A battle rages outside.
The king knows that his enemies are strong, much stronger than his friends. He sends for his armies regardless. Archers and riders, spearmen and swordsmen. Infantry, artillery, cavalry. They assemble from all the regions he wishes to rule. They assemble from all the regions under his thumb. They descend the frozen hills. They sail the coast. They train in the fields and stand guard at the shores. He summons and they arrive, battalion after battalion, pouring through the narrow streets of the capital. He summons with threats of starvation, and they come, because an unknown threat beyond the battlelines is graver. Dignity. They fight to keep what little dignity they have left.
A battle rages outside while Jon is cloistered away in the secret passages of the palace. He is here, in this unlit chamber, one of countless princes deigned more worthy than commoners and peasants. He is worth more, the king says, than the poor and destitute whose blood gushes to the fore in every skirmish. A battle rages outside but Jon is too precious, too necessary. So they lock him here and leave him to his anguish.
“We will be victorious,” Min says with the nerve of a fortune teller. It is his habit to give away whatever one asks of him, even if he does not have it. Conviction, for instance.
Before the battle, tales of his generosity would glide through the streets and reach Jon’s ears, resting their heads on his pillow and pulling from him all the sighs he could grant. He’d think of Min and imagine saintly light pouring from the hands of a simple, commonplace man. He’d think of a creature so vast its heart must resemble the palace courtyard. He’d draw pictures with his mind, build dreams and fancies that could never be entertained should he ever think to voice them to his attendants.
Each story would smell of unparalleled generosity. Each story—often about the last coin in a purse, or the last cloth on a back, or the last arrow in a quiver—would convince Jon that Min must not be real. He must be a dream, strange and wonderful and mythological.
But he is real. And he is here. A battle rages outside, all chance of escape broken off by the desperate furore of a desperate horde. Yet Min stands guard at Jon’s door, willing to be run through by a sword to save one of countless princes.
“Why did you come?” Jon whispers.
“You wished for it.”
“… you are a fool!”
“As it pleases your highness.”
A battle rages outside. A grief billows inside. The kingdom will be lost. The throne will be stolen. The crown will be reforged. Soon, a new king will take the old king’s place. Soon, countless princes will supplant countless other princes. This unlit chamber will be filled with the sounds of slaughter, the music of killing and dying. The temples of his father will burn. The fortresses of his uncles will crumble to dust. The gardens of his youthful capers, the music halls of his secret desires, they will disappear with him. Time will continue its cruel pace, seizing from one and gifting another.
Jon cares little for these fates. Min is here, when he should be elsewhere.
“I never asked this of you!”
“You did, your highness,” Min corrects him. “Your voice is a torch. It lit my path to you.” He is too calm to be corporeal. He is too gentle to be a mortal. He must be more than human. He must be a home.
To be a home one must be kind. One must hold warmth and sweetness found only in the fire of a hearth. To be a home to another, one needn’t be small or large, ordinary or lavish. One can simply grant space between one’s breaths for another to settle into. One can be a deep-rooted tree and dance in the wind of another’s attention. Min is such a home. He is careful and delicate, like water in a clay pot. He is bright and welcoming, like flickering wicks of a lamp. He is cold and constant, like stars that gather around a shy moon. Min is a home Jon dearly wishes to live in.
“I wished for your happiness…” he mourns. “I wished for your charity to be answered tenfold. With joy. With… love. I wished for you to give me that and nothing else. Yet here I find you, fool that you are, a sun risen in bleeding skies. What happiness can you find in sacrifice?” he tightens his fists. “Be gone. Go to, I say! I will not see you perish in my name, be gone—!”
“Your highness,” Min’s hands arrive like a fragrance. Sudden, but soft. They touch Jon’s arms, his shoulders, the sides of his face. In the darkness of this forsaken prison the blind hands are remnants of spring. His touch settles like night on Jon’s cowering flesh: slow and comforting yet resolute in its path. “Your highness,” Min repeats, the pulse of his tongue as generous as the pulse in his chest.
And perhaps Jon had imagined other things in his sleep. Perhaps he had felt bands of silk loosen at an insistent tug. Perhaps he has heard the urgent rustle of sheets. Perhaps these same beautiful hands rested against him before tonight, holding him still lest he dive too deep into the nectar that billowed beneath his graceless weight. Perhaps he had clung to hair and sweat, to rags and robes, as Min spilled the words of a beggar and not a saint. Perhaps such stories had been woven on warm, restless nights until Jon could bury their shameful shadows in the light of day.
Perhaps Min knew.
“Somewhere, deep in your fear, there is solace, your highness. It is my gift to you.”
A battle rages outside. Jon’s heart rages with it.
