My Savior My Tormentor

Pt. 1

"The king exists." The coarse rough voice spoke flushing through the silent atmosphere.

It was this time of day, almost everyday in the kingdom that everyone came rushing down to the storyteller in the village.
He was always so intent to tell his "fictitious tales" of the mad king that lives with his many maidens and servants to tend to his every needs.

Of course no one believed him, he was just another old man who needed spare change to buy himself some alcohol to get himself wasted so he can wallow in his misery at nights.

"He exists," he yells again, extending his neck and voice so the new comers who came to hear his unusual but interesting story about the mad king.

"I am telling you, he lives by himself but he is never alone." This time he spoke soft and low, almost in awe as he tried to convince the almost 50 villagers that circled around him on the ground.

"There he goes again." A woman wearing a rich blue and red hanbok spoke, "always making up words along the way."

She stretches her hand to cover her lips as she whispered into a another woman's ear to her left
What she said was barely hearable but as soon as she moved away and dropped her hand, the other woman snorted, almost disrespectful in a way
but never intended.

Its always like this around this time of day in the village. People gossip and mock the storyteller, but yet they always come to listen.

No one believed a word he was saying, he once told them that he once worked in the palace, he was a guard who was always by the king's side through everything, since birth till adulthood. But he was cast out for no reason.

They all laughed and clowned him for years because of these stories, that he so desperately wanted people to believe.

"Hyung!"

Everyone turned around to see a child looks about 12 years old, running with a huge smile on his face. His hands were filled with red berries that often grow before summer is about to start.

And then they saw him, the guy everyone so desperately admired but never really knew anything about.
He was almost too mysterious for anyone to ever ask him a simple question such as, "what is your name?"

He too seemed very interested in the old man's stories, seeing that he is always in the town square at this exact time.
He is always well dressed in well worn fabric, laced with perfect thread and had never been seen with a speck of dust on him.
He looks almost important, as if he could be of noble blood.

But he couldn't possible by of noble blood, if he was, he would travel with the other sons of the noble families.
Thats the way it has always been, the rich sticks with the rich, the poor with the poor and the wannabe rich often hangs around with these children of important families, not because they enjoy their company. But simply because they want to be of good use to them so that one day, they might be moved up in status.

This can happen. The lower class men can move up to the middle class, and the middle class can jump to the upper class and can sit at the table with all the noble families that usually dine in the palace with the king.

Unfortunately, this has only happened once, years ago, maybe long before the children of this generation of noble bloods were born.
There was this man, really young, maybe in his late 20s, he was called the bastard of the kingdom, born out of a wedlock.

No one knew his family, only that he was often looked down upon because of the rumors of his father, who entangled himself with many women.

Though this was not the only reason why he was shunned and looked down upon.
This is a time where men laid with women, where anyone one of the same sex were caught holding hands with each other were automatically looked down upon, they were automatically assumed "homosexual"