Enormous and deep red,

“We are now in the Red City, your highness.” Yoonjae’s gaze remains forward, his body close enough to Chaeseong to observe all possibilities and angles of an attack.

Passerby commoners prompt themselves into a deep bow, some clamoring to their hands and knees. A young girl approaches in a clumsy gait, a distressed young woman hot on her heels. Her tiny hands hold up a piece of parchment — a flower scribbled on the front and a note on the back. She begins to mutter something but is ushered away quickly, any words forming on Yoonjae’s own lips languished by humble and frantic apologies.

He gently places the parchment in the lapel of his robe, resisting a smile. “A clearing has been prepared for the food tents. We will make our way there and set up a post where you can observe and speak to your people.”

He opens his mouth. 

These days, the weight of rebuttal was one impossible to shoulder, lest his pride take the fall. I didn’t ask for this, he thinks to say, looking at the soldier. What point would there be? Chaeseong already knows his response. His focus exchanges itself with the faces of straggling passersby and hooded peddlers, destitute families clustered around false prophets and soothsayers, desperate for anything even vaguely reminiscent of hope. They didn’t ask for this, either. 

His mouth stays open. 

These days, he could not find it in himself to relinquish the anger; he finds he needs it now more than ever. Only in rage could he kill another man. No other emotion was quite as thick, quite as tangible, quite as blinding. But what does one do with all of that anger? Where would it go if a day came where he wouldn’t need it anymore? Would he live with it, the same way he does now? This demon, festering in the pit of his stomach, stretching itself out inside of him, limb from limb, as if it were testing how his body fit, getting comfortable in his skin. Learning all of his mannerisms and adopting it beneath a blackening, stygian wave like a total eclipse; it feels like he’s only getting worse.

“Don’t—” Chaeseong begins to correct him, as if he could take it back, that time on the cliff where he bared his heart for the first time ever. It’d be more for Yoonjae than for himself, if he has to be honest. The man on that precipice seems further away as the days go by and the war stomps on, crushing anyone and everyone indiscriminately, eventually, but these ones first. 

The innocent, the ones who have no excuse to be involved like this, the sacrifices, the catalysts that transform war into incomprehensible, iniquitous evil. He knew that kind of irredeemable bloodletting would soak the earth forever, even before the south had been razed. Everyone did. It did not stop it from being burned though, did it?

“Don’t worry too much.” Chaeseong substitutes, relaxing whatever had calcified his countenance. He shifts to draw just the slightest distance between himself and Yoonjae, expression playful with furrowed brows and the huff of a smirk. “You aren’t doing my reputation any favors by crowding around me like that. Imagine what they’ll think of me…” He murmurs, preoccupied with his glimpse of the girl and her wayward scurrying. He glances to his guard, then, parsing Yoonjae’s smile. 

leaving her for weeks alone, chaeyul has no answer for that, and she still cradles him like the first time they met. the affection in her eyes feels like it could stave off anything bad in the world, and he wishes he could concentrate more on the way her giggle pinches at his heart if not for the way it sinks to his stomach at her words.

“what?” he repeats again around the lump in his throat, and his own voice sounds faraway to him like he’s listening as a third person privy to their conversation. words aren’t enough to encapsulate the panic that claws at his chest, the realisation that his impenetrable fortress for her isn’t as impenetrable as he thought it was and worse yet, that he wouldn’t have known until it was too late because he left her alone. he thinks she sees the way his face falls anyways, that sharpness in his eyes. “there was a man with a knife in your chambers?” 

his fingers catch her wrist, pulling her closer to him when his other hand reaches to cradle her cheek, eyes scanning for any scratch. when he talks again, there’s an edge of irritation. “why did you not tell me? why did nobody tell me?” the biting of his tongue does little to stop the anger from boiling over. “did nobody deem it important enough to tell me?” 

She’s silent. The weight of recognition, his eyes, is as heavy as an anvil. It presses her into whatever lay underneath her, as though she was being sentenced. It was an imprisonment whose coil was unlike any shackle the world had or could ever impose upon someone. His words are like a sword, too keen to have been forged by anything other than love. She knows that, at least; nothing else would ever be as penetrating and unmistakable. Cut this way. Hurt when he holds her as if he were memorizing her. Ask questions with enough fervor to double as pleas. She sits there mute and stupid, wide-eyeing him like he’s the oddity, her mouth shaping itself around the taste of dense air. 

