The King Who Feared Nothing

In the year 1500 BC, no one in the valley of Seoul said the name of King Jeon Jungkook without lowering their voice.

He was twenty-five, and he was the strongest king of his age. Three neighboring kingdoms had marched against the Jeon dynasty, and three had ended in ash. Their generals had knelt in his hall with chains on their wrists. Their banners hung in his armory as trophies. Soldiers who had faced him on the field told their children that he did not fight like a man. He fought like winter, slow, silent, and impossible to survive.

Jungkook knew what they whispered, and he did not care. Fear kept borders closed. Fear kept councils obedient. Fear, his father had once told him, was the only honest kind of loyalty.

His father had also died when jungkook was ten years old.

The fever had come in autumn and taken his father in three days. His mother had followed before the first snow, quietly, as though she had simply decided not to stay in a world without him. She had pressed one last thing into her son's small hand before she went: a pale stone locket on a silver chain, carved with a crescent moon.

Keep it close, she had whispered. It knows the way home.

He had not understood. He was ten years old, standing alone in a hall too large for him, and the only thing he understood was that love had killed her. She had loved his father so much that she could not live without him. The boy watched the grief hollow her out until nothing remained.

So jungkook made a decision, at ten, that he had never once broken.

He would never love anyone. Love made people weak. Love made queens fade in the night. Love made kings kneel. He would be a wall instead, cold and high and unbreakable, and nothing would ever again be able to take from him what he refused to give.

By twenty-five, the wall had become a man.

That night, the moon hung full above the valley, huge and white. Jungkook alked his kingdom alone in a dark cloak, as he did every month, unseen, listening. Tonight the streets were quiet. The people slept safely. He was, in his own cold way, satisfied.

At the river, he knelt to drink. His hands were still stone-steady as he cupped the water. But the moment the cold liquid touched his lips, the locket on his chest flared white.

He had time to think, sorcery, and nothing else.

The river rose, wrapped around him, and pulled.

---

He woke on his back, on wet grass, coughing.

The first thing he noticed was the sky. It had no stars. It glowed a dull, dirty orange, as though a distant city were burning, and a small pale moon hung in it like a coin.

Jungkook rolled to his feet in one motion, hand flying to the sword at his hip. There was no sword. His fingers closed on nothing.

He turned in a slow circle.

The river was here, but it was wrong, its banks lined with cut stone, its water black and still. Beyond it rose towers. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Glass and steel and light, each one taller than the greatest mountain fortress he had ever besieged, their windows glittering like the eyes of a thousand watching beasts. A bridge stretched across the water, strung with lamps, and something roared across it, a long, gleaming, shrieking creature that did not run on legs.

His breath left him.

For the first time since he was ten years old, King Jeon Jungkook felt afraid.

He forced himself to stand straight. Think, he ordered himself. You have taken cities. You have faced armies. You will not stand trembling in front of a river. But his heart was slamming, and he could not make his eyes stop moving from tower to tower to tower.

"Where," he said aloud, in a voice that came out hoarse, "is my kingdom?"

No one answered.

Except someone did.

A short distance along the bank, on a wooden bench facing the water, a girl sat with her knees pulled up to her chest. She had been staring at the river, but she was now staring at him. Her face was wet. She held a paper cup in both hands, as if she had forgotten how to put it down.

Her name was Y/N, and tonight was the third anniversary of the day her parents had died.

She had come to the Han River, the way she did every year, to sit where they used to take her as a child. She had come to be alone with her grief. She had not come to see a tall, soaking wet man with waist-length black hair stand in the middle of the park in a robe of dark embroidered silk, looking like he had stepped out of a palace drama.

Jungkook’s eyes met hers. Slowly, he lowered his hand from the empty place where his sword should have been.

He crossed the grass toward her with the slow, unhurried steps of a man who had never once walked anywhere he did not own. He stopped a few paces from the bench. He looked at her for a long moment. Then, in the cold, level, absolute voice that had made generals confess to treason, he said:

"I am Jeon Jungkook , sixteenth king of the Jeon dynasty. Tell me where I am."

Y/N stared at him.

A beat of silence. Then a laugh burst out of her, sharp and startled, wet with tears. She pressed her hand to her mouth, but it kept coming.

"Oh my God," she said. "Okay. Okay, sure. You're a king."

"I am."

"Of course you are." She wiped her eyes, still half laughing, half crying, and stood up from the bench. "Look, I'm not in the mood for a prank, or a performance, or whatever this is. Maybe you're filming something. Maybe you're just... really unwell. Either way, I hope you find your kingdom. Goodbye."

She picked up her bag and started walking.

Jungkook stood frozen.

No one had ever laughed at him. In fifteen years of rule, in every hall, on every battlefield, no living soul had dared. He did not know what to do with the sensation. It was as if the ground itself had spoken back to him.

He watched her go. Her shoulders were tight, her steps quick. He did not know this place. He did not know this age. He knew nothing but the shape of one girl wearing different kind of clothes walking away from him into the strange orange dark, and every instinct he had ever trained told him that if he let her out of his sight, he would be truly, completely lost.

So he followed.

Y/N heard the footsteps after two blocks.

She did not turn around. She turned a corner, and the footsteps turned it too. She crossed the street. The footsteps crossed. She walked faster, and they matched her pace, calm and unhurried, always exactly ten paces behind.

The streets of Seoul at midnight were still alive with light. Convenience-store signs glowed green and blue. Two drunk office workers stumbled past, and both stopped to stare.

"Whoa," one whispered. "Is he from a drama? Look at that hair."

"That costume is insane," said the other. "Sir! Which movie is this? Is there a shoot nearby?"

Jungkook ignored them. He walked with his back straight and his gaze fixed forward, the robe moving around his legs like dark water, the very picture of a king who did not deign to acknowledge peasants.

A girl at a bus stop nudged her friend. "He's so handsome," she breathed, not quietly enough. "Who is he? Is he an idol?"

Y/N walked faster.

At the top of her street, she finally stopped and spun around. Jae-kyung halted exactly ten paces behind her. He did not look embarrassed. He looked like he had every right to be there.

"Could you please," she said, through her teeth, "stop following me?"

"I cannot."

"Excuse me?"

For the first time, the cold in his face cracked, only slightly. Something raw showed beneath it, and he looked away toward the glowing towers with an expression that did not belong to a king at all.

"I do not know this place," he said quietly. "I do not know this kingdom. Apart from you, I know no one. Tell me where else I am to go."

Y/N opened her mouth to snap at him. Nothing came out.

She looked at him properly, for the first time. The wet silk. The long hair. The scar along his knuckles, real and old. The way he stood, as though the whole street were his throne room. And the way his hand, when he thought she wasn't watching, was trembling.

Nobody could act that well.

Her anger hissed and slowly went out of her, like a fire with no air. She let out a long, tired breath.

"Ugh," she muttered. "I'm going to regret this so much."

- if you like it please comment and like it.

Thank you🤍