#sanxoc

[zaynestheone]

NOT DESPITE THE BEAST • ATEEZ CHOI SAN

I. BEFORE THE END

prince!san × knight!oc

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After six months exploring the northern mountains, Prince San returns home determined to enjoy every moment of his freedom.

His plans become significantly more complicated when they involve a knight who seems personally offended by the concept of fun.

Unfortunately for Dame Jiyeon, he intends to fix that.

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Content warnings: emotional abuse, violence, major character death, suicide

Dawn had not yet decided whether to be night or morning.

The sky above the palace courtyards sat in that pale, uncertain hour just before sunrise, when the black had thinned to deep blue and the first silver washed over the stone like watered milk. The garden was still. The fountains had gone quiet. Even the cypress trees, tall and severe along the outer wall, seemed to be holding their breath.

Jiyeon liked this hour because the world belonged to discipline then.

No gossip from the kitchens. No ministers. No pages running underfoot. In the early morning, the palace was stripped down to its bones.

She stood in the central training yard with a sword in both hands, her feet set just so on the damp flagstones. Her breath came steady through her nose. The blade in her grip caught the first light and turned it cold.

Again.

She shifted, turned her shoulder, drove the practice strike through the air. The motion was clean enough to have been carved from wood. Her wrist snapped at the end with controlled force. She spun, reset, attacked from another angle. The figure she fought was only a post wrapped in faded cloth, but she did not spare it.

The yard rang with the muted crack of steel against wood.

Again.

The word belonged to her more than any title ever could. Again, because once was never enough. Again, because the body improved only when it was exhausted and still obeyed. Again, because the world never stopped to admire a clean cut or a perfect guard. Again, because she had been taught that anything worth protecting would demand repetition until pain became ordinary.

A lock of hair slipped free from her braid and stuck to the sweat along her temple. She did not bother to brush it away. Her focus was fixed on the practice post, on the line of her blade, on the measured weight in her arms and the way her muscles answered her before thought did.

She drew in a breath. Exhaled. Struck.

“Marvelous.”

The voice came from behind her, warm with amusement and far too early to be welcome.

Jiyeon did not turn immediately. She completed the motion first, because to stop mid-form was to hand the other person your attention on their terms. Only then did she lower the blade and look over her shoulder.

Prince San stood at the edge of the yard in travel-stained boots and a dark riding coat dusted with the road. His hair had gone unruly from wind and distance, and there was still frost clinging in tiny silver flecks to the hem of his cloak. He looked as though he had been assembled out of motion—out of mountain roads, and cold air. There was color in his face from the journey, a kind of living brightness that made the courtyard seem dull by comparison.

Six months away and somehow he returned looking as if the world had amused him the whole way north.

Jiyeon’s expression did not change. “Your Highness.”

San pressed a hand dramatically to his chest. “That voice. That tone. I should have known the palace’s favorite blade was going to greet me like an executioner instead of a friend.”

“I am not your friend.”

“No,” he said, strolling closer with infuriating ease, “you are worse. Friends can be reasoned with. You, I suspect, were born with an argument in your mouth and a sword in your hand.”

She angled the practice blade downward but did not lower it fully. “You have only just arrived and already you are talking too much.”

He looked delighted by that. “And you have only just seen me and already you are glaring. We fall into old habits quickly, don’t we?”

“You would know all about habits. You never leave a room without making a nuisance of yourself.”

San’s grin sharpened. “That is a terrible way to welcome a man who spent six months freezing in the north, nearly being eaten by bears, and developing a deep and spiritual hatred of horse saddles.”

Jiyeon raised one brow. “You survived, nonetheless.”

“Barely.” He tilted his head, studying her as though he had returned from the edge of the world only to find the most interesting thing in the kingdom standing in the training yard at dawn. “And you are still standing at attention like you’ve been nailed to the floor. Tell me, Dame Jiyeon—does your spine ever relax, or is that too much luxury for one knight?”

The question was delivered lightly, but there was enough mischief in it to be offensive on principle.

Jiyeon turned her full body toward him. “Does your mouth ever stop moving, or is that too much discipline for one prince?”

A laugh broke from him before he could hide it. It changed his face entirely, made him younger somehow, or perhaps simply more dangerous in the way sunlight could be dangerous if one stared at it too long.

“There,” he said, pointing at her with all the dignity of a man who had none. “That. That is exactly what I came back for.”

“You returned for your own entertainment?”

“I returned because my sister wanted me home and because the mountains were beginning to take personal offense at my presence.” His gaze dropped, briefly, to the sword in her hand. “But now I think I may have also returned to be thoroughly humbled by someone who looks like she has not smiled since birth.”

“I smile.”

San’s brows lifted. “Do you? When?”

Jiyeon considered him for a long, punishing moment. “When you leave.”

His face split with delight. “Cruel woman.”

“I am merely honest.”

He took another step into the yard, close enough now that she could smell the road on him—pine, cold leather, sweat, and the faint iron tang of weather long endured. There was snow still trapped in the seams of his boots. He must have ridden directly from the outer gate, too impatient to stop anywhere else first. That, at least, was on brand.

“You should have sent word,” Jiyeon said, because she disliked being taken by surprise and disliked even more the fact that, in spite of herself, some part of her had noticed he was gone before she admitted he was missed. “The palace is not a marketplace. People do not simply appear here after months of absence.”

“No,” San said, gaze still fixed on her, “people are usually announced, praised, escorted, and fed something with too much sugar in it. But I have never been one for ceremony when I can help it.”

“You are a prince.”

“Yes, a condition I am constantly and unfairly reminded of.”

“You are also impossible.”

“That one is voluntary.”

She should have looked away then. Instead she found herself noticing the details she did not want to notice: the way the wind had reddened the tip of his nose, the curve of a scar she had not seen before at the edge of his jaw, the dust on the sleeves of his coat and the tiredness he wore so poorly he had nearly disguised it as brightness. It struck her, inconveniently, that he had spent half a year beyond these walls and had returned looking exactly like someone who had spent half a year chasing the horizon and laughing at the cold.

It was difficult to remain severe in the face of such incurable ease.

San followed her gaze toward the practice post, then the sword, then back to her face. “You were training before the sun rose.”

“Yes.”

“Because you’re diligent.”

“Because I am expected to be.”

“Because you like it?

“I did not say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Jiyeon’s jaw tightened. “You are making assumptions again.”

“I am making observations,” he corrected. “The difference is that assumptions are often rude, while observations are merely honest.”

“That is the most arrogant thing anyone has ever said to me.”

San’s smile turned impish. “Then I am improving my reputation.”

He came close enough now that she could see the faint silver dusting of travel on his lashes, the liveliness in his eyes, the kind of reckless attention that made conversation with him feel less like speaking and more like trying to fence a storm.

Jiyeon shifted the sword slightly. “If you have come to disturb my training, I would appreciate you doing it somewhere else.”

“And if I have come specifically because your training looked far too joyless to be healthy?”

She stared at him.

He stared back, utterly serious now in a way that somehow made the teasing worse.

Jiyeon spoke with deliberate care. “Then I would say that the amount of concern you have for my health is disturbing in itself.”

“Untrue.” His tone softened only by a fraction, enough to make it more difficult to dismiss. “The amount of concern I have for your happiness is disturbing. Your health merely came attached.”

That landed with irritating precision.

She looked away first, which was unforgivable. “My happiness is not your responsibility.”

“No,” San said, and though his voice remained light, there was something more thoughtful under it now, something steady and hard to name. “But it might be my interest.”

Before she could decide whether to be offended by that, the sound of silk and soft footsteps drifted across the stones. Both of them turned.

Crown Princess Haneul appeared at the entrance to the courtyard in a pale robe thrown over her nightclothes, her hair half-pinned and half-loose, the morning light catching in the dark gloss of it. She had the same effortless royal grace she carried everywhere, as if the world had been built with her in mind and had never quite recovered from the favor. She looked between San and Jiyeon with immediate suspicion and all the warmth of sunrise.

“San,” Haneul said, as though the name were an accusation. “You have been back for less than ten minutes and already you're bothering my knight.”

San bowed with exaggerated elegance, one hand sweeping across his chest. “My dear sister, your faith in my restraint is deeply touching.”

“It is nonexistent,” Haneul replied. “And accurate.”

Jiyeon lowered her sword fully at last. “You should still be sleeping.”

“So should you,” Haneul said at once, then glanced at the sweat on Jiyeon’s brow and the blade in her hands. “Actually, no. You probably should not. You look like you were raised by wolves and discipline.”

“I was not.”

“Pity,” San murmured. “It would explain so much.”

Jiyeon shot him a look so sharp it might have split stone. Haneul, instead of being alarmed, smiled as though she had been waiting all morning for exactly this.

San spread his hands. “What? I am simply happy to be home and reunited with two of the palace’s most unreasonable people.”

“Two?” Haneul echoed.

San’s eyes flicked to her. “You are my sister. Were you expecting praise?”

“From you?” she said sweetly. “Never.”

Jiyeon watched them with the familiar, detached precision of someone used to standing just outside the circle of family. She knew where to place herself in this choreography: one step behind, one half-breath to the side, close enough to defend and far enough to remain invisible until needed. It was a position she had mastered so well it had become a second skin.

San, naturally, seemed determined to pry it off.

He turned back to Jiyeon, and whatever game he had begun in the courtyard only deepened in the set of his mouth. “You should come with me.”

Jiyeon’s expression hardened immediately. “No.”

He blinked. “I hadn’t even said where.”

“It does not matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“That is your problem.”

Haneul made a small, delighted sound that suggested she was enjoying herself far too much. “Oh, I missed this.”

San angled his head. “You missed me?”

“I now miss the peace that usually arrives once you leave.”

“That is almost affectionate.”

“That is the closest you will get.”

San’s gaze returned to Jiyeon, bright with trouble. “Come on. One walk. If I can spend six months being bitten by weather in the north, you can spare me ten minutes of your company without looking like I’ve insulted your ancestors.”

“I am busy.”

“With what? Staring a practice post into submission?”

“That post has more purpose than your entire morning.”

Haneul laughed outright at that, and San, rather than taking offense, looked delighted all over again. There was something deeply unsettling about a person who seemed to enjoy being refused.

He stepped closer, lowering his voice just enough that it felt meant for her alone. “Then let me make you an offer, Captain.”

“I am not a captain.”

“No, but you carry yourself as though the whole palace were a battlefield and everyone in it needed protecting from their own incompetence. Very intimidating. Very noble. Very exhausting.”

Jiyeon narrowed her eyes. “You have an extraordinary gift for being insufferable while pretending to be complimentary.”

“Thank you.”

“That was not praise.”

“I know.”

Haneul folded her arms in her sleeves. “What exactly are you offering, Brother? Because if it is another one of your reckless ideas, I would like to know before she stabs you.”

San’s smile turned slow and wicked. “Only the chance to learn how not to be so stiff. A public service, really.”

Jiyeon’s stare could have frozen water. “You would be wise not to say that to my face again.”

“You heard me correctly?”

“I heard you perfectly.”

“Excellent. Then no confusion. I am offering to teach you how to enjoy yourself.”

She actually laughed then—one sharp, disbelieving exhale that she would have denied later if challenged. “You?”

“Yes, me.”

“You think you are qualified?”

“I think,” he said, with the faint seriousness that sometimes hid beneath his playfulness like a blade beneath silk, “that you have forgotten what it means to do anything because you want to do it. Not because someone ordered it. Not because someone expects it. Not because the world will collapse if you do not. Because you want to.”

For the span of a heartbeat, the yard seemed to go quiet around them.

Jiyeon looked at him, truly looked. At the way the north had left its mark on him and yet failed to dim him. At the certainty in his posture, the warmth in his eyes, the absurd, impossible audacity of a prince who had crossed half the kingdom only to stand in her way at dawn and tell her she was too serious.

Then she recovered, because she always did.

“You are speaking nonsense.”

San’s mouth curved. “And yet you are still listening.”

His grin returned before she could answer, bright and triumphant and entirely too pleased with himself. “There it is,” he said softly, as though he had won something precious. “That look. I thought perhaps the mountains had been lying to me, but no—you do possess a soul under all that armor.”

Jiyeon’s fingers tightened around the sword hilt.

San lifted his hands in surrender, but his eyes were laughing. “No, no. Keep scowling. It suits you. Terribly. You look like you could frighten a battalion into obedience.”

“I can.”

“I know.”

And there, beneath the teasing and the bright, infuriating ease of him, something else waited—something that Jiyeon did not name, because she was trained not to name what might later be used against her. But it lingered in the space between them all the same, delicate as the first light on the stones.

San glanced toward the training post, then back to her. “Finish your drills, then. I will find you again.”

“I hope not.”

“You do,” he said, with maddening certainty.

Haneul sighed as though she had been watching a play she already knew would become exhausting. “San, leave her alone before she strikes you.”

“Too late,” Jiyeon muttered.

He heard that, of course. His smile widened like a flame catching dry paper.

“Wonderful,” he said. “She’s begun speaking to me like she might one day enjoy it.”

Jiyeon said nothing.

San bowed to her with a flourish that was pure mockery and, somehow, not mockery at all. “Train well, my lady knight. Try not to be miserable until I return.”

“I make no promises.”

“I know,” he said again, and there was something almost tender in the way he said it, though he buried it beneath the usual wickedness a breath later. “That is what makes this interesting.”

Then he turned and left the yard with the same careless grace with which he had entered it, already calling something over his shoulder to Haneul about breakfast, mountain air, and the state of his dignity. Haneul answered him in a tone sharp enough to draw blood, and the two of them vanished toward the palace as though they had brought the sunrise with them.

Jiyeon stood alone in the courtyard a moment longer, sword lowered at her side.

The practice post waited in front of her, plain and silent.

She should have resumed training at once.

Instead she found herself watching the place where San had been standing, as though the morning had changed shape in the brief time he’d occupied it.

Then, with a movement so slight it might have been nothing at all, she set her jaw, lifted the sword again, and began.

Again.

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By the time a little over a week had passed, Jiyeon had begun to suspect that Prince San’s true duty in life was not to his country, his family, or even whatever future crown waited for him in time.

It was, she decided grimly, to make her miserable.

He appeared everywhere.

At breakfast, leaning too casually against a pillar while Haneul pretended not to notice him stealing bits of fruit from her plate. In the east corridor at midday, where Jiyeon had been walking three steps behind the princess on a quiet patrol, only for San to fall into stride beside her and ask, with insufferable cheer, whether she always walked as though she were marching to battle.

Once beside the rose garden, where he had nearly succeeded in making her lose her temper by offering to polish her sword “since she seemed so fond of hard work.” And again in the late afternoon, appearing out of nowhere with muddy boots and a grin full of trouble, asking whether she had ever considered that smiling might improve her circulation.

Each time, Jiyeon had stared at him with the patience of a sharpened blade and answered with enough clipped politeness to make lesser men feel ashamed.

San, unfortunately, was not a lesser man.

He looked rather pleased by every insult.

Worse, Haneul had joined him.

Jiyeon hated both of them for it.

Well, San that is. She could never hate Haneul.

By evening, the princess’s chamber glowed with soft lamplight and the faint sweet scent of the plum incense Haneul favored. The windows had been drawn open to let in the cooling air, and beyond them the palace gardens lay shadowed and gold-edged under the sinking sun.

Jiyeon stood near the side table with a ledger in hand, reading the next day’s route with the sort of attention usually reserved for military maps.

“Breakfast with the queen dowager,” she said, voice even. “Audience with the guild representatives. Noon prayer with the temple envoy. An hour of correspondence. Tea with Lady Yuri. Then the border petition review before supper.”

Haneul, seated at her vanity, removed one jeweled hairpin and set it carefully in a lacquer tray. “That is horribly unfair to you.”

“It is your schedule.”

“It is our schedule,” Haneul corrected. “You say that as though you are not included in my life.”

Jiyeon did not look up from the page. “I am included to prevent it from becoming a disaster.”

Haneul smiled at her reflection. “And yet you say it so fondly.”

“This is my duty.”

“And you carry it out so well”

Before Jiyeon could answer, a voice drifted through the half-open door.

“Someone mention disaster?”

Jiyeon’s head lifted at once.

San leaned casually in the doorway, one shoulder against the frame, travel-dark hair a little disordered as though he had been running around the palace grounds doing exactly whatever he pleased. He held a folded length of paper in one hand and wore that maddening expression of someone who had already decided he was welcome before anyone else had been asked.

Jiyeon’s mouth flattened. “You have a talent for arriving where you are least wanted.”

“I’d argue the opposite,” San said easily. “I arrive where I am most needed.”

Haneul’s lips twitched. “Did you come here to be insufferable, or are you capable of other forms of communication tonight?”

San pressed one hand to his chest, wounded. “Sister. You cut me deeply.”

“I was aiming for your pride, not your flesh.”

“Still,” he said, stepping fully into the room, “I appreciate the consideration.”

Jiyeon folded the ledger closed with a quiet snap. “What do you want?”

San’s gaze flicked to her, lingering with obvious satisfaction as though he had come specifically to be confronted by her expression. “I’m offended that you always assume I want something. Perhaps I just enjoy your company.”

“Am I?” Jiyeon said.

“Yes.”

Haneul laughed softly. “He does want something, Jiyeon.”

San’s eyes brightened with triumph. “See? Your princess knows me.”

Haneul lifted a brow. “Do not make that sound affectionate. It makes you insufferable.”

“That isn’t why I’m here,” he said, finally getting to the point only because he had exhausted the pleasure of circling it. He held up the folded paper. “We have plans.”

Jiyeon’s eyes narrowed. “We?”

San gave a little nod toward Haneul. “We.”

Haneul, who had very clearly been expecting this, turned in her chair with one hand resting elegantly atop the dressing table. “We do.”

Jiyeon looked between them. “What plans?”

“You’ll see,” San said.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

San’s smile sharpened. “You really do enjoy arguing with me.”

“I enjoy being correct.”

“That explains the first three minutes of every conversation between us.”

Haneul set down the pin she had been holding and looked at Jiyeon with infuriating calm. “It is the harvest festival tonight.”

Jiyeon blinked once. “I know that.”

“And,” Haneul continued, clearly savoring every second of this, “I am ordering you to go.”

Jiyeon stared. “Pardon?”

Haneul’s smile turned sweet in the way that usually preceded trouble. “As your crown princess, I am ordering my knight to attend the festival and have fun.”

“That is not a reasonable order.”

“It is a royal order from your future queen.”

“It is an abuse of royal authority.”

“It is a gift.”

“It is a punishment.”

“It may be both,” San said, entirely unhelpful, and looked far too pleased with himself for someone who was supposedly merely the messenger. “You’ve been miserable for days.”

“I have not.”

“You have. You glare at joy as if it insulted your ancestors.”

Jiyeon’s stare could have frozen a river. “You are the cause of most of my misery.”

San looked briefly delighted to hear it stated so plainly. “Then I’m making progress.”

Haneul laughed into her sleeve. “San, go easy on her. She looks as though she’s considering throwing you out the window.”

“Only considering?” San asked.

Jiyeon turned back to Haneul, the better to ignore him. “I have duties.”

“You do,” Haneul agreed. “And you will return to them tomorrow. Tonight, you will attend the festival.”

“I do not need to attend a festival.”

“You do,” Haneul said with absolute certainty. “You are always standing where I am expected to stand, looking as though the world might collapse if you moved one inch from your post. I am your princess, Jiyeon, and I am telling you to spend one night somewhere beautiful for no reason other than that you are alive.”

The words landed with a strange softness.

Jiyeon’s throat tightened in the smallest, most irritating way. She did not like being spoken to as though she were a person rather than a function. It made her feel exposed. Seen. Dangerous things, both of them.

Before she could recover enough to object, San added, “Also, if it helps, I’m deeply invested in the idea of you being dragged away from work against your will.”

“It does not help.”

“It should. It’s sincere.”

Haneul rose from her seat and crossed the room with easy grace, stopping only when she stood directly in front of Jiyeon. Up close, her expression was bright but not unkind, the kind of brightness that could coax even a closed door open if it wanted.

“You spend every hour making yourself useful,” Haneul said quietly. “Tonight, let someone else take care of the useful part. You can be useless for a few hours. I give permission.”

Jiyeon’s jaw flexed. “That sounds suspiciously like a trap.”

“It is,” San said.

“San.”

“What? She already knows.”

Haneul ignored him. “Go with him.”

Jiyeon looked at San as if the order itself had become offensive through proximity. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?” San asked.

“Because I said so.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is the only one you deserve.”

His expression turned very, very interested. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

Jiyeon opened her mouth to retort and found herself cut off by Haneul lifting one finger.

“As your princess,” Haneul said, voice gaining that unmistakable command-softness of royalty, “I am ordering you to stop arguing.”

Jiyeon went still.

Haneul smiled, victorious. “You are going.”

“This is tyranny.”

“Yes, and?”

San, far too pleased with the entire affair, folded the paper and tucked it away. “Wonderful. We’re agreed.”

“We are not,” Jiyeon said.

“We are,” Haneul corrected. “You simply haven’t accepted it yet.”

Jiyeon drew a long, controlled breath through her nose, the kind she used when she was one heartbeat away from drawing steel. “And what exactly am I supposed to wear to this… ordeal?”

Haneul’s smile widened, and Jiyeon immediately regretted asking.

“Oh,” the princess said, crossing to the wardrobe with dangerous enthusiasm, “I’ve thought of that.”

That was how Jiyeon found herself half an hour later standing in the center of Haneul’s room while the crown princess and two attendants worked around her with unrestrained glee.

The dress Haneul had selected was not armor, not fabric spun for court, not the severe practical clothing Jiyeon usually wore beneath her cuirass and swordbelt.

It was soft where her usual garments were hard, light where they were heavy. Pale and floral, with a fitted corset laced gently down the back and sleeves that fell in airy layers around her wrists. Small embroidered blossoms traced the hem and climbed one side of the bodice like something that had grown there rather than been sewn.

Jiyeon stared at it as though it had personally insulted her rank.

“This is absurd.”

“It is lovely,” Haneul corrected, stepping back to admire her work with the reverence of an artist. “And it suits you.”

“It does not suit me.”

“It does,” San said from where he had inexplicably taken up a position by the window, as though he had always belonged in the room and was merely waiting for the scenery to catch up. He looked up from the city lights beyond the palace grounds and then back to her, gaze lingering in a way that was far too open to be proper. “You look like you’ve been reluctantly turned into a dream.”

Jiyeon turned on him with immediate suspicion. “That is not a compliment.”

“It is.”

“It sounds improper coming from a prince to a knight.”

San smiled. “Its a good with I've never been one for proprietary.”

She hated that, mostly because it made no sense and yet somehow sounded like something he would believe with his whole chest.

Haneul reached for a ribbon of pale silk. “Hold still.”

Jiyeon did, because resisting the princess in her own chamber had its limits and because the attendants were already circling like tiny conspirators. Haneul tied back the last of her hair, leaving a few dark strands loose around her face. Then she adjusted the bodice, smoothed the embroidered skirt, and stepped back with sparkling satisfaction.

“There,” she said.

Jiyeon looked down at herself and felt, with a sudden and deeply unfair stab of vulnerability, as though she had been stripped of one language and dressed in another. The dress was beautiful. That was the worst part. Not because she had never seen beauty before, but because this particular kind of softness did not feel like hers. It made her feel visible in a way armor never did.

San’s voice drifted through the room, quieter now. “You look angry.”

“I am angry.”

“No,” Haneul said at once, studying her with the intensity of someone deciding whether a painting needed one more brushstroke. “You look startled.”

Jiyeon lifted her chin. “I am neither.”

San crossed his arms and tilted his head. “You look like someone just discovered she has shoulders.”

That earned him a glare so vicious one of the attendants made a small, startled noise.

Haneul smiled as she fastened a delicate clasp at the neckline. “Good. Now go break some hearts by appearing in public with him.”

Jiyeon stared at her. “You say that as though it is a given.”

Haneul’s eyes gleamed. “It is.”

San, who had the patience of an untied knot, offered his arm with all the theatrical solemnity of a man escorting royalty to war. “Shall we, my lady knight?”

Jiyeon looked at the arm, then at him, then at Haneul, who was clearly not going to rescue her.

“This is coercion,” Jiyeon said.

San nodded once. “Yes.”

“Disgraceful.”

“Absolutely.”

“You are enjoying this too much.”

“Immensely.”

Her mouth twitched despite herself, which only made his grin spread wider.

With a look of profound resignation, Jiyeon took his arm.

San went very still.

It was only for a fraction of a second, so small that anyone else might have missed it, but Jiyeon felt the change all the same. The warmth of his sleeve under her fingers. The way his posture shifted as though he had just been handed something more delicate than he expected. His gaze dropped to her hand on his arm and then, just as quickly, lifted again.

When he spoke, his voice had gone very mildly softer.

“Well,” he said, clearing his throat with exaggerated casualness, “this is already more successful than I expected.”

Jiyeon’s eyes narrowed. “Do not become unbearable about this.”

“I would never.”

“You are becoming unbearable about it already.”

“Then imagine what I’ll be like after we’ve danced.”

She stopped walking. “We are not dancing.”

San continued on for one step before registering that she had halted. He turned back, brows lifting in mock innocence. “You say that now.”

“I say that forever.”

“Princess’s orders,” he reminded her.

Jiyeon’s stare could have killed a lesser man. “I will survive this only to make your life worse later.”

San smiled, all bright teeth and shameless amusement. “That sounds like a promise.”

Haneul, watching from the doorway with a look of delighted satisfaction, lifted a hand in farewell. “Try not to be too scandalous in public.”

Jiyeon looked as though she might request execution on the spot.

San only bowed. “No promises, Your Royal Highness.”

“Awful,” Haneul said fondly.

Then they were out in the corridor, the palace slipping behind them into lamplight and shadow, and the evening air hit Jiyeon with the scent of cooling stone, distant smoke, sweet cider, and a hundred cooking fires already burning beyond the walls.

