The Seat That Was Never His
The King answered without so much as a moment's hesitation.
"It is denied."
"...Your Majesty."
"I said no."
The aspiration his son had carried his entire life was crushed with staggering ease.
"Why? Why do You do this...?"
"...."
The King did not deign to answer, as if that alone were all the reply he would ever grant him.
Seonghwi's jaw trembled violently. It could not be. It could not.
Biting the inside of his cheek until it split, he forced his emotions down.
"That seat was mine."
"No. It was never once yours."
The King's voice, which had rumbled low, gathered force and rang out, driving into his ears like a blade.
"Did I ever promise you the throne? The crown prince's seat already belongs to Yunhwi."
The man before him was not a father. He was the sovereign of a nation.
"But... did You not send me to Cheonmaekji...?"
"Do not chase empty dreams. I did not send you to Cheonmaekji with any such intention. Have you only just now realized that it was for appearances' sake and nothing more?"
The King let out a sigh, as though the sight of such a foolish son had grown stifling.
"When foreign envoys come calling, would parading a sickly eldest son before them uphold our national dignity? The times are turbulent already — this is no hour to reveal a single crack! Why can you not understand that exhibiting a prince who cannot manage one proper conversation without his foreign minister at his side, or hiding him away for no discernible reason, are both failings? Why!"
At the King's roar, Seonghwi stared blankly ahead, and a conversation with his younger brother surfaced in his mind.
If not for that, why else would he have sent me somewhere so far from the palace?
The truth he had tried so hard not to know was laid bare.
You recognized someone more capable. You saw that with my abilities, I could not even oversee a remote village — and so you chose.
He had been a clever child. He must have known all along — that Seonghwi's suspicion was right, that the seat was already decided. And so perhaps he had merely pretended to yield the throne out of pity for his pitiable older brother.
No. It had to have been exactly that. He wanted to play the sage ruler. He wanted to ascend the supreme seat without a whisper of dissent — and he had known perfectly well that a sickly, incompetent brother was no rival at all...!
Crack. A tooth broke with a small, muffled sound between Seonghwi's clenched teeth.
"With vision this narrow, you believe you can sit this seat? From that seat, one must see a thousand li ahead — and you, Seonghwi... you cannot even see a single move before your feet."
The King breathed out a lament. Seonghwi bowed his head to the floor and begged.
"I shall become a sage ruler in Your Majesty's own image! I will uphold the court! I will be father to this nation's people! I will leave a name in history that endures—"
He was desperate.
"No."
To Seonghwi, that seat was desperate beyond all measure.
"It cannot be."
It was the force that had sustained his entire life. The sole reason Seonghwi existed at all. Because that place was his seat — because he had believed it without a shadow of doubt.
There was not the slightest hesitation in the King's gaze as he looked down upon him.
"The king is the root of the nation. I hear there are even men who pass their fortune to children who could die at any moment? That your body is frail grieves me — but no one can say which way the bloody winds of the court will blow!"
As the sovereign's shout rang out, the tiger embroidered across his chest seemed to roar. Light shattered across the golden thread, glittering so brilliantly it brought tears to the eyes — clothing truly fit for a sovereign alone.
As a father, he wavered at the sight of his pleading son —
"If you truly wish to become the father of the people, then obey my will."
— but as the king of a nation, he did not.
"You may go."
The brush in the King's hand slowly pressed down a single dot. Seonghwi raised his head, slow as molasses, and as he watched the ink bloom dark across the paper, the truth finally sank in.
The command had already been given.
There was no undoing it.
"...It shall be as you command."
Watching his son bow low and walk out, the King pressed his lips tightly inward.
The boy he had once believed would die before his tenth birthday had, mercifully, grown into a man.
That was enough. Yes. That was enough.
Thud. The moment the prince departed, the doors swung shut on either side once more. All that remained in the vast office now was a single monarch, fated to live his life at the very summit, alone.
The King lowered his gaze. State affairs stood heaped in wait. The brush had sat idle while his mind wandered, and the corner of the document had already taken an ugly blot.
"Wow... that actually hurts to watch..."
"But honestly? A sickly king is pretty much the perfect recipe for a kingdom falling apart, you know."
"Well, either way, no Yeomga tonight, so my heart is finally at ease."
"B nearly cried her eyes out yesterday. But Yeomga is on a whole other level. She's the kick of Strange Tales — honestly, I think she could show up a bit more often."
This was Daily Media's basement studio, where Reporter Wi — "DramaDork B" herself — and a handful of colleagues were filming their free-form reactions in front of the cameras.
The special video Daily Media had uploaded last time had enjoyed a modest surge of popularity, swelling the official account's subscriber count considerably. There was no need to agonize over what the next item should be — the second reaction cam drama was decided on the spot: Strange Tales.
My Yeo-reum... someday I want to shout my love for you from the rooftops...
Truthfully, Reporter Wi was perfectly comfortable with horror and gore alike. But every time Yeo-reum appeared in episode one of Strange Tales, she'd struggled so hard to contain her love that she had ended up typecast, entirely against her will, as a trembling, overly emotional scaredy-cat.
Now, filming the second reaction video on the heels of yesterday's cut, Reporter Wi made a prediction.
The Strange Tales reaction is going to completely reshuffle our subscriber rankings.
The fact that even Jegal Rok — that Jegal Rok — had laughed at the episode two ending gave her something close to religious conviction that something big was coming.
Cheonmaekji
A beautiful mountain village unfolded across the screen. Sunlight poured down cool and clean between the verdant trees, and birds chirped and trilled somewhere out of frame. A waterwheel turned, sending clear water crashing into white spray. The camera swept down from the sky over Cheonmaekji — an isolated village, yet one blessed with everything a settlement could want.
