A Fae’s Fury
A Fae’s Fury
Yuna
The air felt different tonight. Thicker. Wilder. Full of things unsaid and undone. And I couldn’t breathe through any of it. The garden was empty. Just me and the cold. Just me and the weight of everything I had tried to carry in silence.
Taeyang’s words—You’re not the girl I met—still clung to my ribs like vines, suffocating. But it wasn’t just what he said. It was what I’d been hiding.
What I’d learned. What I feared.
· · ─ ·?· ─ · ·
One week earlier
I went to the archives alone.
The Summer seal on the door recognized me with a whisper of old magic and lemon oil. Dust motes turned in light like tiny planets with nowhere to go. I was looking for maps, treaties, anything to explain why the demon and fae realms were starting to breathe like enemies again.
I found ruin.
A scroll thin as an old scar tucked behind tomes that had learned to pretend, they were harmless. The wax had blackened with time; the ribbon smelled like resin and a lie.
Order of Termination.
Faded ink. Royal seal. My mother’s sigil pressed beside my father’s, perfect and final.
Eliminate the berserker bloodline before it aligns with chaos-born demons.
Eliminate the woman attached to the line.
Eliminate any issue if it has already taken root.
No names. It didn’t need them.
My hands went numb before they shook. The letters swam, then steadied as if the page meant to teach me how to read pain properly.
Berserker bloodline. Woman. Issue. The story was a shape I already knew inside my bones: Taeyang’s mother.
His father. The first girl he loved before he learned to spell leaving faster than future.
The Fae King had given the order. My father—the man who once kissed my brow and said I was made of starlight and mercy—had signed a family into ash to preserve his idea of peace.
The scroll slid from my fingers and hit the stone with the soft sound paper makes when it realizes it has been telling the wrong story for years.
I didn’t retch. I couldn’t. I pressed my fist to my mouth and cried—not just for him. For us. For the shards we had been holding together with bare hands, cutting ourselves to keep the shape.
I almost went straight to Taeyang.
I almost ran through wards and corridors and the last soft parts of my pride and put the Order in his hands and said, I know. I see it. I’m sorry. I’m not him.
But then I remembered the way he looked at me with a crown on my head.
The quiet he built and moved into like a house.
The way the bond burned and he pretended it was a fever he could sweat out.
And I folded the Order, bound it in a thorn-thread so no one could alter it, and put it against my heart where it could ruin me at a proper pace.
It festered.
Grief learned a new language.
—
Present
I stand in the garden, jaw locked, hands empty, and finally myself feel it. All of it. The ache. The betrayal. The guilt I did not earn that still made a home in my bones. The heartbreak he gave me. The war I did not start and will now own.
The bond drums under my skin, a relentless second heart. Through it I feel him somewhere inside the palace, pacing, bracing, pushing me out like a fever dream he can’t afford.
Something in me says enough and means it.
The ground under my feet cracks with a sound like ice deciding to be river. The air turns gold—moonlight caught in honey, too thick to breathe. Power climbs my spine and finds my throat; when I scream I don’t hear it at first—the magic hears me and answers.
It isn’t elegant. It isn’t pretty.
It is grief incarnate.
Lightning veined with starlight rips the lid off the sky.
Wisteria blooms and withers and blooms again in one breath, a time-lapse of survival.
Fire blossoms lift their small faces and crown themselves in brighter flame.
The wardlines Seori wove shiver; I reach without thinking and lace my power through them, not breaking—rewriting. The dome over the garden adjusts to me.
Boots on stone. Shouts at the arch. Palace guards.
“Stay back,” someone calls.
They can’t get close. My magic lashes out—teeth, thorn, flame, no—a storm with a will. It knocks a spear from a hand without breaking bone, snaps a wrist guard without bruising the skin beneath. It is alive. It is mine. And in the middle of it I am sobbing, shaking, waking.
I lift my palms and choose.
Glamour slinks toward me, eager to smooth my edges. I refuse it. I keep the edges. Hair whips my back, heavy braid turned wild, moonstones sparking like choked stars. The mark at my collarbone burns pure-white for the first time since it was placed, not as plea—as declaration.
“ENOUGH.”
My voice rides the wards. Windows quiver. Torches bow. Every bloom in the beds turns to face me like congregants remembering how to pray.
I open my left hand. Light gathers—silver first, then the fierce green of new vines shouldering through stone, then a steady gold that has nothing to do with crowns and everything to do with the stubborn beat under my ribs.