The harvest festival had begun.

By the time they reached the city streets, Jiyeon had already decided she loathed every festive sound in the kingdom.

Music floated through the open lanes in bright snatches—drums, reeds, a fiddle somewhere in the distance. Lanterns had been strung between stalls, their paper sides painted with leaves and foxes and constellations.

Merchants called over one another in loud cheerful voices. Children darted between adults with sugared hands. The smell of roasting meat, spiced dough, and honeyed fruit spilled over everything until the entire street seemed to have been cooked alive.

San, for his part, looked as though he had been personally welcomed home by the entire world.

He walked beside her with one hand tucked into his pocket and the other occasionally pointing out things he wanted her to see, none of which she had asked for. A man was frying twisted pastries in bubbling oil at the first stall they passed.

“Try that.”

“No.”

“You haven’t even asked what it is.”

“I do not need to. The answer is still no.”

San leaned slightly closer, eyes gleaming. “Coward.”

Jiyeon’s gaze cut sideways. “I am not afraid of pastries.”

“Then prove it.”

“I am not required to prove my courage to you.”

“That is unfortunate, because I’m very invested in your bravery.” He turned toward the vendor, ignored her outright, and ordered two before she could stop him.

Jiyeon’s expression darkened. “You are intolerable.”

San accepted the paper-wrapped pastry with a look of pure triumph and held it out to her. “Eat.”

“I said no.”

“You say no to everything.”

“Because everything you suggest is suspicious.”

“This is fried dough.”

“That only makes it more suspicious.”

He laughed under his breath, that bright, reckless sound that seemed to belong to him more than his name. “You are so committed to being difficult that I’m beginning to admire it.”

“That is not the same as agreeing with me.”

“No, but it’s a start.”

She looked at the pastry as though it might bite her. It was dusted with sugar and smelled warm enough to hurt. San waited with impossible patience, one brow lifted in challenge.

Jiyeon took it only because refusing further would have been worse than surrender. She bit into it before she could reconsider.

The dough was soft and steaming, the sugar melting almost instantly against her tongue. It tasted of butter and spice and something golden that she could not place. Her eyes widened a fraction before she could stop them.

San noticed, of course.

His mouth curved slowly. “Well?”

Jiyeon swallowed and scowled at him for seeing too much. “It is acceptable.”

“Acceptable,” he repeated, sounding delighted. “That’s all?”

“It is too sweet.”

“You liked it.”

“I did not say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Haneul would have laughed at the expression on her face if she had been there. Jiyeon could almost hear it.

They moved through the crowd after that, and San seemed determined to attack her senses from every possible direction.

He bought skewers of meat glazed in a dark sticky sauce, then made her try them because he claimed she had never properly lived until she had eaten food from a street vendor while people shouted over her shoulder and children nearly ran into her boots. He insisted she sample a cup of hot cider spiced with cinnamon that made her tongue sting. He bought roasted chestnuts and sweet buns shaped like birds and some bright red fruit threaded through a stick and lacquered with sugar so hard it cracked when she bit it.

Jiyeon disliked every moment of it with admirable consistency.

And yet—

And yet.

There was the thrill of being out in the city dressed like someone else entirely. There was the strange warmth in her chest when San offered her his arm through a dense patch of crowd and did not mock her when she took it.

There was the rare, disorienting knowledge of being seen as more than a guard by strangers who passed them and assumed, from the shape of San’s smile and the way he looked at her, something Jiyeon did not know what to do with.

At one stall, a grandmotherly woman sold strings of tiny bells and carved tokens for luck. San stopped to browse with great seriousness.

Jiyeon crossed her arms. “You do not need luck.”

“Everyone needs luck.”

“You are the prince.”

“Exactly.”

He selected a small carved charm shaped like a fox and held it between two fingers. “This is for you.”

“No, it is not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I do not want it.”

San’s smile turned maddeningly gentle. “You don’t want anything I give you unless it’s an argument.”

“That is because your gifts are usually insults.”

“This one is not.”

Jiyeon looked at the little fox. It was imperfectly cut, one ear slightly uneven, the fur lines on its back rough under the thumb. It was simple and foolish.

She held out a hand without meeting his eyes. San placed it into her palm gently.

The bell from the token was tiny, barely a whisper. Jiyeon curled her fingers around it and, because she was not made of stone despite all evidence to the contrary, said nothing.

San looked absurdly pleased with himself.

The festival square opened before them after that, broader than the market lanes and lit by rows of hanging lanterns strung high above the crowds. Musicians had gathered on a low platform at the center, drums and strings and flutes working together into a rhythm that seemed to move under the skin. Around them, people were dancing in loose joyful circles, laughing as they turned.

Jiyeon took one look and immediately sensed betrayal.

“No,” she said.

San, who had already started moving toward the square, turned back with a grin. “Yes.”

“I said no.”

“And I heard you.”

“Then why are you still walking?”

He offered her his hand as though the answer were obvious. “Because you’re coming with me.”

Jiyeon looked at the hand as if it had personally become offensive. “I am not dancing in public.”

“Then think of it as an exercise in diplomacy.”

“I would rather fight a border skirmish.”

“Mm. That’s not quite the same level of fun.”

“It would be had you been competent enough to join one.”

San made a thoughtful sound, as though he were genuinely considering this. “That may be the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Good.”

He reached for her wrist before she could step back, not hard, not forceful, only certain in the way of someone who had decided the argument was over before she had. “You don’t have to be good at it.”

“I do not intend to be at all.”

“Wonderful. I’m terrible too.”

“You are not terrible. You are shameless.”

“Thank you.”

“That was not praise.”

“I know.”

He led her into the edge of the dancing crowd before she could properly protest, the drums lifting the whole square around them in bright heartbeat bursts. People made space for them with smiles and knowing glances Jiyeon chose not to interpret. San turned to face her, still holding her wrist lightly.

“Now,” he said, with all the patience of a man about to commit a public offense, “you put your hand here.”

Jiyeon glared at him.

“Here,” he repeated, and guided one of her hands toward his shoulder”

She froze. “Absolutely not.”

San’s grin had turned almost boyish. “Yes, absolutely. If you keep looking at me like that, people will think I’m threatening you.”

“You are.”

“Not in this moment.”

“In every moment.”

“That is one of the reasons I like you— so head-strong.”

Jiyeon’s breath caught on the word before she could stop it. She masked it instantly beneath a colder expression, but San saw enough of the reaction to look far too pleased.

“That,” he said, voice warm with victory, “is exactly why we’re here.”

She opened her mouth to argue.

He cut her off by taking her other hand and setting it lightly where he wanted it, then stepping back just enough to give her no choice but to face him.

“There,” San said. “You’re dancing now.”

“I am standing very angrily.”

“Beautifully,” he corrected.

Jiyeon stared at him.

San, in what was clearly a reckless act of self-preservation, lifted her hands and guided her through the first step before she could turn and leave.

It was clumsy. It was wrong. Her feet did not move the way the others in the square did, and she hated the feeling of not knowing where her body was supposed to be when it was not being used for combat.

“Your right foot,” San murmured. “No, not like that. You’re trying to stab the floor.”

“I am not.”

“You are. Look, just follow me.”

“I am following you.”

“No, you’re resisting me while standing in the same place.”

“That is still a form of following.”

San laughed, then tried again, patient in the face of her irritation in a way that should have been impossible. “You have to trust the rhythm.”

“I do not trust the rhythm.”

“You trust swords perfectly fine.”

“That is because swords are honest about intensions.”

“So am I.”

Jiyeon’s eyes narrowed. “That is a dangerous claim.”

“Possibly. But I’m still right.”

He guided her through another step. Then another. At first it felt absurd, her body responding to him with all the grace of a locked door being dragged open.

She stepped wrong, corrected, nearly stepped on his foot, then compensated by pulling her weight too far back.

San caught her before she could stumble, one hand at her waist for the briefest moment.

For a single heartbeat, everything in the square seemed to narrow.

Not because the crowd had changed.

Because Jiyeon had.

His hand at her waist was warm through the dress. Gentle. Certain. Her body registered the contact before her mind did, and then her mind, traitorous thing that it was, began making itself very small and very quiet.

San’s expression shifted just enough to show he had felt the same thing. Not embarrassment. Not fear.

Something sharper and more startled.

Then, because he was San and clearly had no intention of allowing silence to become dangerous, he smiled and said, low enough that only she could hear, “There. See? You’re not falling apart.”

Jiyeon’s pulse had no business being as loud as it was.

She straightened at once, all rigidity and offense. “I was not falling apart.”

“No,” he said, and the softness in his voice made the words worse, “you were just starting to loosen.”

She stared at him as if he had become a puzzle.

Then the music swelled, the drumbeat quickened, and San moved with it, drawing her into another step before she could recover enough to protest. The crowd circled around them in color and motion.

Lanternlight shivered across the square. Someone nearby laughed, someone else clapped in time, and Jiyeon, despite herself, found her feet adjusting.

Not gracefully. Not at all naturally. But adjusting.

San noticed. His smile deepened, small and private and infuriatingly pleased. “That’s it,” he murmured.

“Do not sound so triumphant.”

“I am triumphant.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re doing it.”

“I am enduring it.”

He turned with her, guiding rather than forcing, and Jiyeon had the unbearable realization that he was actually taking care not to embarrass her. He let her stumble without comment. He corrected her without mocking. He did not laugh when her balance went wrong; he only shifted to keep her steady.

That was worse than teasing. That was kindness.

Jiyeon’s throat tightened with irritation she did not bother to name.

“Your Highness,” she said through her teeth, “if you say one insulting thing, I will remove your tongue.”

“I wasn’t planning on insulting you.”

“That alone is suspicious.”

He gave a low laugh and spun her again, just enough that her skirt flared around her legs and caught the lantern light.

The move was clumsy, sure, but the effect of it was devastatingly strange. Her body, which had spent years obeying strict orders and measured routines, was being asked to move without purpose.

To move because music existed. Because the night existed. Because he had asked her to.

And because, to her own fury, it was not entirely unpleasant.

“Better?” he asked.

“No.”

“Liar.”

“I am not a liar.”

“You are terrible at hiding happiness.”

The words struck with careless precision.

Jiyeon looked up sharply, but San was already smiling that maddening little smile of his, one full of mischief and warmth and something she refused to name.

Around them the music kept its bright relentless pulse, and his hands remained steady where they guided hers.

She should have pulled away.

Instead she kept dancing.

Barely.

Only because he would not stop.

Only because, for reasons she did not yet trust, the night had begun to feel less like punishment and more like a thing she might survive after all.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

The festival’s brightness did not travel with them back through the palace gates.

It faded instead, step by step, swallowed by stone and shadow and the old, measured silence of royal halls. By the time Jiyeon and San returned, the laughter and music of the city had become something far away and half-imagined, like a dream remembered in the wrong season.

The scent of pastries still clung faintly to Jiyeon’s sleeves. Her feet were sore in unfamiliar shoes. Her hair, loosened from its usual severity, had escaped in soft strands around her face.

San, naturally, looked delighted with himself.

He walked beside her with his hands folded behind his back, as though he had not spent the last few hours tormenting her into dancing, feeding her sugared fruit, and laughing every time she had attempted to glare him into silence.

“You were less miserable than expected,” he said as they crossed the inner corridor.

Jiyeon gave him the barest sidelong glance. “That is a dangerously generous interpretation.”

“It is the only honest one.”

“You interpret honesty as victory.”

“It often is.”

She would have answered, but the corridor opened into the quiet heart of the palace, where the lamplight was lowered and the air carried the faint scent of polished wood and flowering vines from the inner gardens.

The farther they went, the more the evening seemed to settle back into its proper shape. San peeled off toward the stairwell that led to his floor, still too pleased with himself to be trusted with a weapon or a conversation.

He paused at the first landing and looked back over his shoulder. “You should wear that dress again.”

Jiyeon stopped at once. “No.”

His mouth curved. “That was barely a denial.”

“It was a complete one.”

“I’ll consider it encouragement.”

“It was not.”

San only grinned, then lifted a hand in lazy farewell and disappeared up the stairs two at a time, as though propriety itself had no authority over him.

Jiyeon exhaled through her nose and continued down the corridor toward the floor set aside for Haneul and her staff.

Jiyeon's own chamber was smaller, as all a knight’s quarters ought to be, positioned just across from the princess’s and close enough that she could answer if Haneul called in the night. The arrangement had long ago ceased to feel strange. Duty had a way of making even cramped rooms feel deserved.

Still in the festival dress, she stepped onto the quiet landing and reached for the door to her chamber.

Then she stopped.

Haneul had just slipped into her own room across the hall.

It was not the fact of her being there that caught Jiyeon’s attention. It was the manner of her entrance. Too quick. A hand lifted to keep her sleeve from brushing the latch, her head bent, her posture not quite the easy, flowing grace she wore in public. It was the look of someone trying to arrive somewhere without being seen.

Jiyeon’s hand fell away from her own door.

“Your Highness.”

The princess froze.

Very slowly, she turned.

Even in the dim hall, Jiyeon could see the faint flush in her cheeks and the way one side of her hair had escaped from its pins, as if it had been hastily fixed on the run. Haneul’s expression became immediately and absurdly innocent, which was always a bad sign.

“Jiyeon,” she said, in the overly bright voice of someone who had just been caught doing something she ought not.

Jiyeon narrowed her eyes. “Where were you?”

Haneul blinked once. “In the palace.”

“That was not an answer.”

“It was a location.”

Jiyeon stepped closer. “You were not in your chambers.”

“I was just strolling the gardens.”

“You are lying.”

“I prefer the phrase ‘delaying the truth.’”

Jiyeon stared at her.

Haneul sighed, shoulders easing in a way that suggested she had just decided resistance was a waste of breath. “Can we speak inside?”

No amount of festival sugar had made Jiyeon reckless. But she had known the princess long enough to recognize that particular note in her voice. It was not fear exactly. It was the quivering edge of a secret too large to be held comfortably alone.

Jiyeon looked down the corridor once, then stepped into Haneul’s room after her.

The chamber was warm from the late-banked brazier and lit only by two lamps, their glow soft against the painted walls. Haneul shut the door behind them with unusual care, then turned and rested one hand against the wood as if she needed its support.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then Haneul let out a breath and said, very quietly, “You cannot tell anyone.”

Jiyeon’s spine went rigid. “Tell anyone what?”

Haneul’s gaze flicked to her, then away. “That I have been leaving the palace.”

Jiyeon did not move. “You have been leaving the palace?”

Haneul winced. “That was not the part you were meant to repeat.”

“You have been leaving the palace,” Jiyeon repeated, because she was not the sort of person to allow shock to pass through her unspoken.

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“No.”

Jiyeon’s eyes sharpened. “With whom?”

Silence.

Jiyeon felt the first cold hint of something unpleasant slide down her spine. “Highness.”

The princess pressed her lips together, then gave the tiniest, most miserable shrug. “His name is Son Beomseok.”

The name meant nothing to Jiyeon at first. It took a heartbeat for the rest of it to settle into place.

A commoner.

A man who was not supposed to be standing anywhere near the princess of the realm unless he was delivering tribute, petitioning for tax relief, or sweeping royal floors.

Jiyeon stared at her. “A commoner.”

Haneul flinched, though she had clearly expected the word.

“I know,” she said quickly. “I know what he is. I know what it looks like. I know what Father would say if he knew. I know all of that.”

Jiyeon’s voice went very flat. “How long?”

Haneul looked away. “Long enough.”

“That is not an answer either.”

“I met him months ago.”

“Months?”

Haneul turned, finally meeting her eyes, and whatever guilt had made the words hard to say now brightened in her face into something shakier and more desperate. “Please don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like I’ve done something shameful.”

Jiyeon almost answered too quickly. Almost let the truth become a weapon. Instead she swallowed it.

“You have done something dangerous,” she said after a moment. “That is not the same.”

Haneul let out a fragile breath. “I know.”

Jiyeon stood very still.

Her duty had been built for moments like this. To hear something impossible. To measure the danger. To report it to the king. To protect the princess from herself if necessary.

And yet Haneul was standing in front of her now, twisting the edge of her sleeve in fingers that were trying very hard not to shake, asking for trust with the kind of hope that could break teeth.

So Jiyeon asked, because if she did not, the silence would split her open.

“Does he treat you well?”

Haneul’s expression changed in an instant, softening with a tenderness so immediate and obvious that Jiyeon felt something in her chest go painfully tight.

“Yes,” Haneul whispered. “He does.”

That answer, at least, was genuine enough to be felt.

Jiyeon looked down for a second, thinking. Every lesson in loyalty and caution and the brittle architecture of court politics passed through her mind all at once. A princess and a commoner. A secret affair. A king who would never allow it. A court that would turn it into scandal in a breath. San, who would make some joke and then some plan and then probably a scene. The queen dowager. The ministers. The temple. The entire kingdom, with its appetite for the princess’s obedience.

When Jiyeon looked back up, Haneul was watching her with the raw anxiety of someone who had placed her heart in another’s hand and was waiting to see whether it would be dropped.

“I need you to promise me,” Haneul said. “Please.”

Jiyeon’s jaw tightened. “Princess—”

“Please,” the princess repeated, and now there was no polished royal calm left in her voice at all, only the bare pleading of a woman terrified of being separated from the only thing that made her feel herself. “I could lose him if Father knows. I know I could. Or he could make it impossible. Or he could have him removed from the city. Or he could have me watched every hour of the day. Please, Jiyeon. I cannot—I cannot have him taken from me because I was foolish enough to fall in love.”

The room went very, very quiet.

Jiyeon had spent her life obeying. Not because she was weak, but because discipline was easier than uncertainty. Easier than desire. Easier than wanting something that could be denied.

Looking at Haneul now, she realized with a cold twist of helplessness that this, too, was a form of love—terrible and reckless and wholly beyond reason.

Her first instinct was to say no. To report everything. To step back into the clean, merciless safety of duty.

Her second instinct was worse.

It was to protect Haneul's happiness.

She has never allowed herself to feel excessive joy, but from the moment she swore herself to Haneul, she had promised to protect both the princess' body and her mind.

So she closed her eyes for one brief second, then opened them again and said, “If I say yes, you will be careful.”

Haneul stared.

Jiyeon’s mouth tightened. “You will not be stupid.”

“I can’t promise that—”

“You will not risk yourself unnecessarily.”

“Jiyeon—”

“You will tell me where you are going.”

Haneul’s face brightened with relief so sudden it was almost painful to witness. “Yes.”

“You will not let anyone else see you leave.”

“Yes.”

“And if I think this is becoming dangerous, I will stop helping you.”

That made Haneul hesitate.

Jiyeon did not flinch from it.

After a moment, Haneul nodded. “All right.”

Jiyeon held her gaze a little longer, then gave the smallest, stiffest inclination of her head. “I will not tell anyone.”

For an instant, Haneul looked as though she might cry from sheer relief. Instead she crossed the room in two quick steps and threw her arms around Jiyeon before Jiyeon had any time to decide whether to allow it.

The embrace was brief, fierce, and absolutely unfair.

Jiyeon stiffened like a spear.

Haneul only laughed shakily into her shoulder and whispered, “Thank you.”

Jiyeon stared very hard at the wall over Haneul’s head. “You are welcome.”

From that night onward, the palace developed a second, quieter life beneath its official one.

Jiyeon learned the timings of Haneul’s exits by instinct, by the minute changes in her routine, by the places where the princess paused too long before dressing or asked for an unnecessary cup of tea, or sent the attendants away under some harmless pretext. She learned which corridor shadows were deepest, which gate was least watched after dusk, where the floorboards near the west stair creaked if stepped on too quickly. Haneul, for her part, became a conspirator with a surprisingly poor sense of stealth and a great talent for smiling like she had never once intended to do anything forbidden.

Jiyeon hated how often she had to help.

She hated even more that she had started to understand the rhythm of it.

Weeks passed. Then more.

At first the escape routes felt like accidents. Haneul would step into the hall with a shawl over her hair and a lie ready on her tongue. Jiyeon would be waiting, pretending not to notice the way her princess’s hands trembled with excitement. A servant would be distracted. A lantern would be extinguished. The rear garden gate would open just enough for one woman to slip through into the night.

And always, after a few hours, Haneul would return with the kind of softness in her face that no court ceremony ever gave her.

Jiyeon told herself she did not approve.

That was true.

What she also told herself, with equal fervor, was that she did not care what Haneul’s eyes looked like when she came back.

This was a lie she repeated until it became almost convincing.

San, unfortunately, made the whole thing worse.

He seemed to have acquired the baffling habit of being wherever Jiyeon was trying to preserve order. If she lingered too long in a corridor, he appeared with some absurd invitation. If she stood guard outside Haneul’s room, he arrived with tea and the most irritating expression in the kingdom. If she was in the courtyard sharpening a blade, he somehow materialized with a deck of cards and the firm conviction that she needed “character development.”

It was in the courtyard one evening, under the long amber wash of sunset, that he decided to teach her card games.

“Again, no,” Jiyeon said for what felt like the twentieth time.

San sat cross-legged on the low stone ledge with complete serenity, as though he had not spent the last ten minutes corrupting her by force. “You are refusing from principle now.”

“I am refusing because I am wise.”

“You are refusing because you’re afraid I’ll beat you.”

Jiyeon folded her arms. “You are overconfident.”

“I am correct.”

“You are impossible.”

“Clearly.”

He slapped the deck lightly against the stone. “Come sit.”

“No.”

“Jiyeon.”

The use of her name, unadorned and unguarded, made her pause despite herself.

San saw it happen and looked almost smug. “There,” he said. “That means I’ve got you.”

“You do not.”

“I do. Sit.”

She remained standing a moment longer out of sheer spite, but he only kept looking at her with that maddening calm, one eyebrow slightly raised, as though he had all the time in the world and expected her to waste some of it for him.

At last, with visible irritation, Jiyeon took the opposite side of the stone bench.

San’s grin flashed. “Excellent.”

“If this is another attempt to humiliate me, I will break your fingers.”

“Noted.” He began laying out the cards. “Now, the rules are simple.”

“If you say that, the rules are never simple.”

“Fine. The rules are simple in the way a sword duel is simple.”

“That is not comforting.”

“It’s not meant to be comforting. It’s meant to be true.”

He proceeded to explain the game with absurd patience, only occasionally pausing to smirk at her when she asked a pointed question. Jiyeon had the distinct sense that he was enjoying himself because she was required to sit still in his presence, which he considered an accomplishment in itself. By the time she understood the shape of the game, she had already decided it was a waste of time.

San, naturally, declared this to be “the attitude of a loser.”

“I am not losing to you.”

“You have not won yet.”

“I have not lost either.”

“That is a very defensive way of saying you’re behind.”

Jiyeon opened her mouth to retort—

—and then saw Haneul returning at the far end of the courtyard.

The princess was coming up the garden path with her hood half-raised and the hem of her skirt gathered carefully in one hand. She moved quickly, but not hurriedly enough to hide the fact that she had clearly just come back from somewhere she ought not have been. The setting sun had already dipped low behind the palace roofline, and the courtyard was quiet save for the faint rustle of leaves and San’s idle shuffling of cards.

Jiyeon’s heart gave an alarmed, stupid lurch.

Haneul saw them at almost the same moment.

Her face flickered with immediate panic.

San looked up in genuine confusion. “Haneul? Why are you out so late?”

For one terrible second, none of the three moved.

Jiyeon was already calculating possible lies. Haneul’s expression had gone too blank. San’s eyes were narrowing in the way they did when he knew something was being hidden from him and intended to pry until the walls cracked. There was no time. No room.

Haneul recovered first, because she was better at court deceit than either of them gave her credit for.

“I was in the rose gardens,” she said quickly.

San’s brows lifted. “At this hour?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

Haneul smiled, all graceful innocence and perfect royal composure. “Should I not be?”

San did not answer at once. His gaze lingered on her face, then on the shadowed line of her sleeves, then back again. Jiyeon could practically hear him thinking, which was unfortunate because he was clearly thinking the wrong thing.

The silence became dangerous.

So Jiyeon stood, gathering the cards in one hand. “She was tending to the roses.”

San looked at her with a suspicion that had sharpened into a frown. “At dusk.”

“Are you implying she is not allowed to roam her own palace?”

“That is not what I meant.”

“No,” Jiyeon said coolly, “it usually is not.”

Haneul, sensing disaster, stepped in with all the natural authority of someone who had been raised to smooth the edges of other people’s discomfort. “I lost track of time.”

San’s eyes moved between them again, and Jiyeon could see the exact moment he decided something was off. Perhaps not enough to name it. But enough.

He folded his arms. “You two are being strange.”

“We are always strange,” Haneul said at once.

“That is not a defense.”

“It’s the truth.”

San looked unconvinced. Jiyeon, because she knew the princess better than she liked to admit, made a quick decision. “Your Highness should return to her chambers. You have an early meeting tomorrow.”

Haneul latched onto the out like it was a rope thrown to someone drowning. “Yes. Of course. I should.”

San’s gaze sharpened further at that. “Since when do you need Jiyeon to remind you of your own schedule?”

Haneul smiled too brightly. “Since tonight, apparently.”

Jiyeon moved before San could ask anything else. “I’ll see her back.”

There was no room left for discussion. Haneul slipped past them with another quick, nervous smile and started toward the stairs, Jiyeon falling into step beside her. San stayed in the courtyard for a moment longer, the cards forgotten in his hand.

Jiyeon felt his eyes on her back the whole way.

Only when they reached the landing outside Haneul’s rooms did the pressure ease.

The princess paused at her door, inhaled once, and reached for the latch. Jiyeon stood a half-step behind her, already ready to return to her own chamber across the hall, already prepared to untangle the evening from her thoughts and put it away.

Then she saw it. A bruise.

