The night was eerily still when Taehyung opened his eyes.
A dull ache throbbed through his body, each breath dragging fire into his lungs. For a
moment, he didn't know where he was, only that the air smelled of smoke and pine, and
his body felt unbearably heavy.
Then it all came rushing back, the battlefield, the flames, the screams, Jiwan's last words.
And the silence that followed.
He sat up sharply, ignoring the pain that tore through his chest. His vision blurred. He looked around, a dim forest clearing, the faint crackle of a small fire, and beside it, Aera, sitting with her head bowed, her hands trembling faintly from exhaustion.
Sang and the other two soldiers were awake too, keeping watch. Their faces were gaunt,
eyes hollow.
Taehyung looked at them, then at the forest beyond, and the realization hit him like a sword
to the heart.
They were alone.
His lips quivered. "Where are they?" His voice was hoarse, broken.
No one answered. The air was thick with unspoken grief.
Taehyung's hands clenched around the bandages on his arms. "Answer me!" he roared.
Sang lowered his head. "They're gone, Your Highness. All of them."
The words shattered what was left of Taehyung's composure. He froze for a moment, then
his shoulders began to shake. A raw, guttural sound escaped him, not quite a sob, but
something deeper, hollow.
He pressed a trembling hand to his face, his breath ragged. "I told them to stay back… I told
them to rest…"
Flames flickered weakly around his palms, unstable and violent, a reflection of the turmoil
inside him. The air grew hot. The trees around them groaned under the heat.
Aera, pale and barely holding herself upright, reached out and touched his hand.
Her frost met his fire, cold against heat dimming the flames before they could grow.
"Stop," she whispered. "You'll burn yourself again."
But he didn't seem to hear her. Tears streamed down his face, his eyes wild with guilt.
"I should have seen it coming! I should have protected them! They died because of me!"
Sang knelt before him, desperate. "Your Highness, that's not true...."
Taehyung glared at him, his voice trembling.
"Then tell me why they're gone, Sang! Tell me why Master Jiwan had to die in front of me!"
Sang's voice broke. "Because they believed in you. Because they loved you enough to die
for you."
The silence that followed was suffocating. Only the crackle of the fire remained.
Aera said nothing. Her body was too weak, her energy spent calming his flames earlier. Her
frost barely flickered now, her breathing shallow. She looked at him, this young man who had carried the kingdom's weight, now breaking under it, and wanted to say something, anything. But her lips wouldn't move.
Taehyung sat there, trembling, staring at the ground where his tears fell onto the dirt, sizzling softly from the heat of his body.
Night turned into morning, then into night again. They found an old, abandoned hut deep in the forest, its walls half-collapsed and roof
covered with moss. It wasn't much, but it was shelter. The soldiers helped carry Taehyung
inside. He didn't resist, he just stared blankly, lost in the ghosts of what he'd lost.
Aera patched his wounds quietly, her fingers gentle but cold. He didn't even flinch when she
pressed bandages against fresh scars.
Days passed.
He refused to eat.
Refused to speak.
Refused to sleep properly.
Sometimes they'd hear him muttering under his breath, names of soldiers who'd fallen,
apologizing over and over. Other times, he sat staring at his sword, his reflection trembling in
the blade.
The fire in his eyes that once made men tremble was gone, replaced by emptiness.
Sang tried to reason with him, again and again.
"Your Highness, please… you have to eat. The men who died would never forgive
themselves if you gave up like this."
Taehyung didn't answer. He simply looked away.
"You're their prince," Sang said softly, his voice cracking. "They followed you because they
believed you'd lead them home."
But Taehyung only whispered, "I couldn't even bring their bodies back…"
No one could argue with that.
Aera stayed beside him through it all, silent, pale, her energy flickering like dying frost.
Every time his body trembled with heat, she placed her hand over his heart, cooling him until he calmed. She never once complained, even as her power slowly drained.
On the seventh night, the moon hung low, cold and bright. Aera stood outside the hut with
the three remaining soldiers. Their faces were grim.
"We can't stay here," one of them said. "The rebels might still be tracking us."
Sang nodded. "We'll rest one more night, then we move. The Crown Prince must be
informed of what happened."
But Aera knew that the Crown prince knew about this beforehand but she couldn't spoil the reputation of the prince in front of the soldiers who are looking up to him so loving and devoted to him. If they found out how despicable the Crown prince was, it would cause an uproar giving Taehyung another mess to clean up.
Aera looked back at the hut, at the faint glow seeping from inside, where Taehyung sat
staring into the fire like a man lost in a nightmare. She whispered, almost to herself, "He won't forgive himself."
Sang lowered his gaze. "Then we'll remind him that he still has people who will never stop
believing in him."
That night, as the wind howled through the forest and the soldiers prepared for their long
journey home, Taehyung sat alone in the hut the flames reflected in his dark eyes, tears
glistening on his cheeks.
He was the Sword of the Kingdom.
But now, he felt like a blade that had lost its edge dulled by grief, cracked by guilt.
And as the fire flickered lower, he whispered into the silence:
"Forgive me...…. All of you"
The morning woke with the metallic ring of steel.
Aera and Sang bolted upright from the thin rest they had found and ran outside the hut,
breath pluming in the cold air. In the pale dawn they saw him,Taehyung , standing alone
in the clearing, sword moving in arcs, each strike cutting the air like a promise. His brown
hair was tied back, dark with soot and sweat, and for a heartbeat they felt relief: he had
come back to himself.
But when he sheathed his blade and turned toward them, his face held not peace but a
fierce calm.
