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Hye-Ryeung meets him when she is nine, clutching at the edge of her father’s sleeve, wide-eyed and terrified, a sob trapped in the back of her throat, unable to escape her lips despite the heaviness of it.
She is scared at the time but then- what child would not be? She is a child, she has heard the tales, heard them whispered to her in melodramatic tones by her friends in the safety of daytime, and even the disbelieving giggles that had followed afterwards had not made the stutter of terror go away. After all, she knew what her friends did not- that the tales were true.
He is pale, and cold- and when she sees him, the thought that crosses her mind is that he looks so white , his skin pale against his black robe- and perhaps it is the moonlight cutting through the dark, but it is as if he is not quite there at all, a spirit who had taken the form of a man, immaterial and otherworldly, a ghost like in the stories the maids told her at night.
She is terrified, and afraid. And just for the barest moment in time, she forgets the fear and thinks of awe.
A beautiful ghost, or perhaps a statue- a statue on his cold throne. She thinks his skin would be cold too, like marble or stone to the touch. She does not dare touch him to see.
And when she stands in front of him, her father having put her hands from his- it is as if she is suddenly alone in a suffocating darkness, and she trembles from it.
He tells her his name is Gwi, dark eyes unreadable as they seem to stare into her very soul, and with a voice that she thinks might tremble, she bows and calls him ‘my Lord’.
He summons her, at times. Her father always comes with her to the chamber, bows to his master before leaving her on her own- always it is so, and he turns his back on her without another glance. She stops holding onto his sleeve. He will not help her, he never will. The fear never abates, and she learns to hide it.
The third time is when she sees the bodies, hanging limp in the air, blood dripping from their necks down to a saucer below.
Hye-Ryeung averts her eyes, and her hands shake underneath the sleeve of her hanbok.
She does not understand why he summons her, at times. Does not dare ask. There is nothing for her to do- he does not drink her blood either, unlike how he drinks from the bodies hanging from the air. Sometimes, all she does is stand there in silence, heart thudding in her chest, the cold of the air prickling on her neck. There is nothing for her to do but obey.
(there is an anger festering within her, an anger that will fester into hate, and one day, her father will regret everything he has chosen over his family)
She watches Gwi, listens as he speaks, and often, she does not understand.
Before she realized happy endings did not exist, she had read stories, had loved reading, had always imagined the happy ending before it happened, was always hesitant of reading to the end for fear of what might come, fear that it would not be the end she hoped for. She had read them all, the tales of demons and ghosts, of heroes who fought them away and of the kindly spirits who helped them- she had used to dream of becoming like the heroines in those slim bound books, brave and spirited, free-willed in a manner did not exist in real life.
There was a tale she had read once- about a lonely boy in a house on a hill who had made a pact with a spirit, a boy who had said- ‘I will stay with you and keep you company, if you stay with me, if you serve me’. But the boy grew up, the boy became a man and he fell in love, and he broke his promise to the spirit when his left his old house on the hill, and the spirit had been aggrieved. It had cursed the couple to misfortune and ill luck- the boy’s lover had died only the next spring from fever, and he had followed her in the autumn.
She had not been sure at the time, whether she felt more sorry for the spirit or the boy, or the girl he had fallen in love with- the moral, she was sure, was to avoid dealings with spirits in the first place, it was impossible not to sympathize, impossible not to resent the order of society that seemed to reflect itself so bluntly in those stories. She made up her own ending, and imagined that perhaps they might all stay together in the end.
It was funny, the her of back then- always so intent on happy endings, on her own, thin definition of happiness.
But as time passed, so did her interest for these things.
One day, years after and long since the sight of the bodies hanging upside down have been a shock to her, and the glass saucer of blood is full to overflowing, he motions at her to serve it to him.
With hands that do not tremble, she reaches for it, does not flinch when the blood stains her fingers slick with wet crimson.
He takes it from her outstretched hands, drinks without looking away- it is as if he is staring straight into her, through her, seeing every faint tremor for what it is.
He smiles.
One morning in Spring, she wakes to find a black comb tucked behind her other ornaments, coloured ivory and dark. She almost reaches out to touch it, but her fingers hold her back. She refrains.
