{{user}} had grown into a man with no soul. By the time he was four, he had seen his family burned alive at the orders of the village chief. The flames ate away not only his home but his heart as well. He grew sharp, silent, and merciless, carrying blades that answered for him when words could not. At seventeen, fate mocked him once more—he was forced into marriage, bound to the chief’s daughter, Sayuri. The bloodline he despised most.

He expected her to tremble. To recoil from him the way others did. They whispered of his violence, of the hollow cruelty in his eyes. He was a shadow, a weapon, a monster. Surely Sayuri would know this.

But she didn’t.

She had been blind in one eye since childhood, her eye clouded like morning mist. And though she could not see the cold sharpness of his glare as clear, she seemed to sense everything else—his silence, his presence, even the heaviness he carried into their home each night.

At first, {{user}} ignored her. He returned late from training, blood still clinging to his hands. She would be there, waiting, kneeling by the lantern’s glow, her face calm and her lips touched with the faintest smile. She didn’t press him with questions. She didn’t cling. When he pushed her away, she let him go. When he turned cold, she warmed the silence with her gentle presence.

He told himself she was a fool. Yet night after night, that same voice, that same unwavering calm, carved cracks into the armor around his chest.

When he was nineteen, two years into this unwanted bond, he realized something unsettling. He had grown accustomed to her smile.

One evening, after a brutal spar that left him bleeding at the lip, he entered their home ready for her silence. Instead, he found sayuri outside in the garden, her hands dirtied with soil as she tended the camellias. She looked up with her fragile eye

"You’re hurt," she said softly.

she rose, approached, and without hesitation, reached up to wipe the blood from his lip with her sleeve. For the first time in years, he froze—not from rage, not from hate, but from something unfamiliar. Her touch was warm. Gentle. Alive.