“Keep going.”
I do. I sit with rookies who can’t sleep and teach them a breath that doesn’t need magic to work. I mend a strap on Taeyang’s gauntlet and leave it on the peg without a note. I copy petitions for Yuna so her hand doesn’t cramp and no one can say the Queen’s spelling is imperfect. I carry names to Rheon that other people are afraid to say out loud and stand there while he looks into the dark and promises to keep them where the under can’t eat them.
And every night, I look at the dagger I returned to the armory in my mind and say the rules like prayers I’m willing to be bound by:
No secrets. No trades made with someone else’s fear. No altars I didn’t build with the person who will kneel at them. If she says stop, I stop. If she says go, I ask where she wants me to be when she arrives.
The scars that show—feathers singed, palms roughed from drills—heal the way honest injuries do. The ones you can’tsee make different weather inside me. Some days it rains. Some days the wind is clean.
I catch Minji laughing with Seori in the courtyard at noon, head thrown back, ink on her knuckle, the sound loud enough to make the rookies glance over and stand taller because the world just got friendlier by one laugh. My chest hurts. Not in the way that makes me look for an exit. In the way that warns a man he’s near the thing he wants and might be allowed to try for it someday.
I am not owed that day. I can earn being near it. Taeyang passes me in the hall at twilight, eyes dark, shoulders set. He nods once. It’s not peace. It’s recognition. Two men who broke precious things and decided to become the kind of people who can be trusted to hold them if they’re ever handed back.
“Perimeter?” he asks.
“Archive,” I answer, and we trade posts without needing permission.
On the stairs I whisper the line I’ve learned to prefer over the thousand I used to use to make myself sound holy:
“I’m sorry. I’m here. I’ll keep being here.”
Unspoken scars don’t disappear when you stop denying them. They just stop owning the room.
I keep walking. I keep choosing. I keep changing in ways that don’t require an audience. And when I pass the colonnade, there’s a small tin on the step where I sometimes leave tea for Minji. Inside: a smear of salve that smells like lavender and witch hazel, a note in neat script, two words only.
For your wing.
I sit down on the cold stone and laugh once, quietly, like a man who just remembered the weather can change. Then I press the salve where it aches, and I let it work.
Ruins of the Pact
Yuna
The wind doesn’t sound the same without him. It used to snag on the edges of the roof and carry pieces of him to me—low murmurs, the soft rasp of a laugh he didn’t mean to let out, the way my name left his mouth like he’d stolen it and was afraid of being caught. Tonight it’s only cold. Only empty. It slaps my cheeks numb and combs its fingers through my hair like it’s trying to tidy a mess that isn’t on my head.
I sit on the Guild’s highest ledge with my knees tucked to my chest and my ribbon looped twice around my wrist, twisting it until the green glass bead warms against my pulse. Below, Seoul exhales—sirens far off, a bus groaning over a pothole, a delivery scooter whining past the alley with a squeal that makesthe rookies flinch the first month they’re here. The Han is a soft black seam; the bridges blink like patient eyes. Somewhere a pojangmacha tent bangs metal and laughter spills into the cold. The city is loud enough to feel alive and still too quiet to drown a name.
Taeyang.
He was never mine. I learned early that wanting isn’t owning. But the bond is a liar that speaks fluent body. It hums under my skin like a second bloodstream, a thread that tugs toward a door I can’t make myself open or close. Some days it’s a whisper. Tonight it’s a bruise that doesn’t fade when I stop pressing.
I told myself I didn’t care. Told Seori I’d be fine. Told Minji I didn’t even think about him unless someone saidleatherorcloveorpleasein a certain cadence and then it was just muscle memory, not heart. The lies held until the light changed—the way it does on winter roofs—flat and silver, and I remembered the look on his face the night the mark surfaced across my collar: not hunger. Not victory. Pain, like loving me hurt worse than anything that had ever tried to kill him.
Why me?sat on my tongue like blood.Why deny it when we were carved for each other in stardust and fate?I didn’t say it. He left before I could ask. No door slam. No explanation. Just footsteps that learned new corridors, and the after-silence that makes even walls feel guilty.
I catalog the small proofs that I am not who I was. The girl who flirted with danger and stole the last piece of bread to make Minji pout now ties her boots twice and leaves food on the peg for a cat that never comes. I train like a blade being filed down to a line. I sleep like a soldier who doesn’t trust pillows. I check the balcony twice and pretend it’s for weather.
Minji knows. Of course she does. She lingers in doorways as if a breath too late could mean finding me cracked in half. She swaps out my tea when she thinks I’m not watching—mercy leaves and witch hazel, the mix she made for Jisoo’s wing but won’t admit she repurposed for hearts. She never says his name; she doesn’t have to. It lives between us, a guest that won’t take a hint.
Seori tries to pull me back with gentle gravity. She brings me gossip and makes terrible jokes on purpose. She drags me to the training court and sets my feet right without making a lesson out of me, then nudges me toward rookies who need my voice more than I need my silence. Her light reaches the parts of me that don’t resist on principle. The rest keeps its arms folded.
I press two fingers to the crescent under my collar until heat pools there, mean and consoling. The mark feels like an old truth beneath new skin. Some nights I imagine scraping it out with a dull spoon and immediately hate myself for the cruelty of the thought. Others I imagine following it like a compass until it leads me to a man who can saystaywithout his hands shaking.
“Yuna,” the wind says, because my head is not my friend. For a breath my throat closes and I have to swallow stupid hard to remember air is not a luxury.
The rooftop keeps its shrines—salt lines chalked under the vent, a broken lantern Seori refuses to throw away, three paper talismans that Rhee from the kitchens pasted under the eave the day she decided we were hers too. I add to them because I’m sentimental when it’s safe. Tonight it’s a sprig of rosemary from the ruin and the bead from my ribbon for a moment before I chicken out and tie it back on. I’m brave in battle and ridiculous with keepsakes. It’s fine. I can hold both truths without breaking.
The bond pulses. Not a command. A reminder.Here. Here. Here.