Not a dramatic one, not one of the sort that would shout for attention in the lamplight, but a dark, finger-shaped bloom near Haneul’s wrist where the sleeve had slipped back while she lifted her hand. Jiyeon’s eyes narrowed immediately. Another mark showed on her forearm, half-hidden beneath the fabric, yellowing at the edges in a way that suggested it had not appeared tonight alone.

All at once, the world changed texture.

“Highness,” Jiyeon said, very quietly.

The princess had already turned toward the door. “Mm?”

Jiyeon took one step closer. “Your arm.”

Haneul froze.

Jiyeon’s gaze lowered, sharp and exacting, to the bruise. Then another one. A faint discoloration near the bend of the elbow, tucked under the fabric and impossible to miss once noticed. Her mind went cold in the way it did before battle—swift, silent, and suddenly very clear.

“What happened?”

Haneul’s hand moved automatically to cover the marks. “Nothing.”

“That is not nothing.”

“It is.”

Jiyeon looked at her for a long second, then at the way the princess had gone carefully still, as if movement alone might betray her. “Who touched you?”

Haneul gave a soft, dismissive laugh that did not reach her eyes. “Jiyeon, it’s nothing. I probably brushed against a branch or the edge of a trellis in the gardens.”

“A branch does not leave bruises in the shape of fingers.”

Haneul’s expression shifted, just slightly.

Not enough for anyone else to notice.

Enough for Jiyeon.

The princess tried for brightness and failed. “You are imagining things.”

“I am not.”

“Hm.” Haneul looked away and tugged her sleeve down. “You worry too much.”

Jiyeon did not move.

The hallway felt suddenly narrower.

Beyond the door, the palace slept with its usual polished indifference. Somewhere below them, servants were clearing dishes. Somewhere farther off, a guard changed posts. Somewhere even farther, San was probably still standing in the courtyard with his brows drawn together, thinking.

Jiyeon did not know why that thought came to her at all, only that it did and that she disliked the shape of it.

Haneul touched her wrist lightly, a small plea disguised as casual affection. “It really is nothing.”

Jiyeon lowered her eyes to the hand on her arm.

Then, very slowly, she said, “I want the truth, Princess.”

Haneul did not answer.

And in that silence, Jiyeon’s suspicion began to deepen into something colder, heavier, and far less willing to be dismissed.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

Weeks had a way of passing in the palace like water over stone—quietly, steadily, without asking permission to wear everything down.

By then, Jiyeon no longer found San’s presence alarming in the same way she once had. Annoying, certainly. Unpredictable, always. But there had been a change in the shape of him, or perhaps in the shape of her own patience. He still appeared at inconvenient times with infuriating comments and impossible confidence, still seemed to take personal offense at her seriousness, still treated every corridor like a stage built for his amusement. Yet the sharpness between them had dulled into something else.

Something with edges, yes, but edges that fit.

They bickered more often than they did anything else. They spoke with the easy rhythm of people who had begun to learn each other’s weaknesses and, rather than using them cruelly, preferred to press gently until the other yielded.

The court, oblivious as ever, went on breathing around them.

That night the courtyard was nearly empty, the palace already settling into its sleep. Somewhere beyond the east wall, the city still hummed faintly with life, but inside the palace the world had narrowed to the hush of rustling leaves and the soft pace of Jiyeon’s boots against the stone. She was making her final patrol of the night.

Her hand rested lightly on the hilt of her sword. Her eyes moved over shadows, archways, stairwells, the blind angles where a person could hide if they were inclined toward foolishness. It was a habit so ingrained now that she scarcely thought about it.

She rounded the corner of the inner courtyard and nearly collided with San.

He stood in the dim light like he had grown there, one shoulder against a column, hands folded lazily in front of him. The moon had not yet cleared the roofline, and the lanterns gilded only part of his face, leaving the rest in soft shadow. He looked absurdly at ease for someone who had no business being in her path at this hour.

Jiyeon stopped with only the smallest shift in her stance. “Must you haunt the palace at night?”

San lifted one brow. “I was under the impression that you were haunting it.”

“I am patrolling.”

“Mm. So stern. So official.” He pushed away from the column and came closer, slow enough that it felt deliberate. “I begin to think you only enjoy speaking to me when you are threatening me with steel.”

Jiyeon’s mouth flattened. “That is because you are difficult to speak to otherwise.”

“How tragic.”

“You brought this upon yourself.”

“I know,” he said, and the ease of it made her look at him harder than she meant to. “I’ve always found your disapproval strangely motivating.”

“Then you are easily pleased.”

“And you are easy to provoke.”

She should have dismissed him and continued her patrol. That would have been the sensible thing. Jiyeon wondered why she hadn't.

San noticed, as he always did.

“You seem less irritated with me lately,” he said, voice lighter than the words deserved.

Jiyeon looked away first, because there are some things no warrior is prepared to name when they first begin to feel them. Silence stretched between them, not awkward, but charged in a way that made the air seem thinner. San’s posture changed almost imperceptibly; not forward, not retreating either, simply settling into a stillness she had not yet learned how to interpret.

He spoke more quietly then. “You are very beautiful in the moonlight.”

Jiyeon stared at him.

“That was meant to be a compliment,” he added, with a faint, almost self-conscious smile.

“I know what it was meant to be.”

“And?”

“And it was ill-advised.”

San’s eyes flicked to her mouth and back, quick enough to be deniable and slow enough that it was not. “That didn’t answer whether you disliked it.”

Her pulse, traitorous and immediate, struck hard enough that she resented it. “I dislike most things you say.”

“Most?”

Jiyeon’s jaw tightened. “Do not press your luck.”

“I would never.” His voice had gone low by then, warmed by something she could not quite place. “I only wanted to know if I was imagining—”

Jiyeon had gone still in a way that was not part of the conversation at all. Her attention had shifted somewhere beyond him, over his shoulder, toward the far side of the courtyard where the lanternlight thinned into deeper shadow.

A figure had crossed there.

Quick. Small. Familiar enough to freeze the blood in her veins. Haneul. San followed her gaze at once, but Jiyeon was already moving.

“Wait,” he said, brows drawing together. “Jiyeon—”

She was already stepping backward. “I just saw something.” “What did you see?” “Nothing. Likely nothing.”

He frowned. “That is not an answer.”

Jiyeon’s mind was already sprinting ahead of her body. Haneul had been in her room earlier. Haneul should have been in her room still. Or, if not, then returning from somewhere she had no business being. The shape had been too quick, too careful, too close to the service passage. No attendant. No escort. No reason.

San took a step after her. “Where are you going?”

She did not look back. “To check the courtyard.”

“That is what you are already doing.”

Her voice sharpened with a thread of impatience. “Then consider this part of the patrol.”

“Jiyeon.”

But she had already turned the corner, her boots silent on the stone as she followed the shadow she had seen before it could disappear entirely. San’s confusion followed her like a question she had no time to answer.

She kept to the darkest edges of the path, moving with all the caution of a blade sliding out of a sheath. The inner gardens lay just beyond the courtyard wall, and the moonless dark under the trees made it difficult to see anything beyond a few paces. Jiyeon listened instead. A footfall. A rustle. The faintest caught breath.

There. She slowed. Two figures stood beneath the canopy of a narrow cypress path near the old garden wall. One was unmistakably Haneul, her pale clothing subdued by shadow. The other stood too close, posture sharp with irritation, the angle of his head all wrong for respect. Beomseok. Jiyeon felt her jaw lock so hard it ached.

He was speaking to Haneul in a voice too low for her to catch clearly, but the shape of it was ugly enough on its own. Not merely cruel. Entitled. The sort of tone men used when they assumed affection should forgive them anything. Haneul’s shoulders were tight, her chin lifted in a way that looked fragile rather than proud. Jiyeon’s hand tightened around the sword hilt.

Beomseok moved then, quick and sudden, and Haneul flinched. That was all it took. Jiyeon stepped out of the shadows like a verdict. “Step away from her.”

Both of them jerked toward her. Beomseok’s face hardened instantly with offended surprise, the expression of a man caught doing something shameful who had no intention of being ashamed of it. Haneul’s eyes widened, first with alarm, then with something close to dread.

“Jiyeon,” she said, sharply. “No.” Jiyeon ignored her.

Her gaze was fixed on Beomseok. “You touch her again and I will cut off the hand you used.”

His mouth curled in a sneer that did him no favors. “And you are?”

The insult was so absurdly beneath her that Jiyeon almost laughed. Almost. Instead she took one step closer and let the moonlight catch the blade in her hand. “The person deciding whether you leave here upright.”

Beomseok’s eyes flicked to the sword. He recovered too quickly for a coward, which made him worse. “This is a private matter.”

“Then you should have made it private from the beginning.” Jiyeon did not raise her voice. She did not need to. “You seem to have mistaken secrecy for permission.”

Haneul moved between them at once, one hand half-lifted in plea and warning. “Jiyeon, stop. Please.”

Jiyeon looked at her then and saw the strain in her face, the tightness around her mouth, the way she had gone pale under the effort of holding herself together. Her anger sharpened into something colder. “Move,” she said softly.

Haneul shook her head, eyes bright with panic now. “No. Not here. Not now.” Beomseok gave a short, contemptuous laugh, and it was that laugh—more than the earlier tone, more than the posture, more than the look in his eyes—that finally drove Jiyeon past caution. She stepped around Haneul. Beomseok’s hand moved. Not to reach for her. To strike. Jiyeon reacted before thought could catch up. Steel flashed. The courtyard, the trees, the moonless darkness—everything narrowed to the line between blade and flesh.

“Jiyeon!” Haneul’s hand clamped around her sleeve with desperate force.

Jiyeon stopped so abruptly it felt like colliding with a wall. Her sword remained raised, not quite touching, but close enough that Beomseok had gone pale. He stumbled back a pace, breathing hard now, his confidence evaporating into the night air. He looked at Haneul as though she had failed him by existing in the same moment he had been challenged. Jiyeon saw it. Haneul saw it too. The princess’s voice went brittle. “Leave.”

Beomseok looked between them, anger and humiliation warring across his face. For one vicious second Jiyeon thought he might still try something foolish. Then Haneul tightened her grip on Jiyeon’s sleeve and said again, in a broken whisper this time, “Please. Come back with me.” That was worse than any command. Jiyeon’s breathing slowed only by force. Her blade lowered a fraction. Beomseok took the chance like a man who knew how to survive by being despised. He stepped back, muttered something Jiyeon refused to dignify by hearing, and vanished into the darkness before she could decide whether to pursue him. Haneul swayed, just slightly.

Jiyeon turned at once. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Haneul said too quickly. The answer was so immediate it was meaningless.

Jiyeon’s expression darkened. “Come with me.”

Jiyeon took Haneul directly to her own room, the smaller chamber only a few doors from the princess’s but far more private, tucked close enough to the royal suite to be useful and small enough to feel almost hidden. She shut the door behind them and crossed immediately to the washstand.

“Sit.” Haneul obeyed without protest. That, too, was bad. Jiyeon took a cloth and a basin of water from the table, then knelt at Haneul’s side and began cleaning the redness from her wrist and forearm with brisk, efficient movements. Neither of them spoke at first. The silence between them was full of things neither could safely name. Only when Jiyeon brushed back the sleeve did she see the bruises properly. Not one. Several. Some old enough to have yellowed. Others still dark and angry against the skin. Her mouth went very still.

Haneul looked away, shame flooding her face. Jiyeon said nothing. She only worked more carefully.

The first knock came while she was dabbing ointment along the worst of the marks. Haneul startled. Jiyeon froze. “Who is it?”

A familiar voice answered from the other side. “Me.” San.

Jiyeon’s shoulders tightened. Of all the times for him to appear—yet again he had chosen the worst possible moment with almost supernatural accuracy. “Go away,” she called.

There was a pause. Then, more quietly, “Jiyeon, please open the door.”

She glanced at Haneul, who had gone utterly still.

San spoke again, the tone altered now, rougher around the edges than before. “About earlier—I need to talk to you.”

Jiyeon rose, placing the cloth carefully back into the basin. “Not now.”

“I know I was probably overstepping. I know that.” His voice held an unease she had not heard from him before. “But we’ve been getting closer and I thought—”

He stopped. Because the door had not been locked. It opened under his hand with barely any resistance. Jiyeon turned just in time to see San step into the room, one foot over the threshold, his expression set in the guarded, half-apologetic way he wore when he expected to be told he had misread something. Then his eyes landed on Haneul.

And everything in him changed. Not all at once. Not dramatically. Worse than that. He saw the bruises. Saw the tightness in Haneul’s posture. The torn edge of fear under her careful composure. Saw the basin of water, the ointment, the way Jiyeon had been kneeling as though this was not the first time she had cleaned up after a secret that should never have happened. San’s face darkened with a force that made the room feel colder. “Who did this?” he asked.

Haneul drew a shallow breath, but Jiyeon was faster. “Beomseok.” San stared at her. “Son Beomseok,” Jiyeon said, voice clipped and precise now, because she did not trust softness to survive what was in the room. “Her lover. The one she has been meeting in secret.”

Haneul’s face went white. San’s gaze shifted to her. Then back to Jiyeon. Then to the bruises again, as if his mind refused to accept the shape of what it was being shown.“He touched her?” His voice had gone low enough to make the air tremble around it. Jiyeon did not answer. She did not need to.

San’s jaw clenched so hard she could see it. “Haneul,” he said, and there was something in his voice now that sounded not like a brother’s tenderness, but like a blade being drawn in a dark room. “Did he do this?”

Haneul’s lips parted. Nothing came out. Her eyes were filling now, and the sight of it only seemed to deepen whatever fury had begun to take hold of San. He looked suddenly very old. Or perhaps very young. Either way, he looked dangerous. “I asked you a question.”

Haneul’s breath broke. She did not answer. That answer, if it could be called one, was enough.

San turned away so abruptly his coat snapped at his heels. “Stay here.”

“San—” Jiyeon started. He was already at the door. “San.” Her voice sharpened. “Don’t do anything reckless.”

He looked back once, and the expression on his face chilled her more than any shout would have. “Reckless?” he said, almost softly. “He laid hands on my sister.” Then he was gone. The door slammed behind him with a sound like judgment.

Haneul made a strangled noise and folded in on herself. Jiyeon crossed the room in two strides and caught her before she could slide off the seat. “It’s all right,” she said, though she had no evidence for the claim. “It’s all right.” But Haneul was crying now, not loudly, not even in a way that asked to be comforted—just silently, ruinously, the tears falling with that terrible dignity people used when they had exhausted their last defense.

Jiyeon guided her to the bed. She took off the princess’s outer layer, fetched fresh water, cleaned what she could, and drew the blankets over her with hands that had gone almost painfully careful. Haneul let her do it, though she trembled all the while. By the time the sky outside had begun to pale into morning, Haneul had finally stopped crying only because she had fallen into a shallow, exhausted sleep.

Jiyeon sat beside the bed in the gray hush before dawn and did not sleep at all. She did not need to hear the news to know what San had done. The palace knew before noon. Not officially. Not in a way the king could announce at court. But whispers have their own wings, and the servants’ corridor was a city unto itself. By the time the bells had rung and the first tea had been served, the shape of the story had already spread from kitchen to corridor to guardroom.

Son Beomseok had been found dead beyond the city wall.

No one spoke of how. No one needed to. When the report reached Haneul, she went perfectly still. Jiyeon was there when it happened. Of course she was. She had been there for everything. The princess sat at the edge of the bed with one hand pressed to her mouth, listening to the words as if they belonged to someone else. Then the color drained from her face in a single merciless wave.

“No,” she whispered.

Jiyeon moved to her instantly, but Haneul shook her head once, violently, and the sound that escaped her after that was not quite a sob and not quite a cry. It was something much smaller and far more terrible.

“He didn’t—” Haneul tried again, voice breaking. “He couldn’t have—” Jiyeon did not lie. She did not have to. San had. The realization hit Haneul all at once, and the grief that followed was immediate and ugly in its completeness. She covered her face with both hands and bent forward as though the air itself had become too heavy to breathe. Jiyeon held her shoulders while she shook. Outside, the palace continued pretending to be a palace. Inside, a princess lost the secret she had thought she could keep, and the world around her began, quietly and irrevocably, to split open.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

The palace forgot how to laugh.

Not entirely. There were still conversations in hallways. Ministers still argued over trade routes and taxation. Servants still hurried between kitchens carrying trays and linens. Guards still changed shifts. Bells still rang. The kingdom continued moving because kingdoms always did. But something had gone dim.

The crown princess no longer wandered through gardens. She no longer sat by open windows with embroidery abandoned in her lap. No longer smiled at servants by name. No longer dragged San into ridiculous arguments simply because she was bored. The light that had always seemed to follow Haneul had retreated somewhere no one could reach.

And everyone noticed. The king noticed. The ladies-in-waiting noticed. Even San noticed, though he tried to pretend otherwise. Most of all, Jiyeon noticed. Because Jiyeon saw her every day. Saw the untouched meals. Saw the swollen eyes. Saw the curtains drawn shut against sunlight. Saw the way Haneul increasingly seemed to exist rather than live.

The palace physicians came and went. The king attempted conversations. San hovered outside her chambers more than once before ultimately leaving again. Nothing helped. Nothing changed. And each passing day made the knot in Jiyeon's chest tighten further. She blamed herself for that. Not entirely. But enough. Because she had known. Not everything. Not the depth of it. But enough. Enough to know something was wrong. Enough to know Haneul had been hurting long before Beomseok died. Enough to know she should have done more. The guilt sat quietly inside her ribs. Heavy. Unmoving. Growing.

Three days after Beomseok's death, rain arrived. Not a storm. Just a slow, steady drizzle that painted the palace windows silver and turned the gardens dark and shining.

The evening settled early. Jiyeon stood outside the kitchens with a plate balanced carefully in one hand. The pastry chef had looked surprised when she'd requested it. Chocolate cake. Haneul's favorite. A small thing. A stupid thing, perhaps. But Jiyeon had run out of larger ideas. The slice sat neatly on white porcelain, layered with dark frosting and shaved chocolate curls. She stared at it for a moment. Then sighed.

"Don't make me regret this."

The chef looked confused. Jiyeon ignored him. A few minutes later she climbed the familiar staircase toward Haneul's royal floor. Rain tapped softly against distant windows. The corridor was quiet. Too quiet. She stopped outside Haneul's door. Balanced the plate carefully.

Knocked twice. Nothing. Jiyeon waited. "Princess?"

Silence. Not unusual. Lately Haneul rarely answered immediately. Jiyeon shifted her weight. Knocked again. "Your Highness." Still nothing. She frowned. Perhaps she was bathing. Or asleep. Or simply refusing company again. None of those possibilities were particularly strange anymore. Jiyeon glanced down at the cake. The chocolate was already beginning to soften slightly.

With a sigh, she reached into her belt pouch and withdrew the spare key. Haneul had insisted she keep it years ago. For emergencies. For convenience. For trust. Jiyeon inserted the key. Turned it. The lock clicked open. She pushed the door inward.

The room beyond was dark. Much darker than it should have been. No lamps burned. No fireplace crackled. Only the gray light of the rainy evening spilled weakly through the windows. Jiyeon's frown deepened. "Princess?" No answer. The door swung wider. The plate remained balanced in her hand.

One step. Then another. The room felt strange. Wrong. Not visibly. Not immediately. Just—

Wrong.

Her instincts noticed it before her eyes did. A knight's instincts. The kind that sensed danger before understanding it. The kind that had kept her alive. Jiyeon stopped moving. Something cold slid down her spine. The cake plate trembled slightly in her grip.

And then she looked up. For one impossible second, her mind refused to understand what she was seeing. The chandelier hung motionless from the center of the room. And beneath it—

No. Not beneath.

From it.

A pale figure suspended in the dim light. Bare feet. A white nightgown. Dark hair falling over one shoulder. Still. Perfectly still.

The plate slipped from Jiyeon's hand. Porcelain shattered across marble. The sound echoed.

Nothing moved. Not the body. Not the room. Not the rain against the windows.

Jiyeon couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't understand.

Because Haneul was supposed to be asleep. Or bathing. Or crying. Or angry. Or miserable. Or alive.

Alive.

Alive.

Alive.

The word battered uselessly against the inside of her skull.

Her feet carried her forward before thought returned. One step. Two. Three. Closer. Close enough. The world narrowed.

The bruises beneath pale skin. The slack fingers. The silence. The terrible, terrible silence.

"Haneul." The name emerged as barely more than a whisper.

No answer. Of course there wasn't. There couldn't be.

Jiyeon stared. And stared. And stared. The room blurred.

For perhaps the first time in years, she forgot how to move. Forgot how to breathe. Forgot how to be a knight. Forgot everything except the impossible shape hanging before her.

Outside, rain continued falling softly against palace windows.

Inside, the crown princess of the kingdom hung from the chandelier.

To be continued

☾ zayne’s aurora

[hollowaurora]

⚜️Game of the Beast⚜️

"I'm on the threshold of something new…" I exhale, gripping the cold gate handle.

I cross the boundary, entering the inner courtyard of St. Anna Benedictine Psychiatric Hospital – a sanctuary for particularly dangerous patients. Those whom even prison couldn't hold. Their darkness now resides here, between these walls.

I walk along a narrow path, strewn with damp pebbles. Inside, a restless tremor, like a coiled spring. Is it fear? Or perhaps, excitement?

I walk slowly. I inhale deeply – the damp air smells of rain, flowers, and old trees. There's something wild, primal about it. I look around – it's quiet. Too quiet.

The trees are well-tended. Neat flowerbeds are scattered across the courtyard. The flowers are simple, like wildflowers, but in this simplicity, there's something touching. Something real.

Nothing in this cozy garden hints at what the building it adjoins conceals within.

The same silence prevails inside this old institution. Not at all what I expected from a psychiatric hospital.

The smell of chlorine mixed with dampness and mold hits my nose. I hope I'll get used to it.

The dim light in the corridor further deepens the oppressive atmosphere – something dark, stagnant, hidden… As if time has stopped here, and life itself has frozen.

Only the reception desk area is brighter. Like a small beacon of hope.

"Good morning! I'm Doh Mina, the new nurse," I greet the woman at the counter, a little uncertainly. "Here's my referral."

Instead of a greeting, she merely nods – silently, with an expression that says more than it should. Taking the slightly crumpled sheet from my hands, she quickly glances through it.

"Oh, so you're the one hired to supervise our most interesting cases," a faint, almost predatory smile flickered across her tired face. "So, Choi San and Song Mingi… Let's go. I'll introduce you to the chief physician, show you the staff room, and then… you'll meet them."

There's something both sinister and alluring about this place.

In the way the staff approaches their work.

In the way the most dangerous patients are called "the most interesting."

At the end of the corridor were two doors: one to the chief physician's office, the other to the staff room.

Meeting the team went better than I expected.

In the room where the daily briefing was held, nurses, male nurses, and orderlies were animatedly discussing something. As soon as we crossed the threshold, a dozen pairs of eyes turned to us. After a brief pause – like a wave of warmth – smiles spread across their faces.

The staff room turned out to be unexpectedly cozy: a small kitchen, comfortable sofas, a wardrobe for belongings, bookshelves – everything created a sense of security. One of the nurses placed a vase of flowers on the table, and a fresh scent filled the air, as if dispelling the tension that hung in the hospital walls.

A few minutes later, the chief physician joined us – a tall man around fifty-six, with graying temples and a clean-shaven face on which a restrained smile played. He confidently approached us and extended his hand:

"Doh Mina? Nice to meet you. I'm Kim Jongdae, the chief physician."

I politely bowed and shook his hand.

The introduction turned into a fifteen-minute briefing. Dr. Kim wished everyone a good day and added the traditional phrase before the start of the shift:

"Remember, let their darkness not overshadow you."

"Come, Mina. Now I'll show you where your charges ‘live’ – Choi San and Song Mingi," called out the nurse who had met me at the reception desk. Her name was Park Hyerin. She no longer seemed as unfriendly as during our first encounter.

I nodded, and we walked out into the corridor.

"Hey, where are you going?" a male voice suddenly rang out behind us. We immediately turned around.

Before us stood Jong Yunho – a graduate orderly, a tall guy around twenty, with an open smile that made him look like a puppy.

"I'll go with you! I promise not to get in the way," he said enthusiastically.

"Alright," Hyerin replied curtly.

Yunho shuffled along behind us, like a large, gentle Labrador. However, he broke his promise not to interfere just a few steps later – he showered us with comments and tried to make jokes continuously. Hyerin just silently rolled her eyes.

A few meters ahead, the corridor ended in a row of heavy metal doors with bars and electronic locks.

"We're entering the area for particularly dangerous patients," Hyerin said quietly.

"I will lead you through these gates…" Yunho added in a theatrical tone, trying to sound ominous. He busily pressed codes on the lock panels.

Once inside, we found ourselves in a long, empty corridor. On either side were locked doors, above which hung numbered room signs. On each door – names.

"Don't be afraid, Mina, they're all locked," Yunho said with a wide smile, gently nudging my shoulder.

We walked slowly down the long corridor, and Hyerin pointed to the room doors one by one, briefly describing their occupants. Through the transparent bulletproof windows in the doors, we could see some of them. Most lay on their beds, weakened by strong sedatives. Some were tied down with leather straps. Others sat or stood silently, not at all resembling dangerous patients. For a moment, it seemed like an ordinary medical ward. But that feeling quickly faded.

We walked a little further and stopped at a door opposite a large barred window. This door looked more massive than the others, as if it held something particularly dangerous behind it.

"Choi San," Hyerin grumbled grimly. "Narcissistic, sadistic, obsessive with fixations, domineering. A known stalker. He was apprehended after a series of attempts on women's lives…"

She paused. For a few seconds, a heavy silence fell in the corridor.

I took a step forward and peered into the observation window. Empty.

"Oh, he's hiding," Yunho commented with a smile. "You won't see him like that. This guy likes to play games with the staff before breakfast."

