I have seen wars end. They don’t. They change costumes. I have seen men kneel. Sometimes they get back up different. Sometimes they don’t.
I do not kneel. Not too crowns. Not to curses. Not to the old, ugly voice under my ribs that saysheeland meanshurt her first so she can’t hurt you.
But there is a different voice now. Quiet. Stubborn. It saysstay.It sounds like her.
I don’t know how to be the man that voice deserves. I only know the drills: wrap your hands, square your stance, choose your target, breathe. I can learn new drills. I just don’t trust the field.
So, I keep moving. Keep the fury busy so it doesn’t notice it’s lonely. Keep the blade sharp so it doesn’t notice it wants to be a hand. Keep the brand in a room with no windows and a lock I can break if I need to run.
The truth is a small, hard thing I keep in my mouth until it cuts:
She is the one thing I can’t burn.
The world made me good at turning love into ash. She walks through my fire and does not ask me to be anything I am not. She looks at me like wrath is a tool, not a sentence. She says my name and the room remembers how to open without breaking.
I tell myself I am not ready.
Fate doesn’t care.
So I sharpen my knives and count the routes and pretend I am not already choosing. I tell myself I will not kneel. But when the bond tightens, when the crescent under my skin warms as if it had a say in who I am, when I breathe her in and my power sits instead of pacing—
I know how this ends. She will ruin me. And worse than that—I think I want her to.
Ashes of Silence
Yuna
One Year Later
Silence used to be a kindness. Ash clings to my boots in gray cuffs as I pick my way across what used to be a haven—our haven—low stone walls and wind chimes and a painted door that never quite closed because people needed to know they could come back. The chimes are melted to drops. The door is a black mouth. When I kneel, the ash takes my weight like a grave taking a name.
The smoke is gone. The screams are gone. What’s left is quieter, and somehow worse: scorched rosemary, the sweet-sick tang of wet char, the way wind drags powder over broken tile like a hand aching for something it can’t hold.
I pressed two fingers to the hollow beneath my collar, to the place where my skin used to thrum with warmth. The bond used to be a whisper—soft, stubborn—a rhythm only I could hear. Now it’s a wound that never scabs. A bruise that keeps its own time.
He won’t claim it. I hate that I know Taeyang’s name like a prayer.
Worse, I hate that I keep looking for him anyway.
I sift through the ash until my nails go black. I find a bead of green glass from the wind chimes, a corner of a burned sketch someone tucked under a lamp (two figures drawn in quick strokes, one with a ribbon around her wrist). I turn the bead over and over until it warms in my palm, then close my fist like I’m hiding proof from a jury.
“Yuna.”
Seori’s voice doesn’t startle me so much as pull me back into a body I’ve been avoiding. I glanced up. She’s dressed in black today, not for mourning no one tells Seori what color means—but because it hides soot and grief equally well. Her mouth is softer than usual. Rheon is a shadow at the edge of the ruin, pretending to study a fallen beam while he keeps her in his orbit. Certainty looks good on them. It always did.
“You don’t have to keep coming here,” Seori says, stepping close enough that ash freckles the hem of her pants.
“I know.” My voice scrapes. “But I can’t leave it behind. Not yet.”
She lowers herself beside me without ceremony. The ash takes her weight too. For a while we don’t speak. The wind does. It carries a scrap of singed ribbon past our knees, and I have to bite my tongue not to reach for it like a fool.
“You haven’t said his name in weeks,” she says at last.
“What’s the point?” I let a laugh out, too small and too sharp. “It’s not like he hears it.”
Seori covers my hand, the one still holding the green glass, careful not to pry.
“He hears it,” she says. “Whether he wants to or not.”