It gathers dust there, unused and untouched- she will tell her maids to ignore it, but at the same time forbid them to take it away. A strange sort of command, they must think, and presume it might be a gift given by some important suitor, too important to refuse.
She grows up, and she does not remember a time without Gwi.
But... here is a memory, a memory that she no longer recalls:
She is fourteen. She is sick, terribly sick, and it is dark. She is hot, burning with it, and that is what she remembers from that time- the heat, the terrible heat. They have lit incense to help her sleep, but it only clouds the air, makes it even more stifling hot and she can hardly breathe for it.
And somewhere- somewhere inbetween the heat and the discomfort and the headiness, in the middle of the night, someone comes into the room. A maid, she wonders, and the thought is only half-formed, for she is only half awake, feverish and trembling.
There is a cool, wet cloth being placed on her forehead, cold fingers on her brow, gentle on her cheek. A soothing, soothing cold, cutting through the heat. She almost leans into the touch, she would if she could, and
When she wakes, she will be well again, her sheets drawn up to her chin, a basin at her side filled with cool water. She will touch her forehead and remember the long, pale fingers, have a recollection of the cold hands and the hooded eyes. She will remember the sensation of warmth, of comfort, and it will follow her for years.
She will not know who. She will think of her mother, with wistful hope. By then, her mother already does not know her.
(but she will dream, and sometimes she will think back to the warmth those cold fingers had given her, and she will forbid herself to wonder)
She does not mean to understand him, she has never tried to, and yet as the days pass and the months run their course- she cannot help but to understand.
At some point, it stops being Gwi who reminds her with his cold words and mocking smiles how far her usefulness to him extends. How much or how little value she has to him.
He still does, of course, but it is she who tells that to herself instead.
When she leaves, he presses a cold kiss to her brow. A fleeting touch, barely there. She stays still, unreacting as he does. She does not flinch.
He pulls away after barely a moment, his gaze never breaking from hers- and he smiles, the same smile she has known for so long, and murmurs, soft, “When you return, I look forward to seeing how much you’ll have changed.”
She bows, lowers her eyes to the ground.
Minutes later, she is outside again, in the light of the moon and the warm wind with her father and an attendant waiting for her. The chill of the underground has not yet left her, but it is a cold that has never left, not since she first entered that underground palace.
She disregards her father who steps forward, a question on his lips that he does not phrase. She will not answer it. Instead, she touches where Gwi had kissed her, the cold of it still on her forehead, and, after a moment, brings her fingers down to her lips, wonders if she would be able to taste what his kiss had been like. But there is only the perfume she had worn before entering, the stale sweetness of it, and she lets her fingers fall.
She leaves for the East. The sun is bright in the sky, there are birds in the sky, flying.
The seasons pass. There is something missing. Always, there is something missing.
She wakes up in the night, a cry choked in her throat, wetness on her face, the cold at her veins, climbing to her heart. He cannot touch her here, she thinks, a soothing thought to herself that does nothing, and she waits with closed eyes for the dawn to come. And the nightmares do not stop coming.
The south is warm, and yet the cold in her remains all through Spring and into Summer, a cold ball of ice frozen in her heart, staying into the winter months where even the nights are still lukewarm and humid, where she watches her maids and other nobility wear fur coats and long cloaks, and she wonders at the fashion of the times, for the heat outside has never abated.
She can do nothing here, nothing except wait.
She waits, and she does not know if she longs to return, or if she dreads it.
“Myung-Hee.”
A name. It is not hers. And yet… this man whispers it in such soft tones, in awe and amazement and grief and- she does not understand as he holds her to him, the touch of his skin on her clothing inhumanly chilling. She knows, instinctively, that he has lost someone, that he has lost this person with this name, this name he calls her by.
In a moment, she will recoil, break out of the shock of the moment and glare at him with contempt-filled eyes. But for the briefest instant, then, she feels pity for this strange man.
“You have become a woman,” he says, hours later, and it is as if she has never been gone.
He has not changed while she was in the south- he is still exactly as she remembers him, the robes adorning him, the dark of his hair and the angles of his face, the youthfulness that does not change despite the years that pass.
He was like this too, on the day she met him so many years ago.
There is something almost like wistfulness, in the way he looks at her, something in his eyes that is softer than the darkness about them.
A woman. She wonders what he means, and thinks that it is true.
