--

25

--

These days, when you and Woohyun fought, he was always the first to apologize, but it didn’t seem to help with your anger towards him. And it didn’t help that Seungho assigned you a babysitter to follow you everywhere you went.

“Seungho. Is this really necessary?” you asked one day as the knight browsed through the library while you were having lessons with Seungho.

“Of course. You almost killed yourself. And until you can prove that you can take care of yourself, he will follow you everywhere you go. Everywhere.”

--

“I’m going to the bathroom,” you told the knight as you headed into your bedroom. He leaned in the doorway before looking around a bit, taking in the decor. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited. You blinked at him and scurried into the bathroom, shutting the door behind you.

You hadn’t gotten around to asking the knight what his name was, or thank him for saving your life. He probably thought you were rude or something, but you were suffocating under all of the protection, and you just wanted to feel a little bit free.

You hurried over to the window on the other side of the bathroom and stuck your head out, looking for people before holding your dress down and climbing up, stepping down from the high tower on water steps.

You reached the ground and landed with a soft thump and smiled to yourself before smoothing out your dress and turning around to come face to face with the knight again with an amused smile on his face.

“Do you always leave by the window when you’re done using the bathroom? I think the door would’ve been easier,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest and smirking at you.

“How... How did you know I was...”

“You scurry when you’re planning something. You’ve always done that,” he said, stretching his arms and looking away from you. You furrowed your eyebrows. How did he know something like that about you?

“How did you know that?”

The knight pursed his lips and blinked a few times, choosing not to answer you.

“What’s your name?” you asked suspiciously, narrowing your eyes.

“It’s Myungsoo. And if you keep that up, you’re going to have permanent lines on your forehead,” he said, reaching out to poke you in the forehead. Your memory flashed again, and you saw him in your memory, looking much younger, much happier, with less... roughness to him.

Myungsoo saw you freeze and furrowed his eyebrows. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” you said, still in a daze.

“Don’t you usually go to training around this time? If you’re mad at Woohyun, you can take it out on me. I’m pretty sure I can take it,” Myungsoo said, rotating his shoulders and grinning at you.

You scoffed and tossed your hair over your shoulder. “I’m not the Arch Mage for no reason.”

--

From what he’d seen of you since he got back, your personality had a drastic change. There was something off about the way you did things, and it made him confused. Myungsoo frowned as he watched you warm up as Seungho sidled up to him with a smile on his face.

“How goes guard duty?”

“It’s been a week, and she just asked me what my name was earlier,” Myungsoo said, taking his eyes off of you and moving them over to Seungho.

“Well, she is a bit unhappy about it. I’m surprised she hasn’t tried to ditch you yet.”

“She has. But it was pretty obvious she was going to. I don’t know if she thinks I’m as dumb as Joon but...”

Seungho snorted before crossing his arms over his chest. “You’re not going to warm up?”

“I don’t need to,” Myungsoo said. This time, it was his turn to smile at Seungho.

“Myungsoo! Are you ready to lose?” you called out.

“Absolutely,” he said, stepping towards you.

“Don’t go easy on me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

You took a stance as Myungsoo stood there, hands still in his pockets. Byunghee made his way over to Seungho and raised an eyebrow, watching as you gave Myungsoo wary glances. Myungsoo’s smile was turning into a slight smirk as you sized him up.

“You know. All of the knights are leagues behind Myungsoo. They say he’s even more than supernatural,” Seungho said as you attacked.

You sent a large burning fireball where he was standing at blinding speed. Myungsoo disappeared from his spot in a blur, appearing behind you and shoving at your back as the fireball landed and exploded.

“You’re dead,” he said, chuckling as you huffed.

“You don’t say.” Byunghee’s voice trained off as he strained his eyes to catch Myungsoo’s movements. He didn’t waste a single move. Everything he did had a purpose, which was amazing considering how fast he was moving. Anyone else would be a mass of flailing limbs trying to move that fast.

