August arrived like a breath held too long—hot, stifling, and restless.
Students scattered for the break. Beaches, internships, family trips.
Minjae stayed.
He told his parents it was for extra credits, told Hana he was helping a professor with research, told Taesung he preferred the quiet.
Each excuse was half-true.
But the real reason?
He didn't know how to leave the city without feeling like he'd vanish.
The city wasn't his home. But it was his anchor.
Outside it, in places filled with too much green and too little noise, he feared the past would start to pull. That if he stepped too far from pavement and steel, he might remember too much. Or worse—remember nothing at all.
The campus emptied. The library stayed open.
So he returned to it—day after day, like ritual.
Same seat. Same window. Same silence.
And in that silence, he wrote—not essays, not plans.
Just… thoughts.
They came as they always had in his loneliest moments—quiet and uninvited.
Some scratched at old scars.
Others whispered truths he didn't want to admit.
He wrote them anyway.
| How much of me is memory?
| If a life ends, but the soul continues, is the second life a continuation or a new beginning?
| Would I have been content if I had died that day?
The ink on the page never judged. It only existed.
Minjae had seen kings write laws that turned to ash in a single revolt. He'd seen dragons carve oaths into stone with fire, only to betray them weeks later. Yet here, in the scratch of his pen on paper, there was something honest.
Perhaps because no one else would read it.
One afternoon, Professor Han found him in the economics archive—an older man with a cane that clicked faintly on the marble floor.
"You've been here more than I have this summer," the professor joked, his smile hidden behind kind eyes.
Minjae looked up, a bit startled but not unwelcoming. "Books are better company than assumptions."
Professor Han tilted his head, amused. "Is that your way of saying people talk too much?"
"Sometimes," Minjae allowed, closing the notebook slowly. "But mostly… they guess. And I don't like being guessed at."
The professor leaned on his cane, his tone gentle. "Are you hiding from something, Mr. Yoo?"
Minjae glanced toward the dusty window. "I'm studying."
"That's not what I asked."
He didn't answer.
Professor Han didn't press. Instead, he took a slow step forward. "You remind me of someone I met long ago. Brilliant. Isolated. Eventually disappeared."
"Disappeared?"
"Not literally," Han clarified. "He just… became too much of an idea and too little of a person."
Minjae finally looked up again. There was a flicker in his gaze—curiosity, maybe, or caution. "Did you ever find out why?"
The professor smiled sadly. "I think he believed being understood would make him less. So he stayed unreadable, until even he forgot how to be seen."
Minjae didn't respond.
But he didn't forget the words.
One evening, while walking near the river, Minjae passed a man arguing with a street vendor.
The man's voice was loud. Accusatory. The vendor was elderly, worn by time and sun.
Minjae stopped. Something in him stirred—a stillness sharpening into focus.
Without thinking, he stepped between them.
No magic. No words of power.
Just a presence.
And a look.
The man paused. His bravado faltered. He frowned, muttered something inaudible, and walked away.
The vendor bowed deeply. "Thank you, student."
Minjae shook his head. "It was nothing."
But even as he said it, he knew it wasn't.
It was the kind of nothing he used to do with fire in his lungs and steel in his wings.
He'd once faced tyrants and monsters with that same silent resolve.
Not for glory.
But because someone had to.
That part of him—the one who stood between harm and the helpless—was still there.
Quiet.
But breathing.
Back at the dorm, Taesung returned early from his trip.
He knocked on Minjae's door with two bottles of banana milk and a grin, hair still sun-bleached from days spent outside.
"Still the same old Minjae, huh?"
"I suppose."
"You know," Taesung said, flopping onto the bed like gravity had a personal vendetta against him, "you don't have to be interesting. But you do have to be human once in a while."
Minjae quirked a brow. "I thought I was."
Taesung laughed, handing him one of the milks. "You're like… ninety percent idea, ten percent roommate. Seriously, sometimes I think you sleep with your eyes open."
Minjae considered that. He cracked open the bottle. "I'll try for eleven."
Taesung grinned. "Progress."
They drank in silence for a bit.
Then, Minjae asked, "Was it worth it? The trip?"
"Yeah. Sand, sea, overpriced ice cream. The usual. My little sister cried when we left, so I guess that's how you know it was good."
Minjae smiled faintly. "Sounds like something worth remembering."
"Yeah. So don't die in the library next summer, okay?"
Minjae nodded. But he didn't promise.
Later, alone again, Minjae stood before the mirror.
Not to fix his hair.
Not to check his face.
But to look.
Really look.
The boy in the reflection had human eyes. Tired, yes—but not ancient. No gold. No fire.
Just Minjae.
And yet…
Behind those eyes, something coiled. A memory of wings. Of power. Of a name spoken in fear.
Valmyros.
The Last Flame.
But that name didn't echo here. Not in this room. Not in this life.
He touched the glass lightly, fingertips brushing his own reflection.
"I am not who I was," he whispered.
The words held no sorrow. No defiance.
Just fact.
"But maybe… that's the point."
Maybe death hadn't ended him. Maybe it had simply unmade the parts too large to carry forward.
And what remained… was enough.
Not a conqueror.
Not a god.
Just a boy trying to understand.
Outside, the wind shifted.
Just enough to move the leaves.
Not enough to be noticed by anyone else.
But he felt it.
And for once, he didn't brace against it.
He simply let it pass through.