His core ached from the warmth, too hot and sluggish, magic sluggish in his blood. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the flower-bath—steam curling around Seungho’s chest, the king’s hands sliding soap down Haneul’s arm, the look that had passed between them as if the water itself were waiting to be torn apart by frost or fire.
He’d bitten his lip so hard it bled.
Eventually, the stifling hush of the chamber, the soft snoring of half-drunk brothers, the distant mutter of guards at their posts, became too much. Haneul grunted, tangled himself free of thelinen sheets with a kick, and sat up—bare-chested, hair mussed, eyes wild with the need to move.
He slipped out the narrow window, feet silent on the stone, and scaled the eaves with a fluid, animal grace. The rooftops above the Fire King’s palace were slick with dew, tiles cold under his soles, the wind sharper here, blessedly real. Haneul perched near the edge, legs dangling into the void, spine long and shadowed in the moonlight. The wounds on his back stung in the night air, but he barely noticed.
He tipped his head up and hummed—a slow, wordless melody, the kind sung in the forests before battles or burials, the kind his mother might have sung, once, before the world taught him to bite and run. It was not a song for company. It was for the moon, and the wind, and whatever gods still bothered to listen to outcasts on palace roofs.
??????
Across the palace, Seungho did not sleep.
He’d dismissed his attendants with a wave, let the fires burn down low, stood at his open window, bare-chested, hair loose from its knot and falling over his scarred shoulders. The city was silvered by moonlight, the silence thick and unfamiliar—a peace that tasted like a threat, a dream built on too many unburied bones.
He should have felt triumphant. His enemies under his roof. His rule unchallenged. The ritual a success. The world at the edge of a new order.
Instead, he felt restless. Heat lingered on his skin from the bath, from the closeness, from the accidental truth of the boy who wouldn’t bow—who had let Seungho wash the blood from his back, if only for a heartbeat. That wild, neurotic, unbrokenmagic. That voice. That pause. The world felt smaller, hungrier, unfinished.
He found himself at the window, eyes drawn upward, searching the eaves for movement. The moon was bright on the rooftops, and there—like a half-wild ghost, legs dangling wild, skin glowing blue-pale—was Haneul. His braid hung forward, token-laden, catching moonlight like teeth. He was humming, low and tuneless, the song nearly lost in the wind.
Seungho watched, unseen, heart pounding slow and heavy in his chest.
He wondered—
How did a boy so wild survive so long in a world built to break him?
Why did Haneul’s magic answer only to itself?
Why, when he should have felt like a conqueror, did he feel instead like a supplicant—aching to be recognized by a storm that had never learned to kneel?
He thought of the bath, the truce, the way Haneul had paused when he spoke, not out of fear but as if recognizing something in Seungho that was his own.
A flicker of envy. Of longing.
He wanted—no, needed—to know what that recognition meant.
Was it fate? Was it a mistake?
Or was it the beginning of something the world would never forgive?
The moon climbed higher. The song faded, replaced by silence and the distant howl of a dog or wolf in the old city streets.
Seungho pressed his forehead to the cool frame of the window, breathing in the wildness drifting from the eaves, letting himself want—just for tonight—to step out onto the tiles, join Haneul in the wind, and become something other than a king.
He did not call out. He did not move for a while… and then he did.
Wind curled cold around the palace peaks. Seungho didn’t bother with his robe—he took the ledge in bare feet and loose hair, crossing the tiled eaves with a predator’s confidence. From below, no one would have seen him, but up here the world was silent and every secret belonged to the sky.
He moved toward the wild silhouette at the highest point—a silver-haired animal, lean and scarred and gleaming like a knife. Haneul didn’t startle, didn’t turn. He’d known the Fire King would come, the way any wolf feels the tremor before the lightning splits a tree.
Seungho came to a halt one roof-beam away, shadow sharp against the moonlight.
“Can’t sleep?” he called softly, voice rough with the effort not to sound like he needed an answer.
Haneul grinned, mouth full of sharpness, lips split open on a song that tasted of old snow and better defiance. He looked over one shoulder, pale chest striped with the ghost of healing bruises, braid tumbling between his shoulder blades.
“You again?” Haneul’s voice was light but lethal. “What’s wrong, Fire King? Did the bath not boil the itch out of you? Or are you just hoping the rooftops will bite softer than last time?”
