Then it burns. Tonight, it burns like iron fresh from the forge, pressing its glow into the soft places I keep trying to turn to stone.
I sit beneath a dead gingko at the edge of the outer valley, where the wind comes straight off the mountains with a knife in its teeth. The tree has kept last autumn’s leaves like a crown of paper coins; they rattle when the gusts get mean. My armor lies beside me in sullen pieces—pauldron, bracer, breastplate—each one dropped like an argument I’ve run out of words to win. Mysword rests in the grass, unblooded, asking me who I think I am without it.
Cold finds the sweat at the back of my neck. I tuck my hands under my arms and don’t pretend I’m not shaking.
Yuna.
Her name moves through me like a fault line shifting under a city—quiet, and then the whole world is different. I press my palm to the crescent under my sternum and will it still. It answers like a mouth against my skin:no.
I told myself I could starve this into silence. That if I ran enough perimeters, took enough hits, bled without complaint, the bond would learn the shape of my back and stop trying to find my throat. I told myself it was only magic. A trick. A leash knotted by gods who enjoy a joke.
Magic doesn’t mimic the weight of her hand when she steadies a rookie’s stance. Curses don’t remember the timbre of a woman’s laugh and thread it through a man’s breath until he’s humming in an empty room. Leashes don’t ache like grief when she cries three courtyards away and I feel it under my ribs like a blade turned slow.
I grit my teeth and drop my head. Breath makes ghosts in the air; mine are numerous and ill-mannered.
I left. Clean, I thought. No explanations. No shards for her to step on. I called that kindness and hoped the room would believe me. It didn’t. The room kept smelling like rain on stone and clove on leather and the soft bite of ribbon against my wrist. My body kept stopping at doors I swore I didn’t remember.
If I had stayed… if I had taken what the bond offered, she would have seen it. The berserker. The weapon. The boy a house built out of orders, sharpened until he forgot how to be heldwithout cutting. She would’ve discovered the part of me that listens for war the way others listen for their name. The part that once burned a palace because it learned too young that fire is the only language power always answers.
I couldn’t let Yuna see that. Not the light who insists knives can be used to cut bread. Not the woman who looks at the monsters under the bed and asks whether they’re hungry or just lonely.
So I turned my back. Like a coward.
The bond didn’t get the message. It keeps its own calendar. It wakes me with her name clenched between my teeth. It tightens when she walks into a room and loosens only when she leaves, as if it is practicing the hurt in case I ever ask it to make a habit of it. Tonight it crawls under my skin with purpose. Hot. Hurting.Here.
She’s not sleeping. I feel it—the restless roll of her breath, the way the mark beneath her collar warms and cools like a hand she can’t stop pressing to a bruise. A flicker of anger—mine, not at her, at myself for being the reason a brave woman becomes careful—spits along my knuckles. Shadow licks my wrists, eager to be sent. I shove it down. It pools at my boots like a sulking dog.
“Stop,” I tell my chest. “Stop. Enough.”
It isn’t.
I get up because sitting turns pain into prayer, and I don’t trust what I’ll worship. The ground is iron-hard; frost has written its small cruel laws over the grass. I pace. The valley carries me back and forth like a man on a short leash. Twice I reach for the sword and stop because I know the differencebetween wanting to train and wanting to hurt so I can call it work.
Jisoo’s voice, from a kinder hour, runs a line through my head:You keep trying to quit like it’s a vice. It isn’t. It’s a vow. Either keep it or say out loud that you won’t.
I close my eyes. I see her anyway—hair unbraided on the outer wall, ribbon frayed where she thumbs it when she thinks, mouth set like a queen trying not to cry because the court is watching the shape of her spine. Fury rips through me so fast I have to put my hands on my knees and breathe not to set the tree behind me on fire. Fury at myself. At the old men who taught me to call withholding love a virtue. At fate for putting something gentle in reach of a man whose first language is ruin.
The mark pulses again hard. A flare that isn’t mine. Her pain. It lands mid-sternum and sinks until my breath is a bad violin. I swear, ugly. My body answers like a soldier:go.My feet turn toward the path that will take me to the Guild in nine minutes if I run like I used to.
“No,” I say aloud, to the night, to the brand, to the part of me that thinks impulse is the same thing as courage. “I can’t. I shouldn’t.”
Can’t.Because there is a line between what I want and what she needs, and tonight she needs to win the argument with her own silence without me crashing in to make it worse.Shouldn’t.Because I want to touch her like a man drowning wants to drink, and that is not the same as offering water.
The bond doesn’t argue. Itinsists.It doesn’t bargain with my fear; it ignores it. Under my palm, heat builds to something bright and clean. Not punishment. Promise. The steadying kind. The kind that saysthis will be here when you’re brave enough.
I laugh once, wrecked.
“You’re relentless.”
The wind answers by trying to take my coat. I let it. Cold knifes my lungs; the pain is useful—it announces itself, and I can use it as a metronome. In on four, out on six. Count the stars until the numbers run out. Count the ways I’ve already failed and keep counting until shame gets bored of hearing its own voice.
When the shaking eases, I sit again and pick up a strip of leather from my dropped bracer. My hands work before my mind catches up. I braid the strip without looking, muscle memory from a life where idle hands were punished for thinking. The braid is ugly and uneven and mine. When it’s long enough, I wrap it around my wrist, mean-tight, just below the frayed violet ribbon I never had the courage to stop wearing.
“I don’t love you,” I tell the night, because I know what happens to men who don’t practice the lie—they try to tell the truth and their mouths forget how to form it. “I can’t. I shouldn’t. I won’t.”
The bond warms, patient, like a teacher waiting for a child to exhaust himself. Heat climbs my palm. My throat stings. The dead gingko rattles approval at nothing I said.
I try again.