“Are you …  mad at me?” She murmurs, her head tilting and her gaze settling on him as tentative and as reluctant as an emergency measure. Yerin pulls her wrist closer to herself defensively. “We notified you as soon as it happened. I wrote the missive and sealed it myself. A guard set out to the capital that same day, I even watched him leave. It’s— It’s not my fault.” She rebuttals almost childishly, her eyebrows shoved into a deep crease. 

Yerin places her hand beside herself as if to punish him, uses it to push herself up with, stepping back, away from him. “I was under the impression you had received my letter but didn’t think anything of it. That it was nothing to worry about. That the problem had been resolved. I didn’t know that you didn’t know. If I had known, I wouldn’t have—  I certainly wouldn’t have gone about telling you that way. Did you just think that I wouldn’t tell you?” 

Yerin pauses. It wasn’t fair of her to say that. To lie. If it had been anything else, or simply, if it had not left her terrified, she would’ve been content to say nothing about it to Chaeyul. Not even out of courtesy for him, but for herself. It was like waking up to a wound she couldn’t source, ambiguous and threatening with gashes and infected purples. Something awful and portentous she thought better to leave alone and let heal. 

If she pries too deep, she might find the contaminant inside of herself still. Or that she was the hideous and infectious thing altogether. She might find she had to involve more people just to recover. She might find she has to accept things as they are, instead of how she was wishing they would be. That impenetrable bubble of hers, where a drawn knife is only a threat when it cuts and anything less is negligible. Which is to say, she’s still breathing, isn’t she? 

“You need to relax, Chaeyul. You’re still wounded.” Yerin chides, returning to softness because she knows it better. “There’s no reason to be upset now. Everything ended up fine, for better or for worse. Straining yourself will only prolong the healing process. Come,” she commands with too much of a smile to be anything forcible, extending her hand toward him. 

“I want to be useful.” Yerin replies. She doesn’t know what that entails, having heard before that existence is meaningful innately. When she considers her own life, however, there’s an absence smearing the vision. An emptiness, like a blackening vignette fraying the edges of it. “I want to help other people. I want to feel like I’m helping other people. And I want to believe that I’m doing just that, without somebody needing to tell me that I am. I’d love that. I would love to feel as involved as everyone else does.” She pauses in an acquiescent moment of self-reflection, opting to leave what she knows unsaid under the certainty that everyone else knows it, too. That she was responsible for changing that, could put anything toward trying to change it and she hadn’t. 

“My youngest sister,” she attests. “Yire.” The subsequent moment is her pausing, Yeona aware of her own unawareness and similarly, the vulnerability that reveals itself amidst her stillness and her perpending deliberations. 

In the silence and the unraveling abyss, truth feels harmless. Without words, he can admit desire, say how he wants to find a corpse. How he wants confirmation beyond word of mouth, beyond the tears and the naysaying of the people who loved those once living, left behind now. Without words, he can admit he doesn’t believe it. That distance is a privilege he has been indulging, trying to keep the same proximity to tragedy that a tree could have, if it were razed by fire and collapsed through the ceiling of a family’s home.

Incidental, not too good a place for blame.

You should want to make a weapon out of culpability, he thinks, or something else with a haft. You want to be able to point it, want to be able to use it. Happenstance tragedy doesn’t feel the same without a name to its shape. He imagines the mother he had met toppled over on the streets of the derelict city, the rocks and dirt she had scrounged up beneath her tattered cowl and threw at him. She said something about how her son was a soldier. If Chaeseong didn’t exist, maybe she would’ve just blamed the war, but bodies are only equivalent with bodies. Besides, who wants to go around blaming trees for the rest of their life when you know why the fire’s started?

Chaeseong didn’t know her son, though. This new body could be proof.

This death now could solidify it, the atrocity and his own penchant for turmoil, how he’s another cog in the wheel churning it out. He thinks about Akane there in the gorge and the pledge he made to kill her. Without words, he can admit he has no idea what it would’ve looked like. He can confess he was hoping she would survive anyway. He had just wanted to show her she was wrong about him. That the people did know him; that he bled just the same. Without a title, however, he could not name a single casualty in the war thus far. He knew them by their faction, maybe, or as a part of the “losses” military leaders had only summarized in their reports.

Do you, at any point, think about me as an individual? What my favorite color is, perhaps?

