"Honey! You're so clumsy. How could you drop your mug like that?"

Zhang Yixing faintly heard his wife's voice in the background, but he was too fixated on the television to notice.

"Honey?" she asked again, failing to get his attention. "What's wrong?"

She followed his line of sight and realised he was watching the breaking news broadcast. A solemn looking reporter in a grey jacket addressed the nation.

"Queen Kim Jisoo of New Revenet has passed away. Early this afternoon at twelve-fifteen, the Queen gave birth to a baby boy and soon thereafter suffered from traumatic bleeding. It was reported that there were no complications during the pregnancy, and the trauma was unexpected. Palace doctors tried to save her life, but despite their best efforts, were unable to do so and as a result, will face an inquiry in months to come. The Palace has requested privacy in this dark time and has declared that the nation will go into official mourning from midnight tonight. The Queen is survived by her husband, King Min Yoongi, and her two sons, Crown Prince Min Yunho and Prince Min Jiwoo. She was twenty-seven years old."   

The burial ritual in New Revenet followed the same as the old country.

King Yoongi, being the highest ranking member of society, walked behind the clerk who ran the ceremony. Jisoo's body was to be sent out on the Palace lake, her body cremated inside a wooden boat where she was surrounded by her things while the outside was decorated in flowers. Yoongi looked exhausted. He was barely eating, barely sleeping and spent as much time as he could with his sons, who were not present. He was just about able to hold himself together to explain in the gentlest terms possible to Yunho what had happened to his mother and why she would no longer be with them. The five year old had handled it far better than he did, perhaps because he didn't quite feel the gravity of it yet. Instead, he asked his father a very poignant question for a child his age:

"Is this life?"

Yoongi had clutched Yunho by his shoulders, biting the insides of his cheeks to stop himself descending into another breakdown.

"Mother said the people die because life happens, and it's their time to go. Is this life?"

Without a word, Yoongi nodded in response to his son, pulling the boy close to him and holding him tightly.

Yoongi could not bring himself to watch the boat go up in flames, he simply knelt by the edge of the water with his head down as the rest of the mourners kowtowed behind him, Kim Seokjin and Zhang Yixing included, paying their respects to the Queen. He took a deep breath in and slowly let it out. For a moment, he felt like he would never be happy again, he would never smile again and he never should. However, his sons had already given him comfort without realising it. He had to keep going for them - there was no other choice. Jisoo would not want him to become an empty shell, but at that moment he couldn't even think that far ahead.

"Is it okay if I join