Chapter Text
attuning has had a strange life.
A few years ago, I wrote it as a Taeil/Haechan one-shot for an exchange. It ended up getting a much warmer response than I expected, given that it was very much an AU and only just hinted at romance, and it’s always been one of those stories I couldn’t let go of.
Writing the original fic was deeply tied to processing a lot of my feelings during COVID during the height of isolation, so it’ll always be meaningful to me. But I kept wishing I had more room. Room for the romance, the worldbuilding, the lore, and the story to breathe.
When Taeil’s horrific crime was revealed, I wasn’t ready to lose the story even though I was happy to toss that man out. I also knew I didn’t want to swap another character into his place and pretend that solved the problem. If I was going to revisit the story, I wanted it to become the version I’d always wished I’d had the chance to write.
That turned out to be Renjun.
The funny thing is that it never really felt like Renjun replaced Taeil. The minute I started writing him, I realized the story had always wanted to be about him.
His voice, his history and perspective, his personality (or at least as I gleaned it) changed the emotional center of the story.
Renjun ended up being a key. He opened the door to building the magic system around a wider range of East Asian influences—especially Chinese ones—while still leaving room for Korean influences and entirely original ideas. This is (still) an original fantasy setting, inspired by many real traditions rather than meant to represent any one of them.
Because of all that, this isn’t really an edited version of the original fic. It’s a chaptered story built on the same foundation. The bones are still there, but almost everything surrounding them has grown.
I wanted this note to exist, and to preserve the original comments on the one-shot, because I don’t want to pretend the original never happened, or that getting from there to here was as simple as changing a few names. It super wasn’t.
Whether you’re returning to attuning or reading it for the first time, I’m excited to finally share the version I’ve been carrying around in my head for all these years. I hope you enjoy it.