Inside of the ocean, he can admit he never really has. It was easier to understand death as an inevitability, as the thing that happens because of something like war. If he thought about it any deeper, he would’ve come to water seeking absolution much sooner. Would’ve stayed there.

Chaeseong sputters as he breaches the surface, his hands outstretched in a blind search for Siren’s support. “I can’t find them. I was trying to find them.”

the hand’s chamber was cavernous, more than five times the size of  the average palace dwelling. he called a servant to bring forth a salve, and invited his guest, with no words, to sit at his desk while they waited. siwoo sat behind his desk, placing the sword he had taken from one of the soldiers in front of him. blood still stained the blade, like a gruesome reminder of what had come to pass. siwoo reached into his desk for a folded piece of brilliant white cloth. it was printed with so many white eagles, and soon, they turned red as he wiped the sword clean. “my men will give you no more trouble,” he said, “if they do, i will see them punished.

"for now, await the servant girl.” then, the room fell silent, as if siwoo had ordered all conversation to the gallows. and it stayed silent, deafeningly so, for the entire time that siwoo wiped down the rapier; as if his motions continued to command the noise. he was nearly done when he paused, and looked up across the table. he saw words jumping at their lips. “you want to say something. speak,” he said, “i’m in no mood to guess.”

She did want to say something. How could she speak it, though? Seeing him slit the other man's throat had introduced her to a sanguine reality she had done well to avoid. A reality she had done everything to avoid, commissioned impassable walls and shed all familial bonds just to do away with it. She had never even seen her brother use a sword to kill another person before, but she knew that he could. She knew he had the heart to. And her knowing that was enough justification; his proximity, the mere possibility, was enough justification. 

Yerin plucks at the lilac tassel adorning robes a moon’s silver-silk and pokes her fingertips through the threads. She watches him, lips pouty and looking as if all the words Siwoo had predicted were overflowing beneath the lid she was haphazardly keeping shut. She wants to ask him if the soldier had meant it, deliberate about the hypocrisies and the immoralities of it all, tell him of her gratitude. Looking at him as she is, it all feels rather pointless.

“I was hoping—” She tries instead, just as uselessly. The word doesn’t feel right; war is not a climate warm enough for hope. “I was trying to find my way south. Do you think you could help me?” The question is abrupt to even her, stretching her eyes wide with surprise she tries to repress, clearing her throat as she shifts in her seat. “I oversee a botanical garden with a vast trove of medicinal plants. I thought that I could— I was—  I want to head south and help with treatment there. Traveling alone has proven troublesome, so… Could you provide me with transportation?”

Yerin pauses, wishing she could retract everything that had come from her mouth. It feels idealistic because it is idealistic, driven by a sense of guilt over her privilege to pick and choose whether to involve herself or not.

“The edge is cracked.” She says, pointing her finger at the side of the blade. “Down to the fuller.” Yerin stands to receive the blade that had not lent itself to her scrutiny, hands on his desk as she leans over and peers most curiously. 

“So… yes there is some truth in what she says, Chaeseong. I will be frank with you as usual. That is why I am suggesting we do this publicly. If you wish to know them, you best start now and in full force. There will be no time for any other activities if you intend on giving your all for our people. It means giving all of your self and sacrificing your personal proclivities. I know you would be willing to do so. I understand you wish to do things by way of your heart. I am not your Hand but I do advise that you do not become prisoner there.” He utters the same words said to Chaeseong’s reluctant betorthed, and without a hint of hesitation. It is clear he stands by every word he says — and speaks them as a friend.

“If I may be as bold to say, your grace, your head has drifted far above the clouds.” And Yoonjae is meant to be the stone that keeps him grounded. An unruly burst of flames and the cool stones that detained them.

“You can act on your matters of the heart and do as you please when the smoke of war has cleared. The path our people stand on is overcome with flames and you cannot stray before you put it out or it will engulf us all. The people of the Fire Nation… they are the ones that deserve to be called your true love as the Fire Lord and a servant to this country. You must choose them first, always, even if it dissatisfies you. Such is the role you were given. They are suffering far more than any of us ever will, hence this move that we shall display publicly to bolster your bond.”

