Another wave hits—sadness, loneliness, longing—and I’m on my knees in ash before I know I moved, breath gone thin, vision gone bright at the edges. It’s almost funny, how a prince without a crown can be brought low by the gentlest, quietest things. A bench. A garden. A girl whispering into flowers like they have good advice.
The guards at the far edge of the ring pretend not to see me. One of them, old enough to remember my first berserker turn, sets a waterskin on the post and backs away with his hands open. I hate the fear in his eyes and deserve it anyway.
I press my palm harder to the mark. The ache sharpens, edges out the shame, and what’s left is want, relentless andclean. I think of her eyes when she’s angry—how they flare like someone threw daylight at them. How her laughter curls around my spine and coaxes the beast to lay its head down like it remembers it has one. How she touched the inside of my wrist and said, delighted,There. You do have a pulse.
If she asked me to burn down the heavens, I would ask if she wanted the ashes sifted or left to the wind.
She never asked for anything but honesty. I gave her absence and called it mercy.
A memory I’ve tried to bury claws its way up: a green court, a jeweled smile, blood in an arc so precise it was almost beautiful. The fae king didn’t just kill my family; he made it a performance. That’s the shape of my hatred and the weight I put on her shoulders without asking. The worst part? Yuna is not her father’s court, and I knew it even as I used his shadow to make her smaller so I could pretend leaving was noble.
Rheon’s voice—real or remembered—drops into the hollow I made.You can’t run from fate forever, brother.
Maybe not. But I can still ruin what it points me toward. That’s what I’m good at: cutting the rope before I learn how to climb it.
I drag a breath through grit and stand. The ring tilts, then levels. The mark throbs, not cruel, not kind—just insistent. Across the thread, she goes very still. I feel her palm settle over her collarbone, the way she calms skittish things. For a beat our hands meet without touching. My throat works around words I never learned to say right.
I told myself I left to keep war from her door. The truth is I left because I was afraid that once I let her in, I would not beable to let go, and loving me has always been a way to invite loss to dinner.
Someone like me doesn’t get happy endings. We get blood, and war, and names carved into stone where we practice sounding them out until they stop meaninghome.
And yet—
If she reached for me now, if her fingers slid through the space between this breath and the next and closed on mine, I would go quiet like the tide under the pull of a patient moon. I would crawl through fire just to say her name in the same room as her again.
The ash shifts under my boots. I look down at my hands—scarred, split, the same hands that have ended men and held her like she was holy—and I make a choice that is too little and exactly everything:
I stop running.
Not forever. Not in a way that redeems anything. Just for this breath, and then the next, and the next, until choice becomes practice and practice becomes a path.
If she turns me away, I will keep her safe from the distance she asks for. If she lets me speak, I will put the ugly truth between us first so she can see it and decide if she still wants to build anything on top of it. If she cannot forgive me, the fault will belong to me and will not be a story I tell about her.
The mark warms under my palm, an animal settling. Across the bond comes the faintest answer, like a knuckle against a door. Not a summons. Not a command. Justthere.
I reach for the waterskin, drink until the cold makes my teeth ache, and set it back where the old guard left it. When I lift my head, I catch my reflection in the black glass of the arch—eyes still rimmed in gold, mouth set like I’m braced for a blow. The prince of wrath looks back at me and for the first time in days, I don’t look away.
“I’m coming,” I tell him, because a man who only ever spoke to ghosts should practice saying things out loud. Then I say it to the bond, to the garden, to the girl sitting very still so she doesn’t fall apart. “I’m coming.”
No thunder answers. No prophecy clicks into place. The only reply is the quiet I broke and the way it doesn’t break back.
I lace my torn gloves, roll my shoulders until the ache evens out, and step out of the ring. The guards let me pass without a word. The crack in the wall keeps spreading, patient as ivy.
As I cross the threshold, the mark glows once—bright enough to paint my ribs gold from the inside—and settles, as if wrath itself has conceded there are fires worth walking toward with empty hands.
If she reaches for me even once, I’ll be there. And even if she doesn’t, I will go.
Where She Comes From
Seori
The halls that used to belong to my mother belong to me now.
Their silence has changed. It used to be the hush of being watched; now it’s the hush of being carried. Silk whispers. My boots click once, then twice, runes wake in the wall and gutter out like old stars remembering how to breathe. The gardens below bleed moonlight instead of dew. The throne at the end of the blackglass corridor hums with living magic—our magic—Rheon’s heat braided through my colder light until the stone itself refuses to choose.
Power lives here. History lives here. But my mind keeps going to a smaller room, a tighter beat.
Yuna.
