I open my palm and the Vale becomes a shore: a black river coiling through smoke, the faint chime of all the names it has ever learned. Yuna’s soul hovers over that water, curious and stubborn. I am the King and I could part the torrent for her—but I must not. So I do what the living think kings never do: I wait. I watch. I steady the world so someone braver can cross it.
Seori speaks the braid-words in a tongue that remembers both altars and stars.
“Blood of wrath, make room. Breath of light, return. By my mother’s crown and my father’s wing—by the law that binds a vow to bone—divide and give.”
She turns Taeyang’s hand and guides two fingers into his own wound. He doesn’t flinch.
“Say it,” she tells him. “Name it yours.”
He leans in until his breath warms Yuna’s cheek.
“Take me,” he says, voice torn and certain. “Take the half that keeps time. I will be the other half that learns it again beside you. Live, and let my life be the echo.”
The Vale stirs.
His heartanswers—a hard, painful kick under my hand, then a shudder—then a second rhythm emerges, not his, not hers yet, abraided beat that asks for permission and takes courage instead. Light spills along Seori’s blade, threads from Taeyang’s wound to Yuna’s sternum, and I catch it in my shadow and hold it steady so it doesn’t break.
“Now,” Seori whispers, eyes on me, and I nod once—Gate stilled, current slowed, the hungry parts of the dark told to look away.
She presses the flat of the knife to Yuna’s chest. Starlight floods the steel; hellfire hums beneath; the air smells like first snow and summer rain at once. She lifts the blade and with the gentlest stroke I’ve ever seen, shewritesa half-moon over Yuna’s heart to mirror the one over Taeyang’s.
“Bind,” Seori says.
The thread leaps. It spears Taeyang’s crescent, glows violet, then dives into Yuna’s. For a breath, nothing happens. For a second breath, the river roars its displeasure at being denied. On the third—
Yuna gasps.
Small. Sharp. Furious with the world for making her need it.
Taeyang makes a sound I will remember when the kingdoms are dust. He folds over her with his mouth on her brow, crying like the boy he never got to be and the man he finally is. Jisoo sags, laughter bursting out of him like a wound that chose joy. Minji’s count flips to a prayer and then to a threat she will deliver if anyone interrupts.
I keep the wall high. I keep the Gate gentled. I keep my eyes on a place no one else can see, because the river is petty and grief is greedy and neither likes to be told no.
Yuna blinks up at the sky, then at the man breaking open over her.
“Hey,” she croaks, stubbornly alive. “Don’t look so tragic. I’m not that easy to get rid of.”
Taeyang laughs—wrecked, holy. He presses his brow to hers.
“You’re not rid of me either.”
Seori doesn’t smile; queens count costs even when we get our miracles. She tips Taeyang’s chin up with two bloody fingers and makes sure he’s looking at her when she says the part that matters.
“You are one pulse now,” she tells him. “There is no later in which you choose yourself over her. There is no mercy that separates what I stitched. If she falters, you feel it. If you do, she will. You wanted ugly truth; here it is: this bond will ask for everything andkeepeverything it takes.”
Taeyang nods, tears still running, mouth set.
“Good,” he says, like a man signing the last page of a contract that finally tells the truth. He looks back at Yuna and the line he gave her before becomes something that belongs to every legend I ever hated:
“If the world insists, I behalf of anything, let the half without you be the half that dies.”
Seori’s throat works. Mine does too. I shut the Gate with a thought and the river sulks away, denied a story it wanted to finish. My shadow loosens. The Vale returns to being a battlefield instead of a border.
Over us, the balcony screams—steel, orders, a father choking on the cost of underestimating love. Seori rises with the knife in one hand and a new law in the other. Jisoo adjusts theward; Minji reloads decisions. Taeyang gathers Yuna as if the ground is no longer qualified to hold her.
“Can you stand?” I ask him.
He nods, not looking away from the only horizon he recognizes.
