her," Ha Ria whispered, wonder threading through her voice.
Halmoni's smile was radiant. "Then you're ready to wake her properly."
What followed was the most extraordinary twenty minutes of Ha Ria's life.
First, Halmoni taught her the Summoning Breath: deep and slow, drawing air not into her lungs but into the space behind her navel, imagining golden light spiraling down her spine like honey poured from a great height.
"Feel her stirring," Halmoni murmured. "She's been waiting so long for you to call."
The second breath was the Descent, visualizing the golden serpent uncoiling from the base of her spine, flowing downward through layers of earth and stone and root, seeking the planet's burning core with ancient hunger.
Ha Ria gasped as something inside her spine moved; not painful, but intensely alive, like electricity made of silk and starlight.
"She's found it," Halmoni said, watching Ha Ria's face with sharp attention. "The heart of the world. Now comes the Binding."
The third breath was the deepest: seeing the golden serpent wrap herself around that molten core three times, anchoring Ha Ria's essence to something older and stronger than any human storm. The serpent's tail wound tight around the earth's heart, and her head rose back up through soil and stone to rest in the curve of Ha Ria's lower ribs.
I am here, something whispered inside her bones. I am yours. You are mine. We are anchored.
Ha Ria opened her eyes to find the world transformed.
Everything looked sharper, more vivid. The steam from her tea cup traced perfect spirals. The jade plant on the windowsill seemed to glow with quiet contentment. And Jin's crying from the next room: she could hear his distress, feel sympathy bloom in her chest, but she remained utterly, completely herself.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, she's beautiful."
"Golden serpents always are," Halmoni said with satisfaction. "And now that she's awake, she'll keep you anchored no matter how fierce the storms around you grow."
Over the next week, Ha Ria practiced the three breaths every morning, feeling the golden serpent strengthen with each repetition. The creature,for she was definitely alive, definitely aware,began to feel as familiar as Ha Ria's own pulse. Sometimes she caught glimpses of golden scales in her peripheral vision, or felt the whisper of powerful coils shifting behind her ribs.
The transformation was remarkable. When Mom received news of her promotion, Ha Ria felt her own quiet joy rise to meet her mother's excitement, but from her own centered place, not swallowed by it. When Jin scraped his knee racing through the house, she comforted him from a space of steady calm, her golden serpent humming with protective warmth.
But the real test came on Thursday afternoon.
Mila burst through the front door in tears, her usually perfect ponytail hanging in tangles, her cheeks blotchy and swollen.
"It's not fair!" she sobbed, throwing herself into Ha Ria's arms. "My sister is such a horrible, terrible person! She told Mom about the party, and now I'm grounded for two weeks, and Sarah's birthday is this weekend, and everyone will be there except me!"
The old Ha Ria would have drowned instantly in Mila's anguish, adding her friend's tears to her own collection of borrowed sorrows. But now, with the golden serpent coiled steady and strong around the earth's heart, she found herself in a completely different space.
She felt Mila's pain clearly, sharp and real and devastating in the way that only twelve-year-old heartbreak can be. But she felt it from her own centered place, like sitting at the bottom of a clear lake while storms raged on the surface far above.
"Tell me everything," Ha Ria said quietly, her voice carrying a new quality of calm strength.
As Mila poured out her story: the unfairness, the betrayal, the social catastrophe of missing Sarah's party… Ha Ria listened with her whole heart. But she listened as herself, anchored and present, her golden serpent humming with gentle power.
And something magical happened.
The longer Ha Ria remained centered, the calmer Mila became. Not because Ha Ria was absorbing her distress, but because steady energy has its own gravitational pull. Like a lighthouse in a storm, Ha Ria's anchored presence gave Mila something solid to orient toward.
"You know what's weird?" Mila said after twenty minutes, her tears finally slowing. "I feel better just sitting here with you. Like, the situation still sucks, but it doesn't feel like the world is ending anymore."
Ha Ria smiled, feeling the golden serpent pulse with quiet satisfaction. "Sometimes we just need someone who can stay steady while we figure things out."
That evening, as Ha Ria helped clear dinner dishes, she caught her reflection in the kitchen window. No wavering this time, no dissolution into other people's emotional weather. Just her own face looking back: calm, centered, and somehow more present than she'd ever been.
"My serpent is strong now," she told Halmoni as they dried the last of the plates.
Halmoni's eyes twinkled with ancient mischief. "Strong roots make for generous branches. Now that you know how to stay yourself, you can help others without disappearing."
Ha Ria nodded, feeling the truth of it settle into her bones. The golden serpent shifted contentedly in her spine, tail wrapped secure around the world's molten heart, head resting easy in the curve of her ribs.
She was anchored. She was herself. And for the first time in her life, she understood what it meant to be truly, powerfully present; not just in her own skin, but in the vast, interconnected web of love and struggle that connected every human heart.
The serpent's call had awakened something in her that would never sleep again.
Outside, the first stars appeared in the darkening sky, and Ha Ria smiled, feeling their light echo in the golden coils that kept her steady, strong, and exactly where she belonged.
Beautiful, and true
The kind of story I wish I had growing up! So rich