She studies me for a long breath that feels like the edge of a very steep roof. Then she presses the vial back into my palm—emptier now, warmer.
“Bring me a story tomorrow,” she says. “Not about you. About someone you decided not to be angry at.”
“Yes, Minji.”
She steps back, hand on the door, then changes her mind and steps forward instead. Her fingers touch the singed edge of my wing—a graze, barely there, a permission slip I don’t cash in.
“You did good today,” she says.
I swallow.
“So did you.”
“Tomorrow again?”
“Tomorrow again,” I promise.
When war ends, we don’t become saints. We become people who keep choosing. I walk back into the evening with a list in my pocket, salve on my wing, and a job for morning that looks a lot like atonement wearing the simple clothes of routine.
The bells toll once—present. I say it back under my breath and let the word settle where vows go when they’re too quiet for anyone else to hear.
Mates, At Last
Taeyang
The garden is washed clean after rain, every leaf ink-dark and shining like it remembers the first-time light touched it. Lanterns hang low beneath the wisteria; bowls of honey-colored flame breathe in time with the wind. The palace sleeps. The court is quiet. For once, the world is not watching us be brave.
Yuna takes my hand without ceremony and leads me beneath the arch where we always end up when language fails. She’s bared of jewels, bare of crown—just a thin white slip and a ribbon at her wrist the color of violets bruised under fingers. The crescent under her collar glows faintly through the cloth. Mineanswers, a warm ache under my sternum where Seori’s blade taught my bones a new law.
“Look at me,” she says.
I do. The bond hums—a low, steady thrum that has lived inside me since the first time she spoke my name like it knew where it was going.
“I keep thinking,” Yuna says, soft and fierce, “that every time you touch me, you’re still asking whether you’re allowed to stay.”
“I…” The truth is ugly and simple. “I don’t know how not to ask.”
Her mouth softens, and it hurts in the best way.
“Then let me answer so loudly you stop forgetting.”
She turns my palm up and knots the violet ribbon around it, mean-tight, prayer-sure. Not a leash. A tether. A way back in the dark.
“Taeyang,” she whispers, and the garden leans in to listen. “I choose you. Awake and afraid. Ruined and rebuilding. On battlefields, at breakfasts, in rooms where we don’t speak because we don’t have to. I choose you when it’s easy and I choose you when it humiliates the part of me that used to think love had to look like a crown.”
The crescent under my breastbone swells until my ribs feel too small. I take her hand and knot the ribbon around her wrist to match mine.
“Yuna,” I say, voice rough because this is the last time I plan to say it with doubt in it, “I choose you. I choose your mercy, which scares me more than fire. I choose your anger, which taught me to aim. I choose to be the door you walk through,not the wall you bleed against. I will carry your crown when it’s heavy and put it on your head when you forget who you are. I will be the fire at your door, not the fire in your walls.”
She exhales like a woman who has been holding the roof up with her shoulders and finally got a beam under it.
“Then stop fighting it,” she says, so gentle it breaks me. “Let it in.”
I’ve bled for a thousand vows that never deserved me. This one asks for the thing I never learned to give: permission.
I nod.
“Witness?” she calls, without raising her voice.
