PART 1: THE MISSING PAGES
The Queen's chambers were silent.
Not empty. Not abandoned. Silent.
A stillness too precise, too preserved—like a body kept under glass.
Seorin stood in the narrow crawlspace between walls, her breath fogging faintly in the bitter air. Dust coated the stones beneath her feet. The wood above her creaked softly with every shifting gust outside, but the space inside was unmoving. Untouched. A tomb dressed like a throne.
She had not walked this passage in years.
And never from this direction.
The route had been built for emergencies—an escape corridor carved by eunuchs centuries ago, meant to connect the Queen's inner chamber with the physician's quarters and treasury hall. In her reign, Seorin had sealed it herself.
Now she unsealed it.
She pressed against the old panel behind the mirrored wall. It gave with a reluctant sigh.
Light spilled in.
The chamber greeted her like a ghost of a life she'd already buried.
Everything remained.
Her writing desk. Her pale green tea set. The screen painted with twin cranes rising through clouds. The long couch where she used to sprawl after hours of court—tired, hollow, crowned.
But someone had been here.
She saw it in the thin layer of dust disturbed around the chest near the window.
She stepped to it.
Knelt.
Opened the lid.
The diary lay beneath a stack of letters—her personal journal, bound in leather, sealed with a black ribbon. Her own handwriting scratched across the cover:
Do not trust what you remember.
Her fingers trembled only slightly as she opened it.
The first pages were intact.
She read in silence:
> Today, Baek Hae-ryun smiled too easily. I do not think it was for me.
Lady Eun's words bend like reeds—but her shadow moves faster than her feet.
The priest spoke of blood in the stars. I have not bled in months. Is it the omen they warned me of?
Flip.
> I dreamed again of fire beneath the throne. A voice whispered my name. Not Seorin. Something else.
Flip.
Then—
A jagged tear.
Several pages ripped.
Not cut.
Ripped.
Seorin's stomach dropped.
The next page was burned at the corner, as if someone had panicked midway through destruction.
What remained was worse than absence:
> If I go through with the ritual, I will not remember all of it. That is the price. But the memory will live somewhere. Buried. Waiting. Beneath.
She exhaled.
It wasn't fate.
It wasn't karma, or divine punishment, or the cruel joke of time.
She had done this.
She had set something in motion before her fall.
And then sealed her own memory.
Why?
She flipped to the very last page still intact.
Only one sentence remained, hastily scrawled across the bottom, as if written with a shaking hand:
> If you read this again—run.
Seorin stared at the page.
Then closed the book.
And turned back toward the mirror.
Her reflection met her gaze with something unreadable.
She would not run.
Not yet.
First, she would remember.
---
PART 2: THE DEAD SERVANT'S MAP
They found the girl at dawn.
Face-down in the ritual pool outside the ancestral shrine. The water was shallow—no deeper than a wine bowl. It took effort to drown there. Intent.
"Suicide," the court physician declared.
"Regret from a broken engagement," whispered a passing concubine.
"She was always strange," said one of the kitchen maids, dabbing her eyes without tears.
But Seorin watched from the upper gallery, silent, eyes fixed not on the body, but the position of it.
Face-down. Arms folded beneath her. Knees tucked.
Not a suicide posture.
A ritual one.
Someone placed her there.
Yeonhwa found her that evening.
The maid did not knock, only appeared—breathless, her usual stillness disturbed.
"My lady," she whispered, "I found something."
She unrolled a strip of cloth onto the floor.
A map.
Drawn by hand. Shaky, unfinished.
Familiar.
Seorin crouched. Studied it.
She recognized the top corner—an outline of the outer courtyard. The gardens. Then, descending lines. A spiral.
"What is this?"
"I took it from the dead girl's quarters. Her box was overturned. It looked like someone else was searching, but they missed it. It was stuffed in the lining of her quilt."
Seorin ran her fingers over the ink.
The drawing was clumsy, but the message was clear.
A tunnel. Leading away from the shrine.
Beneath it.
She narrowed her eyes.
There, just before the bottom edge—written in small, sharp script:
> REMEMBER
And below that—
A symbol.
The same symbol carved in the Mirror Room.
And again in her diary.
A broken circle, with a single flame in the center.
"What else do you know about her?" Seorin asked.
Yeonhwa shook her head. "She served in the royal archives before being reassigned. She was quiet. Too clever. Never liked to speak."
"She was looking for something."
Yeonhwa nodded.
"And now she's dead."
Seorin rolled up the map and tied it with red string.
"I need you to cover for me tomorrow."
"Where will you go?"
Seorin didn't answer immediately.
Then, calmly: "Back to the beginning."
---
PART 3: BLOOD BENEATH THE THRONE
The moon was thin and sharp above the ancestral shrine when Seorin arrived.
She wore no jewelry. No cosmetics. Her robe was plain brown, the kind worn by junior attendants. Her sleeves were tied short for movement. A knife was hidden at the base of her spine—not for defense, but for reverence. One did not enter old places unarmed.
Yeonhwa had cleared the garden walk. The sentries had been pulled to the western wing, distracted by whispers of another noble's attempted elopement.
The palace had many secrets.
But none were as old as this.
The shrine loomed silent above her, stone lions cracked at the paws. Its gate was sealed with iron, but the wall behind the western incense basin had long since begun to rot. A single push, and the wood groaned open.
The smell hit her first.
Old ash. Dried blood. And something beneath it all—something metallic and warm, like coins left too long in the mouth.
