"Your Highness, Crown Prince Lee Ji-ho," the eunuch announced as I entered my father's chambers.
"Sit down," my father said, his voice low and unreadable.
I obeyed, though my eyes never left him. He was arranging scrolls on his desk, aligning them over and over again like a man trying to delay the inevitable.
I knew him too well. My father was not one for idle chatter, if he called me into his private chamber, it was not to talk about the weather or the affairs of the kingdom. It was serious.
Deadly serious.
The air in the room grew heavy, thick with the kind of silence that presses against your chest. Finally, he spoke.
"I've made an arrangement."
He paused halfway through, adjusting a parchment as though to soften the weight of his words.
"You are to take a wife on the day you turn twenty," he finished, still not raising his head to look at me. Not even once.
My heart froze.
My twentieth birthday? That was only a few moons away.
The shock hit me like a blow. Words refused to form. Why now? What was the rush? What was he trying to protect, or control?
I stood, intending to leave, but my feet refused to move. My mouth betrayed me, speaking before my thoughts could catch up.
"You promised my mother," I said, my voice trembling, "that the decision of marriage would be mine. You promised me, even as a child, that when the time came, I would choose whom to love. So why now? Why break the one promise you made to a dying woman you claimed to love?"
My father's shoulders stiffened.
For a moment, I thought I saw a flicker of regret in his eyes. A sadness he tried to bury beneath the weight of duty.
I wanted him to say something, anything. To explain. To justify. To be my father, not the King.
But all I received was silence.
Finally, he said, cold and final, "It's been decided. Prepare yourself… to make an heir."
He still refused to meet my gaze.
The words sliced through me like a blade.I turned and stormed out of his chamber, the air suddenly too thin to breathe.
Prepare yourself to make an heir.
That wasn't a command for a son. That was an order for a puppet.A puppet to dance to the tune of the court, to repeat the endless cycle of control, submission, and pain.
Just like him.
I walked without knowing where I was going, until suddenly… I was standing in front of her quarters.
She was laying near the opened widow, her gaze fixed at the moon. She was beauty in all its glory and when she smile, not at me but at a distant thought, that pure, unguarded smile. My chest tightened painfully.
Even after my father's decree, the moment my eyes met her laying there, I knew, my heart was no longer my own.
I had known this for some time, tried to deny it, fought it even. But denial was a fool's armor.
The truth was there, clear as daylight.
The woman before me wasn't like anyone else in this kingdom.Her hair. Her brows. Her nose. Her lips.And her eyes… those eyes. Blue-green like ocean jade, bright enough to drown a man and gentle enough to save him.
She was unreal. A dream made flesh.
Even with the barrier of language between us, I felt understood. I felt peace. I felt… alive.
How do I tell her that she's the only one I see? That no princess or noblewoman could ever match what she makes me feel?
My father would never allow it."She's a stranger," he would say. "A foreigner. She knows nothing of our ways. A King and his Queen are guardians of tradition, not destroyers of it."
And he would be right.But should a man marry only to preserve the past? Shouldn't a ruler be brave enough to invite change? To structure a new part?
Every dawn brings a new sun.
Every season shifts, dies, and is reborn.
Change is not destruction, it is renewal. A gift from the gods themselves.
And she, Isabella, is my change.
My new beginning.
The gods sent her to me, and what mortal would reject a gift from heaven?