Ashes of Silence
Yuna
One Year Later
Silence used to be a kindness. Ash clings to my boots in gray cuffs as I pick my way across what used to be a haven—our haven—low stone walls and wind chimes and a painted door that never quite closed because people needed to know they could come back.
The chimes are melted to drops. The door is a black mouth.
When I kneel, the ash takes my weight like a grave taking a name.
The smoke is gone. The screams are gone. What’s left is quieter, and somehow worse: scorched rosemary, the sweet-sick tang of wet char, the way wind drags powder over broken tile like a hand aching for something it can’t hold.
I pressed two fingers to the hollow beneath my collar, to the place where my skin used to thrum with warmth. The bond used to be a whisper—soft, stubborn—a rhythm only I could hear. Now it’s a wound that never scabs. A bruise that keeps its own time.
He won’t claim it. I hate that I know Taeyang’s name like a prayer.
Worse, I hate that I keep looking for him anyway.
I sift through the ash until my nails go black.
I find a bead of green glass from the wind chimes, a corner of a burned sketch someone tucked under a lamp (two figures drawn in quick strokes, one with a ribbon around her wrist).
I turn the bead over and over until it warms in my palm, then close my fist like I’m hiding proof from a jury.
“Yuna.”
Seori’s voice doesn’t startle me so much as pull me back into a body I’ve been avoiding.
I glanced up. She’s dressed in black today, not for mourning no one tells Seori what color means—but because it hides soot and grief equally well.
Her mouth is softer than usual. Rheon is a shadow at the edge of the ruin, pretending to study a fallen beam while he keeps her in his orbit.
Certainty looks good on them. It always did.
“You don’t have to keep coming here,” Seori says, stepping close enough that ash freckles the hem of her pants.
“I know.” My voice scrapes. “But I can’t leave it behind. Not yet.”
She lowers herself beside me without ceremony. The ash takes her weight too. For a while we don’t speak. The wind does. It carries a scrap of singed ribbon past our knees, and I have to bite my tongue not to reach for it like a fool.
“You haven’t said his name in weeks,” she says at last.
“What’s the point?” I let a laugh out, too small and too sharp. “It’s not like he hears it.”
Seori covers my hand, the one still holding the green glass, careful not to pry.
“He hears it,” she says. “Whether he wants to or not.”
I close my eyes.
It’s too easy then. The memories find me the way smoke finds the seam under a door.
Taeyang bleeding and snarling in rain, dragging me backward by the ribbon at my wrist and cursing me for being reckless in a voice that shook.
Taeyang standing too close at the infirmary window, sunlight cutting his profile into something I couldn’t stop tracing with my eyes.
Don’t die, Yuna, he breathed into my hair when he thought I was asleep. I’d destroy everything if you did.
Then the quiet after. The morning my mark warmed under his palm, and he looked at it like it was the edge of a cliff—and stepped back.
The days he learned new corridors I wasn’t in.
The way the training court emptied ten breaths before I arrived, his gauntlets still warm on the peg, as if avoidance could be polite.
Petals left at my windowsill that smelled like moon mint and smoke; a ribbon tied around a practice blade I never admitted he’d touched.
The small, stupid proofs that care can coexist with cowardice and hurt just as effectively.
He thinks not choosing is a kind of mercy. He thinks wrong.
“I’m tired,” I tell Seori, and the honesty comes out so fast it almost trips.
“I’m tired of pretending I don’t check the balcony before I sleep.
I’m tired of waking up with my hand on a ribbon that doesn’t belong to me anymore.
I’m tired of being angry at walls because I can’t be angry at him without wanting to kiss him or hit him or both. ”
Seori’s mouth tilts—compassion, not pity.
“You’re allowed to be tired.”
“I don’t know which is worse,” I say. “Knowing we were fated. Or knowing he’d rather suffer than love me.”
A rooky would call it dramatic. A queen would call it strategy: say the hardest thing first so the rest has room to live. I curl forward, elbows on knees, knuckles against my lips until I taste ash.
“Demons don’t know how to love,” the old women at the guild used to whisper when I spilled honey on my books and asked why war was necessary.
Not the way fae do. But I remember his hands, bloodied and shaking, holding mine at the vale when the world tried to end again.
I remember the look he gave me when he thought no one else was watching.
Not worship. Not hunger. Recognition. Like something finally fit.
“And then he left,” I whisper. “No goodbye. No explanation. Just… quiet.”
Seori doesn’t argue. She never does when the thing I need isn’t an answer but a witness. We sit like that until the wind changes, smelling of rain. Rheon drifts closer and pretends to study the sky. The ruin settles and for a second, I swear I hear wind chimes again, faint and stubborn.
“You don’t have to wait for him to choose,” Seori says, after the silence has softened instead of hardened. “You get to choose too.”
“And if what I choose hurts?” My voice thins. “If staying near him feels like picking at a scab that won’t heal, and leaving feels like amputating the only limb that still remembers how to dance?”
“Then you say that out loud,” she says, thumb smoothing over the back of my fingers. “To him. Or to yourself first, if that’s all you can manage.”
I push a breath out that shakes and doesn’t apologize for it.
“I hate him,” I say, and the ash doesn’t flinch. “For making me wait in rooms he avoids. For touching my mark like it burned him and then pretending it didn’t. For making me doubt whether I imagined all of it.”
“And?” Seori asks, gentle, relentless.
“And I don’t,” I whisper, throat raw. “I don’t hate him. I hate what fear turns him into.”
I open my fist. The bead sits in my palm like an eye. Green, imperfect, stubborn. I slid it onto the frayed ribbon at my wrist and knot it twice. Mean-tight. Prayer-sure. A promise to myself, not to him.
Seori notices. She doesn’t comment. Instead, she nods toward the far wall where rosemary pushed up through a crack and somehow survived.
“Take a sprig,” she says.
“Call it theft. Or proof that some things decide to live anyway.”
I rise on stiff legs and do as I’m told. The plant smells like kitchens and spring, defiant against the ruin. I tuck the sprig behind my ear and the absurdity of it—prettiness in a place that burned—makes my eyes sting harder.
“Come back with me,” Seori says quietly. “Rheon will scowl at the sky for a while. We’ll pretend it listens. Minji made soup so terrible you’ll laugh. Jisoo will pretend he didn’t help with the spices. It will be noisy enough to make you remember your body.”
I nod, because I am tired of being the only thing in a room that remembers how to breathe.
We turn toward the road. I look back once—at the melted chimes, at the painted door charred into a black mouth—and something in my chest pulls like a thread caught on a nail.
If he ever came back…
I don’t finish the thought because it finishes itself for me, as inevitable as tide: I don’t know whether I’d run into his arms or slap him. Maybe both. Maybe the slap first, then the arms. Maybe that’s the worst part of love, you can’t starve it just because you know better.
On the path, Rheon falls into step a respectable distance behind us. The wind shifts again, bringing the distant scent of leather and clove and the apology of incoming rain.
I don’t turn. I won’t give the day the satisfaction of watching me look for him. But my fingers find the ribbon at my wrist, now anchored by green glass, and hold on.
The silence doesn’t stop burning. It just learns my name.