CHAPTER 1 : The boy without a funeral

“Some children are born. Others are hidden from the world because the world is not ready for them.”

— The Book of Forgotten Queens

The sky was not dark. It was strangled.

Clouds coiled in agony above the forest like the breath of ancient spirits. Lightning didn’t simply strike—it clawed its way out from the heavens, tearing the sky’s belly open to bleed white fire across the land. The wind shrieked like something hunted.

And through the pine-thick woods of western Joseon, a woman ran. Her feet are bare. Her hair is undone. Her robes soaked in both rain and blood. She carried no weapon, only a bundle wrapped in crimson silk. The child inside was impossibly still. Too still.

He hadn’t cried when he entered this world.

He seemed to know that crying would only summon death.

Behind her, the sound of hooves.

Not galloping.

Floating.

Six riders, all veiled in black, their eyes hollow beneath obsidian masks. They bore no insignia—only a single silver crescent etched on their blades.

The Order of the Hollow Moon.

They were not guards. Not assassins. They were silence itself—sent by the throne to erase what should never have existed.

And the woman, once a court lady in the Queen’s inner circle, now ran with a death sentence tied to her arms.

Her name was Serah. Once servant. Once secret-keeper.

Now mother. And traitor.

“Down the ravine!” a voice barked behind her. Closer now. Too close.

Serah’s heart slammed against her chest like a beast inside a cage. She couldn’t feel her legs anymore. Couldn’t hear her own breath. All she could feel was the child. Heavy. Silent. Warm.

She reached the edge of a cliff where the trees broke away into a sheer drop above jagged black rocks. The waves below were wild and foaming, screaming against the earth as if they, too, feared what was coming.

She looked down.

She looked back.

She knew she would not survive this night.

But the boy might.

From within the crimson cloth, the child stared up at her—eyes wide, storm-colored, unnatural in their calm. He did not blink. He did not cry.

He only watched.

“Raon,” she whispered for the first and last time. The name meant “joy”... but it was more than that. It was defiance. To name him was to declare him real. To defy a kingdom that had tried to erase him from conception.

“You must live,” she said, her voice breaking. “Even if the world hunts you. Even if they call you wrong. Even if you forget who you are—live.”

She pulled a talisman from her neck—a coin etched with the Queen’s dying prayer—and slipped it beneath his wrappings.

Then she placed him in the floating basket woven from midnight reeds and stitched with moon-thread spells.

The storm cracked again above her, and a cry echoed from the forest—“She’s at the cliff!”

No more time.

Serah whispered something too quiet for the wind to hear.

She stepped back, arms outstretched.

An arrow hissed.

She fell.

The sea rose to meet her.

But the basket… the basket drifted away.

🜃 The Shore That Shouldn’t Have Found Him

Three days later, a storm-broken basket washed ashore in the gray cove of a forgotten village called Hollowshade—a place where wind passed through trees like breath through bones, and nothing bloomed except weeds and whispers.

An old healer found him there.

Her name was Amah. She was rumored to be older than the rocks, wiser than the priests, and more feared than death by the village’s children. They said she talked to crows. That she’d seen every death in the valley before it happened.

She pulled the boy from the basket, soaked and wide-eyed, still silent. She checked for marks—none. Scars—none. But she saw the talisman. And she saw the royal silk. And she did not ask questions.

She burned both.

She named him Raon, after the firelight in chaos, and raised him as her own.

🜃 The Child Who Didn't Cry

Raon grew without mirrors.

Without songs.

Without stories of princes and kingdoms.

At five, he climbed trees no other child dared touch.

At seven, he stitched herbs together with eerie precision.

At ten, he broke a thief’s nose with a pestle to defend Amah.

At twelve, he sat for hours under the same dead tree each night, claiming it whispered in his dreams.

He had no memory of a mother, but sometimes he saw her in the corners of his nightmares—falling, falling, eyes open, lips moving.

He never cried.

And he never asked who he was.

On the eve of his nineteenth year, the dogs howled before the sun set. Crows gathered at the rooftops and didn't move. The sea, visible from the hilltop, turned the color of bruises.

Amah did not sleep that night.

Raon stood at the old stone well behind the healer’s hut, watching the moon struggle behind the clouds. Something in the air had shifted. Time felt thin. Like the world was holding its breath.

Then he heard it.

A rustle not made by wind.

A whisper not made by voice.

A name not spoken in a decade—

“Raon…”

He turned, heart pounding. No one there.

But something had arrived.

Not from the woods.

Not from the sky.

From the past.

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