In the corridor leading around the corner, approaching sounds were heard. The monotonous hum of wheels – a kitchen worker was pushing a food cart. Two burly orderlies followed silently behind him. It was breakfast time.

Suddenly – a sharp, piercing alarm signal cut through the air. A short click echoed in the electrical system, the lights flickered, and the automatic doors at the end of the corridor spontaneously opened.

"Something's wrong," Hyerin stopped, listening intently.

And then a scream. Sharp. Panicked. Then – a second one. One of the orderlies runs out from around the corner, covered in blood, clutching his side.

"He broke free! Mingi broke free!" he chokes out, screaming.

Everything happened in an instant. Screams. The thud of heavy bodies. About five employees tried to stop him, but he moved with inhuman strength – like a shadow, weightless yet leaving a trail of evil.

I only managed to see the face of another orderly whom Mingi threw against the wall with such force that he lost consciousness.

"Fall back! Back!" Hyerin screams, grabbing my hand and pulling me in the opposite direction.

I looked back. For a moment, our eyes met:

Mingi, covered in blood, with a wild but not chaotic expression on his face, looked directly at me.

There was no madness in that gaze. Only… determination. Calm, icy determination.

The doors behind us should have closed by now…

A second before they clicked shut, I looked back once more. And saw him disappear into the darkness, leaving only screams and chaos behind.

The siren doesn't subside, its wail merging with the screams in the corridor. Patients, agitated by the noise, pound on the doors, some shriek, others monotonously repeat the same phrases.

My heart pounds in my chest. Run – just run.

If only I remembered the building's layout… It's my first day. Where to go? Which exit?

Corridors… corridors again… a turn, another one. I must have gotten lost.

The situation is similar to a riot in a women's correctional facility where I once worked as a guard. Only then, I had a weapon…

A ringing in my head. Everything looks the same: barred windows, numbered doors, identical gray walls. In a panic, I turn left, run past two cells, and…

One of the heavy doors is ajar. Halfway.

Due to the dim lighting, I can't see if it's a staff office or someone's room. Only a metal plaque hangs broken on one bolt. I don't have time to read the name.

The automatic system malfunctioned. Just before that, a short circuit in the technical block overloaded the backup power line, and one of the cells – ironically, the one where Choi San was – went out of the locking system's control. This shouldn't have happened. But it did.

I run inside, hoping to find an exit. Or at least to hide…

Choi San sat on the bed, his eyes fixed on me with an intense, inscrutable gaze.

He didn't move. And he didn't say a word.

Silence hung in the air – heavy, suffocating, as if it had its own weight. It seemed to press on my shoulders, squeezing my throat. The tension in the room grew with each second of his silence.

Click.

The door treacherously closed behind me. The automatic system resumed operation – too late.

I spun around abruptly. The door wouldn't open. There was no window in the room.

"Well, well, well…" a quiet voice said.

I turned sharply to the sound.

He was still sitting. My eyes widened in surprise. This is the first time I've seen him with my own eyes. And – it's not at all what I expected.

Despite the rumors, his name, the whispers of "monster"… he doesn't look devilish.

He looks… angelic.

A pure, almost ethereal face, dark hair softly framing features one would call "beautiful" – even "perfect."

If I didn't know what he had done – I would never believe this creature could be here, in a psychiatric hospital.

Goosebumps ran down my skin.

San slowly rose. His movements – too fluid, too controlled, like a dancer's, or a predator's.

He took a step… then another.

Every move of his seemed premeditated.

His angelic face was inscrutable, cold – without the slightest hint of emotion or warmth.

The room grew smaller with each of his steps. The air – thicker.

"New nurse…" he whispered.

His voice…

Gentle. Too gentle.

As if he hadn't spoken the words, but touched my ear with them.

I lift my chin slightly. My eyes carefully track his every movement and don't leave him. My movements are calm and cautious.

"Yes, that's me, Doh Mina," my voice is quiet but firm.

Around us, silence, broken only by the faint hum of a fan and the quiet whir of the air conditioner in the room. The feeling of tension in this sudden isolation doesn't subside.

His eyes briefly drop to my lips as I speak. He understands how small I am compared to him. He easily towers over me.

"How old are you, Do Mina?" his voice remains soft and almost innocent. He could easily pass for a sweet, harmless man if I didn't know his history.

"Just right for this job," I pause for a moment, peering into his expression.

"I'm 28."

His lips curve slightly into a smile, yet it doesn't reach his eyes. They remain tense and vigilant.

"Twenty-eight…" now he moves even closer, invading my personal space.

"You look younger. Much younger…" his voice drops almost to a whisper, sounding threatening.

"I know." My posture is calm, without the slightest tension, but I don't retreat.

Something flickers in his eyes – like a spark – when he realizes I haven't taken my gaze off him. My directness seems to disorient him somewhat. He's used to people being nervous or afraid around him, but I stand confidently.

"How long have you been a nurse?" His face is now inches from mine; he's deliberately testing the boundaries.

"A few months," my voice is calm and even, I don't take my eyes off him, carefully tracking every movement.

Interest appears in his gaze.

"A new nurse – and you're already assigned here?" His hand slowly rises, fingers gently touching my cheek. The touch is unexpectedly gentle.

"You must be very capable…" his thumb gently strokes my skin.

I pause before answering.

"I worked as a warden in a women's pricon – for lifers and particularly dangerous inmates."

His eyes widen slightly, but he doesn't pull away. His touch doesn't disappear – on the contrary, instead, his thumb continues to stroke my cheek gently.

"Impressive…" he leans in even closer, his lips almost brushing my ear as he whispers:

"...but do you know who I am?"

"I know who you are. I was sent here specifically because of you. And another – the one who recently injured the nurses," my voice drops lower, becoming quieter.

He laughs softly right beside my ear – the sound sends shivers down my spine.

"Good girl for knowing your patient..." he whispers. Then he leans back slightly to look into my eyes. His gaze gleams dangerously. "And what makes you think I won't hurt you?"

"Nothing."

His smile widens, momentarily revealing a hint of predatory nature. He likes your confidence. He likes that you're not afraid of him. He slowly reaches out with his other hand and lightly touches your side.

"Heard what they say about me?" His voice is low, seductive.

"Narcissist. Sadist. Obsessed. Stalker…" the corner of my lips barely lifts. "But you're exaggerating your 'feats' a little."

He bursts into laughter – genuine, deep, so sincere that it's more frightening than a threat. His hand on my waist tightens a little more.

"Exaggerating?…" He leans closer, his lips almost touching mine. "You're the first person to speak to me like that…"

"Disappointed?"

His laughter fades into a smirk. He leans back slightly to catch my gaze again.

"Disappointed? No." His thumb gently traces along my jawline. "Rather, intrigued…" a short pause. "…and, perhaps, even impressed."

"Oh, is that so?" I slowly wrap my hand around his wrist near my face.

He glances down at my hand, then back up at my eyes. His gaze deepens, darkens. He leans in closer, his face inches from mine.

"Yes, that's so." His voice is a low growl now, full of unspoken threats and promises.

Without warning, he closes the distance between us and presses his lips firmly against mine. It's a demanding kiss, filled with all the dark intensity he's been holding back. His free hand moves to the back of my neck, holding me in place as he explores my mouth with his tongue. "Mmph..."

I accept. Because in this game, it's not the weakest who survives, but the one who knows how to play.

The kiss deepens. His fingers clench tighter, asserting dominance. He barely pulls away, whispering on my lips:

"You taste like a threat."

His thumb gently strokes my cheek as he continues to kiss me, his other hand still firmly on my waist.

I lift my hand and grip his throat – tight enough it could to left bruises.

"You have no idea how right you are," I whisper and rip a kiss from him with such intensity, as if I want to tear control away, while my grip on his throat even tightened.

He groans into the kiss – low, hoarse, a hungry sound. He doesn't try to break my grip on his throat. On the contrary – he presses himself harder against me, pulls me close as if wanting to melt me into himself. His hand slides lower, squeezing my thighs.

"Do it…" he rasps.

My kiss becomes harsher, bordering on pain. I wrap my leg around his thigh, not releasing his throat. His desire is already flaring – I see it. I feel it.

He kissing back just as hard, almost violent. He moans low, his voice slightly hoarse from my tight grip on his throat. He nips at my bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. I catch the moment when his mind began to cloud by arousal, drops his guard, and then…

…then everything changes.

My body moves like lightning; I'm behind him, locking him in a hold. In my hand – a syringe. The needle enters precisely. The tranquilizer acts instantly.

"Enough games," I softly murmur into his ear.

His body goes rigid instantly as the tranquilizer hits his system. He tries to struggle briefly, but my headlock is too tight and the drug is too strong. His arms flail weakly before going limp entirely. Blood trickles down from where he bit votre lip earlier.

I pulled him onto the bed and laid him on his back. He's still conscious. His eyes search for me. I sit next to him – too close. Close enough for him to feel the warmth of my thighs against his. I unbutton his shirt, revealing his beautifully toned body – perfect, almost marble. I pull out a folding knife, opening it with a click. I run the blade over his body – cold, unhurried, playing.

"You know the only difference between us?" I smile, licking my blood-covered lips. "You're locked in a hospital. And I'm free."

His eyes, heavy with the effects of the tranquilizer, flicker with a mix of anger and arousal as he watches that the knife trails across his skin sends shivers through him even though he tries fighting unconsciousness. My thighs pressed against his waist make his mind go dirty places. He tries to speak but manages only a hoarse whisper:

"You… you're psycho…"

I lean closer, smiling quietly, almost tenderly:

"Just like you, love… just like you."

His eyelids grow heavier by the second, the tranquilizer fully taking effect now. He can feel the cold metal of the knife and the warmth of my thighs pressing against him intensely contrasting sensations. A weak smirk forms on his lips despite himself.

"...Fuck you..." he slurs incoherently.

I chuckle. Quietly, contentedly.

"Yeah..."

And then he completely disappears into the darkness. His body lies limp beneath me, his breathing steady. The smile – still on his face. As if even in unconsciousness, he says: the game continues.

[zaynestheone]

NOT DESPITE THE BEAST • C.S.

prince!san × knight!oc

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

A prince who carries too much light.

A knight who believes she deserves none of it.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

CHAPTERS

1. Before The End

2. After The Fall

3. Beside The Throne

4. Against The Heart

5. Not Despite The Beast

Epilogue: And The Spring Came Anyway

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

genre: fantasy romance • slow burn • angst • hurt/comfort

Content warnings: themes of grief, trauma, suicidality, violence, and 18+ content

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

☾ zayne’s aurora

[zaynestheone]

NOT DESPITE THE BEAST • CHOI SAN

III. BESIDE THE THRONE

prince!san × knight!oc

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

The court searches for a future queen.

Meanwhile, two fools continue pretending they do not belong to each other.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

warnings: grief, arranged courtship, mutual pining, jealousy, miscommunication, emotional repression, self-worth issues, body horror, curse-related transformations.

By the time the first royal ball of the season reached full bloom, Jiyeon had already decided she disliked it.

The hall was all light and motion, gilded with candleflame and polished silver, the great windows along the eastern wall reflecting the lanterns strung outside in the gardens like a second, quieter sky. Musicians played from the raised gallery in a steady, graceful rhythm that made the room seem to breathe. Silk moved like water between the clusters of nobles. Perfume, wine, wax, and floral oil drifted together in the warm air until the whole chamber felt richly, almost oppressively alive.

And at the center of it all stood San, with the patience of a man being slowly buried.

He wore formal black trimmed with narrow lines of gold, the cut of his jacket sharp and regal enough to satisfy the court, though the expression on his face made it plain that he would rather have been dragged through a river backward than stand where he stood now. Around him, noble young women gathered in careful, bright constellations, each one prettier than the last, each one smiling with the polished confidence of girls who had been raised to know that proximity to a prince could alter the shape of their future.

Jiyeon kept her position by the side of the room, one hand near the hilt of her sword, eyes moving with practiced alertness over the crowd. Her duty was the room, not the prince. Her duty was the exits, the servants, the distance between the musicians and the balcony doors, the subtle shifts in the court’s attention that could become dangerous if left unobserved.

She did not need to look at San. Unfortunately, her eyes kept doing it anyway.

He was listening to some lord’s daughter speak with bright, practiced interest while clearly thinking of anything else. Another young woman, laughing too loudly, had positioned herself just within arm’s length of him. Someone else had asked him a question and touched his sleeve a fraction too long. San smiled politely at all of them, but the smiles never quite reached his eyes. Each time a new woman approached him, his gaze drifted—only for a second, only when he thought no one would notice—toward the side of the room.

Toward Jiyeon.

Every time, she looked away a heartbeat too late.

Every time, he noticed.

It was beginning to feel less like being watched and more like standing beneath a suspended blade that no one had yet allowed to fall.

At one point a young noblewoman with pearl pins in her hair tilted her head and said something that made San’s mouth twitch in what might have been politeness if not for the unmistakable absence of joy in his face. Jiyeon could not hear the words from where she stood, but she saw the shape of them in the woman’s smile, the brightness of her eyes, the hopeful way she lingered in front of him as though expecting the room to begin rearranging itself around her.

San’s gaze flicked past her.

Again.

Straight to Jiyeon.

Then away.

Jiyeon’s jaw tightened.

She looked deliberately at the opposite side of the hall.

A servant passed with a tray of crystal cups. Someone laughed near the fountains of iced fruit. Somewhere behind her, a dowager whispered to another woman behind her fan. Everything was elegant. Everything was sparkling. Everything was unbearable.

“Your Highness.”

The voice at San’s side was soft, measured, and pleasantly curious.

Jiyeon looked up before she meant to.

Lady Lim Yoora stood close enough to the prince that the moment looked intentional but not improper, her dark gown falling in precise folds, a jeweled comb glinting faintly in her hair. Up close she was even more composed than she had appeared at the announcement in the throne room: beautiful, yes, but also intelligent in a way that immediately sharpened the room around her. Her expression was kind, but not naïve. Jiyeon had the distinct and irritating impression that Yoora saw more than she said.

San seemed to collect himself at once. “Lady Lim.”

Yoora followed the line of his distracted gaze without turning her head fully, then returned her eyes to him with an almost thoughtful calm. “You seem… elsewhere this evening.”

San’s mouth lifted in something close to resignation. “It has been that kind of night.”

Her eyes flicked toward the side of the room, where Jiyeon stood. Then back to him. “I noticed.”

He said nothing.

Yoora’s lips curved, not quite teasing, not quite pitying. “Are you always so careful with your attention, Your Highness, or only when you think no one is watching?”

San gave the smallest sigh through his nose. “That depends entirely on who is asking.”

“Perhaps a friend.”

That made him pause.

Yoora did not press. She only waited with the composed patience of someone who had no need to win a conversation by force.

At last San glanced once more toward Jiyeon, then back. “She is Dame Choi Jiyeon,” he said quietly. “My sister’s knight.”

Yoora’s expression shifted minutely. “Ah.”

San’s tone changed only a fraction, but it did. Something in it softened, or steadied, or perhaps merely dropped its mask for the briefest instant. “She was appointed to Haneul’s side years ago. She is… one of the most capable knights in the palace.”

Yoora watched him with careful eyes. “You say that like it matters very much to you.”

San’s mouth tilted, but the smile was too faint to count. “It does.”

That answer seemed to satisfy her, or perhaps only confirm something she had already guessed. “A knight,” she repeated lightly, and there was a quiet, knowing warmth beneath the word. “I see.”

San did not respond.

The musicians changed tempo. A brighter piece rose through the hall, more animated than the last, and the crowd near the center of the floor shifted into motion. A pair of nobles moved aside to make room for another dance.

Jiyeon took an unsteady breath and found, with a sudden and unhelpful ache, that the room had become too full of moving parts she no longer wanted to watch.

San had turned to accept some comment from another woman, but Jiyeon no longer heard it. Her chest felt painfully, absurdly tight. There was no reason for it. None at all. It was only a ball. Only a room full of people she did not care about. Only San, being gracious and trapped and beautiful in a way she resented because it was not fair that grief could make him look so much like memory and yet so different from it.

She could not stay in there.

If she did, she thought quite irrationally, she might say something stupid. Or worse, nothing at all.

She turned without meaning to look back and slipped through the nearest side arch into the corridor beyond.

The air in the passage was cooler.

Jiyeon stopped once she was certain the music had thinned behind her, then leaned one shoulder against the stone wall and shut her eyes.

It did not help.

The ache remained, thin and sharp and impossible to name.

She inhaled slowly.

Exhaled.

Counted the beat of the music drifting faintly through the open doors at the far end of the hall.

It was not enough.

Footsteps sounded behind her. She knew before she turned who it was.

San appeared at the end of the corridor as though he had simply decided the ballroom could survive without him for a while. He looked less formal here, the tension of the hall easing from his shoulders by a fraction, though not enough to hide the weariness beneath it. He stopped when he saw her and let the door swing mostly shut behind him.

“You’ve abandoned your post,” he said.

Jiyeon opened one eye. “And you’ve abandoned your guests.”

“I disliked them.”

“That sounds suspiciously rude for a future king.”

“I said I disliked them, not that I cared.”

That, finally, coaxed the faintest hint of amusement from her mouth, though it vanished before it could become anything resembling a smile. San saw it anyway. He always did.

For a moment they simply stood there, facing one another in the dimmer quiet of the corridor while the music went on behind the doors. The last time they had spoken properly had not been long ago, but it had begun to feel longer. Time did strange things around grief. It made silence stretch and then snap.

San glanced back toward the ballroom, then at her again. “Do you hate this sort of thing?”

Jiyeon’s shoulders remained stiff. “Yes.”

“Everything?”

“No.”

He looked at her for a beat, then said, with unusual gentleness, “You are lying.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I am not.”

“You enjoyed yourself at the festival.”

“That was different.”

“How?”

“It was outdoors.”

San’s mouth twitched. “That is a very poor defense.”

“It is still true.”

He leaned a little against the wall opposite her, hands loose at his sides now, and the posture made him look less like a prince and more like a man who had happened to be born into a title he had never quite learned how to wear comfortably. “You had fun then.”

Jiyeon’s mouth tightened. “I did not say that.”

“You did not have to.”

She looked away first, because she knew his expression would become unbearable if she did not. “Why did you follow me out here?”

He was quiet for a heartbeat.

Then, very simply, “Because you left.”

Jiyeon looked back at him.

San’s gaze held hers for a moment too long, and there was something there that did not belong to the ballroom at all. Not quite hunger. Not quite sorrow. Something softer and more dangerous because it was neither.

The music drifted through the wall behind them, muffled but still clear enough to keep time in the air.

San straightened slightly. “Dance with me.”

Jiyeon blinked. “No.”

His brows lifted. “That was immediate.”

“I meant it.”

“I know.”

“I do not know how to dance.”

San’s mouth curved. “You know how to move.”

“That is not the same thing.”

“It’s close enough for me.”

“It is not for me.”

He pushed off the wall and stepped one pace nearer. “You danced at the harvest festival.”

“That was not dancing. That was—” She stopped, realizing too late that there was no defense readily available that would not sound foolish. “That was entirely different.”

“How so?”

“It was not a ballroom dance.”

“Ah.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” he said, with obvious patience and the slightest trace of a smile, “that you are afraid of making a mistake.”

“I am not afraid.”

He gave her a look that made the lie feel transparent. “Liar.”

Jiyeon’s chin lifted. “You are being annoying.”

“I am being persistent.”

“That is the same thing.”

“Not entirely.”

She would have answered, but he was already extending a hand toward her, palm up, as though the answer were inevitable and she had merely delayed admitting it.

“Dance with me,” he said again, quieter this time.

The corridor had gone very still around them.

Jiyeon looked at his hand. At his face. At the open space between them. At the faint shadow beneath his eyes and the warmth in them that made the rest of the room disappear. She thought of the ball behind her. Of the music. Of the endless line of noblewomen. Of the way his gaze had kept finding her when it should not have.

Of how she had come out here because she could not bear the feeling of it all any longer.

Her breath caught against something she did not want to name.

Then, because she could not allow herself to stand there like a fool forever, she said, “I cannot.”

San’s smile turned small and knowing. “You can.”

“I mean that I will not.”

He waited.

The silence stretched.

Then, with a faint sigh that sounded less like defeat than decision, he stepped closer and reached down to the buttons at the side of her boots.

Jiyeon stared at him. “What are you doing?”

“Helping.”

“You are not helping.”

San ignored that with the care of someone who had decided the objection was not worth answering. He crouched briefly and loosened the first boot before tugging it off her foot, then the second. Jiyeon made a strangled sound of protest and almost took a step back, but he was already rising again, boots in hand, eyes bright with improbable calm.

“San,” she hissed, low and furious now. “What exactly do you think you are doing?”

“Improvising.”

“That is not a real answer.”

“It is in practice.”

She looked ready to strangle him.

He looked delighted by the prospect.

“Put your feet on mine,” he said.

Jiyeon stared as if he had suddenly begun speaking a language she despised.

“What?”

“Your feet,” he repeated, as though this were obvious. “On mine.”

“That is not how dancing works.”

“It is tonight.”

Her mouth parted, then closed again. “No.”

San’s brows lifted. “You were just saying you didn’t know how.”

“That does not mean I am willing to stand on your shoes.”

“It’s not a trap.”

“It sounds like one.”

He smiled. “Trust me.”

That word, for reasons she could not have explained even if she had tried, made her hesitate.

Jiyeon did not like hesitation. It made her feel exposed. But the corridor was empty, and the music beyond the ballroom door had shifted again into something slower, softer, like a hand moving across silk. San remained in front of her with both hands open, patient in a way that felt almost unfair.

At last, with the kind of resignation that comes only from losing an argument before it has fully begun, Jiyeon placed one foot, then the other, upon his own.

He adjusted at once, careful to steady her.

The change was immediate and deeply unsettling.

She was suddenly close enough to feel the warmth of him through the fabric of his coat. Close enough to hear the beat of the music through the wall and his breathing beneath it. Close enough that their bodies had to acknowledge each other whether their minds wanted to or not. San’s hands moved to her waist with a gentleness that made her whole body go rigid for one impossible second.

“San,” she warned, though the word came out quieter than she meant.

“I have you.”

That was not reassuring.

It was worse.

Jiyeon’s hands settled awkwardly against his shoulders because there was nowhere else sensible for them to go. The height of them, the closeness, the absurd fact of his feet bearing her weight while he stood steady beneath her—everything made the room feel tilted, as though the corridor itself had given up pretending to be ordinary.

“Walk with me,” he murmured.

“I am not walking.”

“You are.”

“I am standing.”

“Angrily,” he said, and the corner of his mouth lifted. “But yes.”

Then he moved.

Slowly at first, then with increasing confidence, guiding both of them into a quiet rhythm that had almost nothing to do with the ballroom and everything to do with the space they had made between themselves. Jiyeon had the horrifying and immediate realization that he was dancing for the both of them. Carrying her weight. Setting the pace. Making it possible.

And she was letting him.

The intimacy of it was unlike anything she had expected. Not loud. Not dramatic. Worse because of how soft it was. His hands at her waist, careful and warm. The steady rise and fall of his breath. The faint scent of soap and candle smoke and the cold night air he had brought in from the courtyard when he followed her out. The way his eyes never quite left her face.

“You make this look easy,” Jiyeon muttered.

San gave a low, breathy laugh. “It is not easy.”

“You do not look like you are struggling.”

“I am used to carrying difficult things.”

Jiyeon looked up sharply, but San’s expression remained composed enough to be plausible innocence. Still, something had shifted. The air between them was no longer merely playful. It was threaded through with something quiet and aching that neither of them had any intention of naming. The corridor felt too narrow for the distance they were trying not to close.

She swallowed once.

San’s gaze lowered to her mouth and then returned to her eyes so quickly it might have been imagined if not for the sudden change in the beat of his breathing.

For a moment they simply moved.

Then they stopped.

Jiyeon realized, with a startling clarity that made her chest tighten, that they were far too close. Chest to chest now. Breath to breath. The motion had brought them in without either of them noticing until there was nowhere left to pretend there was space.

San’s hand tightened at her waist. Jiyeon’s fingers curled against his shoulders.

The world narrowed to the line of his mouth.

The music continued on behind the door. Someone laughed faintly in the ballroom. A glass clinked somewhere far away. The palace went on being itself without consulting them.

San’s expression softened by degrees so small they were almost painful to witness.

Then he leaned in. Jiyeon did too, without meaning to.

The air between them disappeared.

Her breath caught. His did too.

They were not quite kissing yet. Lips only lingering as though testing the waters. But it was there—inescapable, inevitable, terrifying in its sweetness. The kind of moment that changes everything without permission.

Then a voice called from the far end of the corridor.

“Your Highness?”

They jerked apart as though struck.

San straightened so quickly he nearly lost his balance. Jiyeon stepped back at the same moment and had to catch herself against the wall because, without his footing beneath her, the room had suddenly remembered how to tilt. Her pulse hammered in her throat.

A servant appeared at the corridor’s far end, pale-faced and apologetic. “I—I’m sorry, Your Highness. They sent me to find you. You had disappeared, and Lady Lim asked whether—”

The rest became meaningless.

San had already turned away enough to hide the expression on his face, though not fast enough to hide the fact that he was breathing more sharply than before. Jiyeon bent to retrieve her boots with a motion that was likely too sudden, too careful, too much like fleeing.

The servant bowed in confusion, clearly unaware that he had interrupted something he had no business knowing existed.

San recovered first. Of course he did.

He was a prince. He was practiced in appearing composed. That did not make the moment any less ruinous.

“I was only getting air,” he said, voice smoother than his breathing deserved. “I will return shortly.”

The servant nodded quickly and withdrew before he could be made more uncomfortable by the silence.

The instant he was gone, the corridor felt too empty.

Jiyeon rose, boots in hand, unable to meet San’s eyes for longer than a second.

He stared at her for a moment as though he might say something. Something reckless. Something that would either save them or destroy what little sanity remained between them.

