In a lonely room tucked away in the heart of the ocean, a body lay limply in a pool of blood, eyes wide open.

“If only you’d chosen Refrain, my friend, you could have built the future that you yearned for. Reality has never shown the future clearly; the future has always been out of reach, even to magic,” Sungjong whispered sadly as he closed Sungyeol’s dull eyes.

“You were right, then, Sungjong. His heart never held greed—it held pain,” Myungsoo said, voice raw with painful emotions.

~°~

“Excuse me, my princess,” a young man in a double-ed coat said softly, pleasantly. The young woman who sat in a wheelchair in the middle of a beautifully constructed garden contained within ornate walls turned to him with a gentle smile on her face, her way of acknowledging his presence. “There are visitors who request your presence,” he explained. “They have specifically asked for you.”

She gave him a puzzled expression, followed by a nod with a gentle smile on his face. She motioned for him to allow them in.

“They have asked to meet you privately, where “no prying eyes would be present to witness” your exchange,” he explained.

She nodded understandingly.

Her knight stepped onto the grassed ground, and gently wheeled her out of the garden. He brought her to the music room, where she spent much of her time alone, surrounded only by the gentle sounds of the instruments. No one ever bothered her there, it was her sanctuary.

After a few moments, her guests were brought in. Her eyes shone with puzzlement as she watched her visitors stride into the room. She’d never met them before.

“I’m sorry,” those were the first words that the handsome young man said to her. His voice shook slightly, as he was unable to meet her eyes.

In the moments that followed, her world crumbled around her. There, in front of her, the two men had laid the corpse of her beloved brother. He was clad in elegant clothes, clothes she had never seen before, soft as silk, adorned with precious pearls and gems. He looked lovely, as lovely as a dead man could.

She looked at them with much grief, tears b in her eyes.

“What has happened to the prince?” her knight spoke rigidly. He understood her pain, as he’d become her voice.

“He finally saw the mirrors that he’d always wanted to see, dear Princess,” Sungjong explained gently. “But he had mistaken the image of a possible future as an image, possibly, of the inevitable future, or a tormenting present. He thought you were dead,” he said. “He thought you had been killed, and had killed himself out of grief.”

She fell out of her chair, wrapping her arms around the cold body of her brother, weeping.

Another person’s choice lay before the elves. They weren’t too sure what it would be, but they feared what it could be. Days after they had brought back the prince to his kingdom, the guillotine fell upon the head of the gentle young woman they had met not too long ago.

She shared his gentle smile, and it would haunt them for eternity--just as the ghosts of their fellow elves and the merfolk haunted the empty hallways that their kinds used to walk through.

A/N: The relationship of Sungyeol and Ailee (his cameo sister) was inspired by the relationship of Lelouch and Nunnally from Code Geass. Were you able to guess correctly? And, just to wrap it all up: register, in linguistics, is the kind of language that you use when you talk to different people. Like formal, when you're delivering a speech, or casual when you're talking to a friend. Some fishing communities do have a variety of their language for use when they're out at sea and the normal one when they're safely on land. Sometimes, these overlap, with Freudian slips of the tongue when on land, and these get assimilated with the normal variety. I hope you enjoyed this story!