“Yes, your Majesty.”
“Don’t call me that here.”
“What do I call you here?”
“Yuna,” I say, and let the name be enough.
Outside, the palace shifts its weight from the past to the future. Inside, our joined pulse finds a steadier rhythm. The realm may not forgive or forget. It may never stop asking for costs in cruel tongues.
But for now, in this room that smells like moon mint and iron and the first quiet after war, I am queen, and I am daughter, and I am lover, and I am alive.
And that is enough to begin.
Her Crown, His Curse
Taeyang
The palace quiets like a beast sedated—eyes open, breath shallow, waiting to see who it will be for when it wakes.
Yuna sleeps. Not the fragile absence from the field; a stubborn, healing sleep that drags my own pulse into its rhythm and makes it behave. The crescent under her bandage warms against my palm every time I touch it, answering the twin cut over my sternum with a double beat: hers, mine, ours. I sit at her bedside and learn the music like prayer.
“Drink,” a healer says, pressing a chipped clay cup into my hand. Moonmint. My throat remembers water. My mouthremembers vows. I don’t move until Yuna sighs and turns toward the warmth of my wrist.
Seori stands watch at the foot of the cot, arms folded, a queen in war-worn leather who smells like steel and ash and the first breath after we don’t die. Rheon is a shadow in the doorway, keeping the world from entering without asking. Minji and Jisoo have folded themselves into the next bed: wing bandaged, fingers ink-black, their shoulders barely touching like an apology that needed a place to land.
I should feel safe.
Instead, the brand under my breastbone hums like a locked door remembering it has a mouth.Heel,it whispers, an old command wearing a new voice.
The peace-cup is gone, but the incline it carved remains—a slope under the floorboards of my bones that wants everything to roll the same way it always has. I press my fingers to the crescent Seori cut into me and breathe until the whisper finds nothing to grip. It doesn’t leave. It waits.
Rheon’s head tilts. He has the look of a man who hears storms inside other people.
“Walk,” he says quietly, and shadows part to make us a corridor that doesn’t crush.
I don’t want to let go of her hand. I do anyway, because part of loving Yuna will be learning how not to make her heal my fire for me.
The hall outside the infirmary smells like rain that forgot where to fall. Lanterns hang low. The palace vines have dimmed their blooms out of respect. Rheon and I stand in the hush, and the brand under my sternum shows me the door again.
“It doesn’t stop,” I say.
“No,” he answers. “It learns you.”
“I don’t want it to.” My laugh is bone-dry. “I’ve been learning other things.”
“Then teach it,” he says simply. “Make it kneel where you choose.”
I look at my hands. I remember what they did when they were empty of choice.
“What if it choosesher?”
His shadow tightens once, the way an animal moves when it decides to kill anything that tries the worst idea in the room.
“It won’t,” he says. Not a hope. A sentence. “But we don’t leave it to hope.”
Seori joins us without the sound of feet.
“I can write another layer,” she says, eyes flicking to the crescent over my heart. “Not a leash. A refusal. ‘Not Yours.’ Keyed to the bond, not the crown. It won’t remove what he planted, but it will make the soil inhospitable.”
