Shadows of the Past
Taeyang
The woods of the demon realm were quiet in the way ruins are quiet—hushed, but full of things that never stopped screaming.
I sat with my back against a crumbling statue, the face long sheared off by wind and old war. The red mist pulsed around the trees like a tired heartbeat. Moonlight leaked through it in thin, sullen threads, too dull to bless anything. I didn’t look up. I watched my hands.
Blood in the old cuts. Scar over scar like rings in a burned tree. Hands made for ending, not for holding. Not for her.
Yuna.
Even her name hurt. It fit in my mouth like a prayer I had no right to keep. If I closed my eyes, there she was—golden-eyed and impossible, the way her laugh tightened at the edges when she was trying not to show her teeth, the way her gaze shattered the day I left and kept going without me. She used to say my name like it meant more than wrath. Like I did.
I am what I was made to be. A weapon. I can be precise. I can be patient. I can cut. I have never learned how to be soft without bleeding.
Memory didn’t knock. It walked in, dragging ash: the house, the roses catching flame so quick it looked like they wanted to burn, the iron in the air so thick I tasted it for days. Fifteen, and stupid with grief, fingers too slow on a latch, breath too loud in a cupboard. My mother gone before the door stopped swinging. A girl I had started to imagine a life around—snatched, then displayed. The fae king smiling like cruelty was culture.
That was the night I decided love is a blade you hand your enemy. I taught my chest to be a vault. I taught my pulse to lie.
Then came Yuna. Fae-born. Wild. Moonfire and stubbornness. She read me like a map even after I set myself on fire to keep anyone from following the lines. She touched me like the stain wasn’t the only thing she saw.
And I fell. I am still falling.
The bond thrummed under my skin like a song I can’t shut off—heat when she is near, ache when she is not, a thread tugged by hands I pretend I don’t miss. It isn’t killing me. It is making me honest, which is worse.
Because I left her. Because I was afraid.
Not of her. Of wanting the life she made me see. Of the peace you have to stay to earn.
“Still hiding?”
I didn’t need to turn to know the voice. Jisoo stepped into the clearing, moving like a shadow that learned grace to survive. The angel in him makes even the demon realm keep its distance. His eyes, though—they were hollowed out in the familiar way of men who have made a wrong choice and carry it like a second spine.
“You’re one to talk,” I said, closing my fist until the split skin wept. “Still wearing regret like a coat you won’t take off?”
He huffed something that wanted to be a laugh and couldn’t.
“Aren’t we all?”
We let silence sit between us, not friendly, not unkind. He watched the trees like they might confess. I watched my knuckles dry. The ground smelled like old smoke and wet stone.
“She’s not the same,” he said after a while, voice low enough that the mist didn’t bother to carry it far. “Minji and I aren’t either.”
I nodded, the motion small and stiff.
“Yuna’s fading.”
His head came up.
“You see it?”
“How could I not?” The laugh that escaped me tasted like rust. “She used to be starlight. Now she practices being a shadow, so no one will notice she’s gone.”
“Then go to her.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