"We will not run," he said simply. "We will go after their base. We will kill them where they
hide."
Sang staggered back as if struck. "That's impossible!" he blurted. "We're five men. Ten if you count breath. How will we fight thousands?"
Taehyung's eyes did not waver. "We can. We will."
He dared them with the faintest lift of his chin. "If you won't follow, then leave now. Go back
to the capital. Live."
Aera came forward, voice cracked but steady. "Taehyung .... wait." She put a hand lightly on
his sleeve. "Let me make the core. Give me one month. I will craft an artificial core to steady your flames. It will bind them, make them less wild. Then we can move with a plan."
He looked at her. For the first time since all this began, something like relief softened him.
"You don't have to...." he started.
She cut him off with a small, hard smile. "I will. I am not leaving you. I am staying."
Sang swallowed. He had no choice. The three remaining soldiers — hollow-eyed,
bone-weary, met each other's gazes and nodded. "If we die, we die as warriors," one said softly. "Not as cowards who ran.
So it was agreed.
The month that followed was a crucible.
They did not stay idle in that hut. Taehyung trained until the muscles in his arms trembled
into iron, striking at the empty air until his sword sang and the echoes of Jiwan's lessons
returned, the way the master had corrected his stance, the patience in his hand, the pride
that had once warmed a young prince's face. Each memory of Master Jiwan fed the vow in
Taehyung's chest. I will not let him fall in vain. He practiced until his limbs protested, until the
blade felt less like metal and more like an extension of his will.
Aera labored inside the hut and in the hidden clefts of the woods, where frost could be
coaxed into forms other hearts could not bear. The art of creating a core was not simple: it
demanded sacrifice, precise channels of power, the cold that belonged to Hanuel's line
woven into a vessel that could live inside another. Each night, sweat and frost mixed on her brow as she molded, sang the soft runes her mother had taught her, and poured into the
core everything she could spare.
She grew thin. Her laughter, already rare, faded into an exhausted hush. Her fingers
shook as she held the newborn core, a tiny pulse of white-blue light that hummed like a
caged storm. She knew, with the quiet certainty of someone who had been taught by fate itself, that the price would be cruel. The core would stabilize Taehyung's internal blaze, give him steadiness and focus, but it would leech much of her strength away. She thought of Hanuel's last breath and the vow that had been passed down; she thought of the child she had watched grow and the soldier who had become his protector. There was no question in her mind. She would give.
The three soldiers left the clearing and hunted for truth. They moved like ghosts to the
nearest villages, traded coin for gossip, and crept into ruined watchposts. They learned
routes, courier timetables, the faces of men who fed the rebels, smugglers, traders with
more loyalty to coin than crown, and a few mercenaries who might be paid to turn. Their
reports came back in whispers across the fire: the enemy's numbers were replenishing
slowly; a small merchant lord had begun to funnel men through a hidden pass; Mok-Jae's
network was not dead but bleeding, and there were still factions that would die for him.
Taehyung listened to each scrap of news and folded it into his training. He practiced not just
strikes but economy of motion, how to expend flame in a single, devastating strike and then
hold nothing but steel. He learned to let the fire live in the sword rather than in his blood, a
dangerous technique because every time he poured his flame into the blade, his skin felt
colder afterward and something deeper inside him burned until it hummed with pain. It
healed him outwardly; the wounds closed as if kissed by frost. But inside, each infusion was
a debt paid by his core.
By the end of the month, the core was finished. Aera presented it to him beneath the low
light of the hut, its small glow steady and cruelly bright. Her cheeks were hollow; her hands trembled as she placed it in him.
This will make your flames stable," she whispered. "You'll fight with purpose, not blind heat.
But it will cost me, I will become weaker. I… I might not be what I was."
Taehyung looked at her, at the sacrifice written in the lines of her face. He reached out with
one hand to steady hers and with the other took the tiny core. He did not speak for a long
time; words felt small. Then he bowed his head and touched his forehead to the tiny light, as
if naming the debt she paid into his bones.
He fitted the artificial core into his chest the way a man places a talisman against a wound.
At once, the fire in him stilled and flowed like a river contained by stone. He felt steadier,
less rage, more focus and yet an ache spread through his limbs, a hollow that was not
physical but as real as any blade.
Aera's color drained further. She sat back, breath shallow. The price was paid.
In the days before they moved, Taehyung poured flame into his sword until the metal drank it and glowed faintly along the edge. He learned to hold the heat there so that one swing could fell a grove; he learned also how each such discharge left him drained, the warmth retreating like a tide. The sword became a conduit, terrifying and beautiful, and he practiced until the motion was muscle and thought and instinct all at once.
At night, in the hut, he would sit by the small fire and look at Jiwan's old training cloak folded
on a trunk. He would think of the men who had died and of the three who would follow him
now, and he would vow quietly to himself, again and again, that he would not be the reason another soul fell. That vow turned into a shape in his chest, something that neither frost nor flame would soften.
When the morning came to leave, Aera could barely stand. Sang and the other two soldiers
though worn and scarred shouldered their packs with the stubborn resolve of men with
no other place to stand. They had chosen the Sword. They had chosen death or glory.
Taehyung mounted, sword at his side, the artificial core humming faintly against his ribs. He looked the three men in the eye and did not offer them speeches. He only gave them what
his master had given him once in a different life: a steady nod and the quiet command to be
brave.
They set out, small like a seed beneath the earth, but with the flame of a promise within
them. The journey toward the rebel base had become their own thin war: quiet steps,
shadowed tracks, and a single, terrible hope that when they struck, the blow would be enough.