Emperor Min Yoongi ascends the throne with a vow to avenge the untimely death of his father. It is a promise that will take he and his consorts to battle through fire and water, and to bring back the dead on a quest for the truth of what happened on...
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Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
That's what Yoongi's father always told us, when we were younger. And he ought to know. I do not remember the day he was crowned emperor, but for as long as I was old enough to understand, I've known he felt the weight of responsibility resting heavy on his shoulders. Being the emperor of the Bangtan Empire was rewarding, to be sure, and as a general rule, it's people loved their emperor. However, our people were volatile, often chaotic, every single one of them apparently born with an agenda they were determined to see to the end. And if the slightest thing went wrong, the buck ultimately stopped with the emperor.
The Bangtan Empire was ruled by the Emperor, backed by his queen consort, usually a female, and his king consort, usually a male. Many decades ago the emperor had passed a decree which outlawed concubines, but had at the same time put through the necessity that the emperor take both a queen and a king consort. The law had been followed, to various degrees of success, throughout the dynasty, and we'd learnt in our history lessons about male queens and female kings, depending on the whims of the emperor. But it did have the result of introducing polyamory into the realm, and today it was a common practice. I suspected that the emperor who had originally passed the decree had been in love with both his queen and his king, and that the abolishment of concubine laws had been merely to appease the court. The advantage of the consort law was that it gave the emperor two people who had very heavy sway in the court. Together, the court could not overrule the emperor unless they had the backing of both the queen consort and the king consort.
Yoongi's father had not loved his king consort - at least, not in a romantic sense. He was in fact one of his best friends, and he'd had relationships of his own until he had been killed saving the queen's life. The friendship that the three of them had, had been something special, and upon his death, Yoongi's father had not replaced him, preferring to leave the position vacant, granting more power to the prime minister.
As for me, I was abandoned as a child, or so the story goes. Every gossiper in the realm would tell a different tale, some believing my parents had died whilst travelling, and some believing they'd deliberately laid me where the emperor of the realm would discover me, and that they were still alive somewhere. I'd always believed the former to be closer to the truth, and even though I'd lost hope of discovering how my parents had died, Yoongi's parents, the emperor and his queen, were always kind to me. Yoongi had cared for me and protected me like a little sister when we were younger, but now the relationship had morphed into something more like very close friends. The two of us always had each other's backs, and most of the people of the realm treated me like a Princess. There were, of course, those who hated the fact that the emperor would allow an abandoned child to become third in line for the throne, but Yoongi would not allow me to take their words to heart. I wasn't entirely sure when it had happened, but he was fiercely protective of me these days.
I had been the youngest of the royal palace for many years, and the only female in the small group of children that the emperor would allow us to associate with. Growing up within the sanctuary of the palace walls, I'd been determined to do everything that Yoongi did, despite being a few years younger than him and quite a bit smaller. I learnt to call him hyung from a young age, simply copying anything they did, and we were well on the way to becoming adults before we learnt that this was not in fact the correct term for me to use. By that time it was so engrained that it was hard for me to stop using it. Although, I wasn't sure that Yoongi didn't know himself, but he never tried to correct me. There were around five children who we spent our time with, and of the five, there were two we were particularly close with - Park Jimin, the son of a close friend and advisor of Yoongi's father, and Jeon Jungkook, a boy of the same age as myself, whose mother died at birth, and whose father was killed in battle as a general of the Bangtan army. Yoongi had all but adopted him, much to the amusement of the emperor who perhaps saw something of himself in his son, and as a result Jungkook spent considerable time with us.
