I climb onto the lip of the obsidian balcony and sit the way I did when I was only a girl with stolen knives and a thousand plans. A night-bloom curls toward my fingers, recognizing the half-angel in me, the half-demon too. My mother used to say the flowers knew our blood; they would open for us even when the sky didn’t. I am not thinking of my mother. I am not thinking of the war massing outside the wards.
I am thinking of the last time I saw Yuna’s eyes.
Dull at the edges. Fractured in the middle. As if something sacred had been dropped and glued back together and someone kept pretending the crack was a design.
She is fading. And I don’t know which door in her I am allowed to knock on anymore.
Once there were just three girls with blades and matching scars, laughing too loud in hallways we were not supposed to run. Yuna used to steal fruit from the Guild kitchens and tuck flowers behind Minji’s ear while we planned missions like constellations on a cheap paper map. She used to bait Taeyang into honesty with a grin that said she wasn’t afraid of his teeth.
Gods, how she sparked when she smiled at him. A flame looking at a forge and deciding to be brighter.
The day he left, something in her went quiet. Not the dramatic kind—the kind that kills slowly. The bond didn’t break; itlearned to erode. Not the mercy of a clean wound. The cruelty of a glacier cracking from within.
She throwed herself at the day the way we were taught—training, diplomacy, more training, the crownwork I can never take from her no matter how much I want to keep her safe by keeping her still. She kept breathing. She stopped singing. She touched my hand and I felt the ache she refused to name, the silence she refused to split open.
Because she still loves him.
And Taeyang—fool that he is—loves her the way a tide loves a moon it resents: against his will, against his stories, against every version of himself that makes more sense.
I press my fingers to my mark. Rheon answers like a second heartbeat, steady as tide on stone. He is the other half of me; after everything we burned and broke to stand here, he chooses me out loud, every time.
Yuna has always been waiting to be chosen.
I hate it. Not because waiting is weak—she has never been that—but because she is the kind of woman who deserves to be chased. She is the kind who should be worshipped until the world learns its lesson. She is a storm that has taught herself to whisper so no one calls her dangerous.
Taeyang left her in the dark and told himself it was mercy. I was raised by a court that named its cruelty by nicer words; I recognize the shape.
Down in the gardens, the fire blossoms we replanted shove their bright, torn faces through the soil. Minji cried when she found the bed trampled after the ambush; she pretended it was from smoke. We rebuilt it in an hour. Some things cannot wait for the world to apologize.
A wind moves blue through the wisteria. I see Yuna by the pond at the old Guild—a memory that will never learn to sit, knees tucked up, talking to the lilies as if they belonged to her in some old way. She said fae blood made her strange about flowers. That they whispered in the wind and she listened because someone should.
Now she walks past them like they might ask her a question she can’t answer.
She hasn’t said his name in weeks. The absence rings louder than any argument.
Footsteps pause at the mouth of the balcony. I don’t have to turn to know it’s Rheon; the air shifts the way it does when the room remembers a thing it loves.
“Seori,” he says, voice warm enough to melt the edge off my name. He pauses, closer now. “You’re counting the stars again.”
“I’m counting the hours I pretend not to be afraid for her.”
His palm finds the small of my back, grounding without pinning. He learned that on purpose.
“Wrath flared in the training ring,” he says after a beat, as if remarking on the weather. “Hard enough to crack stone. He’s… not running.”
The breath I didn’t know I was holding burns going out. The ache that has been my companion all week stumbles, then steadies.
“Did he say anything?”
“Only your friend’s name.” Rheon’s thumb draws a slow circle through silk. “Only like it hurt and helped.”
“It should,” I say, too quickly. The night-bloom opens another fraction, dark petals slick with moon. “It should do both.”
Rheon is quiet in that patient way that once drove me mad.
“You want to drag him here by the throat.”
“I want to drag them both into a room with soft chairs and hard truths and lock the door until they remember how to be brave at the same time.” I huff out a laugh that shakes. “I want to make the world kinder than it has been to us.”