Lively music drifted from a lotus-strewn pavilion by the water.
"Hahaha! Hahahaha!"
The men's laughter rolled out deep and resonant. With beautifully dressed women seated at their sides like dolls, their faces were brimming with smiles.
"Congratulations, Lord Magistrate!"
"Ah, how delighted I am that our Cheonmaekji's beauty will be proclaimed far and wide."
The elderly man called the Magistrate beamed as he drank from the cup a beautiful woman held to his lips.
"Our Cheonmaekji's waters are so fine that the Grand Prince himself comes all this way to bathe in our hot springs — and this water is every bit as fine! Isn't that so, Hwa-yeong?"
"Yes, Lord Hyang-ri. It is indeed."
The Hyang-ri, the local official, sniggered as he wrapped an arm around the shoulder of the woman in the pink jacket. The woman called Hwa-yeong silently raised her smooth, pale hand and poured wine once more into the emptied cup.
"Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon have exalted our village's name so high — my heart grows bitter-sweet at the thought! But! It reminds me once more of these women's chastity, and for that I am grateful."
"Lord Jang must be rejoicing in heaven right now!"
"Quite so! A hundred times, a thousand times better to follow their father to the grave than to live beneath a stepmother! Why — chastity and filial devotion both? The two sisters were absolutely exemplary!"
At this cavalier dismissal of human lives, the expressions of the young girls seated nearby froze in an instant.
The men were speaking of Jang-hwa and Hong-ryeon, the two sisters who had taken their own lives only days before.
The sisters had been around the same age as the girls at this table. In a village this small, they had exchanged at least a few words now and then over the course of their childhoods.
And yet, before long, the girls smoothed their faces into careful placidity. These men were, for all intents and purposes, the sky of this village.
"The self-sacrifice of chaste women defiled by a band of thieves — how profoundly moving is that? And with compensation money flowing into our Cheonmaekji on top of it, there's no better news to be had. None!"
"Ah, then Chimyeongji is as good as finished! Naturally the merchants will be passing through our village from now on!"
"Then our Cheonmaekji shall prosper more than ever! Heheh!"
Guffawing, they heaped abuse upon Chimyeongji. It was a village nearby with a name similar to Cheonmaekji's, and because its mountains were slightly gentler, the merchants had long favored it over theirs.
And because of that, Cheonmaekji's isolation had deepened with every passing day.
"Once the compensation money arrives, shall we renovate this pavilion first? Ah, if a village is to flourish, it must have something grand to show off to outsiders — wouldn't you agree?"
They had not the slightest interest in the miserable deaths — or lives — of innocent folk. For all their flowery words, the naked greed underneath was plain to see.
"But still... a genuine shame, that."
The Magistrate, mid-drink, let his words trail off slowly, thoughtfully.
"A woman's chastity is, generally speaking... something a widow must guard with even stricter care than most..."
The air turned to ice in an instant. At those words, everyone at the table thought of one and the same person. Sidelong glances were exchanged, silently shared.
Every single one of them sensed that at this very moment, on this very pavilion, some scheme was unfolding.
And still, the women and girls could say nothing at all. They were haeehwa — flowers that understood the speech of men — but they were not people. They merely bit their lips and set their hands in motion. Those fair, flower-like hands plucked at the strings of the gayageum, and the beautiful music flowed on and on.
Clunk—. The waterwheel clattered, halted for a breath, and resumed its turning. The lotus flowers were as fresh and serene as ever.
And so the little village of Cheonmaekji was trampled, peacefully, beneath their feet.
"No, fuck! Those insane bastards!"
Seo I-deun jabbed his finger at the screen like a drunk on the Line 1 subway. Nobody had asked him to, but he had appointed himself an official reaction cam subject, throwing himself into every scene without pause.
"What the hell is this? It's not even a proper daughter-in-law's rite — what is it, then? She's not even daughter-age, she's granddaughter-age!"
"I-deun. It's a hired-mourner's rite."
"Whatever, okay?! They're all ancient — what the hell are they even doing?"
"Let it go. The way the story's going, they'll be dead soon enough."
"They should drop dead this instant. Your conscience is no joke, seriously."
Seo I-deun had, at some point, gone completely and hopelessly over-immersed in Strange Tales.
Between the TV, the tablet, and his phone, every screen in the lodge was blaring Strange Tales, and the place felt utterly overrun by the drama's old men. The Magistrate's face loomed out of three different screens simultaneously, large and small.
"I-deun, can I have my phone back?"
"Hyung, you never even watched it before, and now you've got zero loyalty. You're supposed to be rooting for them!"
"...They're your coworkers. Why am I the one who owes them loyalty..."
"My coworkers are your coworkers! That's what a team is. Anyway, no. Keep watching. Ugh, this story is seriously no joke."
Seo I-deun had confiscated every phone his groupmates owned and set them all playing Strange Tales, slapping away any hand that reached for one — and then diving straight back into the screen himself.
And so the members had been forced into watching Strange Tales.
But as time passed, every last one of them abandoned the sofa for the floor, inching their bodies closer and closer to the screens.
The woman called Hwa-yeong — seated beside the Hyang-ri only moments before — was now running headlong somewhere, anywhere.
Her crimson skirt hem billowed violently. Her breath came ragged and urgent between her rouged lips, and the silk bundle clutched in her hands looked heavy as a stone.
"Hah... hah..."
The moment she reached a certain house, she pressed herself into the shadows to hide.
Bang! Bang!
She snatched up stones from the yard and hurled them against the kitchen door. Whether or not the sound reached inside, a soft creak— followed, and from within came the faint groan of a door being opened.