I reach—palms not moving, only the part of me the living can’t read—and test the thread that ties Yuna to her body. Thin. Fraying. Jisoo’s seal covers the vessel; the soul is already drifting toward the Gate that is everywhere to me and nowhere to anyone else.
“I can hold the door,” I tell Seori, and hate the shape of the next words in my mouth. “I can’t bring her through it. Not back.”
The law isn’t written. Itis. The Sovereign of Below may guide the lost, judge the unquiet, bar the murderous, crown the dead kings who forgot humility—but he does not steal the living from the river. We don’t get to be thieves and shepherds both.
Taeyang doesn’t hear us. He hears the end of a world.
“Yuna,” he breathes, a raw scrape, “please. Take the rest of me. Take all of me. Just—”
Her lashes flutter. They shouldn’t be able to. The body remembers the soul even when the soul is trying to forget pain.
“Rheon,” Seori says, and there is a new thing in her voice—decision sharpened to a point. “I can.”
I look at her. I know that tone. I wore it when I set a palace on fire.
“How?” I ask, already preparing to bear whatever the answer costs.
“Not resurrection,” she says. “Re-binding. A life for a life, braided—half of one heart into the other. Not a metaphor.A division.”
I taste iron.
“Seori—”
“I am my mother’s daughter,” she says softly, fierce and bright—the Demon Queen’s blood rising in her cheeks—“and my father’s too.” Starlight ghosts her irises at the wordfather. “I can weave a red thread through two beating things and make them one drum. But the price is the law that makes it hold: if one fails, both fall. It cannot be unmade.”
Taeyang’s head snaps up. The world is gone from his eyes. Only Yuna exists there, and the ruin of the man who put steel where a vow should’ve been.
“What price?” he demands, hoarse.
Seori kneels into the mud across from him, so close the under light in her skin warms his bloody knuckles.
“Half your heart,” she says. “Given. Marked. Shared. If she dies, you die. If you die, she dies. No bargains after. No gentle exits. One pulse between you, forever.”
He doesn’t look at me. He looks at the girl bleeding into his hands and answers like he’s been starving his whole life and someone finally set a bowl down.
“Take it.”
“Taeyang,” I warn, because the job I hate has taught me to count the ways love can become a weapon. “This is not pretty. This is not a poem. This is the kind of vow that makes gods move out of the way.”
He turns to me then. He is not the boy in the burning house. He’s the man who crawled out.
“I don’t want a life she isn’t breathing in,” he says, and every word lands like a blade driven hilt-deep. “Give her my tomorrows. Tie me to her nights. If cost is the language the world speaks, let it hear me: I would rather end with her than exist without her.” He looks down, presses his mouth to Yuna’s hair, and when he lifts his head his voice breaks into something that ruins me. “If you need poetry—fine. Take the half that learned how to live without her. I won’t be needing it.”
Seori’s eyes shine, but her hands are steady.
“Then listen. Both of you.”
Jisoo’s seal brightens; his jaw locks; Minji’s counting never falters. I throw a wall of night high and wide to make us a chapel war can’t interrupt. Seori draws her knife—a slim, sacred thing that remembers every name it cauterized instead of killed. She looks at Taeyang.
“Over the sternum. Where the brand lives. May I?”
He nods, strips open his coat with shaking fingers, bares the mark that has lied to him all his life. Seori carves a small crescentjust left of center. Not deep—true. Blood wells black-red. Steam blooms in the cold.
Then she turns the blade in her hand and lays the flat over Yuna’s breastbone.
“Follow me back,” she murmurs to the gold drifting just above us. “He paid your fare.”
The under answers.
