Daughter,
You will return at once.
Queen Elara of the Summer Court
High King Consort Theron
Three lines. A lifetime.
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. I wanted to go to the garden and tell the lilies that I am still the girl who talks to things that can’t answer and maybe that makes me foolish, but at least it makes me mine.
Instead I stood and let the weight of two realms find the narrow shelf of my collarbones.
“Are you going to obey?” Kaelen’s voice traveled the corridor like it had paid for the privilege and was trying to be discreet.
“I don’t know.” It was the truest thing I’d said all day. “I know I’m done being hidden. By anyone.”
Silence, then:
“He will follow, if you leave.”
I closed my eyes and felt the bond nod in my skin.
“I know.”
“And if you stay?” Kaelen asked, gentler. “If you choosethis—these people, this war, that man—over crowns and courts?”
“Then I’ll have chosen for once in my life,” I said, opening them again. The hall blurred, then steadied. “And whatever happens will be mine, not a story told about me.”
We stood in the kind of quiet that isn’t empty so much as full of everything you haven’t said. Somewhere below us, Minji laughed bright and brave for someone else’s sake. Somewhere above, Seori’s crown hummed against Rheon’s, two storms deciding to be weather together. Life insisted. It always does.
I set the scroll back in my palm and forced my fingers to unclench. Duty. Love. Kingdom. Bond. The words jostled each other, rude and stubborn. I pictured my father’s face when I walked into the throne room, the way he would call medaughterand meanasset. I pictured Taeyang’s face last night when he saidI choose youlike a man unlearning a lifetime of silence and meaning it even if his mouth shook.
The mark warmed, a small, steady light under my skin. Not command. Not permission. Justthere.
I breathed in smoke and summer, moonlight and iron, and let it burn a little on the way down.
Then I turned toward the stairs.
Because sometimes love isn’t fire at all. It’s the smoke that chokes you while you learn how to breathe in a room where the windows won’t open. And sometimes duty is not a chain but a mirror—one that shows you the woman you are when no one is watching.
The summons curled in my fist like a choice pretending to be fate.
I walked—past the place where he had waited, past the portrait that looked too much like my mother’s profile when she was young and still believed she could make the world polite. I did not look back.
Not because I wasn’t brave enough to. Because if I did, I would choose with my body before my mouth caught up, and I want the next choice I make to be a thing I can say out loud in any court, in any garden, with or without him beside me.
The mark ached. The future yawned its wide, blue mouth. I kept moving.
Echoes of War
Rheon
The wind on the outer rim had shifted.
You could taste it first—iron on the back of the tongue, a hint of rain with nowhere to fall. Then you felt it under your boots, the way old stone takes a breath before it remembers how to crack. Shadows curled at the edges of corridors they used to cross in straight lines. Wardlights flickered as if a giant had brushed the ceiling with the back of his hand.
War wasn’t coming. It was already walking the long road toward us, dragging its bloody breath like an old curse relearning the names it meant to speak.