Instead he only reached out, caught her hand for the briefest second, and then let go.

No words. No apology. No explanation.

Just the quiet, catastrophic knowledge that neither of them had imagined it.

Jiyeon slipped back toward the ballroom first, San a step behind and then another, both of them returning to the light and noise as though nothing had happened at all.

But something had.

And neither of them would be able to forget it.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

Weeks began to pass in the palace with the slow, grinding patience of winter.

The ball had become the first of many formal appearances. After that came gardens, teas, walks beneath clipped hedges and bowed branches, small gatherings in bright rooms where the furniture was too delicate to rest one’s anger against. The court called it courtship with the solemn confidence of people who believed naming a thing gave them authority over it.

Jiyeon called it an endurance trial.

She was on duty for nearly all of it.

At first because it was convenient. Then because it was expected. Then because the king had begun to trust her in the same tight, practical way he trusted any blade that had not yet failed him twice. Jiyeon followed San through the endless, ritualized movement of the palace as though her shadow had been stitched to his. She stood at a distance when she could. She stepped closer when she had to. She learned the faces of the young women who were brave enough to stay after hearing about the curse and the faces of the ones who only came once and never returned.

Some were frightened before they ever met him.

Some were curious.

Some came dressed in their best pearls and self-possession, determined to treat the prince as an opportunity and not a man.

All of them changed when the transformation happened.

The first lady to see it screamed so loudly the sound echoed down the west corridor. She had been seated across from San beneath a trellised garden arbor, one gloved hand resting delicately over a porcelain teacup while the other toyed with the edge of her sleeve. The conversation had been shallow, polite, all smiles and careful questions, and Jiyeon had stood several paces away pretending not to notice that San looked as though he were counting the leaves just to survive the exchange.

Then his cup slipped.

The sound it made on the stone table was tiny.

His fingers had gone rigid.

The young woman noticed only because Jiyeon did.

By the time San’s breath turned harsh and his shoulders began to shake, the lady had already gone pale. The courtiers nearby looked confused for one breath, then alarmed, then fear. By the time the change became visible—gold starting to catch at the edges of his eyes, the first unnatural pattern of scales surfacing along his throat—the woman had stumbled backward so fast her chair tipped over behind her.

Jiyeon moved without thinking.

“Everyone back.”

That stopped the nearest attendants. Not because they obeyed her out of fear, but because they knew what her voice meant when it became that sharp. The lady’s face crumpled in terror.

San, still half-caught between pain and humiliation, looked up at her with a flicker of apology that struck Jiyeon harder than the sight itself.

He said something—her name, perhaps, or a warning—but the next wave took him and folded him inward with such force that the words came apart in his throat. A low, awful sound filled the garden. The servants were already retreating. The lady had one hand over her mouth and the other pressed to her chest as if she were trying not to faint.

Then the transformation surged fully through him.

It was never graceful. Nothing about the curse was.

The prince’s body bent and resisted and changed in jagged, painful pieces, as though something beneath his skin was forcing its way outward and his flesh had no choice but to make room. When it was over he was still himself in shape, still humanoid, still impossible to mistake for anyone else, but the wrongness of him had deepened. The light in his eyes had become a bright, reptilian gold. Darker patterns moved along his arms and the side of his neck, half scales and half shadow. There was a predatory stillness in the way he held himself now, as if some part of him had gone very old and very watchful.

The lady made a strangled noise and fled.

Not out of cruelty. Out of terror.

Jiyeon did not blame her.

San shoved himself upright against the arbor post with a hiss of pain and a shame that looked, for a moment, worse than the curse itself.

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice ragged. “Leave.”

The attendants were already leaving.

Jiyeon remained where she was.

His head snapped toward her, eyes fierce with panic. “Jiyeon. Go.”

The way he said it—her name in that beast-roughened voice, desperate and protective and ashamed all at once—made something in her tighten painfully. She did not move until he turned away and struck the side of the arbor with a hand hard enough to crack one of the painted slats.

Only then did she retreat with the others.

And after that, the court changed its mind in a dozen tiny ways.

A few ladies still came. Curious ones. Brave ones. Girls too sheltered to understand what fear could do to affection. But there were fewer after every transformation. One woman laughed too nervously and never returned. Another lasted three meetings before deciding the prince’s condition was “too unstable for a meaningful engagement.” A third, after hearing whispers from the servants, claimed a sudden illness in her family and vanished from the conversation entirely.

The court did what it always did when faced with danger.

It softened into distance.

It called the curse tragic in public and inconvenient in private.

San endured all of it with a stillness that frightened Jiyeon more than the transformations ever did. He grew quieter between events, more careful with his face, more reserved in public. Sometimes he smiled at the right moments and spoke to the right people and wore the right expression, but the effort of it seemed to cost him something each time. It was as though every failed courtship stole a little more of the easy brightness he had carried before.

And yet there were moments when he did not seem entirely miserable.

That was the part Jiyeon did not know what to do with.

Yoora made those moments happen more often than anyone else.

She was not like the others. The others came to be seen. Yoora came to observe. She was calm where the rest were eager, patient where the rest were performative. When San was tired, she did not make him smile on command. When he went quiet, she did not punish him for it with flustered speech or offended laughter. She asked direct questions and waited for honest answers, and when she received none, she did not take it personally.

That, perhaps, was why he tolerated her.

Or why he seemed to.

Jiyeon began noticing the shape of their conversations from across gardens and drawing rooms. Yoora spoke to him as though he were a person rather than a title. San, in turn, became a little less guarded around her because she never seemed to demand more of him than he had to give. They walked together during supervised promenades. They spoke over tea in rooms that smelled of citrus and polished wood. They exchanged formal courtesies that, to Jiyeon’s eyes, became almost companionable.

Almost.

It was enough to hurt.

Once, at a noon gathering in the east conservatory, Jiyeon saw San laugh.

It was only once, and only briefly. Yoora had said something under her breath while examining a vase of winter lilies, and San had looked at her in a way that suggested he had not expected wit from her and found it disarming when it appeared. The laugh that escaped him was quiet and real enough to make several people nearby turn. It softened his face in a way Jiyeon had almost forgotten.

She looked away too quickly.

The ache in her chest sharpened until it felt nearly physical.

Later, when the room had thinned and the attendants were busy with the tea service, Yoora approached Jiyeon by the window where she had stationed herself under the pretense of surveillance.

“Dame Choi,” she said, in the polite, measured voice she used with everyone. “May I ask you something?”

Jiyeon straightened at once. “Of course, My Lady.”

Yoora’s eyes flicked toward the prince, then back to her. “How long have you known His Highness?”

The question was simple enough that it almost betrayed her.

Jiyeon answered carefully. “Since before I was assigned to Princess Haneul’s household.”

Yoora nodded once, as though filing the information away. “He seems comfortable around you.”

That nearly made Jiyeon laugh, though not from humor. “He is not always comfortable.”

“No,” Yoora said softly, and there was a glint in her expression that suggested she knew she had touched the edge of something true, “but he looks for you.”

Jiyeon’s breath caught before she could stop it.

Yoora noticed. Of course she did.

The noblewoman did not press the point. She only smiled faintly, not unkindly, and turned back toward the room as though she had said nothing unusual at all.

Jiyeon, left standing by the window, felt the world tilt by a fraction.

After that, it became harder to pretend not to see.

San and Yoora spent more time together. He still went through awful courtship events with women who hoped to withstand the curse, but Yoora remained the one constant presence that did not flinch. She met him on promenades and in formal sitting rooms and in the palace garden paths where the roses were beginning to bloom again. She listened. She asked. She did not chase him when he went quiet.

Sometimes, when Jiyeon watched from a distance, San seemed almost calmer with her there.

That was what made it hurt.

It was not that Yoora was cruel. She was better than that. She was patient, graceful, and kind in a way that made everyone around her look slightly cruder by comparison. Jiyeon could see why the king favored her. Could see why the court thought she would make a suitable match. Could see why the word crown princess began quietly appearing in whispers whenever people thought she was not listening.

And every time she heard it, Jiyeon told herself it was right.

Yoora was perfect for him.

Yoora could take the curse without fear. Could stand beside him in public. Could charm the court. Could survive the demands of a crown.

Jiyeon had no such delusions about herself.

She was a knight. A guard. A remnant of a failed promise. A woman who had stood outside Haneul’s door and not seen the sorrow growing behind it until it was too late. San deserved better. He deserved grace and lineage and a wife who could look at him without remembering blood and grief and the dark shape of a grave freshly filled.

He deserved Yoora.

She repeated this often enough that it nearly became a prayer.

Then San would glance at her across a room and ruin it.

It happened in little pieces.

A promenade through the rose walk where Yoora spoke to him beside a fountain and San’s attention drifted past her shoulder toward Jiyeon standing at the far end of the path.

A tea reception where a minister’s daughter complimented him on his patience and he thanked her politely while still looking at Jiyeon over the rim of his cup.

A formal luncheon where the entire table seemed bent on showcasing Yoora’s elegance and San kept, with irritating consistency, turning toward the only person in the room who was actively pretending not to notice him.

Jiyeon would catch him staring and look away.

He would catch her pretending not to.

And the whole palace would keep breathing around them, oblivious and ruinous.

By the time a month had passed, the court had mostly accepted that the prince’s curse would make marriage difficult. By the time two months had passed, several noble families had withdrawn their daughters from consideration with polite excuses. By the time three had passed, the palace began to treat Yoora less as one possibility among many and more as the only candidate still brave enough to remain.

San never said he liked this.

But he also never said no.

And that, Jiyeon thought, was perhaps the cruellest part of all.

Because there were moments—rare, maddening moments—when San looked almost comfortable at Yoora’s side. Not in love. Not yet. But at ease enough that Jiyeon’s heart did something stupid and sharp every time she saw it. He would walk beside Yoora in the garden and look less like a prisoner of the court and more like a man remembering how to move through the world without bracing for impact. He would answer her questions with a little more honesty than he gave anyone else. He would let her make him laugh once or twice, quietly, under his breath, as if the sound were a secret.

Jiyeon watched all of it and punished herself for watching.

Every night she told herself she was being sensible.

Every night she failed to believe it.

Then, one afternoon, while she was on patrol in the upper west corridor, she heard San scream.

The sound hit the stone so hard it seemed to vibrate in her bones. Jiyeon was already moving before her mind caught up. The hall had emptied around her in an instant. A tray dropped somewhere behind a door. Another voice called his name. Jiyeon’s hand was on the hilt of her sword before she reached the chamber entrance.

The guards outside were white-faced and useless.

“Open it,” she snapped.

One of them fumbled with the door. It gave.

The instant she stepped inside, she knew she had arrived too late to see the beginning of the pain and just in time to witness the rest.

San was on one knee near the bed, one hand braced hard against the floor. His head was bowed so low his hair hid most of his face. His shoulders were already jerking in terrible, involuntary spasms. The room smelled faintly of broken candlewax and sweat. A lamp had been knocked over. A chair lay tipped on its side. His breath came in raw, strangled pulls.

Then he looked up.

Jiyeon froze.

The first thing she saw was not the scales.

It was his face.

Not yet fully changed. Not yet fully beast. Just San, in pain so severe it had stripped every last bit of composure from him. His eyes were wide and bright with panic. His expression, when it found her, changed at once into something worse than fear.

Shame.

“No,” he rasped, voice fractured by agony. “Get out.”

The words were almost swallowed by another convulsion. He tried to rise and failed. The transformation had begun around the edges of him—the gold of the eyes, the dark sheen creeping beneath his skin, the hardening lines along his throat. His breath hitched painfully.

Jiyeon took one step toward him.

San lifted his head too quickly and shook it once, sharply, as if he could physically stop her. “No. Jiyeon, don’t—”

His body buckled with another wave, and the sound that left him then was the kind that made a person feel cruel simply by hearing it. Jiyeon crossed the room in three strides and knelt beside him before the panic could force her away.

“Hold still.”

He flinched. “I said go.”

“You are in pain.”

“I know that.”

“Then let me help.”

San gave a broken laugh that was almost a snarl, though it held no anger. Only humiliation. “Help with what? This?”

The transformation surged hard enough that she had to brace him as he nearly collapsed sideways. Jiyeon caught his shoulder and pulled him upright before his head struck the bedframe. His skin was burning hot beneath her hand. The dark markings had spread further now, tracing his neck, jaw, collarbone, all the places the curse seemed to reach first. He trembled violently.

“Jiyeon,” he said, and the name sounded torn out of him, “please.”

She did not ask what he meant by it. She knew.

Leave.

Do not see me.

Do not make me watch you look at me like this.

She had no intention of obeying.

Jiyeon did not hesitate.

The moment San’s voice broke around that single plea, she was already moving with the instinct of a soldier stepping into fire. She got one arm beneath his shoulders, the other braced across his back, and when his body jerked again with the next wave of the curse, she held him harder instead of letting go. San was trembling so hard she could feel it in every point where they touched. His breath came in harsh, uneven pulls, each one rough enough to make her own chest ache in sympathy.

“Easy,” she murmured, though there was nothing easy in any of it. “I have you.”

His breathing had already gone ragged. The scales had begun to rise beneath the skin at his throat and along his collarbone, dark and unnatural in the wavering lamplight. His head had fallen against her shoulder. His body gave a sharp, involuntary jerk, and she tightened her hold at once, one hand at the back of his neck, the other spread carefully between his shoulder blades as if she could somehow anchor him to the world by sheer refusal to let go.

Jiyeon could feel the violent heat of the transformation through the thin fabric of his shirt, feel the tremor in every muscle of him as his body resisted what it was being forced to become. She drew in one sharp breath, then reached for the fastening at his chest with hands that somehow did not shake.

San made a choked sound, half protest and half agony.

“I need to see,” she whispered, and because he could not stop her even if he had wanted to, she ripped the shirt open along the seam.

The fabric parted. Under it, the curse was writing itself across him in terrible detail.

Scales surfaced over his chest in uneven waves, some still half-hidden beneath skin that seemed too tight for what was trying to emerge, others fully formed and catching the light in dull, iridescent flashes. They spread along the line of his ribs and down across his abdomen in branching, living patterns, as if some old and ancient thing were being dragged up from beneath his flesh. His muscles seized and released, seized and released, each motion so abrupt it made him gasp through clenched teeth.

Jiyeon’s throat tightened hard enough to hurt.

Even now, even like this, he was beautiful in the way only heartbreak can make a person beautiful—ruined, yes, but unmistakably himself beneath the ruin. The sight of it made her chest ache with a helplessness so sharp it felt almost physical.

She lifted one hand, then hesitated only a fraction before letting her fingers settle lightly over the scales forming along his sternum.

San shuddered.

Not away.

Toward.

The reaction was so small she might have missed it if she had not been looking for anything that might tell her where to place her hands, where to be gentle, where not to make the agony worse. She stroked once, very carefully, the way one might soothe a frightened animal, the way one might handle a wound one could not fix.

“I know,” she murmured. “I know it hurts.”

His breathing hitched. San’s fingers clenched weakly against her sleeve. Tears slid soundlessly down his face, one after another, catching at his jaw before disappearing into the torn collar of his shirt. He was crying without making a sound, and somehow that was worse. It made the whole room feel like a wound that had no language for itself.

Jiyeon bowed her head over him. She hated the helplessness of it.

Hated the fact that all the skill in her body, all the discipline, all the years of training, could not strike down a curse or cut pain out of the flesh it tormented. She could kill a man. She could defend a prince. She could hold a shield line or split a blade from a wrist or stand between the people she loved and any threat she could name.

But she could not stop this. Not for him. The thought burned through her with such force it almost made her sick. She wanted, absurdly and violently, to take the pain into herself just to stop it touching him.

Instead she kept stroking his chest, his shoulder, the line of his neck where the scales were still climbing.

“I’m here,” she said, though she was no longer sure whether she was speaking to him or to herself. “You’re not alone. Not while I’m here.”

His hands were trembling so badly she could feel the motion against her as she held him.

The transformation continued. The changes were never graceful. Nothing about the curse had the mercy of elegance. His body arched once, then again, and Jiyeon braced herself against the bedframe so he would not strike the floor. The room was full of his breathing, rough and broken and inhumanly strained. His head tipped forward until his forehead nearly touched her collarbone. She bent with him, holding him through the convulsion, until he had no choice but to lean into the shape of her body to stay upright.

When the worst of the transformation surged again, San gave a broken gasp and buckled against her. Jiyeon tightened her grip and fought to keep him steady, one hand now sliding up to his hair, fingers tangling there as she pressed him closer. He was shaking so hard she could barely tell where his body ended and hers began. She could feel the curse moving through him in sickening, undeniable stages—hardening the line of his throat, sharpening the shape of his shoulders, pulling something old and wild into the surface of his skin.

And all the while, he was still San.

Or at least, that was what Jiyeon told herself.

She had no real proof. No certainty. He had never let anyone close enough to know what happened when the curse fully took hold. No one in the palace could answer the question because no one had been allowed to see the shape of him after the pain passed. Did he remain himself behind the eyes? Did something feral and unfamiliar take over entirely? Did he remember anything at all?

Jiyeon found, to her own surprise, that she did not care. Not in that moment.

Even if he was no longer entirely human beneath the curse, even if his mind was changed beyond recognition, all that mattered to her then was that he hurt. That he was scared. That his body was being torn into a form it had never asked for.

At last the pain drove his weight down more fully, and Jiyeon, with all the strength in her arms and back and stubborn will, managed to lift him enough to settle him onto the bed. He was heavier than she expected. Or perhaps she was weaker than she liked to admit.

San sagged against the mattress as though every bone in him had been emptied out. Jiyeon climbed up beside him without thinking, one knee into the blankets, one arm still around his shoulders. He was shaking too hard to lie still. His head turned, searching blindly until it found her again, and then, with a low sound of exhaustion and pain, he folded toward her.

She caught him before he could fall.

His face pressed against her chest.

For one absurd, shattering second, her entire body forgot how to function.

Then she wrapped both arms around him and held on.

There was something devastating about it—about his body, changed and altered and covered in cursed, unnatural marks, still seeking safety in exactly the same place a human would have. Jiyeon felt the tremor of him through every breath. Felt the wet heat of his tears through the front of her dress. Felt the desperate, involuntary way his fingers curled into the fabric at her side as though he could anchor himself there.

Her own eyes burned. She blinked hard and looked away before the tears could fall.

Jiyeon sat with him half-curled against her, one hand in his hair, the other smoothing over his shoulder and down the line of his arm in slow, repetitive motions meant to soothe rather than touch. He was still trembling, but the panic in it had begun to blunt around the edges. The room, with its torn chair and fallen lamp and scattered shadows, felt smaller now. Less like a chamber of horror and more like a place that had been pressed painfully into intimacy by necessity.

She stroked his face. Then his hair. Then the ridge of his arm where a few scales had spread beneath the skin. He leaned into her touch by degrees so small they might have been imagined.

Jiyeon lowered her mouth near his temple and spoke very softly, as though volume itself might make the spell worse. “It is all right.”

It was not all right.

She knew it. He knew it. The gods probably knew it too.

But she said it anyway. “It will pass.”

San shuddered once. His hand moved weakly, catching at the fabric over her waist with a grip too unsteady to be called certain, but enough to tell her he had heard.

Jiyeon kept talking, because silence felt too much like surrender

“I’m here,” she whispered, her voice roughening. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She touched his sweat-slicked hair, combing it back from his damp forehead with careful fingers, then stroked along the side of his face where the curse had not yet fully marked him. His skin was hot. Too hot. She traced the edge of his jaw, the slope of his cheek, the tense line of his throat. Every touch was tentative at first, then steadier when he did not recoil.

“I’ll find a way to break it,” she promised, voice low and fierce in the darkening room. “Whatever this witch has done, I’ll undo it. I’ll tear the answer out of the earth if I have to.”

San’s breathing stuttered. His head shifted, not quite a nod, not quite a shake.

Jiyeon’s hand paused in his hair for one brief second before resuming its slow, steady motion. “I will find someone,” she said, trying to make the words gentler than the ache that pressed behind them. “A woman who can help. Someone who can end this properly. Someone who can—”

His body shifted, and though his face was still half-hidden against her chest, she felt the movement of his head as he gave the faintest shake, once, then again. It was not the deliberate refusal of a man in full command of himself. It was stranger than that. More instinctive. More immediate. As though the suggestion itself had unsettled him.

Jiyeon frowned faintly, looking down at him. “What is it?”

He did not answer in words. Not really.

His head turned against her chest, then lifted a little, and she thought at first that he was simply trying to breathe more easily. But when she went to smooth the hair back from his temple again, he caught her wrist—not hard, not enough to hurt, only enough to stop her for one bewildering moment.

Then he buried his face into the crook of her neck.

Jiyeon went utterly still.

The motion was instinctive and strangely gentle, more seeking than clinging, more protective than possessive. It unsettled her not because it was too much, but because it was so plainly the opposite. He did not seem to be asking for anything she could name. He only stayed there, breathing against her skin, as though the place between her shoulder and jaw were the one safe corner left in the room.

Her confusion flickered and faltered beneath the force of the feeling that followed.

Something tender.

Something terrible.

Something that made her think, with sudden and unwelcome clarity, of what it would mean if someone else were to take her place here one day. Of hands she did not know touching him when the pain came again. Of a stranger soothing the edges of his suffering while she watched from somewhere else, helpless and excluded from the only thing she was beginning, against all reason, to understand.

The thought turned her stomach in a way she could not explain.

So she held him tighter instead.

“It’s all right,” she repeated softly, though this time it was less a reassurance than a vow. “I’ve got you. I’m not going anywhere.”

His breathing, still rough, eased only by a fraction.

Jiyeon kept stroking his hair. His shoulder. The line of his arm where the scales had not yet spread. The human parts of him. The parts she could reach. The parts that answered to her touch with little shivers that she felt all the way through her own ribs.

The room stayed silent around them except for the storm of his breathing and the tiny, relentless creak of the bed beneath their combined weight.

And in that silence, Jiyeon realized with a slow and painful certainty that whatever this curse had made of San, whatever monster it forced him to become, she did not care about the shape of his fear so long as she could still be the one to soothe it.

That thought should have frightened her.

Instead it only made her heart hurt more.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

Half an hour later, the worst of it had passed.

The room had gone quiet in the way exhausted things often do, as though even the air had grown tired of bearing witness. San slept in Jiyeon’s arms with his face pressed against her chest, one hand still caught in the fabric at her waist as though the body he had become refused to believe he was safe enough to let go. His breathing had finally slowed. Not normal. Not yet. But steadier.

Jiyeon remained very still beneath him.

She did not trust the silence.

Not because she expected pain to return at any moment, though it might have. But because there was something almost unbearable about the sight of him at rest after so much suffering. Something in her refused to stop seeing the trembling that had just gone out of his body, the way he had clung to her as if she were the only fixed point in a world that had turned cruel.

The change was complete now.

The creature in her arms was still San, and not San, and somehow entirely himself in the middle of both truths.

Scales covered him in layered patches over his throat, shoulders, chest, and down the length of his arms. They caught the lamplight in dull gold and ash-dark green, like a living mosaic made by something patient and old. The shape of him had not become wholly monstrous so much as ancient in a way that made the word monster feel far too small. A semi-basilisk, yes—she understood that now. There was something long and watchful in the shape of his face, in the set of his jaw even softened by sleep, in the way the markings spread along his skin like a warning written by nature itself.

And yet for all that terrifying majesty, there was still something absurdly tender about the way he had settled against her.

He had curled into her as if seeking warmth. Affection. Safety.

Like a cat, she thought, with a helpless sort of disbelief, though the comparison would have sounded ridiculous aloud. He was too large, too strange, too dangerous-looking for the image to make any sense. And yet the instinct was there all the same—his weight leaning into hers, his body molded to the one place he trusted not to vanish under him. Even now, half-lost in sleep, his hand rested near her side with that loose, possessive curl of fingers that felt less like grasping and more like needing.

Jiyeon drew in a careful breath.

Her hand rose of its own accord and settled against his hair.

It was softer than she had expected.

Thicker at the crown, a little damp at the temple where sweat and fever had dried. She stroked it once, then again, slow and light, letting the motion continue because he did not stir from it except to relax by a fraction. A tiny sound escaped him then—so faint she almost thought she imagined it.

A purr.

Jiyeon went still.

She looked down at him in stunned silence, then very gently stroked his hair again. There it was again, so small it might have been mistaken for the bed settling beneath them if she had not been listening for it.

The absurdity of it should have made her laugh.

It did not.

Instead, a strange tenderness rose in her chest so suddenly it made her throat ache.

San was still sane enough, she thought, to know who she was. Still sane enough to recognize her, to seek her out, to calm when she spoke. But there was a shift in him now that she could not quite define. He was less human in the small details, less expressive, yet not lost. Not gone. The beast had not devoured him. It had reshaped him around itself.

Jiyeon did not know whether that knowledge should comfort her.

It did.

And it did not.

Her fingers continued their slow path through his hair.

Then, before she could think too hard about it, she bent her head and pressed a soft kiss to his forehead.

She felt his breathing shift in answer, just a little, and closed her eyes for the briefest second.

“I’ll make sure nothing comes between you and Lady Yoora,” she whispered.

The words hurt to say.

Physically, almost. As though they scraped raw against the inside of her ribs before leaving her mouth.

She forced them out anyway.

Because it was the proper thing to say.

Because it was sensible.

Because she had already decided she would be sensible, even if it killed something in her to do it.

“She’ll be good for you,” Jiyeon murmured, more quietly now, and somehow that made the lie sting worse. “She’ll be kind. She’ll understand court life. She’ll—” Her voice faltered for only an instant before she steadied it again. “She’ll be able to break this curse.”

San did not wake. Not fully. Only shifted faintly in her arms, a movement that might have been nothing more than the body settling deeper into sleep.

Jiyeon pressed her lips together and looked away.

