“I can do anything she needs.”
“Then do this first,” I say, and the King’s voice rakes the air like a broken crown. “Live.”
Seori squeezes my wrist once—queen to king, lover to lover, partner to co-conspirator. We turn together to face the rest of the night. Behind us, two heartbeats catch, then fall into a new, braided time.
Ashen Vale breathes out.
And for one defiant moment, the underworld and the living agree: what love claims, law must learn to hold.
Not Without Her
Minji
I’ve kept a tally of too many things in this war—arrows left, exits open, lies that pass for strategy. I didn’t know I was also counting heartbeats until Yuna’s came back.
The sound is small at first—two pulses braided, learning each other’s timing. Then stronger. Thenstubborn, like her. Jisoo’s ward seal softens from blistering white to a steady glow; Rheon’s wall of night thins just enough to let air through. Taeyang bends over her as if the sky asked for permission and he told it to wait.
I stop counting.
My legs move before my mind does. One moment I’m kneeling in blood and ash; the next I’m running, boots slipping on churned soil, ribs aching from breaths I wouldn’t take while we bargained with death. Seori straightens from the ritual, blade still in her hand, underlight flickering across the half-moon she’s written over Yuna’s heart. She turns just in time for me to crash into both of them.
I don’t ask permission. I fold myself around my best friend and my almost-sister and cling like the world has two handles and I finally remembered to hold on.
“Hey,” Yuna croaks into my hair, ever inappropriate, forever her. “Min—it’s okay.”
“It wasnotokay,” I tell her, and it comes out as a sob that’s been waiting since the night we were twelve and she dared me to jump off the academy roof because the moon looked like a coin and she wanted to see if it would buy us a wish. “You don’t get to do that.”
Her laugh hurts.
“I’m very dramatic.”
“I know,” I say, and squeeze tighter. “We let you be dramatic at bars. Not on battlefields.”
Seori’s arms come around both of us, firm and shaking at once. She smells like steel and garden smoke, familiar as the night-before-a-mission when we ate dumplings on the dorm floor and swore we weren’t afraid. I feel her breath go rough against my temple.
“I almost lost you,” I whisper into Yuna’s shoulder, into Seori’s hair, into the old fear that I’ve been so good at ignoring I forgot how to speak around it. “I almost—”
“You didn’t,” Seori says, voice low, unflinching. “You didn’t.”
I nod into her braid and let myself cry properly for thirty seconds—silent, ugly, efficient. When I pull back, it’s with both hands on Yuna’s face, thumbs sweeping blood and ash and a future I refuse to let be short.
“You’re here,” I say, as if naming it will make it refuse to change.
“I’m here,” she echoes, small smile pulling at her mouth. Her eyes flick past me to Taeyang, who’s hovering like a vow that grew a body. “Don’t tell him, but that hurt.”
“I heard that,” Taeyang mutters, wrecked and gentle, one hand cupping the curve of the bandage like he can guard it with skin. His other hand shakes until he tucks it into a fist.
“You don’t get to joke yet,” I tell them both, wiping my face with an ash-smeared knuckle. “I’m instituting a no-gallows-humor policy for the next…ever.”
Yuna’s gaze snags on Seori’s wrist—on the matching half-moon shining faintly through blood—and then on Taeyang’s. The realization lands; the emotion that follows is too big for her body. She swallows hard. “You”
“Later,” Seori says softly, and something in her eyes tells me she’s already counting the cost and paying it without flinching. “We’ll explain everything. Right now you breathe. That’s the job.”
“That’s your job,” I say, recovering enough spine to glare. “Mine is yelling at both of you for terrifying me.”
Seori’s mouth tips.
“You can multitask.”