Chaeseong makes repetition his busywork, his steps arrhythmic but unwavering as the ground beneath them transitions from palace to earth. With this newfound answer, he begins to wonder if his question was better left unasked. His eyes scour their periphery nearest to the man beside him. He turns his head, as if to only glance was cowardice and obscurity; as if Chaeseong’s undeterred stare could speak words in itself, amplified by his silence, convey the things no mortal tongue could convey. 

There is a depth to those eyes. A cavernous gulf, stretched far by those inenarrable sayings. By those near-incantations, the ones that siphon the fire inside of himself in exchange for burrowing a tunnel so deep in to himself. So deep it reaches into his closest hell. The most personal hell. The one inside of himself. It makes a passageway, goes so deep into his hell that what Chaeseong summons forward is the most red demon. 

A demon that takes its form in the way he occupies his space. A demon that takes its form in the way he tilts his head. A demon that takes its form in the curl of his lips and their uneasy breadth. How their ends press on like rusted prongs and stab under his eyes like pitchfork parades, express themselves in a burst of blood. 

What does one do with seven-hundred-thirty days of anger? Where does it go? And how thin is the margin dividing it from hate? 

“The Fire Nation…” Chaeseong repeats, voice low in a murmur whose weight exposes his elsewise preoccupation. The pair stand outside now, a few meters shy of their destination. He’s regarding what he can of the city’s peaks from this vantage point. “The ones who I must call my true love.” 

I was scared and I was worried that they would—

Sayuri couldn’t finish her sentence then, but he could. 

That they would kill me.

“Yes,” Chaeseong says, returning to his company now, acknowledging them with a smile that feels like one. “I suppose I should. Love them unconditionally and be there for them always, just as they are for me. Endless in their loyalty and steadfast in their conviction that I will wrestle us free of this darkness.” A pause. Something is shifting.

“Give all of myself, because there is even more that remains of me after my name has been exchanged for family tradition and I will never be able to go home again. I am a dragon, Yoonjae. Where else would I be but above the clouds? What smoke and flame would ever blind my vision? Deter me from my course? I know what I’m doing. I’m here. I don’t need lecturing from an artist lying to himself with a sword because his forebears bade it so. You don’t need to worry about me.” 

His steps halt abruptly, interrupted by the solid structure preserving the separation between the Hari Bulkan and the Red City. Its sentries regard them formally, say something about the update they had received regarding their arrival, extend their arms forward with quiet indication and guidance. Right this way, they say.

The world unveiled before them is one he has never seen before. Chaeseong finds himself unable to finish what point he thought he had been making, struck by the sudden realization of what Yoonjae had meant. Of who Yoonjae had meant.

“When I first came here, it seldom occurred to me to introduce myself by that name. By Noeul.” He would pause, gaze drifting toward its periphery where his own, unseen curiosity would teeter: Why? 

“I don’t know,” he says, answering the voice inside. “Either I was content with my new name or I was eager to adjust to this new place. Being here now, seeing what I have and going where I have gone, I can say I do miss it; miss him. Noeul. Every day.” His eyes empty and cast their nothingness over another void, the one he suddenly feels himself standing upon. The palace, from its floors to walls to its ceiling, all emptiness. 

“I was going to say that he still lives in my heart. That, since being forgotten could be worse than death, I haven’t forgotten him. And I could still say that. Say that and be honest. But it doesn’t feel sufficient. It’s not enough to remember. I wish I was still there. But if I never came here…” Chaeseong breathes in. Chaeseong breathes out. 

“i was sorry to hear of your husband’s passing,” yisu spoke as he spooned loose leaf tea into an ornate steeping ball. in the silver, small dragons were twisted with flowering vines in a constant dance. in another, the sun and moon forever chased each other. he took great care setting the infusers inside painted porcelain teacups, but they still clinked heavily. he poured cool, clear water into the cups, then curved his hands around them for a moment. steam began to rise, then slowly, the water turned green. 

“war is an ugly thing,” yisu quietly slid a cup across the table to her, then lifted his eyes and offered her a small, solemn smile, “but not the ugliest of things. he died honorable and free, for an honest purpose, protecting his people from tyrannical injustice. i hope it offers you comfort.”

