Epilogue - Always
Taeyang
Morning pours itself across the moon garden like warm milk and honey.
Yuna sits on the low stone bench beneath the wisteria, crown forgotten on the table, hair in a loose braid she never manages to finish because I keep touching her.
The crescent beneath her collar glows slow and soft, answering the one over my heart.
Between them—between us—a third rhythm thrums now.
Smaller. Stubborn. The court calls him Crown Prince. I call him Little Drum.
He kicks when I say it. The slip of linen over Yuna’s belly twitches under my palm.
“There,” I whisper to the spot that hits back. “See? Already arguing with me.”
Yuna’s laugh is sunlight on stone.
“He gets that from his father.”
“He gets his spine from his mother,” I murmur, and press a kiss to the place he lives. “Hello, Little Drum. This is your father. I’m the fire at the door, not the fire in the walls. I’m also the reason your mother rolls her eyes before breakfast.”
“She would!” Yuna protests—to him, not to me.
Her hand slides into my hair and stays there, idly tracing the line where battle left a pale scar.
The ribbon on her wrist—violet, frayed from a thousand knots—brushes my temple.
When she shifts, the bond hums a braided song: her pulse, mine, his.
I never knew peace had a sound until it took up residence in my chest.
Two years ago I woke to nights that smelled like smoke even when there was none.
Today, the palace smells like wisteria and warm bread, like steel oiled because we respect it, not because we expect to bleed.
The court walks softer. The rookies plant their feet the way I taught them, shoulders saved for tomorrows that deserve them.
The Veil is steady. The peace-cup is dust.
“Seori sent a note,” Yuna says, thumb smoothing over my brow. “She made Rheon promise not to hover for an hour. He lasted seventeen minutes.”
I grin.
“I believe in his growth.”
“She says the baby kicks whenever Rheon reads out loud,” Yuna adds, eyes bright. “He insists it’s because of his voice. She insists it’s because the princess is already judging his punctuation.”
“Our niece will rule us all,” I say solemnly.
“As she should.”
I lower my ear to Yuna’s belly again. The Little Drum thumps once, offended that the conversation moved without him.
“You hear that?” I confide to him. “You’ll have a cousin who will teach you how to steal the kitchen honey without getting caught.”
“And an aunt who will teach you not to,” Yuna says primly, which is how she tells on herself.
Footsteps in the grass. Seori and Rheon appear at the garden arch like a benediction learned to walk.
Seori is barefoot, a hand braced at the small of her back, the underlight at her throat dimmed to a steady pulse that matches the faint glow beneath her dress.
Rheon’s shadow tries to bow to every pebble she steps on. It fails and looks pleased about it.
“Your Majesty,” Rheon intones, king-smooth, then under his breath to Seori, “—don’t kill me, I’m only using the title because it makes the Sentinels behave.”
Seori levels him with a look that could reforge iron.
“I am making a person,” she says. “If anyone behaves, it will be you.”
Yuna rises and we meet halfway. The four of us stand together, the garden making a soft cathedral around the fact that our world didn’t end when it should have. Seori takes my hand without ceremony and flips my palm to check the sigil above my heart like a blacksmith checking a blade.
“Holds,” she says, satisfied. “Good.”
Rheon glances at my chest and then at Yuna’s belly, something raw and grateful loosening his face. “How is he?”
“Opinionated,” I say.
“Related, then,” he answers gravely.
We sit. The babies kick hello to each other like cousins learning secret handshakes.
Yuna and Seori talk names in low, conspiratorial tones while Rheon and I pretend not to be men who would fight a mountain if it looked at these women wrong.
When Yuna grimaces at a sharp nudge, I feel it—faint, like a lantern on the far end of a hall—and my hand is there before she asks.
The bond cools it. The ache softens. The Little Drum resettles, mollified.
“Do you ever stop staring at her?” Rheon asks, not unkind.
“No,” I say honestly. “It keeps the old doors shut.”
He nods like that was the answer he hoped I’d give.
“Good.”
The day moves the way healed places do: gently, then all at once.
Minji arrives with a stack of lists and a jar of salve that smells like lavender and resolve; Jisoo ghost-follows carrying a carved mobile of feathers and starwood he pretends is a diplomatic gift but hangs carefully over the cradle anyway.
Seori drags Yuna to the shade and orders her to sit like a queen who gets to issue commands that are also caring.
Rheon and I are dispatched to the rookies, who now run drills for the Crown and try to pretend they’re not showing off for the babies who can’t see them yet.
I correct a stance here, a grip there. Names come to me like prayer: Seo-joon, who still keeps bread in her sleeve for the garden cats; Han, whose ankle no longer betrays her; Kaelen’s newest, whose jaw is too tight until I tell him the story of the first time I missed on purpose because mercy was the point.
By noon the courtyard breathes easier. By afternoon Yuna charmed three elders into admitting that the nursery doesn’t need five ceremonial quilts.
By evening the four of us are back in the garden as the lanterns warm and the day’s noise tucks its chin.
Seori leans her head on Rheon’s shoulder and finally lets herself be small in a way that isn’t weakness.
Yuna tips into me with the same permission.
The Little Drum rolls beneath my palm; a comet dragged lovingly by gravity.
“I keep waiting for the fear,” I admit, quiet, because the others are close enough to hear if they’re meant to. “For the part where I break something I love because that’s what I was built to do.”
Yuna’s hand slides over mine.
“You were taught to do that,” she corrects softly. “Different kinds of building. We unlearned it.”
“Together,” Seori adds, a smile in her voice.
Rheon’s shadow folds around the bench like a cloak, then loosens.
“And if fear comes,” he says, mild, “we will give it a job. It can count the doors we keep shut.”
A breeze lifts the wisteria. Somewhere a bell marks an hour that doesn’t matter. I press my lips to Yuna’s temple and feel everything I used to pray for without knowing how to ask to make a home in my mouth.
“Say it,” she whispers, because she knows the spell that holds me, and because she taught me that love likes to be loud even when it’s quiet.
I slid to one knee, because the garden remembers who I am when I do. I lace our fingers and lay them over the half-moon beneath her collar. The Little Drum answers with a kick that makes my throat ache.
“Always,” I vow—to her, to the boy learning our song, to the life that turned wrath into a door and asked me to stand in it.
“When the crown is heavy and when it’s forgotten on the table.
When he cries at dawn and when he sleeps through my best stories.
When your power frightens the people who refuse to learn what mercy is for.
When my hands remember the old ways and I need you to say my name out loud to call me back. I am yours. I am theirs. I am here.”
Yuna’s eyes shine. Seori wipes hers as if she can deny it; Rheon doesn’t bother trying. The garden breathes around us like a living thing that decided to stop holding its own fear.
“Again,” Yuna says, greedy for the truth the way I am.
“Always,” I repeat, and the bond hums it threefold—queen, mate, son—until the word lodges in the bones of the palace.
Later, when the moon is high and the rookies have finally stopped pretending, they aren’t watching from the colonnade, Yuna falls asleep against me on the bench, crown on the table, ribbon looped around my fingers.
The Little Drum keeps time slow and sure beneath my palm.
Across from us, Seori dreams with her mouth barely smiling while Rheon counts the stars like he can will them to stay where they’re put for once.
I don’t sleep. I keep watch, the way I promised I would, calm in a way I didn’t know existed. The old whisper tests the door of my chest—out of habit, not malice. The sigil warms. The bond answers. It has nowhere to land.
When the night finally cools to the hour where even shadows rest, I bend and press a kiss to Yuna’s hair, then to the place our son made holy without asking.
“Always,” I tell them both, and feel them answer from the inside