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Zoey is forty when she realizes it. Mira has grey hairs, some wrinkles and Zoey herself can look in the mirror and see how the years have started to collect on her skin. All that time hunting, how they practically destroyed their bodies both as idols and as hunters is taking its toll. Unseen by them all, it took it's toll on Celine too. A little over a year later, they bury her next to Miyeong.
But Rumi is unchanged, almost. Like she turned thirty and time stopped. Her hair is the same purple it's always been, the only marks on her skin besides her patterns scars from battling demons. She's nimble and spry and fast.
She catches Rumi some nights, watching over them. Fingers in their hair, tracing their faces, mapping them as they age. One night, Zoey catches her hands and kisses her fingers and the sorrow on Rumi's face breaks her heart. Mira stirs, grasping for Rumi's other hand, nuzzling it.
It's a very old story, with no other version.
Someone has to leave first.
Mira's barely fifty when her heart gives out. She lingers for a few days, out of what Zoey is sure is pure stubborn will and probably a little spite. They sit with each other, trying to make every moment last forever. Not knowing if Mira will be with them for another hour or another day and only understanding how precious time is when she passes in the night, wrapped safely in the arms of her family.
It had been a foolish thought, but Zoey had always hoped they'd go together somehow. Fighting demons, or just laying down and not waking up, because the thought of living without one of them shatters her heart.
Zoey doesn't have to say anything to know why Rumi clings to her all the tighter. Zoey turns fifty and Rumi still has nary a wrinkle. But she smiles, just a little, when Zoey jokes about how she pulled a girl half her age.
But humans live.
They age.
And they die.
Rumi buries Zoey next to Mira and Celine and her mother. Perhaps in a fit of desperation, she leaves a space between them for herself.
She's sixty and thinks she may have her first wrinkle and her heart is so full of the love they'd given her and so utterly broken as the reality settles onto her like a weight.
She's going to be alone; not for years but decades or centuries and those emotions will have to be enough to sustain her. There can be no one but them, both because of who they were to her and because she'd rather be alone than feel the ache of this grief ever again.
But the Honmoon is kind.
And the Honmoon is cruel.
Years later she feels it. A tug that becomes a pull and then a pair of binary stars flaring to life as they touch the Honmoon.
Rumi finds two young women and they look nothing like Mira or Zoey. But she recognizes them in their eyes, in the very shapes of their souls and they in turn know that they love her.
The Honmoon is kind, because it brought them together again, but it is cruel because they are human.
They live —longer, she makes sure of it— but they age and they die because that is what humans do.
Like the proverbial moth, Rumi burns herself on their flames again and again. She learns to identify the moment they are born, but never seeks them out until the Honmoon calls them to her—save once, when the Honmoon screamed for her and she moved heaven and earth to save two children from an early grave.
But she lives life after life with them. Lives of joy, of sorrow, of all the exciting and dull moments. And each time she loses them, she mourns them anew, reliving the ache of losing Mira and Zoey that first life, so long ago.
Often, in the space between lives, she's found at the carefully maintained headstones that mark the final resting place of four of history's greatest hunters. Their names will never be worn down by time, so long as Rumi exists to care for them. Those who remade the Honmoon, and those who sacrificed everything so that they could. In this way she takes her place between her girls, where she belongs, where they can be connected.
Perhaps because of this, Rumi becomes a legend among those who hunt; the half-demon hunter chasing her soulmates through time. An eternal vigil against time and demons both, and so frequently her soulmates are hunters too.
In some of the hunter stories she's doomed to this fate, never able to hold them for longer than a single life at a time. It's her penance for her demon blood or some vague misdeed that was lost long ago in the annals of time. But even she follows their stars like a lonely burned out planet she remains a sentinel, standing witness to the ages of the Earth.
In other stories, this doom is only finite. That once her demon blood burns out she can finally rejoin them in the cycle. That some day, her vigil will end. That some day, she will no longer have to bear witness to the endless passage of time and she will be reborn at last and that the souls that make up two-thirds of her own will find her.
Humans live.
They age.
And they die.
Rumi is half-human.
When she is finally embraced by a natural death, it's in the arms of her girls. They bury her between the headstones marked "Mira" and "Zoey" in a language that Rumi was the last to ever speak and the wind in the leaves seem to whisper that ancient tongue.
Rumi finds them again when she's reborn, their memory etched into her soul from thousands of years and hundreds of lifetimes. They recognize her in her eyes and the shape of her soul and she in turn knows she loves them.
It's said that the Honmoon can be cruel.
But it can be kind, too.
Rumi never again visits the old graves. She gave enough of herself to the hunters and the Honmoon and for her long vigil her soul and theirs are granted the kindness of good, gentle lives. It sings with their joy and their happiness and their love forever and ever and ever.
The hunters take care of their own and maintain those old graves for as long as hunters are needed or until the ending of the world.