AN: Here is our first return to Abi, I have had a few messages from people eager to see more of him, and since he is one of my favorite characters in all of the Yona canon, I am more than happy to oblige. This is part one of a two part update, the next part is coming tomorrow. Thank you all for your continued enthusiasm and encouragement and especially for your patience! Every bit of feedback I get on this project makes me grin like a fool, you have no idea.

Abi is thirteen years old when Hiryuu is made king. Tuen sends the news in a hastily scribbled note sealed with an unfamiliar seal and carried by a man on horseback. The man shows both the paper and one of Tuen's riding gloves as proof of his news' legitimacy; in the note Tuen explains that he lost his own signet ring on the battlefield and so had to borrow Lord Seung's. This does not matter as much as it once might; with all the clans now being in agreement that they will bow to a single god-king, it is clear from the tone of Tuen's message that the clan representatives who travel with the god-king have developed a new sort of camaraderie that Abi, listening quietly, can scarcely believe. He has been taught all his life that his father is the wisest and most powerful of all the lords and that all other lands are to be frowned upon; he is not sure that he likes the idea of being friendly to them now that they have all decided to follow the same king. Just because all the warring lords have agreed they are subject to a god's will does not mean that they are all equals, surely.

When Eun-bi travels from his own palace to that of the new god-king, in order to be present at the coronation ceremony, he brings only Abi and the lady Li-he as his family representatives. The journey is longer than any Abi has made so far, as he has spent most of his life kept carefully within his father's palace walls, and on the few occasions he has traveled it has always been well within the bounds of his father's land. The jolting of the carriage he is made to ride in wearies him, as does the monotony of the food on the road and the dust that clogs his throat and makes his nose run. Even worse, he has to spend the entire trip in his mother's company, as they are kept in the same royal carriage. It is built of lacquered wood and precious metal, and the exterior is entirely covered with intricate painting, but it is extremely stuffy inside and the windows are covered by curtains at all times so that no commoner will have the opportunity to see the lord's favorite wife's face or person. Whenever his mother sleeps, Abi seizes upon the opportunity and twitches the curtain open enough for him to peer out the opening and watch the fields rolling by, breathing deeply of the cooler air despite the ever-present dust. Whenever his mother is awake, he tries to feign sleep as much as he can, because if she knows he is awake she will not let him alone. She coaches him on how he is to present himself to the new king, and on how he is to interact with Tuen, and on what things he should say should he find himself fortunate enough to converse with the king—he is drilled on lines of poetry he may recite to impress the king with his wit, and political opinions he is allowed to express in order to curry the king's favor, and books both scholarly and theological that he may reference to sharpen the contrast between himself and his elder brother, who has never been as well-suited to booklearning as he is to the arts of war.

"I am good with a blade too, though," Abi tries to protest during his first day trapped in the carriage—and it is the truth, as two years of relentless focus and hard work have indeed shaped him into a fine swordsman, albeit one not yet come into a man's height or strength—but his mother shakes her head sharply, cutting him off.

"The king has just united all of the tribes, and not all agreed to bow to him without fighting first," she says. "He will have seen plenty of good soldiers, and your elder brother has been at his side all that time. But this king does not love battle. When he visited your father two years ago, he was very firm in his desire for peace. You will show him that you are well-suited as a peaceful lord, one who is well-educated and well-spoken and desirable to have at his right hand."

Li-he has trained him all his life thus to pander to his father's desires, and he has learned her lessons well as a matter of survival. Thus Abi knows that his mother is right, and that if he is to impress the god-king he must set himself up as a more desirable contrast to Tuen, not as his eldest brother's second coming; but the thought of performing that role for Hiryuu as he has performed his role for his father all these years mortifies Abi in a way he cannot really understand—and which he certainly cannot explain. His mother still thinks this will be his first meeting with the king; she does not know that Abi has spoken with Hiryuu before. He has kept his secret for two years, and even now he is not sure why. All the same, he is convinced on a visceral level that if he meets Hiryuu again and plays his mother's puppet role of pious and learned lordling, his precious memory of that first meeting will be irrevocably ruined.
When his father's company arrives at Hiryuu's half-constructed palace, Abi is immediately whisked away to the quarters set aside for lord Eun-bi's family and retinue, in one of the few finished rooms on the east wing, and is not invited to accompany his father in his private audience with the king. He is so relieved to bathe and eat properly seasoned food again that he almost does not care, but in the days counting down to the coronation he grows almost physically sick with nerves, confined to his family rooms and unable to find much to distract himself from the looming prospect of meeting Hiryuu again and—instead of showing him what sort of man he is growing into—showing him only the sort of man that Hiryuu will want to see.

