"The ravenous fire that crackled in your souls was one and the same, stoked by repressed fear and the overwhelming desire to survive in a world that only valued material power."
In their desperate battle to survive the harsh aristocracy, the desire...
His limbs were weary from hours of unforgiving Azāri practice, begging him to shut his eyes and rest, but those pleas went unheard by his mind. Void of thought, yet utterly restless.
It was another typical night for the Sōrsānt.
The world slept around him. Not a squawking bird outside interrupted the palace's numbing quiet. Hyunjin turned to his side with a sigh, tired of hearing his lonely heartbeat in the silence. He blinked in the dark, gaze landing on a book washed over by shy moonlight.
There, on his empty desk, sat the item you hurriedly shoved into his hands once your training finished. He should've ignored you and left it at the court. He should've thrown the book aside and reported you to the Ērmār.
Instead, he carried it with him and tossed the book onto his desk when he entered his room. Going about the rest of his monotonous day, he forgot about your sudden gift.
Only now did he remember it.
With nothing to do except toss and turn, Hyunjin's curiosity got the better of him and he found himself slipping out from under the bulky covers toward the desk.
The book was heavier than he recalled, its leather unblemished and in perfect condition. No imprint hinted at its contents, and perhaps it was his exhaustion or boredom, but Hyunjin thought nothing of it when he flipped the thick cover.
A blank page stared back at him.
Curious, he turned the page. The velvety parchment whispered against his fingers. You wouldn't give him an empty book, would you?
Ink lined the following page, the careful script too small for him to discern from afar, save for the few words brushed with gold at the top.
The Art of Flowering: Cultivating and Practicing Flowering Magic.
Hyunjin dropped the book with a shrill gasp, clamping his burning hands over his mouth a moment too late as his gaze flickered across the room in horror. Was this an ill joke of some sort?
The walls seemed to bristle around him, grey and looming and suddenly too close. His lungs refused to relax, holding in air as though the faintest sound from him would alert the entirety of the palace. Not a sigh of breath. Not a murmur of silk.
The petrifying silence of the palace continued, unperturbed and unaware of the intense clamor that erupted in Hyunjin's mind. A hundred invisible eyes were set on him, prickling, making him want to crawl out of his skin and hide from no one.
He was sure that if he left the book on his desk a second longer, his mother would barge in and unleash her unfading scorn on him.
With trembling hands, Hyunjin reached for the book again, shutting it and tucking it under his arm with frantic haste. He refused to ponder upon its contents any further. He had to hide it before those simple words festered into a beast in his thoughts, hunting him down, ravaging his sanity until it unraveled.
He stumbled toward his bed, throwing the heavy blanket over and thrusting the book under the dense mattress. He pushed it as far as his arm could go, uncaring for the weight crushing his bones. He needed that book forgotten until he figured out a way to rid of it completely.
His shoulder was close to popping when he pulled his arm out recklessly, but his consciousness was too muddled to notice. He left the book pressed somewhere under the enormous mattress, and only then did he dare to exhale, albeit weakly.
Fatigue wracked his body, fiercer and more intense than it was some minutes ago. He scrambled onto his bed, lying limply as his internal clamor continued.
Was this your way of taunting him? Reminding him of his fatal, irredeemable flaw?
You were mad. You had to be. Or maybe you had a death wish, Hyunjin didn't want to know which of the two it was. You were treading perilous land, and he wanted nothing to do with your foolish adventures.
Even though the broken desire in him whispered otherwise.
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