Uncles and Assassins
Minji
The air in the demon realm never truly went quiet. It thrummed—beneath stone, inside bone—as if the land kept its own pulse and we were trespassers inside a living thing. Not thunder. Older. Closer. A whispering that knew names.
I tightened the leather bracers at my wrists until the seams bit skin. The soft rasp of armor and the last echo of Rheon’s footsteps were the only sounds left on the ridge. He’d gone on ahead with two scouts to walk the High Summit beforethe parley. White pennons. Peace-bonded steel. All the language of trust.
Nothing about it felt safe. Not with Yuna moving through the world like a beautiful ghost.
Not with Jisoo looking at me as if longing were a right he’d misplaced and meant to reclaim.
I pushed the thought away—filed sharp feelings where a fight couldn’t knock them loose. Sword strapped high between my shoulder blades. Three knives at my hips. Sigil-ink along my palm bright as a fresh bruise. Taeyang fell in a pace behind me, breath quiet, wrath throttled. Lethal on a leash.
But it wasn’t him I watched. It was the shadows ahead—how they thickened in the ravine between two boulder spines, how the wardlight along the ridge blinked like a tired eye.
“Hold,” I said.
Taeyang’s head tilted the way beasts listen.
“Do you—”
“I feel it.” The hum changed key. Something old remembering itself.
They stepped out with the care of men who wanted to be seen. Cloaked. Tall. Familiar the way old wounds are familiar. The House Korr sigil—three-horned hound pierced through the tongue—glinted like a joke on dark leather.
Taeyang went very still.
“Uncles.”
The word hung in the air like ash suspended in breath.
Three of them, fanning out to eat space: Garran, Vorren, Daesin. I recognized them from whispered stories and onebloody page in the Guild’s old ledger. The eyes were the same—hungry, but not for flesh. Power. Place. The pleasure of yanking a chain and feeling something choke on the other end.
“You bring outsiders into our lands,” Vorren sneered. “Fae. Traitors. Half-blooded vermin.”
My hand found a knife without asking my head first. “Say that again.”
Garran’s gaze slid over me like a blade choosing where to rest before cutting. Then to Taeyang. Then to Jisoo where he stood slightly forward of my flank, silent, his shadow long and deliberate.
“You were always a disappointment,” Daesin told Taeyang pleasantly, as if offering tea. “Running with a bond you should’ve bitten through. Aligning with the cursed, the forgotten. And now you bring war to our door?”
Taeyang didn’t rise. Didn’t flinch. Only the small tick in his jaw—the tell I’ve learned to watch. The mark under his collar flared once, gold through gray. Yuna, I thought. He held the name like a blade turned inward.
“She’s your enemy,” Vorren said. “Her kind never love ours. You know what her kind did—what they stole.”
I moved before sense could catch up, steel singing free, edge kissing his throat.
“Another word about her and I swear—”
A hand closed around my wrist, cool and controlled. Jisoo.
“Minji,” he said, voice a hush meant for me, not them. “Not here.”
The uncles laughed the way men laugh right before they throw a child into a river to see if it swims.
“You’re not here to talk peace,” Taeyang said, stepping forward so the moonless light cut his face into something a legend would recognize.
“No,” Garran grinned, teeth too even. “We’re here to make sure you never get the chance.”