It was easier not to think too closely about the shape of the pain in her own chest. Easier to imagine the future as something already decided, something she simply had to endure with dignity until it was no longer her business. Yoora was kind. Yoora was noble. Yoora was everything the court would want standing beside San when the time came.

Jiyeon was only a knight.

A blade.

A failure wearing a uniform.

She had stood outside Haneul’s door and not known what sorrow was growing behind it. She had not saved the princess. She had not seen enough. Done enough. Been enough.

What right did she have to think of herself at all, when San had the kind of life that demanded more than grief and guilt from her? He was a prince. A future king. He deserved someone who could stand beside him as the kingdom expected. Someone gentle. Someone beautiful. Someone proper.

Someone like Yoora.

Someone not like her.

The thought settled into place with the grim finality of a vow.

So Jiyeon stayed where she was a little longer, stroking his hair until the tension in her own shoulders began to burn. Only when she was certain he would not wake did she slowly untangle herself from his grip.

His hand resisted at first.

Not enough to wake him. Just enough to make the separation feel wrong.

Jiyeon hesitated, then eased his fingers loose one by one with the kind of care reserved for wounds.

The blanket at the foot of the bed had been pushed aside during the worst of the transformation. She pulled it up and draped it over him, tucking it gently around the lines of his shoulders and chest. The scales made the fabric bunch in odd places. She smoothed it flat where she could, then lingered for one impossible second with her hand resting just above his temple.

She wanted to kiss it.

The thought came so suddenly and so clearly that she froze.

Her heart gave one sharp, traitorous pulse.

Jiyeon drew back at once, as if the impulse itself had burned her. Her hand fell to her side. She stood there for a breath too long, staring at the sleeping shape of him as if he might somehow hear the direction of her thoughts if she stayed in the room another second.

Then she turned away.

Quietly, she crossed to the door, opened it, and slipped out.

The hallway beyond was cool and dim, the palace holding its own breath around her. Jiyeon shut the door with the softest click she could manage and stood there for a brief moment with one hand still on the wood, collecting herself before the rest of the world could ask anything of her again.

Hours later, she found herself in the knights’ meeting hall waiting for Captain Han to assign the evening patrol.

The room smelled faintly of oiled leather and old iron. A rain-lamp burned low in the corner, its light turning the weapon racks into long dark shapes against the wall. Jiyeon stood with her arms folded loosely and her face arranged into the calm blankness she had learned to wear when her thoughts were too loud.

Three other knights stood near the far table, speaking in low voices they clearly did not intend her to hear.

At first she paid them no mind.

Then her name—or rather, San’s—caught her attention.

“Lady Yoora seems the likeliest choice now,” one of them was saying. “If His Highness is ever going to settle, it may as well be with someone who isn’t frightened of him.”

Another knight made a small sound of agreement. “She’s composed. Clever. The court likes her. That’s half the battle already.”

“The curse is the other half.”

“Hm. Curse or not, the prince does seem less ill at ease with her than with the others.”

Jiyeon stared at the wall ahead of her.

Did not move.

Did not speak.

The first knight glanced toward the doorway, then lowered his voice. “And you, Dame Choi—you know him better than most. What do you think?”

The question landed in her chest with all the lightness of a blade.

Her head turned slowly.

All three of them looked at her with the careless curiosity of people who assumed the answer would be practical, harmless, perhaps even amusing.

Jiyeon’s mouth was dry.

She could still feel the ghost of San’s weight in her arms. Could still remember the sound of that faint, impossible purr. Could still taste the shape of the words she had spoken to him just hours before. All of it pressed against her ribs until speaking felt dangerous.

But she had always been good at danger.

So she said, with the same even tone she used in the hall with nobles and kings, “Lady Lim Yoora is perfect for him.”

One of the knights nodded, as if he had expected exactly that.

Jiyeon kept her face still.

“She’ll be a good crown princess,” she went on, and each word felt like something being placed carefully onto a grave. “Eventually queen. She’ll be able to help him. She’ll be able to cure him of this curse.”

The others murmured in assent, satisfied with the answer.

Jiyeon continued anyway, because if she stopped now the ache in her throat might give her away.

“She’s kind. She’s gentle. She understands the court. She’s exactly the sort of woman His Highness should have at his side.”

One of the knights smiled faintly. “Then you approve.”

Jiyeon’s expression did not change.

“Yes,” she said.

It was easier to say than the truth.

And the truth was too ugly to survive out loud.

That she did not deserve the light San carried around him.

That she deserved whatever pain remained after Haneul’s death.

That she had failed where it mattered most, and perhaps she would be made to carry that failure in silence until the end of her life.

San deserved someone noble.

Someone sweet.

Someone who had not stood too close to grief and failed to stop it.

Someone who had not already stained herself with the memory of a dead princess.

Jiyeon was only a knight.

Only a blade.

Only a failure.

“Lady Yoora is far better for him than I could ever imagine anyone else being,” she said, and if her own voice sounded strange to her, no one commented on it.

The knights seemed satisfied.

One of them nodded. Another looked relieved to have a sensible answer. The conversation drifted away from her after that into easier, smaller things.

Jiyeon stared ahead and endured it.

Outside the hall, just beyond the partially open door, San had stopped in the corridor.

He had changed back.

The human shape of him stood in the half-light with one hand braced against the wall, his face turned only slightly toward the voices inside. He had not meant to stop. He had not meant to listen. But the words found him anyway.

Lady Lim Yoora is perfect for him.

She’ll be a good crown princess.

She’ll be able to cure him.

His breath hitched once.

Then again.

The room inside blurred at the edges of his vision, not from pain this time but from the cold, sudden understanding that Jiyeon had spoken those words with complete calm. Not forced. Not flustered. Not resentful. Certain.

She meant it.

She wanted him with someone else.

She didn't want him, herself.

San’s hand tightened against the wall until the joint in his wrist ached.

Of course she wouldn't.

Of course she would not want a monster. Not when she had seen what he had become. Not when she had seen the scales and the gold eyes and the hideous shape the curse carved out of him when it took hold. No one would. No one could.

He had known that already, in the vague abstract way grief teaches a person to expect rejection.

But hearing it from her—hearing her choose Yoora aloud, hearing her speak as though the matter were settled—made the thought bleed into something far worse.

Not pity.

Worse than pity.

Resolution.

She had not wanted him.

Not like that.

Not as he was.

The realization struck so hard his throat tightened painfully.

Jiyeon, inside, kept talking to the knights with her back straight and her voice level, while outside San stood in the corridor with tears threatening at the edge of his eyes, staring at the seam beneath the door as if it might split the room open and tell him he had misheard.

But he had not.

He had not misheard.

And that knowledge settled into him like a bruise.

So that was it, then.

Yoora was the one who could save him.

Yoora was the one Jiyeon thought suitable.

And Jiyeon—

Jiyeon was only being kind.

Only practical.

Only loyal.

Not in love.

Not with him.

Never with something like him.

San shut his eyes briefly and leaned harder against the wall, feeling the shame of his own body like a second skin.

He had already fallen too far for her to pretend this did not matter.

He had already loved her in the quiet, stupid way people loved before they admitted it to themselves.

And now, hearing her choose another woman for him, he understood with absolute certainty that the thing he had wanted most in the world was also the thing he could never have.

Because who would love a monster?

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

The next morning arrived with the cruel efficiency of all mornings that follow sleepless nights.

Jiyeon woke with the taste of old exhaustion in her mouth and the sensation that she had never truly slept at all. The memory of San in the night before clung to her with an indecent tenacity: the heat of him beneath her hands, the way his body had trembled through the curse, the wet shine of scales under lamplight, the silence of his tears. Worst of all was the softness that had followed after—the weight of him asleep against her, trusting her without question, as if her arms had always been the place he would return to when pain became too much.

She had spent the night turning over and over beneath a blanket she could not seem to keep or discard, her thoughts returning in spite of her to the smallest details.

The way he had clung to her.

The way his face had changed when she spoke.

The way, for one dangerous second, she had almost kissed the temple she was still certain she could feel beneath her lips.

No.

Jiyeon shut the thought down with the same sharpness she used to stop a blade’s swing.

No.

That had been weakness. Fatigue. Sympathy carried too far. Nothing more.

She rose, washed, dressed, and fastened her sword at her hip with automatic hands. By the time she left her chamber, she had arranged her face into the controlled blankness she wore best, the one that let no one guess how little she had slept or how much she had thought.

The palace was already awake.

Servants crossed the corridors with lowered eyes and trays balanced expertly on their palms. Somewhere beyond the outer garden wall, a fountain had begun to splash into its stone basin with the steady, soothing sound of ordinary life continuing as though nothing in the world had changed.

Jiyeon carried a stack of reports beneath one arm toward the royal library.

Halfway down the western corridor, she stopped.

At the far end of the hall stood San.

For one brief, impossible moment relief struck her so sharply she nearly forgot how to breathe.

He was upright.

Walking.

No bandages visible. No visible limp. No signs of the worst of the transformation lingering in his posture. The sight of him, whole again in the pale morning light, made something inside her unclench in spite of itself.

Good.

Thank the gods.

The curse had not left visible injury.

He was alive. He was intact. He—

San looked up.

Their eyes met.

Jiyeon’s heart gave a small, unsteady lurch.

And then he smiled.

Not the smile she knew.

Not the open, reckless grin that always threatened to become a laugh if she insulted him badly enough. Not the one with dimples, bright and devastating and impossible to resist if one were foolish enough to admit it mattered. Not the smile he gave when he was trying to make her roll her eyes or lose her temper.

This was the sort of smile a prince gave a knight in passing.

Polite.

Measured.

Distanced.

“Good morning, Dame Choi.”

Her throat tightened.

The title landed between them like a closed door.

Dame Choi.

Not Jiyeon.

Not Jiyeon-ah like when he wanted to provoke her.

Not my lady knight, like when he was being irritatingly fond.

Just Dame Choi.

Her fingers tightened once around the edge of the reports. “Your Highness.”

San dipped his head a fraction. Formal. Correct. Controlled.

Jiyeon felt, with a sudden cold clarity that made her spine go rigid, that something was wrong.

Not with his body.

With this.

With the way he was standing. The way he was looking at her. The distance he had placed in his voice as if it were a boundary he intended to keep.

She forced herself to speak before the silence could stretch into something uglier.

“How are you feeling?”

His answer came immediately, and too smoothly. “Much better. Thank you for your assistance yesterday.”

Assistance.

The word hit her with the force of an insult, though it was plainly not meant as one.

Like she had helped him move a wardrobe.

Like she had brought him water.

Like she had not held him through pain so sharp it had made her own chest ache with it.

Jiyeon stood perfectly still.

San’s expression did not change. Not even a flicker. If anything, the distance widened in the careful line of his mouth.

“Are you certain?” she asked.

“Yes.” Another polite dip of the head. “I’m grateful you were there when you were needed.”

When you were needed.

She stared at him.

There was no teasing in him now. No warmth. No private spark of mischief or softness. Only precision. Only the shape of a prince speaking to one of his knights with the exact amount of courtesy expected of both.

The corridor seemed suddenly too narrow.

Jiyeon had the absurd and terrible feeling that something had just been taken from her, though she could not have named what. San’s face remained composed. His eyes did not linger on hers a second too long. He had become, in the span of a single night, someone she did not know how to read.

He inclined his head again, shallow and proper.

Then he turned and continued down the corridor.

Jiyeon remained where she was, staring after him long after he had disappeared around the far bend of the hallway.

The reports in her hands felt heavier all at once.

She told herself not to be foolish.

He was tired.

The curse had exhausted him.

Perhaps he simply did not wish to be pitied.

Perhaps this was all it was.

And yet the unease would not leave her alone.

By midday, the feeling had become a thing with teeth.

San did not seek her out.

That, at first, was easy enough to dismiss. The prince had duties. He had physicians to consult, schedules to endure, people to appease. Perhaps he was resting. Perhaps he was avoiding everyone after the transformation, not only her.

By evening, it had become impossible to ignore.

He did not appear in the courtyard during her patrols.

He did not interrupt her at the garden paths.

He did not show up beside the kitchens with some maddening observation or some unnecessary question.

He did not drift into the rooms where she was stationed and pretend he had a reason to be there.

He did not look for her in crowded spaces.

The loss of it was almost invisible at first, because her body continued to expect him.

She would step into a courtyard and look, without meaning to, for the flash of his black coat near the colonnade.

Nothing.

She would hear laughter from the far side of a corridor and turn instinctively, expecting to see that easy curve of his mouth and the lift of his brows.

Nothing.

She would finish training and, with complete betrayal, find herself waiting for some sharp little comment from behind her shoulder.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

It was only after several days of this that she realized her hours had begun to arrange themselves around the absence of him. The thought came to her in the middle of a routine patrol, and it struck with such force that she had to stop and grip the corridor wall for a moment.

She had not noticed how much of the day had belonged to San until it had all gone silent.

The realization made her furious.

Then ashamed.

Then furious again.

She told herself she preferred the quiet.

She did not.

Meanwhile San was suffering just as badly, though from the other side of the same cruel wall.

Every instinct he possessed told him to seek her out.

To stand beside her in the training yard and annoy her with impossible questions.

To find her in a corridor and make her roll her eyes.

To ask whether she had eaten.

To see whether her sword hand still hurt.

To hear her say his name in that clipped, irritated way that had somehow become the sound of home.

Instead, he remembered her words.

Lady Lim Yoora is perfect for him.

She’ll be a good crown princess.

She’ll be able to cure him of this curse.

She’s exactly the sort of woman His Highness should have at his side.

Every time he remembered, it felt as though some small cruel hand reached into his chest and tightened around the space where hope ought to have been.

So he stayed away.

Not because he wanted to.

Because he had begun, with humiliating certainty, to believe he ought to.

If Jiyeon saw him as a prince and nothing more, then it was better to remain that way. Better to let her think he had moved forward with dignity. Better not to embarrass himself by looking for what could not be his.

Better not to be cruel to himself and ask for more.

It was an ugly sort of discipline.

He wore it badly.

The court did not make it easier.

At the next supper gathering with the royal and noble houses, Jiyeon stood stationed behind the high table while the king received his guests with the measured solemnity required of such occasions. She was close enough to see everything. Far enough to pretend she was only there as part of the room.

San sat at the king’s right.

Lady Lim Yoora sat beside him.

The sight of it made Jiyeon’s chest tighten in an unpleasant, prickling way she had no name for and did not want to examine too closely.

Yoora looked as composed as ever. Elegant. Calm. Perfectly at home among polished silver and candlelight. She spoke when spoken to, listened with care, and carried herself in a way that made the court seem to relax around her without noticing it was happening.

San answered her politely.

Always politely lately.

The smile he gave her was the same smile he had given Jiyeon that morning.

Not warm.

Not fake.

Just controlled.

Jiyeon should have been relieved.

This was what she had said she wanted.

This was what she had told the knights, what she had told herself. Yoora was good for him. Yoora was kind. Yoora was noble and graceful and would make a proper Crown Princess and, eventually, queen. Yoora could weather the court, smooth over the curse, stand beside him in public without shame.

Jiyeon had no right to want anything else.

None at all.

So when Yoora reached over with a small, almost absent-minded gesture and adjusted San’s collar before withdrawing her hand again, Jiyeon felt something ugly and immediate twist inside her chest.

Not anger.

Not exactly.

Not at Yoora.

Yoora had done nothing wrong.

That was the worst part.

The gesture had been so innocent it was impossible to resent. She had merely smoothed the line of his collar where it had folded awkwardly beneath the edge of his jacket. A little act of care. Entirely proper. Entirely kind.

Jiyeon felt it like a blow.

Because she wanted to be the one standing close enough to do that.

Because she wanted it and had no business wanting it.

Because, with a clarity that made her stomach turn, she realized that whatever she had tried to tell herself about duty and sense and noble matches, her heart had begun to behave like something treacherous.

At nearly the same moment, San glanced up.

Their eyes met across the table.

For one brief, terrible second the room fell away.

Jiyeon saw the faint shadow under his eyes. The line of his mouth. The careful distance he had put between himself and everything else that mattered. San saw her standing behind the king’s chair, rigid and watchful and very much too still.

And in that instant, all the longing, all the grief, all the things neither of them had dared say made the space between them feel like a wound.

Then Jiyeon looked away first.

She could not bear it.

San saw the movement.

Saw her turning aside.

And because he was already fraying under the pressure of what he believed she wanted, he misread it exactly the way fear taught him to.

See?

She wants this.

She wants me with Yoora.

She doesn't want me.

Jiyeon, on the other side of the hall, felt her own heart sink with a different but equally poisonous interpretation.

See?

He’s starting to like her.

Yoora was perfect for him.

He doesn't want me.

By the time the plates had been cleared and the servants had begun to drift back toward the kitchens, the king rose.

The room quieted at once. King Segye looked older than ever beneath the candlelight, his sorrow worn thin by duty and grief both. He rested one hand on the back of his chair and regarded the court with the air of a man who had decided to do something unpleasant simply because he could no longer delay it.

“There will be a wedding,” he said.

The room reacted in a subtle wave. Heads turned. A few ministers straightened. One noblewoman lowered her fan as though she had been waiting for this exact sentence and did not quite know whether to be pleased or horrified.

A lord near the far end of the table ventured carefully, “Your Majesty?”

The king did not look at him. “The marriage arrangements are already under discussion.”

A murmur spread through the hall now, low and uncertain.

San’s hand tightened at his side.

Jiyeon felt the floor itself seem to shift.

Another voice, this one from an older minister, asked tentatively, “Whose marriage, Your Majesty?”

The king’s gaze moved, briefly, to Lady Lim Yoora. Then to San. Then away again as though the matter were already settled and therefore no longer his problem to dwell upon.

“As discussed with Lord Lim,” he said, “my son, Crown Prince San, and Lady Lim Yoora are officially betrothed.”

To be continued

☾ zayne’s aurora

[zaynestheone]

NOT DESPITE THE BEAST • ATEEZ CHOI SAN

II. AFTER THE FALL

prince!san × knight!oc

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

A princess is dead.

A prince inherits a crown he never wanted.

A knight fails her duty.

And somewhere in the shadows, a curse begins to tighten its grip.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

warnings: grief, major character death, suicide aftermath, self-blame, discussions of execution, violence, body horror, painful transformations, emotional distress.

Rain fell with such patience that it felt cruel.

It did not crash down from the heavens in a storm, did not tear at the flags or lash the trees into fury. It simply came, thin and endless, the kind of rain that soaked into cloth and skin and bone until even grief seemed dampened by it. The palace courtyards had been dressed in mourning black, but the rain made everything the same color anyway. Stone, silk, flowers, armor, hair, tears. All of it blurred into one great gray wound.

Princess Haneul’s coffin stood beneath a canopy of dark cloth, surrounded by white lilies that the rain had already begun to bruise at the edges. The flowers were too bright for the scene, almost indecent in their innocence. Jiyeon hated them for that. Hated the way they looked alive beside the dead.

She stood at the front of the gathered court in full ceremonial armor, hands folded behind her back, shoulders perfectly straight, face set in the stillness expected of a knight who had failed and lived. Around her, people wept with their whole bodies.

The palace was full of broken sounds.

A lady-in-waiting had her mouth pressed into her sleeve and was still sobbing through it. One of the younger attendants had already been led away because she kept shaking so badly she could not stand. A minister, usually severe and red-faced, had the look of a man trying not to collapse in public. The queen dowager’s eyes were swollen and bloodshot, her mouth taut with the effort of not crying louder than her dignity allowed. Even the temple priests, who were supposed to sound serene as they spoke over the dead, had voices gone rough at the edges.

But it was the king who looked the most ruined.

King Segye stood with both hands braced on the side of the gravestone like it was the only thing preventing him from falling into it himself. He had not changed clothes from the night before. Or perhaps he had and the grief had simply made a stranger of him. His face had gone gray with exhaustion, his mouth thin and trembling, the lines around his eyes deeper than they had any right to be. He looked like a man who had lost his daughter and found, in the same breath, that he no longer remembered how to be a king.

And San—

Jiyeon could not bear to look at him for long.

He stood one step behind his father, dressed in black from throat to heel. No gold. No color. No trace of the bright, careless prince he had been only days ago. His hair was tied back because someone had insisted on it. His hands hung at his sides, clenched so tightly the knuckles had gone pale. He had not slept. That much was obvious. His eyes were hollowed out, ringed with shadows so deep they seemed carved there. His beautiful mouth, so often curved in mischief or laughter, had forgotten every shape except pain.

He had not spoken in hours.

Not since the room. Not since they had found her. Not since he had seen his sister.

Jiyeon remembered fragments of that night with a violence that made her stomach turn.

The click of the door in her hand. The cake on the floor. The way the world had become instantaneously and impossibly wrong. The sound she had made when she understood.

Then the hallway filling with footsteps. Guards. Servants. Lanterns flung open too quickly, their light harsh and useless. Someone asking what had happened. Someone else already crying. The physician arriving in a useless rush, breathless with the knowledge that he had no work to do. The king appearing with the first truly frightened expression Jiyeon had ever seen on his face. The queen dowager clutching at her sleeve. Haneul’s name spoken once, twice, a dozen times in tones that kept changing from disbelief to dread to desperate hope to the bleak acceptance of something no one wanted to say aloud.

San forcing his way through the crowd.

San going white.

San making a sound so broken and animal it had frozen the entire room around him.

And Jiyeon—Jiyeon standing in the doorway as if someone had struck her dumb.

She had barely remembered answering questions after that. Had barely remembered the servants pulling the room apart searching for some explanation that would save them all from the truth.

Had barely remembered the way her own hands shook when they took the body down. Had barely remembered the prayers spoken over a girl who should have been laughing in the sunlight, should have been ordering tea, should have been scolding San for some stupidity or other, should have been alive.

Alive.

Alive.

Alive.

The word had become a punishment in her mind. Because every time she repeated it, another memory of Haneul answered.

Haneul in the rose gardens, turning to smile at her as though the whole world could be made kind with enough will.

Haneul stealing a pastry from San’s hand and laughing when he protested.

Haneul leaning close in her chamber and whispering, “You don’t have to be so hard on yourself all the time, Jiyeon.”

Haneul tying a ribbon around Jiyeon’s wrist during a spring festival because she said the color complimented her eyes.

Haneul asking her if she ever thought about disappearing for a while, and Jiyeon, stupidly, innocently, answering no.

Jiyeon had thought the question strange then. She thought it murderous now.

Because perhaps Haneul had not meant vanish. Perhaps she had meant what it felt like to be crushed slowly under a life no one had built to hold her. Perhaps she had been asking for help in the only way she knew how.

And Jiyeon, who was supposed to know her princess as well as she knew the edge of her own blade, had missed it.

The thought went through her like ice.

It had been her duty to notice. Her duty to protect. Her duty to stand watch. Her duty to know when the person she was sworn to guard had begun to disappear right in front of her.

She had seen the bruises and thought suspicion. She had seen the sorrow and thought exhaustion. She had seen the way Haneul smiled too brightly and thought it was simply grace.

She had not understood. She had not asked enough. She had not done enough.

The guilt had been waiting under her ribs ever since, growing quiet and heavy and absolute.

The priest’s voice rose, chanting over the coffin. Words about passage. About mercy. About the gods receiving the departed. About peace beyond the veil.

Peace.

Jiyeon hated the word so fiercely it nearly made her dizzy.

There was no peace in Haneul’s room. No peace in the memory of the cake shattered on the floor. No peace in the sound San made when he saw her. No peace in the corridor outside the bedroom where Jiyeon had stood frozen and unable to stop the world from ending.

If the gods wanted peace for Haneul now, they were too late.

The prayers continued. The court answered when instructed.

Jiyeon did not speak. She could not. If she opened her mouth, she was afraid what would come out. Not words. Never words. Something worse. Something that would expose the raw, ugly shape of her blame to everyone standing around her.

The priest lifted the bowl of sanctified ash. The rain slid down the canopy edge in silver threads.

At last the king took the first shovel of earth. His hands were shaking. He lowered the soil into the grave with a sound like something cracking.

The next person was expected to step forward. Instead, Jiyeon moved.

The decision came from somewhere deeper than thought. Her body simply obeyed before her mind had caught up. She walked to the waiting shovel, took it from the attendant, and stepped to the edge of the grave.

For one second, the court was perfectly silent. Then she drove the blade into the wet earth. The sound that followed was small. Too small for what it meant.

The first clump of soil struck the coffin lid with a soft, final thud. Jiyeon’s entire body went cold.

Again.

She lifted another shovelful and let it fall.

Again.

And again.

With every stroke, something inside her split a little wider. The grave deepened. The white flowers disappeared beneath the darkening soil. The coffin vanished inch by inch, and with it the last visible proof that Haneul had ever existed in a way Jiyeon could touch. The earth was wet and heavy and stubborn under her hands, and she hated it for doing exactly what it was meant to do.

Hide her. Seal her. Make this real.

Her thoughts were no longer orderly by then. They came in shards.

I should have noticed. I should have known. I should have told someone. I should have gone with her. I should have been enough.

I should have—

The shovel struck the ground again. Jiyeon’s jaw clenched so hard it hurt.

Haneul’s laughter flickered through her head, bright and unbearable.

Not the loud laughter. Not the kind she shared with San when they were both being insufferable. The softer laughter. The private kind. The kind that had once sounded only for Jiyeon, in chambers with drawn curtains and in gardens where no one else could hear. The kind that made her feel, in some small impossible way, that she had been let into something sacred.

That laughter was gone now. It existed only as memory, and memory had become a knife.

The priests kept chanting. The king kept standing. The court kept crying.

Jiyeon kept shoveling dirt over a girl who should never have been reduced to a grave in the first place.

When the attendants tried to take the shovel from her, she let them. Her hands were trembling by then.

The burial ritual drew to a close.