Myungsoo was moving too fast for your fireballs, making you frustrated as he sent his own back, slightly singe your clothes. Your eyes couldn’t keep up with him, and then you realized they didn’t have to. You stopped your fireballs and looked around for him, and when you didn’t find him, you quickly summoned up a wall of water and send out a circular wall, soaking the ground.

“What is she...”

“Oh, how clever. She knows she can’t see Myungsoo because her eyes aren’t fast enough, but unless Myungsoo can naturally levitate,” Byunghee said, “then he’s going to leave foot prints in the water.”

Your eyes scanned the water, and you saw a trail moving, and sent a barrage of razor wind in that direction. Myungsoo was caught slightly off guard by your attack and brought up his arm to catch the blunt of your attack.

He suddenly appeared before your eyes, sleeve of his shirt torn from your wind. You smiled and followed up with a barrage of fireballs. He brought his other hand up, and you watched in disbelief as your fireballs circled around in front of him before flying back at you.

Surprised, you threw up a water wall and heard a hissing noise as the fire evaporated it and shrouded the room in steam. You whipped up a vortex of wind to gather all of the steam quickly before Myungsoo would have the chance to attack again, but you were too late, and he was gone.

You looked around warily until you heard a shuffle and immediately threw up a wall of water around you and froze it, surrounding yourself in ice.

Then you felt fingers pressing against your back, and you stopped.

“You’re dead,” you heard Myungsoo whisper. You turned around and saw him take a few steps back with a smirk on his face and lean against the wall of ice.

“That was impressive. You’ve certainly gotten better.” He pressed his hand against the ice and sent it shattering to the ground. Seungho nodded in approval.

“You’ve still got a lot of work to do. I told you not to slack off, but no. You had to take that vacation around the land of the dead with Woohyun.”

You stared at Myungsoo in awe as he stuffed his hands into his pockets again and walked over to Seungho.

“You didn’t even use any of your powers,” Seungho said, raising an eyebrow at him.

“Sure, I did. I shot her with fireballs, didn’t I?”

“Those were sparks for you, weren’t they?”

“Maybe,” Myungsoo said as Byunghee walked up to you and handed you a sword. “But she doesn’t need to know that.”

--

Joon noticed that you weren’t the only one to go through a personality change. Yours changed after you bonded with Woohyun, something he wasn’t expecting. Myungsoo’s personality changed drastically as well.

After a hundred years, he knew that there was no way that Myungsoo would come back with the exact same personality he had before he left. He didn’t expect that his personality would change so much though, and he suspected that it had something to do with you.

“Myungsoo, are you free to talk?” Joon asked, staring at the other boy as he walked by him. Joon mentally corrected himself. Myungsoo wasn’t a boy anymore. He was far from the boy that used to be the bane of his existence when he lived at the castle.

“Sure,” he said lazily, jerking his head in the direction of yours and Woohyun’s room. “They seem to be making up. I have some time to kill.”

--

“Training treated you well,” Joon said as he watched Myungsoo stretch out lazily in the garden.

“I would hope so.” A silence fell across the two of them. Joon didn’t remember it ever being difficult to talk to Myungsoo, whether he was begrudgingly thanking him for something, or yelling at him for being a pain in his... well.

“What changed?”

Myungsoo was silent. What changed? Everything changed. Rivedon, itself, looked exactly the same way it did a hundred years ago when he left. It was the people and the atmosphere that changed. Seungho was getting tired, falling behind on his work, and at the same time, teaching Myungsoo how to pick up the slack.

There was so much tension in the air from the impending attack from Armalis, even though he’d heard that it was quiet for the hundred years he was gone. The town tried not to worry about it, going on with business as usual, but Myungsoo could feel it. The unease. The anxiety. And with the news of Seungho’s dwindling life, he could understand why the people felt that way.

And here was Joon, looking a little more run down, dark circles underneath his eyes like he spent too much time thinking about things when he shouldn’t be. Or thinking in general.

But none of these things were what Myungsoo voiced.

“... It’s like a whole part of her personality is missing.”

