Toward the beginning of everything.
Jisoo
The Demon Kings whisper
The Demon Realm was still as cursed and crimson as I remembered — ash-streaked skies, floating mountains pierced by black iron chains, rivers of lava twisting through violet canyons. But the unease twisting in my chest had nothing to do with the landscape. It had to do with her.
Seori walked ahead of us, her posture steady, her breath unshaken. She wasn’t coughing. She wasn’t trembling. No mortal — let alone a half-blood — could walk through the Demon Realm's miasma without reacting. Not even seasoned demons walked through the borders without their skin blistering at first contact.
But Seori? She moved like the air belonged to her.
I shared a glance with Taeyang. No words passed between us. We didn’t need to. Taeyang’s expression was carved in suspicion — and something that looked dangerously like awe.
Later that night, while we made camp inside the ribcage of a dead colossus beast, I found myself alone.
I wandered beyond the glow of the firelight, my boots crunching against crystallized bone. I leaned against a jagged boulder and exhaled — but the second I closed my eyes, I felt it.
The darkness peeled open like a wound.
“You disappoint me, Fallen.”
The voice split through my mind like a cleaver.
My eyes snapped open. Blood roared in my ears. I hadn’t heard that voice in centuries — and I’d hoped I never would again.
The Demon King.
“You walk beside the girl who carries the demon queen's blood and you say nothing. She steps through my realm untouched. Do you not feel it? She does not belong to the Guild. She belongs to me.”
I gritted his teeth, clutching the mark on my arm.
“Why now?” I growled into the shadows. “Why her?”
“Because she is the key. Bring her to me and I will give you what you’ve always wanted.”
The King’s voice slithered through me like poison.
“Freedom from your curse. A throne of your own. Your mortal girl, untouched by time.”
My breath caught.
Minji.
The silence that followed was worse than the voice itself. It left me standing there, breathless and breaking.
I stared back toward the camp, toward the girl wrapped in a blood-marked fate, and the prince still unconscious back in the mortal realm.
I turned my back to them, eyes hardening.
For the first time in centuries… I didn’t know whose side I was on.
Seori
Born by Shadow, bound by flame
The Demon Realm was wrong.
Not in the way I was taught. The Guild’s whispers painted it as a place of agony and horror—where shadows had teeth, where demons carved suffering into stone. But when I stepped through the gate, it wasn’t terror that greeted me.