Because the truth is, Abi has always dreamed of war. He would love nothing more than to ride out to battle alongside the god-king, shining and tall like Tuen, but better than Tuen—more cunning, more frightening, more deadly than his famously open-hearted brother. Tuen has always been easy-going and easy to love; Abi has reconciled himself these past years to the fact that he does not make friends so easily—or, truth be told, at all. He still looks like his mother, delicate and wide-eyed and small, but her quick temper only quickens in him as he ages, her biting wrath flaring all too easily into his father's more terrible rage, sharpened by both his own sharp tongue and his love for seeing people squirm at his mercy, the latter of which he knows he has inherited from both parents. He knows, too, that he could be a war hero at least as mighty as Tuen, if he were only a few years older, because while Tuen is a master horseman and warrior, Abi is a tactician, and he knows how to make people afraid.

But he is not a few years older, and the war is done. He has missed his chance to prove his true value to Hiryuu, to prove he is more than merely a silk-robed child in a sunlit corridor. It is a bitter truth, but instead of swallowing it he only takes it into his mouth and holds it there. The day before the coronation, Tuen finally visits to give greetings to his thirteenth mother and rival brother, but he does not seem at all affronted by the fact that the lady Kura is not there. Lady Kura herself had been livid at being left in Eun-bi's palace with his other wives and children instead of being presented at court to the god-king, but Abi supposes Tuen is too stupid to understand the slight. He has never played games of ambition like his mother. He bows respectfully to lady Li-he and inquires after her comfort, and he laughingly ruffles Abi's carefully combed hair with one of his large hands and gives him a candy, and Abi glares up at him, holding his silence around the bitterness in his mouth.

"You have grown so much, Abi-chan!" Tuen says encouragingly—which is a lie, because Abi knows he has grown hardly at all in the past two years—and then Abi is made to fetch his foolish boy's sword and demonstrate one of the forms he has drilled daily for the past two years to his elder brother, while the lady Li-he watches all the while like a hawk. When he is done, Tuen applauds, offers a couple corrections, and then takes his leave, as he has "important duties yet to attend to for my king that I dare not put off any further, no matter how pleasant and diverting the company here." Once he has gone, lady Li-he calls Abi to her couch and has him kneel so that she can tease her pretty, delicate fingers through the snarls in his long hair.

"You let him speak to you as though he was your better," she scolds. "Never let him do so again. Everything you do tomorrow will be seen by the entire nation, do you understand? Everything. They all know who Tuen is, already, but they do not know you. They know he is an excellent soldier, but you have to remind them that he is also a fool. Remember: your father still does not name him heir, and you come of age in only five years, now. Do not," she hisses, emphasizing her point with a sudden, sharp tug at his hair that makes his eyes water, "let the king see you let Tuen talk down to you. Impress him."

"I will," Abi hisses, jerking away from her painful hands. He leaves his sword where it lies sheathed at her feet, and stalks away to his low-framed bed to sulk. He opens one of the few books he brought with him at random, hoping that reading will calm him, but his eyes run across the words without seeing them, any meaning drowned under the sound of the blood he can hear pumping hard behind his ears, so loudly he is almost dizzy with it. Impress him. Impress him. Impress him.

He hates that in this one thing his ambitious mother's desires run in accordance with his own. The Lady Li-he cannot know it, and surely thinks that she has put the wanting into him like she has put everything into him, but to impress Hiryuu is what Abi has secretly desired, these past two years, more than anything in the world, and it is the only desire he has that is wholly his own.