A battle rages outside.
Trees have stopped to flower. Birds have ceased their song. The streets are awash with despair. The skies rain nothing but the promise of misery. Such is the fate of kingdoms great and small. Kings may change. Capitals may move. Battles may come to a momentary end. But a single bull will always be held in greater value than ten peasants. A battle rages outside, perhaps since yesterday. But the rages of famine have already touched the lives of so many… too many. Their battle is unending. Their suffering is unending. Its wings span the length of the nation, from barren mountains to ashen seas.
Min does not hope for change. He does not hope for deliverance from these tribulations. His birth has not earned him titles or respect. His poverty allows him no swords or knives of protection. So he smiles and bows, offering what little he can. A bowl of his rice, a bucket of his water, a bundle of his firewood. He may not know the remedy to what ails his ill fortune, so offers what comforts people may seek in the throes of anguish.
“We will be victorious,” he places his false promise in the prince’s lap. He wishes to offer more: you will live, you will flourish, your name will survive. But where other princes desperately seek such praise, this one does not.
Before the battle, Min spread the ashes of his love on a hill. He watched it swim with the wind and leave his side. For what love could survive beggary? It too starves on an empty stomach. Even so, the prince had watered the people with kindliness, and from it bloomed hope. He’d open his private stores and granaries to them like opening his heart, a heart not yet poisoned by thirst for power. Prince Jon, fourteenth in line for the throne, cared naught for his father’s ambitious madness. He was always composed of dreams and light.
In the darkness, he smells like serenity, even if his voice betrays him. “Why did you come?” he asks but his arms reach across the chamber, yearning to fold around Min’s frame. In the darkness, he glows like divinity.
But he is real. And he is here. A battle rages outside, all chance of escape broken off by the desperate furore of a desperate horde. Yet Min chooses to slink across Jon’s threshold, willing to gamble his life for a chance at survival.
“Why did you come?” Jon whispers.
“You wished for it.”
“… you are a fool!”
“As it pleases your highness.”
A battle rages outside. An ambition glimmers inside. The kingdom will be lost. The throne will be stolen. The crown will be reforged. Soon, a new king will take the old king’s place. Soon, countless princes will scramble for the seat left empty by war. But it needn’t be so. This unlit chamber needn’t be a prison. Their stomachs may be empty and their hearts may be heavy, but their dreams can thrive off of the smallest spark of bravery; of generosity. They don’t need a new king. They don’t need countless new princes. All they need is a Jon, the ripples of his benevolence touching everyone he seeks.
Min smiles and imagines himself as a pebble. He clasps a dithering hand in his own.
“I never asked this of you!”
“You did, your highness,” Min corrects. “Your voice is a torch. It lit my path to you.” He draws a rein on his tongue at this, knowing that fear must be erased with a slow and practiced hand.
What he leaves unspoken sits on the edges of the darkness, strolling the width of this chamber on padded feet. It is Min’s twin in shape and size, a ghost that shares in his eagerness. Sometimes it soars over his voice, sometimes it drowns in his guilt. Sometimes, in Jon’s presence, it shudders and weakens at its seams. It grips hard enough to break. He could summon it into the small circle of starlight that pools around Jon. He could bring its odd, somewhat unsightly form out into the open. But the prince is free to look in its direction of his own accord. Their trio can share a drink under the moon someday. One day. If they survive.
The prince is afraid—not for his own life but for Min’s. Even in the face of mortal threat he is so selfless that… that maybe Min must be imagining it. No man is so unfettered by parsimony to cherish a stranger over himself. No ordinary man is so sympathetic, so bountiful in his love that he forgets his own safety. Jon cannot be anything less than a god.
“I wish for your happiness.”
His palms are the lamps of a temple. His voice is the chime of a prayer bell. When he holds Min close, he smells of camphor and incense. When he releases kindness, it cascades from his lips like a sutra. When they walk through the darkness, pressing their fingers into wood and stone, seeking little breaches of light, Jon folds their hands in a promising bind. He is a deity made from unsung songs and unheard laughter. He is sacred, celestial.
And perhaps some of Min’s love still remains. Perhaps what he purged from his body was not permanently lost. Perhaps love, like dreams, can also grow from a spark. Perhaps all it needs is the flint of an unsaid confession, the kindling of a reassuring hold, the fuel of courage and respect. Perhaps he can fan the flames high enough, until they swallow him whole and leave him reforged. Renewed. Perhaps Min’s unsightly twin needn’t remain in hiding forever. Perhaps his generosity could turn its head to him and reward it with what it asks of him.
“I wish for your happiness…”
“I wish for yours.”
A battle rages outside. Min doesn’t let it touch him.