The crowd began to pull away in uneasy waves, servants leading nobles back toward the palace steps, their mourning garments dripping rainwater onto the stones. A few people lingered to bow one last time. The queen dowager was helped inside. The king remained longer than anyone expected, staring at the grave as if his gaze alone might keep it from closing. Then, slowly, as though the act required all the strength left in him, he allowed himself to be led away too.

One by one, the others retreated.

Until only two figures were left in the rain.

San.

Jiyeon.

The world had emptied itself around them. No attendants. No priests. No voices. Only the sound of rain falling on fresh earth and the distant hush of the palace trying to pretend it had not lost a daughter.

Jiyeon stood still over the grave. San stood behind her, motionless enough to be mistaken for a statue if not for the way his hands shook at his sides.

Neither of them spoke. There was nothing to say that would not shatter.

For a long moment Jiyeon only stared at the mound of earth. She could not look away. Looking away felt like betrayal. Looking away would mean accepting that this was where Haneul ended. Here. In the rain. In the mud. Under a name carved in stone before the world had finished hurting enough.

And then, suddenly, the silence in her cracked. All at once.

Jiyeon made a sound that was part breath and part breaking glass and dropped to her knees on the grave as though her body had simply run out of the strength to keep pretending. Her fingers plunged into the wet soil. She clutched at it with both hands, fists closing around mud and rain and nothing at all, as if by sheer force of wanting she could drag Haneul back up through the earth.

“Haneul—”

The name tore out of her.

Then again, louder.

“Haneul!”

Her voice shattered on the second cry. She bent forward so violently her forehead struck the ground. Her shoulders began to convulse. She tried to breathe and could not. She tried to hold herself together and failed instantly, spectacularly, with the kind of ruin only love can make. Tears flooded her face before she even realized she was crying. Then came the screaming. Raw, ragged, unrestrained. The kind of sound that does not belong to language and does not care who hears it. The kind that comes from somewhere deep enough in the chest to leave bruises behind.

“No, no, no—”

Her hands clawed at the earth.

“I’m sorry—”

Again, sharper this time, as if she could cut her own guilt out of her throat by saying it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

She did not know whether she was apologizing to Haneul or to the gods or to the grave or to the part of herself that had believed love and duty were enough to save someone. It did not matter. Nothing mattered. Not the rain. Not the mud soaking through her sleeves. Not the way her own voice kept breaking on Haneul’s name until it sounded less like speech and more like a wound being opened over and over again.

All around them, the heavens stayed silent.

Jiyeon cried like she had not been allowed to cry in years.

Full, shaking sobs that made her body fold in on itself. Grief so violent it seemed to tear at her lungs. She screamed until her throat went hot and raw. She cried until the world blurred entirely and Haneul’s grave became only a dark shape in the rain, and that dark shape was still too much because it was where her princess had been placed.

San lowered himself to the ground beside her.

His face—his beautiful, bright, usually laughing face—was already wet with tears by the time he knelt. There was no dignity left in him either. No princely composure. No witty line waiting behind his tongue. Only grief. Pure and brutal and human.

He looked at the grave, and his mouth trembled. The tears came harder then. Silent at first. Then not. Jiyeon caught the sound of him trying, and failing, to breathe through it.

He had always been so vivid. So alive. The kind of person who filled a room without trying. The kind of person who made even being teased feel like a kind of brightness. Now that same face was twisted into something almost unrecognizable with sorrow. His dimple, which had once appeared only when he smiled, was hidden now beneath the shape of grief pulling at his mouth. His eyes were red. His lashes clumped wetly against his cheeks. He looked younger than she had ever seen him, and older too, as though love and loss had both happened to him too quickly.

He reached for her. The motion was hesitant. Reverent, almost. Jiyeon collapsed into him with no resistance left at all. The moment his arms closed around her, the last of her composure shattered entirely.

She gripped the front of his mourning robe with both hands, muddy fingers bunching the fabric, and cried into his shoulder with such force it seemed impossible she could survive it. San held her as though he had known all along she would fall apart and had been waiting for the exact second to catch her. His own tears fell into her hair. She felt his breathing stutter. Felt his hand move unsteadily over her back in a gesture so tender it made the pain worse.

They clung to each other on Haneul’s grave while rain soaked through both their black clothes and the earth beneath them turned to sludge. Jiyeon sobbed until she could no longer tell whether she was crying or simply gasping for air. San made a sound beside her that was so broken it almost made her cry harder. He buried his face in her hair for one brief second and then pulled back just enough to keep holding her, his own grief still leaking silently through every line of him.

There was no comfort in it. Only shared devastation.

Jiyeon pressed her face against his shoulder and heard herself say, over and over, as though the words might become true if repeated enough, “I should have known. I should have known. I should have known.”

San’s grip tightened at that. He did not answer. Perhaps he could not. Perhaps he understood too well what it meant to stand beside a grave and discover that love could not undo failure.

The rain kept falling. The kingdom behind them kept breathing.

And on the fresh earth of Princess Haneul’s grave, two people who had loved her in different ways broke apart together, helpless before the fact that she was gone and nothing in the world had been merciful enough to stop it.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

By the time the rain had thinned into a gray mist and the funeral ground had been left behind, Jiyeon no longer felt like she was walking so much as being carried forward by the force of habit.

Her knees were heavy. Her throat was raw. Her hands still smelled of wet soil and iron and the terrible sweetness of crushed flowers. The sound of her own crying had not fully left her yet; it seemed to follow her in the spaces between breaths, lodged somewhere deep in her chest like a splinter she could not pull free.

She did not remember crossing half the palace.

Only the way the corridors seemed too bright after the grave. Only the way servants bowed their heads and stepped aside without meeting her eyes. Only the way the black mourning cloth hanging from the walls looked like the palace itself had gone into hiding.

The hall where the knights gathered was colder than the rest of the building. It always had been.

A place built for discipline, for orders barked across stone floors, for armor laid out with care, for swords checked and rechecked and checked again. On any other day it smelled of oil, leather, polished steel, and sweat. Today the air held all of that beneath something sharper—incense from the funeral still clinging to clothing, rain soaked into hems, grief carried in on boots.

Jiyeon entered without looking at anyone. A few knights straightened when they saw her. A few looked away. One lowered his eyes immediately, as though the sight of her had become an offense in itself.

Captain Han stood at the far end of the hall with his arms folded so tightly across his chest that the knuckles of one hand had gone white. He did not speak at first. He only looked at her. The silence in the room changed shape under it.

Jiyeon stopped two paces inside the doorway and bowed, though the motion felt distant, almost abstract, as if it belonged to someone else’s body. “Captain.”

That was all it took. His face twisted with the strain of what he had clearly been holding in since the procession. “Do you have any idea,” he said, voice low and dangerous, “what you have done?”

The room went still. Jiyeon did not blink. “Yes.”

One of the younger knights shifted uncomfortably behind him. Someone else inhaled and did not manage to hide it.

Captain Han’s jaw flexed. “Then say it.”

Jiyeon’s spine remained rigid. Her face did not move. “I failed my duty.” The words were flat. Not dramatic. Not defensive. Only true.

That seemed to anger him even more. “Failed?” he repeated. “You were assigned to the princess’s side from the day you took your post. You were the one standing outside her door. You were the one who knew her routines, her movements, her moods. You were—”

“I know what I was.” The interruption came out sharper than she intended. She did not apologize.

Captain Han’s eyes narrowed. “Then you also know what this means.”

“Yes.”

He stepped forward, boots striking the floor with hard, measured sounds. “A knight who fails to protect her charge does not get to decide her punishment. That is not your privilege.”

Jiyeon bowed her head a fraction. “Then punish me.”

A few of the knights looked at one another.

Captain Han’s expression did not soften. “You say that as though you have any say in the matter.”

“I don’t.”

“Good. Because you don’t.”

Jiyeon’s throat tightened, though she kept her voice steady. “I am aware.”

“You think shame is enough?” he snapped. “You think standing there looking like a ghost means anything has been paid? You think because you are grieving you are beyond consequence?”

“No,” she said.

“Then what exactly are you doing?”

Her answer came without hesitation, because she had already repeated it to herself enough times for it to become something near prayer. “Waiting to be told I deserve death.”

The room changed. A few of the knights inhaled sharply. One looked down so quickly it was almost a flinch.

Captain Han stared at her for a long second, anger still burning, but something in it had shifted. Not pity. He would not have been so generous. Something harder. Something like grim recognition. “That may very well be true,” he said at last. “But it is not mine to grant.”

Jiyeon said nothing.

“The king will decide what happens to you,” he went on. “Exile, dismissal, imprisonment, execution—whatever form his grief takes when he remembers you are still breathing.”

She inclined her head once. “I understand.”

“No,” he said sharply. “You do not understand. If the king chooses mercy, it will not be because you have earned it.”

Her fingers curled at her sides. “I know that too.”

For a moment Captain Han looked as though he wanted to say more. Perhaps shout more. Perhaps call her stubborn or foolish or a disgrace to the order she had spent her life serving. But grief had emptied too many things already. Instead he exhaled slowly through his nose, pinched the bridge of it, and turned away with visible restraint.

Jiyeon stood where she was.

He addressed the room instead of her when he spoke again. “All of you will remain on duty until further notice. No one leaves the inner palace without approval. The guard rotation continues as scheduled. The palace may be in mourning, but it is still a palace. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Captain,” came the chorus, subdued and uneasy.

He gave a curt nod, then started to dismiss them—

A servant appeared at the hall entrance, breathless and pale “Captain Han,” she said, bowing quickly, “the king requests your presence. Immediately. And the senior knights as well.”

The room sharpened. Captain Han turned back at once. “For what reason?”

The servant swallowed. “He said… he said witnesses are needed in the throne room.”

No one spoke after that. There was a kind of silence that falls only when everyone in the room understands before the words have finished arriving.

Captain Han’s eyes swept once over the gathered knights. “Those assigned to the inner court—move.”

His gaze paused on Jiyeon.

“Come.”

Jiyeon did not answer. She simply followed.

The throne room had always seemed too large for mourning.

Today it seemed absurdly so.

The black banners hanging from the rafters swallowed the upper reaches of the chamber in shadow, while the windows along the far wall threw in the flat, merciless light of a rain-washed morning. The polished floor reflected everything faintly, as though the room itself were trying to remember the shape of those who stood within it.

The court had already gathered. Ministers in black. Royal advisers. A few high-ranking ladies. Officials from the temple. Enough people to make the silence feel ceremonial and enough grief-stricken faces to make it feel like an invasion.

Jiyeon took her place with the other knights along the side wall. She stood there as she always did—straight-backed, still, hands at her sides—but she could feel the room moving around her in slow, ominous currents.

At the front, the king sat upon the throne.

Or rather, he occupied it.

There was a difference now.

King Segye looked like a man carved out of exhaustion and will alone. His robe was formal, his crown in place, but neither concealed the ruin underneath. The skin beneath his eyes had gone hollow. His face had not yet recovered from the funeral. Or perhaps it never would. He looked like he had aged years in the span of one day.

San stood to the king’s right.

Jiyeon had expected him to be there, and still the sight of him struck her hard enough to make her chest tighten.

He was in court dress now rather than mourning black alone, though the garment still held the weight of grief in every fold. No bright colors. No ornament. His hair was tied back, though not as tightly as the court would usually have required, as if someone had started to demand proper appearance and then given up halfway through the effort. He looked still, but not calm. There was a tension in him that had nowhere to go.

The cheerful prince from the courtyard, from the festival, from all the weeks before—gone. What stood in his place looked hollowed out by loss.

Jiyeon could not tell whether he had looked this way all morning or whether it had only begun when he took his place beside his father.

The king spoke. His voice, when it came, was hoarse with mourning and made even rougher by the strain of speaking publicly at all.

“Before my daughter’s passing,” he said, each word measured as though it cost him, “the matter of succession was secure. There was an heir. There was a spare. There was no cause for the court to concern itself with the line of inheritance.”

A pause. The room held its breath.

Jiyeon’s eyes flicked, almost unwillingly, to San. His expression did not change.

The king continued, gaze fixed somewhere beyond the gathered court as though looking directly at the reality he was being forced to shape. “That is no longer the case.”

No one moved. The silence became so complete that even the rain at the windows seemed to fade.

“The Crown Princess is dead,” the king said, and his voice broke just enough to make several people lower their heads. He drew in a controlled breath and kept going. “The kingdom does not have the luxury of uncertainty. The throne must remain stable. The line must continue. The people must know who stands after me.”

Jiyeon’s fingers twitched once at her side.

The king turned his head slightly.

“From this day forward,” he said, “my son, Grand Prince San, will assume the title of Crown Prince of the realm.”

The murmuring began at once, low and frightened and quickly silenced by a raised hand from the king. “I have delayed this discussion for as long as I could,” he said. “I will not delay it further.”

He turned at last, not to the council, but to San. The room seemed to hold its breath with him. “Grand Prince San,” the king said, and his voice changed on the title. Not warmer. Not gentler. More final. “Step forward.”

San obeyed. The movement was small and horrible in its restraint. He walked to the center below the dais and knelt with a precision that looked almost violent in how carefully it was done. Jiyeon saw the strain in his shoulders. Saw the set of his jaw. Saw the way he kept his eyes lowered as if looking up might make the words unbearable faster than they already were.

King Segye’s hands tightened on the armrests of the throne. “From this day forward,” he said, the words falling over the room like judgment, “there shall be no uncertainty in the matter of my succession. The heir to the throne is no longer the crown princess.”

A shiver moved through the court. Jiyeon knew, before he said it, what was coming. And still the words hit her like a blow.

“Grand Prince San,” the king said, “you are hereby named Crown Prince of this realm.”

Silence. For one impossible heartbeat, the room did not react.

Then The court reacted in one sharp, collective breath. A few ministers bowed at once. One of the royal scribes lowered his head so quickly his brush nearly slipped from his hand. Murmurs did not rise—not here, not yet—but the air changed all the same. The change of title had already altered the room’s shape.

San remained kneeling.

Jiyeon could not see his face. That, somehow, made it worse.

King Segye’s voice returned, quieter but no less absolute. “The realm will treat him as such from this hour onward.”

The announcement settled in the throne room like ash.

Crown Prince.

Not just heir in theory. Heir in fact.

The weight of future kingship had been dropped onto San’s shoulders with no gentleness whatsoever, and the room knew it. Jiyeon felt it in the stiffness of her own spine.

San remained motionless, but she could see the strain in him now that the announcement had been made. Not surprise. He would not have had that luxury. Only something deeper and more reluctant, a kind of exhausted resignation wrapped around grief so fresh it had not yet learned how to harden.

The king went on, because kings did not get to stop simply because they were heartbroken.

“Preparation for the succession will begin at once. The court will adjust its duties accordingly. All matters pertaining to the throne, the future of the royal line, and the stability of the realm will now be addressed with the understanding that there is no longer a spare to absorb the burden.”

The phrase landed like a blade. No spare.

Jiyeon saw several of the ministers react to that even as they kept their faces carefully arranged. It was not only grief that had changed the room. It was politics.

It had already begun.

Already, in the same breath as Haneul’s burial, the court was turning toward heirs, lineage, marriage, heirs again, succession, heirs, children, duties, heirs. The language itself was a machine built to grind grief into policy.

Jiyeon felt nausea rise faintly in her throat. San had not so much as moved. But his hands—she noticed, because she could not seem to stop noticing him now—had curled once into fists before loosening again.

The king looked out at the gathered court with a face that had become older than his title. “You will all remember,” he said quietly, and the quiet made it worse, “that the kingdom does not pause simply because my family has been broken.”

Several people bowed their heads. One of the ministers looked as though he might weep again. Jiyeon did not blink.

It was impossible, standing there, not to think of Haneul. Of the funeral that had just ended. Of the coffin. Of the dirt. Of the way the king’s own voice had trembled when he lowered the first handful of earth into the grave. And now, not even hours later, the machinery of the court had already swung itself back into motion, converting a dead princess into a new heir and a fresh list of obligations.

The world never stopped. It only changed what it expected of the living.

The king’s hand tightened once on the armrest of the throne. “The Crown Prince will begin assuming additional responsibilities immediately.”

The word Crown Prince made San’s jaw clench almost imperceptibly. Jiyeon saw it. So did the king, perhaps. But he did not allow himself to soften. There was no room for that here. Not now. Not with the court watching. Not with the line of succession hanging over them like a blade of its own.

The announcement concluded with formal instructions, murmured acknowledgments, and the rustle of black sleeves as the court bowed.

But Jiyeon heard none of it properly. Not really. Her mind had begun circling one thought, over and over, with the terrible persistence of a wound that will not stop being touched.

Haneul was gone.

Haneul was gone, and the first thing the palace did was replace her with the shape of a future.

When the king dismissed the court, the room exhaled in careful fragments. People turned. Whispers began immediately, though subdued and respectably mournful in tone. The ministers drifted together in low conversation. The servants shifted and prepared to move. The knights remained where they were until ordered otherwise.

Jiyeon did not. She stayed very still, eyes fixed ahead, while the announcement settled over the room like dust.

Crown Prince.

San had become the heir.

And Haneul was truly, irrevocably, gone.

The throne room emptied the way a funeral chamber empties after the last prayer—slowly, reluctantly, with the lingering sense that the air itself did not know how to leave.

Black sleeves drifted past the doors. Ministers bowed and withdrew. The scribes gathered their papers with shaking hands. Even the servants seemed to move more quietly than usual, as though the room had absorbed enough grief to make everyone inside it cautious of their own breathing.

Jiyeon remained where she stood. Still. Straight-backed. Silent.

San had not looked at her again after the king’s announcement. Or if he had, she had not allowed herself to notice. Her focus had narrowed to a single point: the throne, the man seated above it, and the fact that Haneul’s death had not ended anything. It had only rearranged the shape of the damage.

When the last official had gone, when the heavy doors closed and the room sank into a dreadful kind of quiet, King Segye’s voice cut through it.

“Dame Choi Jiyeon,” he said.

Not softly. Not kindly. With the full weight of title and authority.

“Knight and member of the Royal Imperial Honor Guard.”

Jiyeon’s knees struck the floor at once.

The motion was automatic. Precise. Rote. She lowered herself before the throne as if she had been ordered there all her life, and perhaps she had. The only difference now was that this time she did not rise again. Her sword came free from its sheath in one smooth movement, the blade held out before her with both hands.

An offering. A surrender. A confession.

The steel caught the gray light from the windows and flashed once, cold and bright.

“Your Majesty,” she said.

Her voice did not tremble. That, too, was automatic. Before he could speak, she heard herself continue. “Execute me.”

A pause.

Jiyeon did not look up.

The silence that followed was so complete she could hear the faint rain still tapping at the glass.

“Your Majesty,” she said again, more urgently now, because the first request had not felt desperate enough. “I failed her. I failed my princess. I stood beside her and let it happen. I knew enough to suspect and not enough to act, and that is no different from choosing to do nothing. I am as good as the reason she is dead.”

The words came faster after that, rushing out like blood from a wound that had finally been cut open.

“Give me the highest punishment you can. Whatever the law allows. Whatever pain you think I deserve. I deserve all of it. More than all of it. I deserve to suffer for this until there is nothing left of me to suffer with. If there is any justice in this kingdom, then let me die for what I have done—or failed to do—and let it be the worst death imaginable.”

For the first time, the king sounded genuinely startled. “Choi Jiyeon.” It was the first time he had used her name without her title attached, and somehow that made it worse.

She did not lift her head. “Please,” she whispered.

And then, because she could not stop once the dam had broken, because grief had made her brutal with herself in ways she had not known how to be before, she added, “I should have stopped her. I should have seen it. I should have been enough.”

A long silence followed.

Then the king spoke, and when he did, his voice was tired in a way that had nothing to do with age and everything to do with the burden of surviving the impossible. “San.”

Jiyeon’s breath hitched.

The king did not raise his voice. He did not need to. “Leave us. Begin your duties.”

San, who had been standing near the foot of the dais like a shadow made flesh, did not move immediately.

Jiyeon could not see his face from where she knelt, but she heard the shift in his breathing.

“Father—”

“Now.”

Another beat of silence.

Then, reluctantly, the sound of his steps receding across the floor.

Jiyeon kept her eyes fixed on the stone beneath her knees.

Only once the room was quieter still did the king speak again. “I had intended to have you hanged.”

Jiyeon’s fingers tightened around her sword. For a moment she thought she had misheard him, but the king continued, measured and grim.

“I considered the law’s full severity. The sort of sentence that would make an example of your failure. The sort of death that would satisfy the court and leave no room for argument.”

Jiyeon closed her eyes. There it was. The punishment she had asked for. The one she had been preparing herself to receive. She nodded once. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

“If that is what you would call mercy, then you are more broken than I realized.”

“I am not asking for mercy.”

“No,” he said quietly. “You are not.”

At last, Jiyeon forced herself to look up.

King Segye sat in the throne with both hands resting on the armrests, his face carved into exhaustion and something darker. Not hatred. Not quite. Something like grief sharpened until it could cut. He looked back at her with an expression so heavy she almost wished he had chosen anger instead. He exhaled through his nose and shook his head once, the smallest possible motion. “I notice things, Dame Choi.”

Jiyeon said nothing.

“I am not blind.” The words landed without force and yet with unbearable weight. His gaze moved briefly toward the closed doors, toward the hall where San had gone. “My son is fond of you.”

Jiyeon went still.

The king kept speaking. “As Haneul was fond of you.”

Her throat tightened painfully.

“San sees you as a dear friend,” the king said, “and I have already buried one child. I will not watch my only son lose another person he cares for if I can prevent it.”

Jiyeon’s lips parted, but no sound came.

The king’s expression did not soften. If anything, it became harder. “You may believe yourself undeserving of life. That is your affair. You may believe you deserve the deepest pit in the kingdom for this failure. Again, that is your affair.” He leaned forward slightly, and the motion made him look suddenly more like a father than a monarch. “But you will not drag my son into another grief if I have anything to say about it.”

Jiyeon’s eyes burned. Not with tears. Not yet. With the effort of holding herself still.

The king’s voice turned quieter. “And do not think to make a martyr of yourself by choosing death on your own terms. I will not have it. You will live with what has happened. You will carry it. Every day. Every hour. Every breath.”

Jiyeon’s grip on the sword trembled once.

“You will live,” he repeated, and there was no mercy in the command, only judgment and the shape of something that almost resembled care when viewed from far away. “You will remain in this palace. You will continue your duties until I decide otherwise. And you will not attempt to flee your guilt by ending yourself.”

The room seemed to shrink around the words.

Jiyeon swallowed hard. Her voice, when it came, was barely audible. “Then you should kill me.”

The king looked at her for a long moment.

“I know,” he said at last, and the simplicity of it was worse than any shout. “You think that would be easier. You are wrong.”

Jiyeon’s hands were numb around the sword hilt.

He continued, and now his voice carried a terrible, deliberate finality. “You will live with the knowledge that the princess trusted you. That my son begged me not to destroy you. That Haneul—” His mouth tightened briefly around her name. “—Haneul loved you deeply enough to make your survival matter to the people left behind.”

The king’s gaze did not waver. “If you are to suffer, Dame Choi, then you will suffer for a reason. You will live with this grief, this shame, and this failure until it becomes part of the bones of you. That is your punishment.”

Jiyeon stared at him. Everything in her felt raw. Exposed. Too full. Too empty.

The sword in her hands suddenly seemed heavier than armor. She had expected death. Expected pain. Expected a clean and final judgment. What she received instead was worse in a way she had never imagined: survival.

A life that would not let her escape what she had lost.

A life that would force her to remember Haneul in every corridor, every room, every breath.

She bowed her head so low her forehead nearly touched the blade. “As you command, Your Majesty.”

When she looked up again, the king had already turned his gaze away from her, as though the conversation itself had become too much to bear. In that brief motion, Jiyeon saw the full shape of his own grief—how much he was holding in place simply because the throne demanded it. How much he had already buried. How much he could not afford to lose.

The punishment was not mercy.

It was a sentence.

One he had made deliberately with his remaining family in mind.

And as Jiyeon remained kneeling before him, sword still offered in silent surrender, she understood with sickening clarity that she had not been released from guilt.

She had only been ordered to carry it.

✧˖ °. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁‧₊˚ ☾. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁˖°✧

The first sign that something was wrong was not the shouting.

It was the running.

Jiyeon had been on the west corridor patrol when the palace shifted around her all at once, the air breaking with hurried footsteps and the sharp, frightened cadence of servants moving too quickly to be disciplined. A pair of physicians passed her in such haste that the hem of one man’s sleeve brushed her shoulder. A maid nearly dropped the tray she was carrying. Somewhere ahead, a door slammed open and then another voice rose—too high, too strained to be ordinary alarm.

Jiyeon stopped.

Her fingers tightened once around the strap of her sword belt.

Then she saw it: the small river of people moving toward the royal floor, all of them with the same stricken look, all of them refusing to meet one another’s eyes as if doing so might make the matter more real.

One of the servants caught sight of her and nearly stumbled in relief.

“Dame Choi—”

“What happened?” The question came out already sharpened, already wrong-footed by instinct.

The servant swallowed so hard Jiyeon could see his throat move. “The Crown Prince,” he said. “Something has happened to His Highness.”

The words did not make sense. Not at first.

Jiyeon stared at him for a beat too long, as though he might explain himself more clearly if she gave him enough silence. “What kind of something?”

The servant’s face went pale with the effort of saying it. “We do not know. He was in his chambers and then—he cried out. The physicians were called, but—”

He broke off when another cry rang out from farther up the hall.

Not a scream. Not exactly. A sound of pain so raw it made every person nearby freeze at once.

Jiyeon was moving before the servant finished his sentence. Her boots struck the marble hard enough to echo. The corridor seemed longer than it had any right to be, the lamps along the walls suddenly too dim, the palace itself holding its breath around her. She passed two more servants hurrying in the opposite direction, saw fear in their faces before they had the chance to hide it, and felt a cold, nearly unreasonable dread begin to crawl up the back of her neck.

