The Omega Who Shook The Kingdom
1
The first thing Taehyung noticed was the ceiling.
It was massive. Hand-painted and vaulted, stretching above him like the inside of a cathedral, deep midnight blue with gold leaf dragons coiling across it in elaborate spirals — their scales catching the warm flicker of a hundred candles suspended from iron chandeliers. The craftsmanship was extraordinary. The detail was extraordinary. The sheer scale of it was extraordinary.
Taehyung stared at it for approximately four seconds.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
Then he sat up, and the world tilted unpleasantly, and he pressed both hands to his temples and said, very calmly, into the empty and enormous room:
"Okay."
His voice came out wrong. Softer than he was used to — lower in timbre, smoother. Like someone had taken his voice and run it through a filter. He frowned and pressed a hand to his throat.
The bed beneath him — if it could be called a bed and not a cloud personally commissioned by a deity — was piled with silk the color of crushed plums, embroidered at the edges in gold thread so fine it looked like it had been stitched by moonlight. There were approximately nine pillows.
He was wearing robes — heavy layered silk robes, deep indigo and silver, with sleeves that fell past his wrists and a sash tied so elaborately around his middle he wasn't sure he could breathe deeply without damaging something expensive.
He looked down at his hands.
They were his hands — same long fingers, same slightly bitten thumbnail on the left — but the skin was softer. Uncalloused. The hands of someone who had never carried anything heavier than a teacup.
Okay, he thought again, more carefully this time. Okay. Assess the situation. You are Kim Taehyung. You are seventeen. You were studying for your history final. You fell off your chair. And now you are—
He looked around the room. Stone walls hung with silk tapestries. An enormous carved wardrobe. A dressing table laden with jade and ivory ornaments. A narrow window, its paper screen glowing faintly with pre-dawn light. No light switches. No outlets. No phone charging on the nightstand.
—somewhere that does not have electricity.
He breathed in slowly through his nose. The air smelled of sandalwood and something sweet and unfamiliar — a palace smell, he'd guess. Rich and still and ancient.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
"I've time-traveled," he said aloud, to the empty room, to the dragons on the ceiling. "I have actually time-traveled."
The dragons did not respond.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
"Okay," he said, for the third time. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His feet hit a silk carpet.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
He stood up — wobbled slightly, like this body's center of gravity was different from what he was used to — and straightened. "Okay. This is fine. I am fine. I will figure this out. I have watched enough historical dramas to—"
A knock at the chamber door. Sharp, practiced.
random
"My Lady." A woman's voice, low and careful. "The First Prince requests your presence at breakfast."
Taehyung went very still.
My Lady.
He turned that over in his mind with the speed and precision of someone who had always been, despite everything, extremely good at thinking under pressure. My Lady. First Prince. Palace. Robes. No electricity.
I am someone's wife.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
"I'll be there shortly," he said, keeping his voice soft, giving nothing away.
A pause from the other side of the door. Brief. Like the person on the other side had expected — what? Something else. A different cadence. A different energy in those four words.
random
"...Shall I send the maids to dress you, my Lady?"
Taehyung looked down at his robes — the ones he was already wearing — and realized with a sinking feeling that these were sleeping robes, and that whatever came next was going to be even more elaborate.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
"Yes," he said. "Please."
2
The maids were efficient and silent and kind in the particular way of people who had learned that kindness was safest when it made no noise.
There were three of them. They moved around him like water around a stone — practiced, unhurried, utterly professional. They removed the sleeping robes and replaced them with something that involved seven layers, two sashes, and a collar so stiff Taehyung had to consciously remind himself not to roll his neck.
They arranged his hair — his hair, longer than he kept it in his real life, fine and dark — with pins and ornaments of jade and pale gold. They worked without speaking unless he addressed them directly, and when he did, their eyes stayed carefully downcast.
He catalogued everything.
The maid on his left — young, perhaps sixteen, with a small scar on her chin — was named Areum. She'd introduced herself in a whisper when he'd asked, like she was surprised he had. The one on his right was Soonja, older, the clear authority among the three, sharp-eyed in a way that suggested she noticed more than she showed. The third — quiet, quick-fingered, who handled his hair ornaments with the focus of someone defusing a weapon — was Boram.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
"How long have you served in this palace?" he asked Soonja, keeping his voice light and conversational.
Soonja
Soonja's hands stilled for just a fraction of a second on the sash she was tying. "Thirty years, my Lady."
jeon Taehyung/TBO
"And in this chamber specifically?"
Soonja
"...Two years, my Lady. Since your arrival."
jeon Taehyung/TBO
My arrival. He tucked that away. "And before I arrived — whose chamber was this?"
Soonja
A pause. "It was prepared for you, my Lady. It has always been yours."
jeon Taehyung/TBO
A non-answer. Carefully delivered. He let it go for now and asked instead, "What's the First Prince's name?"
The stillness this time was more pronounced. All three maids paused, briefly, before resuming their work.
Soonja
"...Prince Jungkook, my Lady," Soonja said carefully. "First-born. Crown Prince of Jeonha."
jeon Taehyung/TBO
"And the Second Prince?"
Soonja
"Prince Jeonguk, my Lady. General of the Royal Army."
jeon Taehyung/TBO
Twins, Taehyung thought. Something about that felt significant — two princes, one Omega wife between them. He filed it. "Are they — what are they like?"
Areum
"They are... very distinguished, my Lady," Areum offered, in a tiny voice.