Joon didn’t have to ask to know who he was referring to. “What do you mean?”

Myungsoo blinked a few times as he pursed his lips. “There’s no... spark. No snark to her personality anymore. She feels empty, like something was locked away inside and now, she has to live with only a part of herself.” He turned his head towards Joon’s curious stare for a moment before closing his eyes.

“It’s like the only reason she even exists anymore is to love Woohyun and be loved by him.”

--

It was mental torture to follow you and Woohyun around after you two made up. The amount of love between the two of you was going to make Myungsoo sick, and it made him a bit nauseated to see the looks of love exchanged between you two.

He reminded himself to remain impassive. A hundred years of training would be wasted if he couldn’t at least control himself from strangling Woohyun every time he said something so utterly disgusting, Myungsoo would never be able to scrub it from his mind.

He didn’t understand how you could deal with this for so long, until he noticed that you had a sort of far off look in your eyes when Woohyun was talking to you. What he wouldn’t give to be there with you, wondering what you were thinking about.

Myungsoo sat in Seungho’s study, shuffling around the scrolls on his desk to find the one he was looking for while Seungho sat in one of the more comfortable chairs, staring at the portrait of Gyuri on his wall. Joon told Myungsoo that it took a few decades, but he finally uncovered it.

There was something comforting about Gyuri’s gaze in that portrait. The artist must’ve been nothing short of a genius to be able to capture something as ethereal as Gyuri onto canvas. Though he hadn’t gotten to know Gyuri for too long before she died, Myungsoo would say that she was the closest thing he had to a mother.

“Do you remember your parents, Myungsoo?” Seungho asked, his eyes still on Gyuri’s portrait.

“They were farmers in the country. I don’t remember too much about them. I think I was only five when I was brought here to the castle to start training.”

Seungho watched out of the corner of his eye as Myungsoo signed a loopy signature at the bottom of a scroll and sending it over his shoulder into the cubby. If Seungho didn’t know any better, he’d say he was looking at a younger version of himself.

“Yes, you were five. You didn’t even cry. Did you know that? You didn’t cry about being separated from your parents. And I don’t think you ever went to see them again until you heard they’d died.”

Myungsoo blinked a few times, setting the quill down for a moment. He’d never felt any attachment to his parents. He was grateful to them, of course, for giving him life and taking care of him for the first five years of his life. But for some reason, he couldn’t really identify with them. He couldn’t even remember their faces anymore.

“Will you remember me? When I pass away,” Seungho asked, staring off aimlessly. Myungsoo’s eyes focused on him, and he felt something sad worm its way into his heart.

Seungho.

“... You’re the closest thing I have to a father.”

Seungho chuckled and sighed. “Gyuri and I were the closest things you had to parents?”

“And Joon is the closest thing to an older brother. But don’t tell him that. I don’t want him going sentimental on me.”

“Speaking of Joon... is there something he knows about me that I don’t know?”

“Yes,” Myungsoo said, staring at Seungho with a playful smirk on his face before going back to the paperwork. Seungho blinked a few times in confusion at Myungsoo and sighed. He wasn’t going to get any answers from him either.

--

“Full moon tonight. You’re in for a treat,” Joon said as he walked by Myungsoo in the hallway. Myungsoo had the day off, and with the full moon, he was going to gather a little bit of extra power for his eternity stone. He just wanted to be left alone that day.

“Oh?”

“Her true form. A sight to see.”

--

You woke up in the evening, fully wrapped up in blankets and Woohyun’s arms. He was sleeping so peacefully, you didn’t have the heart to wake him up, so you wiggled out of his arms gently and got ready for the night.

You still weren’t used to your wings. They’d filled in over the years, until they towered over you, threatening to topple you if you weren’t careful. For the first few years, Woohyun thought it would be funny to shove you around, watching as you teetered dangerously in one direction while you yelled at him until he helped you.

Now that you were a little bit stronger, it was easier to carry them around, but it was still a pain to get dressed in the mornings.