There is a man. A vampire.
A vampire whose lover Gwi had killed, two hundred years ago.
She wonders how she did not see.
Power, she tells him. Power. And it is the most truthful thing she has ever told anyone.
(she thinks of her mother, of foreign, angry eyes, of the loss in them, of the bewilderment. she will never let anyone do that to them, to her, not ever- not again.)
But he only looks at her, silent and still. And he says, “Then, what about becoming my woman?"
A simple sentence, a simple offer. For a moment, her mind goes blank.
Her mouth opens of its own accord, and she does not think- is thinking too much, is not thinking at all, when she says- "I want to be a human with power." Her voice does not shake, she does not hesitate. She is almost surprised.
She gazes into his cold eyes, and there are some things she does not say, there. There are some things she will never say, not even to herself. She has learned long ago not to hesitate.
But here, here is what she does not expect. That she likes this man, this Prince. His eyes are open- utterly, bewilderingly open, a kindness in his gaze that she does not understand. This is different. This is unexpected.
“So, the marriage is to be declared soon.” He looks at her, perhaps amused, perhaps feeling nothing at all.
She bows her head faintly, “Thanks to you.” She demurs, and the words are empty.
The edge of Gwi’s mouth pulls up in what might be a smile- it might as likely be a smirk. Before she can blink, he has left his throne and is standing in front of her, and his sudden presence barely millimetres away makes her breath hitch.
The vampire tilts his head, unaware of her discomfort or- more likely- merely ignoring it. He raises a hand, uses two fingers to tilt her head up so she is gazing straight at him. His fingers are cold. There is an intimacy to this, an intimacy that makes her skin prickle and wrongness twist in her chest.
“You’ve become quite beautiful.” His gaze doesn’t waver as he runs his fingers across her skin, drifting to her throat, pressing over the beat of her pulse. Her heart beats steady, even and undisturbed. It had taken her so long to learn that, but now she cannot shake the unnatural calm. “It seems I made the right choice letting you live until now.”
“A shame," he continues, and that is where the first hint of something amiss comes, "The first one to have you will not be me."
He regards her, in seeming consideration, "Perhaps I should take you," he contemplates, and her pulse is slow, even. She wishes it would beat faster, would stutter, uneven. It does not. "Before your Crown Prince does." His breath is cold as it washes over her neck, a cold that prickles her skin and makes faint goosebumps rise.
His hands are cold, they trail deeper, her mind is blank. The cold is like an iron, trailing fire across her skin. She cannot move.
“It will be known, if you do this. You cannot.” She says, without emotion, without desperation, “You told me you would make me the King’s woman.”
His fingers slide underneath her hanbok, to the slim jut of her shoulderbone, lower. They linger there, above her chest. She wants to pull away. His dark eyes look into her own, and it feels impossibly dangerous, impossibly inhuman- she does not look away.
(where he has touched her there is a burning trail left across her skin, where he still touches she can feel the icy heat seep through to her bones, and she is afraid)
She wonders, with a spark of what might be muted, stifled fear, if he will listen to her. If he is even listening now. But his lips twist into a slow smile, and then she knows he will.
“You’re an amusing woman,” he tells her, and relief suffuses her for the barest instant. “Very well."
He smiles, "But.” There is something in his expression, something he has not shown her before. “In exchange, you will give me this.”
He leans forward, slow and slight, and his hand is curling around her shoulder, not pulling, not coaxing, but still a weight that is unmistakably there and he brings his mouth to hers, settles his lips atop her own. She stiffens- she cannot help the reaction- and he chuckles, the sound of it vibrating across her skin. She cannot stop him, she realizes. She cannot deny him here, so she does nothing instead.
It takes everything in her to.
She stays still- impossibly still- as his tongue parts her lips, slowly pushes inside her mouth and licks a swipe across her tongue. She wonders what she is meant to do, for a moment, whether she is meant to reciprocate, before she remembers she will not. The kiss is slow, gentle- too slow, too gentle, as if it is a lover’s caress. It... feels like an intimate thing, a soft thing, and his fingers are gentle on her skin, they do not draw her towards him, they only settle there, as if to steady himself. There is nothing of fire here, nothing of ice, nothing of the sharp angles and cutting edges that she had thought would be there.
