A scroll thin as an old scar tucked behind tomes that had learned to pretend, they were harmless. The wax had blackened with time; the ribbon smelled like resin and a lie.
Order of Termination.
Faded ink. Royal seal. My mother’s sigil pressed beside my father’s, perfect and final.
Eliminate the berserker bloodline before it aligns with chaos-born demons.
Eliminate the woman attached to the line.
Eliminate any issue if it has already taken root.
No names. It didn’t need them.
My hands went numb before they shook. The letters swam, then steadied as if the page meant to teach me how to read pain properly.Berserker bloodline. Woman. Issue.The story was a shape I already knew inside my bones: Taeyang’s mother. His father. The first girl he loved before he learned to spellleavingfaster thanfuture.
The Fae King had given the order. My father—the man who once kissed my brow and said I was made of starlight and mercy—had signed a family into ash to preserve his idea of peace.
The scroll slid from my fingers and hit the stone with the soft sound paper makes when it realizes it has been telling the wrong story for years.
I didn’t retch. I couldn’t. I pressed my fist to my mouth and cried—not just for him. Forus. For the shards we had been holding together with bare hands, cutting ourselves to keep the shape.
I almost went straight to Taeyang.
I almost ran through wards and corridors and the last soft parts of my pride and put the Order in his hands and said,I know. I see it. I’m sorry. I’m not him.
But then I remembered the way he looked at me with a crown on my head. The quiet he built and moved into like a house. The way the bond burned and he pretended it was a fever he could sweat out. And I folded the Order, bound it in a thorn-thread so no one could alter it, and put it against my heart where it could ruin me at a proper pace.
It festered.
Grief learned a new language.
—
Present
I stand in the garden, jaw locked, hands empty, and finally myself feel it. All of it. The ache. The betrayal. The guilt I did not earn that still made a home in my bones. The heartbreak he gave me. The war I did not start and will now own.
The bond drums under my skin, a relentless second heart. Through it I feel him somewhere inside the palace, pacing, bracing, pushing me out like a fever dream he can’t afford.
Something in me saysenoughand means it.
The ground under my feet cracks with a sound like ice deciding to be river. The air turns gold—moonlight caught in honey, too thick to breathe. Power climbs my spine and finds my throat; when I scream I don’t hear it at first—the magic hears me and answers.
It isn’t elegant. It isn’t pretty.
It is grief incarnate.
Lightning veined with starlight rips the lid off the sky. Wisteria blooms and withers and blooms again in one breath, a time-lapse of survival. Fire blossoms lift their small faces and crown themselves in brighter flame. The wardlines Seori wove shiver; I reach without thinking and lace my power through them, not breaking—rewriting. The dome over the garden adjusts tome.
Boots on stone. Shouts at the arch. Palace guards.
“Stay back,” someone calls.
They can’t get close. My magic lashes out—teeth, thorn, flame,no—a storm with a will. It knocks a spear from a hand without breaking bone, snaps a wrist guard without bruising the skin beneath. It is alive. It is mine. And in the middle of it I am sobbing, shaking,waking.
I lift my palms andchoose.
Glamour slinks toward me, eager to smooth my edges. I refuse it. I keep the edges. Hair whips my back, heavy braid turned wild, moonstones sparking like choked stars. The mark at my collarbone burns pure-white for the first time since it was placed, not as plea—as declaration.
