𝐈'𝐦 𝐚𝐧 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐝𝐲 𝐍𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥 (𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐏𝐋𝐄𝐓𝐄𝐃)

Side Story 2: Stardust

The quiet hum of the recording studio was the only sound that kept Park Hanbyeol anchored to the present. Neon blue LED lights lined the soundproofed walls, casting long shadows over the sprawling mixing console in front of her.

As a music producer, she spent her days breathing life into other people's words, turning their fleeting emotions into rhythmic architecture, but tonight, the canvas belonged entirely to her.

Her fingers hovered over the sleek black keys of the MIDI keyboard. Beside her sat a lukewarm cup of black coffee, her favorite.

On her left hand, the diamond ring Taeyang had slipped onto her finger glinted under the low lights—a silent, heavy promise that locked her to this timeline.

But her mind kept drifting backward, pulled by an invisible tide toward the phantom echoes of a life she had left behind in the other world.

She closed her eyes and pressed a single, deep chord. The low reverberation echoed through the studio monitors, thick with a heavy, mournful gravity. It was the sound of a crumbling palace courtyard. It was the sharp, biting chill of a northern winter.

She began to write.

For the first time, she wasn't arranging a trendy pop track or a sweeping cinematic score for a client. She was translating the topography of her soul onto a digital grid.

She pulled up a tracking layer, layering a haunting, minimalist cello line that felt like a ragged breath in a dark bedroom.

Over it, she added the distant, sharp strike of a percussion hit—staccato and cold, mimicking the sound of an arrow leaving a bow string, or perhaps the heavy click of iron dungeon doors shutting.

The memories flooded her vision, no longer terrifying, but beautifully sad.

She remembered the heavy velvet curtains of the imperial bedchamber. She remembered the raw, agonizing confession she had shared with a man who knelt on the floor, weeping into her lap as the guilt of a hundred failures broke him.

She remembered the fierce, protective promise he had made beneath a blazing fireplace, swearing that he would carry her burdens and give her the peace that had been stolen from her.

"It's a star that I would take," she murmured to herself, watching the sound waves cascade across her computer screen in jagged peaks of vibrant green and blue.

She pulled a microphone closer, setting the track to record. Her voice, usually guarded and precise, let slip a raw, unpolished melody.

She didn't write explicit lyrics about crowns, regressions, or severed heads; the modern world wouldn't understand a tragedy so literal.

Instead, she deciphered the emotional truth of it. She sang about a star that had gone missing in a velvety night sky. She sang about a coincidental collision of two souls in a different lifetime.

The chorus was a sweeping, crescendoing wave of acoustic piano and layered strings, a musical portrait of a man with brilliant red hair and unshielded, transparent eyes—a soul who wore his heart openly and freely.

She sang about an unbreakable, invisible thread that neither a tragic public execution nor a two-year coma could ever sever.

"Until our paths meet again... Can you wait just a bit more," the phantom melody echoed in her mind, a direct paraphrase of his final, desperate promise against her forehead as the darkness had pulled her under on that quiet balcony.

She spent hours fine-tuning the arrangement, carefully filling the empty spaces between the heavy chords with soft, gentle sentences of instrumentation.