불 (Fire)

Part 1

Chanyeol had been seen as faulty for all his life.

Well, maybe not all his life, but certainly a high span of it, long enough to be seen as mostly all of it.

Chanyeol was the heir to the throne of the Fire Kingdom, one of the biggest and most renowned of the kingdoms. As the only son to the King and Queen, certain things were expected from him. For example, impeccable manners, exquisite taste and wide wisdom to be able to rule the kingdom and its inhabitants with justice. At this, Chanyeol greatly exceeded the expectations put on him; for the people of the Fire Kingdom had never seen a prince so handsome, so prepared and so eager to demonstrate his abilities.

The problem was of other kind.

As a tradition, every ruler of the Fire Kingdom was gifted with the power of fire. Controlling it, creating it; even magical creatures related to fire as phoenixes or dragons that lived in the kingdom or outside would obey their commands when ordered to. It was a gift given by blood, royal blood.

And the young prince didn't have it.

Powers weren't expected to start revealing themselves until the young heir was already five or six years old. It could even be delayed a bit more, but usually by the age of ten, every single one of the princes and princesses born under the name of the fire had already developed their power. But that wasn't the case of Chanyeol.

He was a tall and good-looking young man of seventeen, and a prince many kingdoms would die to have as their heir, but there wasn't a single drop of magic in him. He could not control fire, nor create it and although he was good at handling magical creatures, it was in no way the same as to be able to control them by magic. He couldn't make his own phoenix, the same one that was born the same day he had been, obey him more than a domesticated eagle would obey his trainer.

At first, the people of the kingdom had claimed that the Queen had been unfaithful and deemed Chanyeol an illegitimate child, a bastard. Nevertheless, the Queen defended her good name and the King stood right beside her, stating that there was no way the Queen had laid with a different man other than himself. They claimed that a sorceress had made a prophecy about Chanyeol; the heir's power was predicted to be so great that, unless he found his soulmate and became one with him, the power would be not awaken to avoid disaster.

But said sorceress was nowhere to be found when the murmurs and whispers about Chanyeol started. Messengers and knights were sent to search for her, they searched until the very ends of the known world for her, but their search was fruitless and they came back after years with their bare hands. People then started to call Chanyeol 'faulty' behind his back but, in a kingdom like that, the news soon reached the castle and its inhabitants.

So that left Chanyeol with nothing but the love of his parents and the distaste of the Kingdom, secluded behind the walls of the castle that gave him protection from those who wanted to harm him. This created a feeling of uneasiness in the young prince, feeling that he was nothing but a burden to his parents, even though they had never said anything of the such and loved him dearly.

So when the King and Queen announced a ball to celebrate the coming of age of their son, inviting only a handful of very selected guests, Chanyeol was in ecstasy. He could finally socialise with people, he could meet people of his age according to the guests that had already accepted the invitation and he was really looking forward to it. Even more, prince Baekhyun from the Light Kingdom was said to be coming and, since he was the most acclaimed and famous prince of the Kingdom Union, Chanyeol couldn't avoid but feel his coming of age party was going to be a huge event.

The day of the party arrived earlier but still later than Chanyeol would have wanted it to. Even though snow storms had been recurrent on the previous days, it had stopped right before his party, and so the day dawned in perfect, balmy even weather. Chanyeol woke up, revising mentally all the rules of protocol and trying to remember the speech one of the royal scribes had written for him. He had conveyed to his parents his desire of writing his own speech but, as he was going to be the centre of attention, they didn't judge the decision sensible. He would have time to write his own speeches in the future, they said.