The tear I’ve been holding skates free and falls into the soil, vanishing before I can decide whether to be embarrassed. Maybe that’s all hope is: water no one saw you give, roots drinking in the quiet.
I stay until the sun climbs higher and the shadows move on. When I finally rise, my knees ache and my hands are filthy and the hurt inside me is still a room with too much echo.
But something small has bloomed anyway, right where the ache lives—a secret I’m almost ready to say out loud:
I will go on loving what is mine to love.
And if he is among it—if he is brave enough to come back—I will meet him in the light with both hands open.
The wisteria sways like a nod. The fire blossoms hold their small flames. The mark answers once more, soft and undeniable.
Somewhere, he does.
The Prince of Wrath
Taeyang
There’s blood on my knuckles. Again.
It’s drying in the old splits of skin, flaking rust-red over bone, a ritual as tired as it is useless: find something to fight, win, bleed a little, pretend the noise inside me got quieter.
It never does.
The training ground looks like a battlefield that refused to end—scorched stone, shattered sparring poles, sand gone black where my temper kissed it. The guards keep their distance now. They’ve learned the turn of my shoulders that meansdon’t. Even the miasma sky—the demon realm’s permanent bruise—hangs back, as if the air itself has had enough of me.
It used to sit easy on my lungs. Not anymore.
Now it feels like trying to breathe underwater because I know she couldn’t breathe here. Not without me.
Yuna.
Every step I took away from her carved another channel through me, a riverbed with no water, the shape of something that should be flowing and isn’t. I kept running anyway, because staying—staying would have ruined her.
That’s the lie I was proud of: sacrifice, dressed in armor. Truth is smaller and meaner.
She is light. I am rage. She is fae royalty, born of wild magic and moonfire and the kind of grace that survives a thousand courts. I am the knife they throw when they don’t care where it lands. I was bred to break things and then call that purpose. What right did I ever have to stand beside her and call it fate?
My jaw locks until my teeth hurt. The bond answers the thought like it’s a challenge.
Heat flares under my ribs, a spark turning greedy. The mark ignites and starts to eat its way outward—fire through ice, light through scar—until I’m pressing my palm flat to my side and cursing through my teeth. The sound rattles the obsidian arch to my left. A hairline crack skitters through the stone like a fleeing thing.
“Not now,” I snarl at myself, at destiny, at whatever ancient cruelty thought making one soul out of two was a kindness.
But it’s already happening. The burn dives deeper—and then I feel her.
Not memory. Not wish. Her.
Soil under her nails from replanting. Wisteria’s soft breath moving her hair. The steadying weight of a bench’s cold edge beneath the curve of her knees as she folds into herself so she doesn’t fall apart. The single, stunned bloom of a laugh that breaks in the middle and doesn’t know what to do with its own echo.
I sway. My knuckles bump the wall, and the world jumps. She still wears the mark.
Worse—so do I.
I look down. Fae runes and demon fire knot together low on my ribs, bright as if my skin were thin paper and someone held a candle on the far side. It sears through old scars like a new story refusing to fit into the space where the pain used to live.
“You’re a fool,” I tell the man using my body like a ruin he’s proud of. “You left. You made her think she wasn’t enough.”
She always was. She always is.
