Young and Wild || seongjoong || ATEEZ

Chapter Fifteen: A Thousand Lifetimes in One

Chapter warning: none

There were many times in Seonghwa's life that had been filled with darkness.

There were many times when not even the strongest rays of the sun could infiltrate the deep darkness that would spread when no one was looking and it was least expected.

The night was a perfect example of such darkness, it was so common that no one thought it was odd when the world turned dark and the sun that provided life seemed to disappear completely for many hours at a time. Storms were another- when the land and wind became violent and again the sun disappeared thus casting the world into a kind of darkness that wasn't entirely difficult to see in, but it was still dark.

Many were scared of the dark because they relied heavily on their sense of sight. Once sight was taken away, the imagination had a way of coming out in ways that were not peaceful or comforting. Darkness always brought uncertainty. Death and danger liked to linger in the shadows because the two sorrows could only make a move if no one saw it coming.

Seonghwa couldn't count how many times he had been cast into darkness. Much of his life had been in darkness, both physical and emotional. He knew that just because his physical body stood under the hot sun, didn't mean that his emotional body was also hanging in the bright light.

But Seonghwa had always loved the night for reasons that many could not understand. Even as a child, he thrived when the ball of dancing fire that was said to be the great protector went away for a long time. The darkness hardly ever scared him, especially when it was quiet and peaceful in a room that was far too large for any child, where he could sit on the balcony and overlook the kingdom's meadows and imagine anything his mind could think of.

Darkness inhibited sight, and when that sense was dulled, imagination bloomed. Some feared this greatly, most did in fact, but Seonghwa had always found his imagination taking him to places he wished he could travel to. His hopes and dreams of a better life were only kept alive because of his hope that bloomed within the darkness.

That hope that kept him together only diminished in the light.

But there were those who swore by the light of day, and one of those people was always his mother. She had been a lover of the day, even though her beauty seemed ethereal in the moonlight. The sunlight on her skin always made her glow a color that seemed unnatural to the human eye like her body would become extensions of the soft sun's rays.

"As long as you are looking into the sunlight, you will never see shadows."

She always spoke of the sun as a god, as if one was underneath the light no harm could ever come to them.

Seonghwa's mother, the great queen who had lost her mind to the heavy pressures of the world, had always looked straight into the sun with both of her eyes no matter how bad it burned.

"Do not forget that the sun is the giver of life."

He would often find her in the corners of the castle looking up through the stained-glass windows, staring up into the bright light of thousands of colors for hours at a time. Even as he grew up and became the man he soon found himself to be, she was always staring at the sun in a longing way.

It was like there was no one else in the world besides his mother and the bright circle of life.

But just because Seonghwa preferred the night to the day, it didn't mean that he always wanted to douse himself in darkness all the time. There too were times that he wished to see the light of day and open his eyes to see something other than darkness.