Taehyung met her eyes in the bronze mirror. She looked away immediately, but not before he caught it — the smallest flicker of something. Not fear, exactly.
More like the careful blankness of someone who had learned that honest answers were dangerous.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
Got it, he thought. They're difficult. Possibly unkind. Possibly worse.
He looked at himself in the mirror. The person looking back was — objectively, almost startlingly — beautiful. High cheekbones. Wide, dark eyes. A mouth that curved naturally, resting in something that was almost a pout.
The elaborate court robes should have looked suffocating on someone this young, but instead they looked like they'd been made for this specific face.
This is Kim Taehyung, he thought. The real one. The one who lived here.
Something ached in his chest — sudden and surprising.
he was lonely, taehyung thought, looking at that beautiful, carefully composed face.the Omega was so, so lonely in this palace, and no one even noticed.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
He pressed his lips together. Breathed in. Breathed out.
I notice, he promised the real taehyung, silently, to the face in the mirror. I see you. And I'll live differently. I'll be loud enough for both of us.
3
The corridor that led to the dining hall was approximately one kilometer long.
Taehyung counted his steps and memorized the route and catalogued the details: guards in dark armor at every major intersection, bearing a crest of two wolves turned back to back beneath a crown. Servants who pressed themselves to the walls as he passed, eyes lowered.
Tapestries depicting battles and hunts. Stone floors so polished they reflected the torchlight like dark water.
No sunlight yet. The world outside the narrow windows was the pale grey-purple of very early morning.
He heard the dining hall before he saw it — or rather, he heard the silence of it, which was somehow louder than noise. The kind of silence that had weight and architecture. That had been built deliberately.
He stepped through the doorway.
The room was vast. High ceilings, stone hearth roaring at the far end, a table of dark polished wood that could have seated thirty but currently seated two. Candles everywhere — iron stands, wall sconces, a chandelier above the table heavy with flame.
Two men.
Taehyung stopped for just a fraction of a second — controlled, invisible to anyone not paying close attention — and looked at them.
They were identical in the way of a mirror held at a slight angle. The same dark hair, the same severe bone structure, the same particular quality of physical presence that made the room feel smaller just by existing in it. But they wore their sameness differently.
The one on the left — Jungkook, Taehyung noted, First Prince, the one who had summoned him — sat with a straight spine and perfect stillness, black robes immaculate, one hand resting beside his breakfast plate and the other holding open a scroll he was reading. He had not looked up. His profile was all clean lines and cool distance — the face of someone who had long since decided that the world was only worth engaging with on his own terms.
The one on the right — Jeonguk — was sprawled with the deliberate carelessness of a man who wanted you to know he didn't care about your opinion of his posture. One elbow on the armrest, one leg crossed over the other, a cup of something dark swirled lazily between two fingers.
He looked up when Taehyung entered. His gaze swept across him like a blade — quick, sharp, assessing — and then slid away with the particular disinterest of someone who had already categorized what they'd seen and found it unremarkable.
Furniture, that gaze said. You are furniture.
jeonguk/TBA/2th prince
"You're late," Jeonguk said.
His voice was lower than Taehyung had expected. Rougher.
Jungkook still did not look up from his scroll.
Taehyung felt something flare hot and immediate in the center of his chest — a feeling he recognized intimately, because it was the same feeling he got when a teacher talked over him in class, or when someone dismissed him mid-sentence, or when the world arranged itself in a way that assumed he did not matter.
jeon Taehyung/TBO
Oh, he thought clearly. 💭We are going to have a problem, you and I.
But he was smart. And he was in an unfamiliar world with unfamiliar rules and he needed time and information before he acted. So he breathed through it — that hot flare — and schooled his face into something soft and neutral and walked to the table with measured steps.
He sat down.
He picked up his chopsticks.
He began to eat.
The silence that followed had a different texture than the one he'd walked into. It shifted slightly — changed shape. Because the Omega who had sat at this table for two years had a particular way of existing in it: waiting, head slightly bowed, hands folded, the careful performance of someone who needed permission to take up space.
Taehyung was eating the braised lotus root like he had somewhere to be and the food was excellent and neither of these men existed.
Jeonguk's cup stilled in his hand.
He looked at his twin.
Jungkook had, at some point in the last thirty seconds, looked up from his scroll. He was looking at Taehyung now — not obviously, not with any change in expression, but his eyes were tracking the motion of Taehyung reaching across the table for the dish of pickled vegetables. Reaching across without asking. Without hesitating.
Without any of the elaborate deference that should have preceded the act.
Their eyes met.
Taehyung did not look away.
He held Jungkook's gaze with the complete, unruffled steadiness of someone who had never been taught that this particular pair of eyes was something to fear.
A full breath. Two.
Something moved across Jungkook's face — too fast to name, there and gone like a cloud shadow. He looked back at his scroll.
But his hand, resting beside the plate, had not moved. And the dish of pickled vegetables — technically on his side of the table — remained exactly where Taehyung had reached for it.
Available. Unclaimed.
Taehyung served himself calmly and thought: Good. That's a start.
Across the table, Jeonguk was looking between them both with an expression that sat somewhere between suspicion and bewilderment — the look of a man whose world has just made a sound he doesn't recognize and cannot place.
Nobody spoke for the rest of breakfast.
But the silence, by the end of it, was an entirely different shape than it had been at the beginning.
author
do you like this plot?
Download NovelToon APP on App Store and Google Play