In truth she had thought he would be harsh, if he ever kissed her, had thought it would be icy cold and bitter, that he would draw blood and the roughness of it would sear deep and cut and
She forgets, for a moment, that she has never thought these thoughts.
But the softness might as well burn as deeply as the ice, and for a moment there is a part of her that is cut open for it, the part of her that is nothing but emptiness trembling, on the verge of breaking.
He draws away, breaks the kiss with a slowness that is almost unbearable, and the brief daze in her vanishes.
She remembers the anger then, and swallows (tastes a sweetness that is not hers)- and the bitterness, the resentment breaks the surface, and when she looks at him next her gaze is shuttered and blank.
Is that all, she wishes to ask, bitter and sarcastic, but there is a feeling in her- something strange, something not quite her that tells her she should not, that she should let this moment be.
Gwi lifts his hand and- too gently- wipes away the wetness from her lips. His smile is strange, and he takes a step back, his robes swaying in the still air.
“Go,” he tells her, and what mocking is in it is unreadable, “Go to your Prince.”
She pours tea into her cup, raises it to her lips and washes down the lingering taste of hours past. The heat is scorching, and the water burns her tongue, burns away the aftertaste of what should already have disappeared long ago.
Her fingers do not tremble, but she almost imagines that they do.
“Love is a weakness,” he tells her, and he may think he is advising her, may think his words have knowledge that she does not- but there is an irony there, an irony she understands where he does not.
She lowers her eyes, and there is a flame lit in her chest that she keeps guarded close, and it will not be snuffed out, not now that it has been sparked and kept so close by warm hands.
There are soft lips on hers, warm and tentative. She leans into it, opens her mouth. There is a warmth in her chest, a warmth that carries through to her bones and she thinks that this might be love.
(she remembers the feeling of cold lips, of softness and gentleness, so gentle she might have broken from it, and she closes her eyes and wills her thoughts away)
A question, fleeting: could things ever have been different. Another thought that follows it, quieter; they could have been. And she does not wonder any more than that.
She knows without wondering that it is already too late.
(She thinks it has always been too late)
Gwi told her, once that she was more like him than anyone among the humans he had ever met.
She knew he was wrong. She was more like him than he would ever be. He did not see her, not in the way she saw him. He does not see her, not as she sees him.
He thinks she does not know, after all, what lies deepest in his heart.
(there is a part of her that wonders- if only he had said it, if only he had told her, and maybe if it were another place and another time, perhaps she could have tried)
(but there is no other world she knows, no other time they can be in save this one, and so she does not think such things)
When she sees that girl, the peasant in the roughspun clothing and the wide eyes and open smile, she thinks, oddly, of herself.
She thinks, the moment after that, that this girl, with her worn clothes, the brightness about her eyes and the openness of everything in her expression- no, she could not be any more different, she could not be anything more than the opposite of Hye-Ryeung.
She looks at the girl, weighs her words with care before she speaks. And she knows that what she says is the truth- knows that this is perhaps the only thing that will save this girl from what will come, and so she lets her voice become cruel as she speaks, the cold splintering in her words until she can see them cut through the skin and flesh and into bone.
She watches, eyes burning behind the cold, and hopes- prays- that this girl will listen to her.
Here is the truth: there is always a choice. Love has no meaning, neither does hate, only the meaning you choose to give to it. Only the choice you make for it. The choices you make in spite of it.
And she thinks of gentle lips and dark eyes and long, cold fingers, and she thinks back to the damp and the shadow, the things that lurked in the dark, of the comfort that was found within the cold. And she thinks of all the things that are already too far in the past, too far gone and too late to keep on holding in her heart.
She chooses.
“Have you slept with him yet?” He asks, mocking, gentle, and she realizes- she has known it for a long time- he is always gentle with her. It is less of a sin to admit it to herself now, now that she no longer cares for that knowledge.
She does not reply, and she would tell the truth and deny it, except she does not want him to obtain even a modicum of pleasure from that.
There is a man she would die for, and that is what Gwi will never understand. To love someone enough to die for them.
The thought is more bitter than she thought it would be.
And yet.
She stands in front of him, her white robes thin, the wind blowing over her, chilling her already cold skin.
She says, “It’s not only because of that.”
And she lies.