Amidst certain pandemonium, routine is a welcomed deception. It is a privilege, too; here with him, the world and its ruination feels as far as inevitability does, or at least, Summer Sea where she first met him. Hana receives her cup with both hands tightly nestled, her lips grazing its brim as she savors a thoughtful sip, watching him with a simper, quiet. “It’s how he would have wanted to die. Protecting the weak; those undeserving of the toll war takes. When he first heard he was being deployed to the south, he was overjoyed.” She lies seamlessly, more concerned with how she would look if she didn’t. “I wonder,” she intones teasingly, replacing her cup to the table before her.  Hana inclines herself over the table just enough to intrude where others may think she shouldn’t, her voice hushed and inquisitive half-purr of a murmur.

at this point, akane was far too exhausted to argue with anything he said. 

instead, she remained silent and looked right past him, blocking out any sound he made. she felt like there was no use in listening to him speak on and on about the same things; there was no use in trying to make him understand something he would never have the capacity to even if he lived another million years.

she was tired and so she stood quietly, making eye contact from time to time so he wouldn’t realise that she was in fact meeting him with utter ignorance. she knew that it didn’t matter what he was saying or what she would say in response to that, it didn’t matter how much longer they would shout and hiss at each other. after all, in the grand scheme of things, this very meeting was of no significance. it seemed like this conversation would never bring any of them any further and if she continued to add fuel to his fire, they would continue to burn until one of them decided to extinguish the other. and if she was being honest, she didn’t think it would be too pretty.

nonetheless, a couple of his words reach her ears despite her attempt at ignoring every single one of them. she just couldn’t help it. takao akane had always been interested in what people that had more power than her had to say– more precisely, she had always been interested in how she could use those people to her own advantages.

then suddenly, her ears pearked up. finally, she thought. finally you’re saying something that means something to me.

akane couldn’t help but smile.

“ that’s everything i asked of you. so mote it be. ” she remarked, trying to bite her tongue to appear more stern and less amused. there were a million things she wanted to say, a million things that would only continue to anger his spirit further and further … but she knew it would be foolish to let the petty side of her get the upper hand this time. “ i am now politely asking you to let me retreat back to my chambers now as i feel like i have spent more than enough time talking to you. ”

he doesn’t deserve her, he knows. but he’s always been selfish, and he refuses to change that when it comes to her.

her words ring in his brain with that dim sort of fear that creeps up quietly at first, before sending his heart lurching, thudding against his chest. chaeyul sits up, hand reaching up to set the damp towel aside on the table when his eyebrows draw together, mouth turned down in that mild frown. he traps yerin in his gaze. “the man in the courtyard four nights ago?”

“what are you talking about?” he catches the own bite in his voice but it’s too late to soften now, the words sharpened. “what do you mean there was a man here?”

They render one another into certain, unmistakable softness. For her, she is always the mound of impressionable love-putty. Chaeyul, comparatively, seems encased. Like a chrysalis, or something more uninspiring and cold, like a husk. She has to push both thumbs into the center hard and crack the shell. What seeps out is never what she wants it to be. Thinking of it now, however, she realizes she doesn’t know what she imagines would have come trickling. Does she want the stories of the massacres? Does she want to know about the things he would never forget? The irremovable horrors of wartime and whether the bodies are more ash or blood and gore by the time the dust has settled? 

Safe within the boundary of her own mind, for once, she finds herself unable to lie: of course she doesn’t. Yerin cares as far as she can touch. How convenient then, that she’s kept herself here to tend to him whenever he is present and when he’s gone, unresponsive plants. 

It isn’t apathy, at least. She knows that much. Knows that if she opened her heart to it, unshackled her mind and ever really considered it, she would be ravaged. She would lose the part of herself Chaeyul is trying to protect. The part she knows he’s trying to protect. It’s an incomprehensible feeling, an indescribable one, or maybe it’s just revolting, the image in her head where she’s only going as far as the gate with him. Where she just undoes the hatch for him and waves him off, unknowing but knowing, content but discontent, wanting but not really wanting. When he first told her that he loved her, Yerin had told him that it couldn’t be true. 

What can I do for you? She asked. 

What do you need to do for me? He answered.

Something. Yerin almost says as much now, but she swallows it down beneath the coverage of estranged silence, leaning back, unoffended but confused. It shows on her face until it doesn’t, replaced by the breadth of a half-smile whose push still reaches her eyes. She loves when he does that, makes big things into small things with a placating joke or a harmless ruse. The man she had met in the flowerbed would never leave. Never leave her, at least. 

The giggle she gives is genuine and more hearty than the last. She pushes at him lightly. “I don’t know,” Yerin mumbles back, teasing him. She shrugs her shoulders.