More Short Stories!- Kai Ships Only

🍿Beomkai- Prince of the North

Kai snuck away from Soobin because the Prince was driving him crazy. Just a quick visit to the woods was all he needed. He wanted to hear absolutely nothing after hearing his royal pain-in-the-ass complain for the past hour. Laundry wasn't hard to do. Chores in general weren't hard to do. The Prince made it hard.

There was four different forests to choose from in the kingdom. Kai chose the one in the southwest. The closest to Soobin incase he had to get back quickly. It was also the one he explored the most as a child.

His mother called it "serenity" due to her favorite pine tree. The sun always shined there. It was like the forest had it's own magic when the Huenings stepped into it.

Mrs. Huening would sit at the top branch and hum to herself. Kai would sing with her on her lap. A lot of the more difficult spells to memorize, were turned into a song on that tree. It's a technique he continued to use after her passing.

When Kai stepped through the portal, he didn't see the sunlit paradise he remembered. He saw black bark and ash. "What...?" Kai touched the ground. His fingertips were covered in soot. The dirt was oddly warm. This had to be recent.

A million questions were running through his mind. The biggest one was "why?" Kai kept walking through the smoke, trying to find that tree his mother loved so dearly. Twigs snapped under his feet. His brown boots began turning black as he journeyed deeper. Then, he found the tree. Part of him wish he hadn't. It was as tall as he remembered it but the similarities ended there. Honestly, it wasn't even the tree he was so upset about. It was the fact that it was tied to his mother. Just another grim reminder that she was gone.

Kai knelt to the ground. His hands started brushing away every square inch of ash around him. He was desperate to find a fleck of green. Any sign of life, any sign the forest was alive, he was searching for. Even a bug would've been a welcome find.

The heat hurt his hands. He brushed his sweaty bangs away from his forehead while unknowingly staining his face. The North obviously did this. The South wouldn't burn down their own forest but Kai still couldn't understand why. He knew what he had to do to fix this.

Once again, his hands sunk into the ash. He whispered a long spell. His hands begun to omit an emerald green glow. His eyes burned that same green as he whispered the spell on repeat.

Kai wasn't rooting for any side to win. Both had fucked him over in one way or another. He lived by his moral compass. Right now, that compass was telling him the South was the lesser of two evils.

When he stopped the spell, he started to smile. His smile drew wider when he stood up to see what he really did. Buds of green were poking out through the black. Small daisies were in full bloom. Clovers mixed in with patches of grass. Purple wildflowers were scattered between the blossoms of white. The monochrome forest was now a vision to behold. It was full of life. Kai stood in awe of what he did.

Prince Beomgyu saw everything from the branch he was sitting on. He ordered the forest to be burned down because he suspected his rival, Prince Soobin, was hiding in it. Instead, he found someone more inticing than he could've imagined.

That mage was powerful. Perhaps more powerful than the rest in his "work force". Everyone knows you can't produce magic without sacrificing something in the realm of chaos. This mage, this guy that he desperately had to have, seemed to handle it like it was nothing. No consequences, no adverse reaction to his well being, nothing. The South couldn't have known about him either. They would've found traces of him in the castle.

"No..." Beomgyu mumbled to himself. "He kept his identity a secret because he would be enslaved or die if he didn't." The Prince silently withdrew his sword. He had to talk to him. Figure out where a mage that young, that powerful, had been hiding his whole life. He was prepared to offer him anything to have him as an ally.