Runes ladder up my forearm, old Summer script and older forest mark, binding themselves into a sigil that reads No More Hiding.
“I am not a scandal to be managed,” I say, and my words braid into the air, into the wards, into the listening stone. “I am not penance for a king’s sin. I am not a balm for a weapon who can’t decide to be a man.”
The guards hesitate at the arch. Kaelen appears behind them, sword at his hip, eyes wide and listening.
“Princess—”
“Stand down,” I say without looking. The command is soft as velvet, heavy as iron. Steel lowers. Boots retreat a pace.
I reach into my bodice and pull out the thorn-bound scroll. The sealing thread pricks my thumb—blood bright as a promise. I break it. The Order unfurls like a confession dragged to light.
“By the blood that named me and the magic that made me,” I say, voice steady as tide, “I annul this issuance.” The runes on my arm flare and leap, scrawling a counter-script in the air—letters of light overlaying the old cruelty until the page itself smokes.
“Any hand that moves against a berserker line in my name burns.”
The parchment combusts—clean, complete. Ash spins and catches the gold air. The wardlines drink the ash and hum, satisfied.
My knees want to go. I make them stay.
I turn my face to the palace. The bond tightens, a knuckle against a door.
I press my palm to the mark. Feel this, I tell it—not compulsion, not a breach—just truth pushed along a tether we didn’t ask for and kept anyway.
I send him the shape of the Order. Not its heat.
Not its smoke. The shape. The choices. The word father laid next to murder without apology.
I do not beg. I do not excuse. I do not frame myself inside his hurt to make it easier to look at.
Power still roars in my veins, but I welcome it now.
I take the storm by the throat and teach it how to move with me.
Lightning gentles into thread; I stitch it into the clouds and sign my name across the night.
The garden exhales. The vines I cracked out of the ground resettle, gripping stone like guardians rather than jaws.
Kaelen steps into the edge of my magic and stops when it tests him. He raises both hands. “Yuna,” he says—friend-soft, court-steady. “Do you need a wall, or do you need a door?”
“A door,” I answer, and the power parts just enough to let him stand two paces away. His eyes flick to the fading rune on my arm, then the ash-deepened wards. Pride tries his mouth on for size and keeps it.
“Messages?” he asks.
“Yes.” I lift my chin and the girl who used to braid flowers into Minji’s hair stands shoulder to shoulder with the princess who has learned which knives belong in which rooms. “To the Queen of Summer: bring your truth to the parley or keep your silence at home. To the Consort-King: if he speaks my name while plotting another purge, I take his tongue and leave him his crown. To the court: I am not peeling myself into something prettier so their politics can eat it easier.”
Kaelen’s nostrils flare. “And to the prince of wrath?”
The bond answers for me, hot and honest. I meet Kaelen’s gaze anyway. “He knows,” I say, and it isn’t cruelty; it’s faith. “If he wants me, he can stand where the knives can find both of us.”
The last of the lightning climbs my arm and sinks into skin, a thin, bright line that will fade, then never quite. The guards put their swords away with the care men use around saints and storms. Somewhere, ward-drums shift cadence—moving from gather to ready.
I pick up a cluster of fire blossoms, twist them until they are a crown, and set it on the bench beside me. I do not wear it. Let anyone who needs a picture learn to imagine it without help.
“Princess.” Seori’s voice comes through the wards—bone-sure, sister-soft. I felt that.
Good, I send back along the weave I reforged. I meant you to.
The wind turns. Petals rise and wheel like small, bright birds. My braid settles against my spine, heavy with moonstones I will keep because they glint like honest work, not because anyone says they prove me.
I look up into the sky I just stitched and feel a steadiness I haven’t tasted since I was very small and the world was less crowded with men’s ideas. I am still shaking. But the shake has changed dialect. It reads readiness instead of collapse.
“Let them come,” I tell the night, and my power carries it to every listening surface. “Let them ask me to be small. Let them ask me to be silent. Let them bring their old orders and their newer lies.”
I lift my hand; the rune under my skin answers with a warm, low thrum.
“I am done being hidden. I am done being sorry. I am done waiting.”
The garden, greedy for beauty, keeps the echo. The mark answers—one steady pulse that feels less like ache and more like drumline.
If he feels it, he feels it.
If he doesn’t, I am still here—ember-eyed, midnight-haired, palms bright with a magic that will not apologize for speaking in my voice.
I was born from starlight and mercy. Tonight I learn the other truth:
I am also made of thunder.