Your eyes were a light, glowing grey, and something around you seem to exude grace. Your movements seemed to flow better, and everyone around the castle seemed to marvel at you. A true angel, they said.

You walked by one of the castle windows and stopped. Someone was spread out on your favorite bench in the gardens, head resting on their arms. You could see that their shirt was open, and a bright red stone was glowing on their chest.

Curious, you hopped up onto the ledge and floated down, extending your wings to slow your decent into the gardens.

Myungsoo had his eyes closed, relaxing on the cool bench in the moonlight. He could feel his eternity stone gathering up the moonlight and storing it as energy, and it was relaxing his body and soothing his emotions.

Soohyun called him stupid, for exposing his weak point like that. Myungsoo shrugged his shoulders at him every time. Hiding in plain sight. I don’t think people think I’m stupid enough to expose something like this so readily.

But he was. Soohyun said it would be the reason he was going to die one day, because he underestimated someone.

“You’re dead.”

Myungsoo opened up an eye to see you reaching over and tapping his eternity stone on his chest. And of course, you would know that it would kill him if you destroyed it. The tap alone made his body tense up with anxiety, but he took a few deep breaths to calm himself down.

He looked you up and down with his open eye before closing it again and making himself comfortable, pulling a leg up onto the bench and letting the other one hang off the side. “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your company on this moonlit night? I have an off day today.”

You scoffed and sat down on the bench across from him, raising an eyebrow. “Bodyguards don’t have a day off,” you said.

“I do.”

You stared at Myungsoo for a moment while something prodded at your heart. There was something. There was definitely something about him you were trying to remember, but what was it?

Myungsoo let out a breath of air and sighed, adjusting his head on his arms. You saw something on his necklace slide down and rest on the bench. You squinted at it and made out a ring.

“Is that... half of an eternity ring?”

Myungsoo’s eyes snapped open, and he sat up abruptly, closing his shirt and buttoning it up. You watched him clear his throat and bid you goodbye before turning around to leave.

“No! Wait! Did you have someone waiting for you when you came back from training? Am I keeping you from seeing her?”

Myungsoo stopped and glanced over his shoulder. You felt your own heart squeezing when you saw the look of sadness, maybe a hint of defeat in his eyes.

“No.”

--

The High Priest was becoming restless. He was working his forces day and night, giving none rest until they completed what he wanted.

You sister was tired these days. She was thinner, sleepier, but she surveyed the madness the High Priest was creating and felt herself get anxious with worry. She sent you a message through her personal knight, hoping that somehow it would reach you.

My dearest sister,

I hope this letter reaches you well. I didn’t have a chance to congratulate you on your wedding, though it’s been more than a hundred years now. I hope things are going well for you, and maybe I’m wondering if you have children yet. I’m still single, and not a day goes by when I don’t get a proposal for marriage.
But enough with the pleasantries. The High Priest is planning something heinous. He’s using my power to fuel it, and I apologize that I cannot oppose him because he would kill me if I tried. He may end up killing me with this mad attempt to take over the land of the dead. He plans on using more than just reanimated corpses as foot troops. He’s got illusionists weaving spells of epic proportions, designed to complete destroy your mental capacity. He’s got time experts warping the field of time, and I’m afraid.
I don’t know what he’s planning, I can only report what I’ve been seeing. But rest assured, the Gods will not take too kindly to this. The air and skies of Armalis have been darker than usual, and I know that we will take the punishment from the Gods soon.
Please prepare yourself. I don’t know what I would do if something were to happen to you. I love you so much. Please be safe.

Your loving sister-

“What are you working on there?”

Your sister froze and glanced over her shoulder to see the High Priest standing in the doorway, giving her a look. She discretely hid the letter and help up a dummy letter for him to see. He swept across the room and took it from her hands, eyes scanning over it.

“I need you in the manufacturing room again,” he said, giving her suspicious look before leaving. She breathed a sigh of relief before rolling up the real letter and discretely handing it off to her knight.

“Please make sure she gets it...”