She stepped through.
The tunnel descended fast.
Stone steps slick with moss. The walls tight, close, almost breathing. Her lantern threw flickering shapes across carved images: serpents. Flames. Eyes.
She stopped when the staircase ended.
Before her lay a chamber.
Circular. Tall enough for a king to stand without bowing, wide enough for twenty men to kneel in silence.
At its center: the altar.
Black stone, cracked and stained. Marked with grooves for channels. The floor beneath it was painted with the same broken circle she had seen in her diary.
Flame at the center.
Memory at the edge.
The air buzzed faintly. As if something had once lived here. Or still did.
She moved toward the far wall.
Symbols had been carved there—names in three columns. Most were half-faded.
But one line stood sharp.
SEORIN
And beside it—scratched in hastier, jagged script:
HAYEON
Seorin's breath caught.
Hayeon.
That wasn't a noble name.
It wasn't even a court name.
It was a servant's name.
And not just any.
Her name.
The body she now wore. The name of the maid she'd awakened inside.
This body was not chosen by chance.
She turned slowly, looking back toward the altar.
Suddenly, the memories in her diary—the dreams of fire, the mention of a ritual, the things she'd dismissed as paranoia—clicked into place.
There had been a design.
A ritual for remembrance.
And someone had tampered with it.
She was not just reborn.
She was redirected.
Someone else was supposed to rise.
And instead, it was her.
Seorin backed away from the altar.
And that was when she saw the second inscription—carved into the edge of the stone, nearly lost to shadow.
Words in blood-red pigment:
> One burns. One watches. One survives.
Then the flame in her lantern flickered blue.
She did not wait to see what else lived there.
She turned, fast, and fled up the stairs.
---
PART 4: THE BURNING MEMORY
Seorin couldn't sleep.
The scent of the stone altar clung to her skin—soot and scorched bone and something older than blood. Even after she bathed, even after she scrubbed her nails, she could still feel it in her teeth.
By the second hour of night, she returned.
This time, alone.
No disguise. No cover story. Just herself, her lantern, and the weight of her name.
The chamber had not changed.
But something inside it had.
The air was warm now. Not from fire, but from memory.
She approached the altar slowly.
The etching of her name seemed deeper than before. The grooves around the flame symbol darker. As though they had swallowed light.
Her fingers hovered above the center of the stone.
She didn't know what would happen.
But she knew what would happen if she didn't try.
So she touched it.
The surface was warm.
Then hot.
Then—
Flash.
She was no longer in her body.
Not in this one.
She stood atop a tower of flame. The sky was red. Soldiers screamed below, armor catching fire as they fell.
A woman stood beside her. Her face identical to Seorin's—but the eyes were crueler. Her voice colder.
> "You thought you could hold this kingdom without fire?"
Flash.
A temple. Stone columns. Ritual chanting in a forgotten tongue. Her wrists bound in gold thread. The Queen-priestess tracing the symbol into her palm.
> "You will remember, no matter the name.
You will burn, no matter the throne.
You will not be alone. She follows. Always."
Flash.
The Mirror Room. But ancient. Covered in ivy. Her own reflection grinning, even as she cried.
> "You are not the first.
You are not the last."
Seorin screamed.
But only inside.
Outside, her body trembled—fingers locked to the altar stone, sweat pouring down her back.
And then—
Silence.
She collapsed to her knees.
Gasping. Heart pounding.
The stone was cold again.
But the memories remained.
Not hers. Not entirely. But real.
She had lived this.
In another time. Another war. Another kingdom fallen under her rule—or because of it.
And someone had followed her.
Through the fire. Through lifetimes.
Someone with her face, but not her name.
And the ritual—
The ritual had not been meant to carry a
soul.
It had been designed to carry a warning.
A witness.
And she had stepped into its path.
---
PART 5: A NAME IN THE DARK
The tunnel seemed longer on the way out.
Every step felt slow, distant, muffled by the weight of what she had seen—of what she had been. Seorin's legs shook. Her lantern had long since burned low. The last of its wax flickered like a dying heartbeat against the stone.
She didn't remember opening the shrine door.
She only knew the cold air struck her like a slap when she emerged.
The moon was gone. Clouds swallowed the sky. The trees in the garden leaned like listening figures, branches sharp and silvered with frost.
Seorin stepped into the garden, breathing hard.
And froze.
Someone whispered her name.
Not Hayeon.
Not Lady Seorin.
But the name from the altar.
The one etched first in blood, long before she'd ever been queen.
"…Sah-yeon."
Her breath caught.
She spun around.
No one.
Not a servant. Not a shadow. Not even wind.
Just the chill.
The dark.
And the certainty that someone—some thing—had called her.
Not in warning.
In remembrance.
---
She returned to her quarters long before sunrise.
The halls were quiet. Her feet made no sound on the polished floors. She opened the door to her study with care, half-expecting to find it ransacked, or worse—emptied.
But nothing had changed.
At least not at first.
Then she saw it.
Her diary.
Sitting on her desk.
Where she had not left it.
She crossed the room slowly.
Opened it.
The pages… were back.
The ones torn, burned, destroyed—they'd been restored. Every entry she remembered. The blood. The altar. The mirror. The flame.
And at the bottom of the final page—
A new line.
Written in fresh ink.
Not her hand.
> I never left.
Seorin stood still.
The fire in the lantern guttered.
And this time, s
he did not look into the mirror.
She already knew something would be looking back.
---