Chapter Text
It’s all Black,
Bleak, blatantly bare
Embers of Hope
Lie in the cinders of rebellion
There is a strange tale woven with truth and veracity, a tale that has become lore. Yet to every listener, it had seemed so appalling and glaringly filled with untruths and grotesque imagery that they had rejected it forthrightly. Exclaiming with their hands upon their ears “Tell me how can it be so!”. Despair followed the narrator and despair took root in the listener. Yet the tale refused to die.
So, gentle reader, here is the tale as it was narrated to me. The tale has a King, as all tales do. Though this King was not benevolent or kind. By a dance of terror and lust did he rule. Whether it was his lust that fired his tyranny, or was it violence that grew into lusty appetites, who can say?
They say it is rare that one is born with golden locks and sunny skin, and even rarer when the golden tresses and sun-kissed skin encase eyes as green as emeralds, as the land was not of the pale ghosts. In such a land this King’s predecessors were an anomaly, yet they were considered blessed by the Dragon.
The King truly did have ancestors who were blessed by the breath of the Dragon. Their hair possessed miraculous qualities and their eyes could still a man where he stood. Yet this King was all things perverse. He spared nary a thought for his Kingdom and relished all in all the power he got.
He was vain and promiscuous, and did I tell you he was a tyrant? He was. There were the poor and destitute across his kingdom and he did not care. All he cared for was designing a golden armor for his guardsmen. When the state's advisors called his plans foolhardy, as gold, for all its shiny goodness, was also a very malleable metal prone to breaking under heat, he had their tongues cut.
The Kingdom had a fertile and flourishing duchy in the west. The residents of the duchy were all in praise for the duke for his just and fair ways. The King noticed this, and perhaps it was his vainglorious nature or his personal greed that made him raise the taxes on the duchy in the west. The taxes became so exorbitant that the populace could not pay them, which made this mad King punish them by cutting their access to the rivers that made the duchy fertile. None of his state advisors spoke against this decree as everyone treasured their tongues.
Now that I have acquainted you with his greed and self-importance, let me tell you about his perversions. It is whispered that the King had a rapacious appetite. One that was not sated with bodies of men and women alone. His appetite was more perverse, as he did not spare children any more than adults. He bedded children as young as a mere 10 years of age, and regret of what his ill bodied lust visited these young’uns bodies were not carried in his soul.
That is, until the day he had mutilated a child of age 14, did he realize that perhaps his lust can only be quenched with a body that is responsive instead of one which has grown cold. Then he passed another decree that obligated all nobles in the Kingdom to raise their boys to the ripe age of 15, and after which they shall make the harem called the King’s Children until they turned 20 years old.
Each noble tried to hide away their boys or have peasants raise them, for they could not fathom a crueler fate than this for their boys. But the King always knew when such a trick had been played and captured away the noblemen’s wives to birth bastards from his lust, and as a fitting punishment for the imagined crime. Of these unholy punishments many children were born, and if luck was with the infant, then their golden hair and green eyes would liken them heir, otherwise they would be the less fortunate who were thrown away to God knows where.
Fear not dear readers, for I shall not carry on any more with this King, as this tale has been too long and too grim. I only want to familiarize you with the start, and now we shall meet one person who interested me most of all the King’s Children; a boy whose name was Kim Seokjin.
Young Seokjin was the child of the Minister of Finance; a man of pure, cold logic and outer calm. The Minister would have liked to shield his child and spare him the hurt, but he saw no way of doing it without losing his head, and thus he sent Seokjin to bear with it as best as he could. Young Master Seokjin was a peculiar boy indeed: while most boys his age were playing, he took to books instead. And in those books, he had read of a just and noble King, thus he had he vowed to make such a King himself than the one he would have to forcibly bed.
With that thought in mind, Seokjin took the hand of the corrupt King and forced a smile upon his face. In his mind, he was not curtseying to this mad ruler, but to the one he had imagined. He took every opportunity to gauge the heirs apparent while spending his days in the library, an escape from his dreadful reality. The nights were cold and brutal because he felt the pain, and every touch became abhorrent, so he planned to have this mad ruler dead.
He learnt all courtly manners and acquired an artful tongue. It was said that Master Seokjin could leave the courtiers hanging upon his every word. It didn’t hurt at all that he was blessed with ebony hair, porcelain skin, and lips plump and red as freshly picked cherries. His eyes were said to be doe-like and filled with innocence. Though if one really paused to look, Master Seokjin housed a wolf within him, one that was waiting for his time to come.
Seokjin could not make peace with the passing of time; his only wish was the day be nigh when he would finally be free. And their kingdom would readily breathe. An heir had to show himself ready to take on the King's mantle, as everyone in their land was getting desperate. Oh! Where could their savior be?
The eldest known heir was greedy, the second was slick and sly, the third was good at following the second because he had nothing to show for himself, and the fourth was a mere sickly child castaway in a vassal kingdom left to recuperate and remedy.
Thus, I leave you with this final image from the dreary beginning, a young man of 17 (two years have since passed since he was given to the King) staring out of a high window into a world blanketed in snow. He hopes it won’t be cold forever. He hopes that winter thaws soon, for it has cost their land more than an arm and several legs.