By the time she reached San's royal floor, the air had turned heavy with bodies.

A crowd had already gathered outside San’s chambers—physicians, attendants, a few guards held back by the press of frightened people, and enough servants with wide, white faces to make the hallway feel smaller than it was. No one seemed to know what to do. No one seemed willing to be the first to do the wrong thing. The door to the Crown Prince’s chamber stood half open, and from beyond it came another sound, lower this time, strangled and furious and full of agony.

Jiyeon pushed through the edge of the crowd. Someone tried to stop her. She ignored them.

San was on the floor.

For one terrible second, Jiyeon’s mind refused to name him.

He was half folded against the bedframe, one hand clawing at the carpet as though he could anchor himself to the world through sheer force. The other arm was drawn up tight to his chest, his body bent in a way no body should be. Sweat soaked through his hair. His face was twisted with pain so severe it made him look almost unrecognizable. His usually bright eyes were blown wide, unfocused and feral with the effort of enduring something that did not belong in flesh.

Then his shoulders jerked. A sound tore out of him—raw, involuntary, almost animal.

Jiyeon stopped breathing.

His skin—

It was changing.

Not in one sweep. Not like a storybook curse, not in a way anyone could later describe cleanly. It happened in broken waves, in horrifying pieces. A dark shimmer moved under the skin along his neck and jaw, as though scales were trying to break through from beneath. The lines of his face sharpened and then tightened again. His pupils had gone strange, narrowing under a wash of gold that made the whites of his eyes look too bright, too exposed. A faint, terrible pattern ran over the side of his throat like something half-remembered by the body and forced back to the surface against its will.

Humanoid, yes. But only just.

The shape of him was still there, still unmistakably San in the set of his shoulders and the angle of his mouth even now, but layered over it was something else—something vast and ancient and unnatural, something that made the room feel wrong simply by existing in it.

One of the physicians had backed all the way into the wall.

Another was muttering prayers under his breath so quickly they had stopped sounding like language.

A maid stood frozen near the doorway, both hands pressed to her mouth to keep from screaming.

And at the center of it all, San gasped and arched violently as another wave of pain seized him.

The bed behind him had been shoved partly aside in the struggle. The curtains were torn. A glass cup lay shattered on the floor, water spreading into the rugs. One of the chamber screens had been knocked over completely. It looked less like a royal room than the aftermath of a fight with something that refused to be fought.

Jiyeon took one step forward.

San’s head snapped in her direction.

For the briefest moment, through the haze of pain and whatever was overtaking him, his expression changed. The look that crossed his face was worse than fear. It was shame so immediate and so naked it made her chest seize.

“No—” he rasped, voice fractured and rough, barely human around the edges. “Get out.” He was looking at her. Not really. Not through the transformation. Still, the instinct was there. The same one that had made him hide his grief the day Haneul died. The same one that had always come before pride in him. The same one that now, even in this state, wanted to push her away before she could witness him at his most ruinous.

Jiyeon’s breath caught painfully.

Another tremor ripped through him. The dark markings at his throat deepened. A line of gold flashed in his eyes. He made a sound through clenched teeth that turned into something close to a snarl, though the room was so full of terror that no one could have blamed him for it.

Someone whimpered. One of the attendants backed out of the chamber entirely. “Do not touch him!” a physician shouted to no one in particular, though no one had tried. Jiyeon stood rigid in the doorway, every instinct she possessed screaming to move, to help, to do something, and at the same time horrified at the fact that she did not know what that something was.

Then the crowd outside the room shifted violently. The king had arrived. King Segye entered with two guards at his heels and a face already gone from worried to white. He stopped dead in the threshold the moment he saw his son on the floor. For a fraction of a second the crown on his head looked absurd, too heavy and too formal for a father watching his child suffer.

Then his knees nearly gave way. One of the guards caught him by the elbow. “San,” he said, and the name broke in the middle. San’s body jerked again. The king made a small, strangled sound and took one stumbling step forward before forcing himself to stop. Not because he wished to. Because he could see, in the frozen terror around him, that if he lost control now the entire room would collapse with him. “What happened?” he demanded, voice raw.

No one answered immediately.

The chief servant—face gray, hands trembling at his sides—bowed so quickly it was more like a flinch. “Your Majesty, we do not know. He was speaking to one of the aides, and then he cried out. It began with pain in his chest, then his throat, and then—”

Then he looked at San, unable to continue. The king’s jaw tightened. “What,” he said again, more dangerous now, “happened to my son?”

This time the head servant answered in a rush, as though saying it quickly might spare him responsibility for it. “There are rumors, Your Majesty. I heard from the lower corridor that Son Beomseok’s family is rumored to have witches among their line. If that is true—then perhaps this is a curse. Perhaps it was placed when he died.”

The room went still in a different way. Not from fear now. From realization. From the weight of a word spoken aloud that none of them had wanted to name. Curse. The king’s eyes sharpened with instant, murderous clarity.

Then he turned. And because grief and urgency had made every other thought secondary, his gaze landed on the nearest knight in the room. Jiyeon. She had barely enough time to straighten before he was speaking. “Dame Choi Jiyeon.”

Her spine locked immediately. She dropped to one knee before he finished the title, though he had not yet given the command. The motion was automatic. A reflex written into her bones by years of training and service. Her hand moved toward the sword at her hip, but only to steady herself.

The king did not care for ceremony now. “The moment you hear me,” he said, “you will go. You will find the source of this curse. You will find the cure. You will return to me with a solution, immediately, and you will tell no one outside this chamber more than is necessary to keep this palace from panic. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Her voice sounded distant even to herself.

San made another broken noise behind the king, and Jiyeon’s head lifted before she meant it to. The sight was almost unbearable. He was trying to force himself upright, one hand braced against the floor, the other trembling violently against his own chest. The dark sheen along his skin had spread another inch. His expression had gone from pain to fury to something frighteningly blank, as if his mind were trying to escape the body before it could be trapped any further.

The king followed her gaze and seemed to understand, at once, the scale of what he was asking. “No one leaves this room speaking of what they have seen,” he said, his voice hardening into command. “No one. The Crown Prince will remain here until further notice. All servants are dismissed. The physicians will stay until I give them leave. If the news spreads through the palace before we know what this is, we will have chaos before nightfall.”

No one argued. No one dared. The attendants bowed and retreated in a blur of frightened movement. The physicians followed reluctantly, glancing back once at the prince they could not help. Guards moved to close the doors. The chamber emptied by degrees, as though the room itself were exhaling the panic out of its walls.Jiyeon remained kneeling until the king’s command shifted again.

“Choi Jiyeon.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

His voice lowered, though the force behind it did not. “Bring me an answer before this grows worse.”

She swallowed once. “I will.”

The king held her gaze for a long second, then nodded sharply.

Jiyeon rose.

Behind her, San’s breathing had gone ragged again. The last thing she saw before she turned away was the shape of him bent half over, trying and failing to hold himself together as something monstrous and painful and wholly unwanted crawled through his body .She did not allow herself to look twice. If she did, she might stay. If she stayed, she might not leave. And if she did not leave, then there would be no one to find the answer.

So Jiyeon turned from the chamber, tightened her sword at her side, and set out into the palace with the image of the Crown Prince writhing in his own room burning behind her eyes.

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Mirae was restless beneath her.

The mare’s ears kept flicking at every sound in the road, every branch whispering in the wind, every bird taking sudden flight from the hedgerows along the country path.

Jiyeon kept one gloved hand tight on the reins and the other close to her sword hilt, as if the simple posture of readiness might keep the world from unraveling any further.

The palace had fallen behind her hours ago. So had the Crown Prince writhing on the floor of his chamber. So had the king’s voice, clipped and grim with authority, and the dreadful hush that had followed once the servants were ordered away.

The road north of the outer district grew quieter the farther she rode, until the city’s sounds dissolved into wind, gravel, and the muted thud of hooves. She had expected the witch’s home to announce itself somehow—by rotting trees, by unnatural silence, by a stain in the air that felt wrong to breathe.

Instead, the cottage stood in a small clearing like it had every right to be there. A plain little house. Whitewashed walls. A thatched roof gone slightly gray with age. Smoke curling lazily from a chimney. A line of drying herbs hanging beside the door. Window shutters painted a faded blue. There was nothing sinister about it at all.

Which, Jiyeon thought with a cold edge of certainty, was exactly the kind of thing a witch would do.

She dismounted in one clean motion, landed on the packed earth, and tied Mirae’s reins to the low post near the gate. The mare blew a soft, uneasy breath through her nose, as if she too disliked the place on some instinctive level. Jiyeon gave her neck one brief, absent pat before striding up to the door.

She knocked. No answer. She knocked again, harder. Still nothing. Jiyeon’s jaw tightened. She lifted her hand and pounded on the wood until the frame rattled.

At last, the door creaked open. An elderly woman peered out through the narrow gap. She was hunched, wrapped in layers of plain brown wool, her silver hair pinned back in a neat coil. Her hands, knotted and veined with age, rested on the edge of the door as though she needed them for support. She looked, Jiyeon thought, exactly like half the old women in any village market—small, harmless, forgettable.

That was the first lie. The second was in her eyes. They were too clear. Too watchful. Too amused.

“Yes?” the woman asked, voice papery and mild. “Can I help you, child?”

Jiyeon did not relax. “I am Dame Choi Jiyeon, Knight and member of the Royal Imperial Honor Guard.”

The woman blinked slowly. “My, my.”

“I need to speak with you.”

“With me?”

“With whoever lives here.”

The old woman pressed a hand to her chest with feigned confusion. “I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else. I am only an old woman.”

Jiyeon stared at her. The woman stared back with the practiced innocence of someone who had had centuries, perhaps, to refine it. Jiyeon did not waste time on politeness. She stepped forward, reached with her left hand, and drew her sword in one smooth, sharp motion. The blade flashed once in the gray daylight before she laid it lightly beneath the woman’s chin.

The old woman’s brows rose. Jiyeon’s voice was flat. “Try again.” For a moment, neither moved.

Then the old woman sighed in a way so deeply theatrical it might have been insulting if the situation were not already absurd. “Oh, very well,” she said. “You people are always so tiresome when one tries to be subtle.”

The door opened wider. Before Jiyeon could properly react, a hand snapped out, not touching the blade, not quite touching her at all, and yet somehow forcing her backwards with a sudden invisible shove. Jiyeon stumbled one step, then another, and the old woman—no, not old woman, witch—caught the edge of her sleeve, gave her an almost bored tug, and dragged her bodily into the cottage.

The door slammed shut behind them.The interior was warmer than expected, lit by a banked fire and crowded with shelves of dried herbs, cracked jars, hanging bundles of roots, and more books than seemed possible inside such a small house. The air smelled of smoke, earth, resin, and something sharp and bitter that made the back of Jiyeon’s throat sting.

She whirled instantly, sword up again. “What have you done to Crown Prince San?”

The witch wiped dust from her sleeve and looked offended by the urgency of the question. “Oh,” she said. “Is he a beast already? How efficient. Goodness me, that worked faster than I expected.”

Jiyeon’s fury snapped.She crossed the room in a blur and slammed the witch back against the nearest wall, forearm pressed hard across her collarbone, sword point at her throat so quickly the blade made the woman’s skin dimple under the steel. “Tell me the cure.”

The witch only laughed. Not pleasantly. Not even wickedly, if that were a comfort. She laughed like someone hearing a joke she had waited too long to tell.

Jiyeon’s grip tightened. “I am not in the mood for games.”

“Oh, but I am,” the witch said, eyes gleaming. “And your prince seems to be in precisely the condition I intended. How delicious.”

Jiyeon shoved her harder into the wall, fury making her voice shake for the first time since the palace. “What did you do to him?”

The witch’s smile widened. “I cursed him, of course.”

Jiyeon’s face went hard enough to crack stone. “Why?”

The witch tipped her head as if the answer ought to be obvious. “Because he murdered one of mine.”

Jiyeon’s expression did not change, but the room around her seemed to sharpen. “Beomseok was not harmless,” she said coldly.

“No,” the witch agreed. “He was not.” That answer, more than any denial, made Jiyeon’s stomach twist. The witch’s eyes drifted briefly to Jiyeon’s blade, then back to her face. “And yet that is not the point, is it? You did not ride all this way to discuss morality.”

“Tell me the cure.”

The witch gave a shrug that was infuriating in its carelessness. “True love.”

Jiyeon stared at her. For one terrible second, she thought she had misheard. Then the witch smiled as though she were savoring the disbelief. “That is what breaks it,” she said. “True love. Clean and simple and terribly inconvenient.”

Jiyeon let out a short, disbelieving laugh that held no humor at all. “Do not insult me.”

“I am not insulting you.”

“You expect me to believe that is enough?”

“I expect you not to be rude about it, yes.”

Jiyeon pressed the blade a fraction closer. “Give me the real cure.”

The witch’s expression cooled. Then, without warning, she spoke a word Jiyeon did not recognize. The air in the cottage lurched. Something shoved into Jiyeon’s chest with the force of a violent hand. She was thrown backward so hard her shoulder struck the opposite wall with a crack that sent white pain racing down her spine. The sword slipped from her grasp and clattered across the floorboards.

For a heartbeat, the room went dim around the edges. Then Jiyeon pushed herself up instantly, ignoring the throb in her ribs, and crossed the room with the kind of speed that came from years of training and no patience left in her body.

She seized the witch by the front of her dress and slammed her back against the wall, this time hard enough to rattle the shelves. Her hand shot out again, reclaiming the sword by sheer muscle memory, and the blade was back at the witch’s throat before the woman could even draw breath. Jiyeon’s voice had gone dangerously quiet. “What,” she asked, each word clipped with precision, “is the cure?”

The witch looked at her, and for the first time there was something almost serious in her expression. “True love,” she said again. “I am not lying to you.”

Jiyeon’s eyes narrowed to slits. “That is impossible.”

The witch gave a small, derisive snort. “And yet here we are.”

“I want something real.”

“You have been given something real.”

“That is not an answer.”

“It is the only one you will get.”

Jiyeon held her there another second, breathing hard through her nose. The room was so full of herbs and old paper and smoke that it felt as though the cottage itself were listening.

Then the witch sighed, and before Jiyeon could decide whether to tighten her grip, she shoved her shoulder forward and shrugged herself free with a strength that should not have belonged to an old woman. Jiyeon stumbled once. The witch seized the opening, grabbed the front of her sleeve, and bodily dragged her toward the door.

Jiyeon caught the frame with one hand, bracing herself. “What are you doing?”

“Seeing you out.”

Jiyeon resisted. “You are not finished with me.”

“I think I am.”

“You cursed the Crown Prince.”

“Yes.”

“You expect me to accept that nonsense and leave?”

“No,” the witch said, with a smile that sharpened one corner of her mouth. “I expect you to leave confused.” She opened the door and shoved Jiyeon out onto the threshold.

Jiyeon turned back immediately, fury blazing in her face. “What did you say?”

The witch paused in the doorway, one hand on the wood, the other resting lightly on the frame as if she owned the space and all the time in the world. “The cure is true love.” Then she gave Jiyeon a look so pointed it was almost kind. “Not despite the beast, of course.” There was the faintest smirk when she said it.

Jiyeon went still. Her brows knit. “What did you say?”

But the witch had already begun to close the door.

Jiyeon stepped forward at once and pushed against it with her shoulder, but the wood slammed shut in her face with a force that made the latch rattle. She immediately struck the door with her fist once, then again, and then drove her shoulder into it hard enough that the frame groaned. The door burst open.

The cottage beyond was empty. Not empty as in unoccupied. Empty as in impossible. The witch was gone.

Jars remained on the shelves. Books lay open on the table. The fire still burned low in the hearth. But the room carried none of the shape of a body, none of the scent of the woman who had just stood there. Jiyeon whirled once, sword up, every muscle in her body alert for movement—Nothing.

She moved through the cottage in a fury, checking behind the curtain, behind the shelves, even under the table though she knew how foolish it was as she did it. Her palm struck one of the hanging herb bundles aside. She yanked a book from the nearest shelf and flipped it open so hard pages cracked under her fingers. Another. And another.

The witch’s house was full of books bound in cracked leather and paper so old it seemed to flake beneath her touch. Jiyeon turned through diagrams, symbols, scribbled notes, half-finished spells, pages of cramped handwriting in languages she could not read quickly enough.

Then she found it. A page marked with a hand-drawn shape too similar to the marks she had seen beginning to spread over San’s skin.

A curse spell.

The wording around it was brief, maddeningly so. The transformation. The pain. The conditions. And, beneath all of it, in a cramped line of script that seemed almost smug in its neatness: Cure: true love.

Jiyeon stared at the words until they blurred. Once. Twice. Then she closed the book with a very controlled, very careful motion and stood there with her jaw clenched so tightly it hurt.

True love. It was ridiculous. It was offensive. It was impossible. And yet the witch had not lied. Jiyeon knew enough of magic to recognize a trap when one was built in the shape of a joke. She knew enough of people to recognize when they were honest in precisely the worst way.

She knew enough of her own life to know that the answer, however stupid it sounded, was not changing just because she wanted it to. Her fingers tightened around the book until the leather creaked. She thought of San on the floor of his chambers, body bent in agony, shame in his eyes even through the transformation.

She thought of the witch’s parting words. 'Not despite the beast, of course'. It landed nowhere useful.Jiyeon did not let herself think about it further.

Instead she stepped back out into the cold afternoon light.

Mirae raised her head when she approached, ears twitching, as if asking whether the world had become any less strange while Jiyeon had been inside. It had not. Jiyeon mounted in one smooth motion and gathered the reins.

For a long time she simply sat there, looking back at the little cottage that had turned out to contain both the answer and the insult of the century.

Then she let out a breath through her nose, gave Mirae a light nudge with her heels, and turned the mare back toward the palace.

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A week after Jiyeon returned from the witch’s cottage, the throne room filled again with silk, steel, and the brittle silence of a court trying not to stare too openly at its own fear.

The kingdom had not been kind to rumors. By now the story had spread everywhere, in fragments first and then in full, ugly shape: the Crown Prince had been cursed. The Crown Prince had turned into something monstrous. The Crown Prince had been seen writhing in pain, hidden away, then hidden away again, then again.

Servants whispered it through corridors. Guards carried it from post to post. Merchants carried it into the city. The city carried it outward into villages and border towns until the whole realm seemed to know what the palace would not have chosen to announce so soon.

San had emerged only twice that week, and both times only long enough to vanish again behind the safety of closed doors. No one had been permitted in with him. No physicians. No attendants beyond those he trusted most. No questions. No lingering hands. No witnesses. And each time the transformation came, the palace went still with fear, as if the walls themselves remembered what had happened and preferred not to hear it again.

Now he stood beside the king’s throne as though he had been carved there from the same black wood, head bowed, face unreadable. He had returned to his own shape, at least for the moment. His hands were clasped behind his back. His expression was controlled to the point of cruelty.

But Jiyeon, standing among the knights along the wall, could still see the strain beneath it if she looked too carefully. The exhaustion. The humiliation. The hard, braced quiet of a man who had been made a spectacle by pain and answered by hiding from the world.

The room was full. Not of servants this time, but of the court in its finest formal dress, each face arranged into the careful solemnity demanded by royal speech. Lords stood in rows like dark pillars. Ladies-in-waiting waited with folded hands and averted eyes. Ministers occupied the lower steps beneath the dais, all of them tense with the knowledge that a public truth was about to be made official.

Jiyeon did not look at the crowd. She kept her gaze forward. At the throne. At the king. At San. At the fact that this morning had the shape of an ending even before it began.

King Segye sat straighter than Jiyeon had seen him in days, though the effort made him look carved from grief rather than sustained by authority. The loss of Haneul still seemed to live in the set of his mouth. But now there was something else there too, something grim and deliberate. A father who had been forced to decide that the kingdom could not survive on silence.

The room grew quieter as the last murmurs died away. The king lifted one hand. No one moved. His voice, when it came, carried cleanly through the chamber. “My daughter is dead,” he said.

The court lowered its heads as one. Jiyeon’s throat tightened, but she did not react otherwise. The words had become no less sharp with repetition. If anything they had grown worse, because each time someone named Haneul aloud in the present tense and then corrected themselves in the same breath, it felt like watching a wound open all over again.

The king continued. “In the days since her burial, the palace has endured a matter that I would have spared you had it been within my power. But secrecy has its own danger, and the realm must not be left to rumor.” His eyes swept over the assembled court, hard and tired at once. “Therefore I will speak plainly.” A pause. A thousand breathless seconds in one. “The Crown Prince was struck by a curse.”

The room stiffened visibly. Not all at once. In waves. A few people looked up despite themselves. One of the older ministers went pale under his powder. A lady in the second row pressed her fingers to her lips. Someone farther back made the smallest involuntary sound before catching it and turning it into a cough.

Jiyeon remained still.She already knew what had happened in the week after her visit to the witch. She had been the one to carry the answer back to the king herself that evening, the witch’s book tucked under her arm like a loaded insult. She had knelt and said the words as evenly as she could: true love. The cure was true love.

King Segye had looked at her for a long moment after that, not with disbelief, but with the expression of a man forced to accept the stupid shape of fate and hate it without being able to change it. Then he had ordered the palace sealed around San as tightly as possible.

Now, a week later, the answer had become public. The king’s voice sharpened with controlled bitterness. “The curse was inflicted in retaliation for the death of Son Beomseok, and I will not waste this chamber with the details of its origin.”

His hand tightened once on the armrest. “What matters is this: my son is afflicted. He has endured agony over the last week that no parent should be forced to witness and no child should be forced to bear.”

Several eyes flicked toward San, then away again at once. He did not look up.

“He has returned to his proper form for the moment,” the king said, “but the curse is not broken. It will continue to plague him until it is.”

No one spoke. The silence after those words was heavy enough to feel like a pressure against the skin.

The king continued, voice now taking on the unmistakable edge of policy. “The line of succession must still be secured. The kingdom cannot afford uncertainty because its future king has been cursed, nor will I allow a single disaster to endanger the stability of this realm.”

There it was.The court shifted in subtle, uncomfortable recognition. This was what they had all known would follow. Not only a curse. Politics.Heirs. Marriage. The necessary machinery of a kingdom continuing to grind even while the people inside it were still bleeding.

Jiyeon’s jaw tightened.

The king spoke more formally now, each word carefully placed as though he were laying stones across a river. “Therefore, alongside securing another heir, a young lady must win my son’s heart in order to break the curse.”

A very small murmur passed through the court and died immediately when the king looked up. He was not finished. “I will host balls and events in the coming weeks to aid the Crown Prince in courtship.”

His gaze moved across the hall, measured and solemn. “Eligible noblewomen of age will be invited to attend. The kingdom will see that the Crown Prince is not without prospects, and that the curse shall not be the end of our line.”

Jiyeon’s fingers curled slightly at her side. She should not have felt anything at that. It was sensible. Political. Expected. Yet the words scraped through her with an unpleasant heat, as though something inside her had been touched in a place she had not known was vulnerable.

The king’s expression shifted, not much, but enough to signal that he had reached the part of the announcement he had likely rehearsed most carefully. “There is, however,” he said, “one lady I would introduce personally.”

A ripple moved through the court. Not enough to be called surprise, but enough to prove they had all been waiting for the name. King Segye turned slightly. “Miss Lim Yoora.”

For the briefest instant, nothing happened. Then a young woman stepped forward from the line of attendants near the side wall. Jiyeon saw her before she was fully in the light and thought, absurdly, that the room itself had changed around her. She was beautiful in the polished, undeniable way of a noblewoman raised to be looked at and admired—dark hair arranged with elegant precision, pale skin, a gown the color of deep wine that caught the light when she moved. The sort of beauty that did not beg to be noticed because it knew it would be.

She knelt before the king with graceful composure and bowed her head. “Your Majesty,” she said. Her voice was clear, poised, and measured enough to suggest training in public presence. Nothing trembled in it. No one would mistake her for timid. When she rose, she turned toward San and bowed again.

He did not move. Not much. Perhaps the smallest incline of his head, if that. He did not smile. Did not speak. Did not seem either offended or interested. Only tired. Tired in the way of someone too far into grief to bother feeling enthusiasm for anything yet.

Lady Lim Yoora lifted her head and looked at him with calm, readable courtesy, as though his silence were merely another condition to be observed and not taken personally. The room seemed to hold its breath around them.

Jiyeon, for reasons she could not have named if threatened, felt her heart give one sharp, unpleasant lurch. It was not jealousy. Not exactly. That would have been too simple, too easy to recognize, too tidy an emotion for the shape of what struck her now. It was something stranger. A sudden awareness that the palace had just shifted again and that this woman, standing so composed and elegant beneath the king’s attention, had been introduced into the center of a story Jiyeon had not expected to witness so soon.

A story that would not belong to her.

San’s future.

His courtship.

His marriage.

The possibility of him being given away, publicly and formally, to someone who belonged to his world in a way Jiyeon never would.

The thought should have been nothing. It was not nothing.

The king continued speaking, but Jiyeon barely heard the next lines. Something about propriety. About the kingdom’s hope. About the need for stability and the courage required to pursue it. Something about the balls to come and the obligation of noble houses to attend in good faith. All of it blurred.

San still stood beside the throne, head bowed, hands behind his back, while the court stared at the woman the king had chosen to bring forward first.

Lady Lim Yoora remained perfectly poised under that attention. Beautiful. Calm. Expected.

Jiyeon felt, with a cold and bewildering clarity, that something had just been set in motion that she would not know how to name until it had already gone too far.

The king’s voice drew her back at the very end. “Let it be known,” he said, the weight of finality settling over the chamber, “that these proceedings begin at once.”

The court bowed.

The room exhaled.

And when Jiyeon lifted her eyes again, she found San staring right at her.

To be continued.

☾ zayne’s aurora