Kingdom Falling | Gyuricky forty five.

He didn’t remember falling asleep, but he’d passed out from sheer exhaustion at some point during the night, and when he awoke, there was a clean bandage wrapped neatly around his arm over yesterday’s wounds. He lifted his arm closer to his face; he could smell the faint scent of medicinal salve, the kind they sold at apothecaries, specially brewed by masters of medicinal herbs and healing. The blood had been cleaned off his other hand, too, though the remnants of dried blood still lined the sleeve of his robe.

He almost passed out again out of anger. Did he have another one of those episodes again? Had he woken up and cleaned himself up without even remembering?

“Oh, you’re awake.”

Gyuvin jumped a little. “Oh. Good morning, Chungho.”

“It’s already past noon,” Chungho said, glancing over at his arm just for a second. “I came in and cleaned you up earlier this morning. Be careful with that wound, okay? I’ll come and change your bandage tomorrow.”

Gyuvin sighed. “You don’t have to do that. I deserved it.”

Chungho gave him a look, and sighed in return. “Whatever it is, there must be a better option than that. Humans were made to hurt other people, not themselves. If they weren’t, then we wouldn’t need prisons like these.”

“I think that’s the problem,” Gyuvin answered slowly. “I’ve already hurt too many people.”

Now that his, though admittedly half-crazed, attempts to regain his memory had failed, he was effectively back at square one. The self-directed anger that had blinded him temporarily the previous night had cleared, and he could tell he was obviously going nowhere trying to dig for something that wasn’t there, so the rational choice was to move on to his next best option.

He wrote diligently, noting down every single detail and everything he could remember, from the strange dizzy feeling he’d felt when he first gained consciousness, to the bottle of Soul-Cleansing Elixir Hanbin had been holding before he died. Gyuvin couldn’t say the seniors had the wrong idea because he didn’t know what the right idea actually was, but the best he could do was to be as honest as he could and tell Minwoo everything.

If he was lucky enough, there could even be people speaking up for him at the trial. He’d always been friendly with everyone, and if he wasn’t sure of anything else in the world, he could at least be sure that he was well-liked. At least, enough that people wouldn’t just sit by and let him be punished for something that was clearly out of character for him to do. Everyone at the Court knew how close Gyuvin and Hanbin were. They’d grown up with their lives intertwined, like two shoots from different seeds that had grown and wrapped around each other. No one would believe that he could ever hurt Hanbin, right?

He bit his lip, and continued writing. The letter had to be comprehensive, and address everything Minwoo had brought up. He didn’t know when his trial was going to be, but it was safest to be pessimistic and assume this was the last correspondence he would have with Minwoo before the trial began.

First, the allegations about Hanbin.

I did not kill Hanbin-hyung, he wrote. He put down his brush and read it again. Did it sound convincing enough?

I have no memory of what happened to Hanbin-hyung, only that when I found him he had already been hurt, and he was bleeding out fast. I tried to use a healing talisman on him, but it had no effect.

He deliberated over whether he should include the logical conclusion that had followed, that the inflicting weapon had been a holy weapon. He decided, ultimately, not to. To mention that might raise more questions about why he hadn’t offered that information when he was first interrogated. To play dumb, he thought, would be the smartest move. Ignorance was no crime, just a character flaw at most.

I lost consciousness again, and when I woke up I could hear the sounds of screaming outside. I do not remember ever leaving my detention room, or deactivating my tracking sigil. I confess that I considered it, in a moment of anger, but I do not know how to deactivate it, so there is no way I could have done it.

“There,” he said, satisfied. “Let’s see what they can say to that.”

He’d already walked the seniors through the events that came afterwards, back at the Peak, so he didn’t see a need to rehash them again. He ended the letter with an emphatic paragraph pleading for Minwoo not to desolate him in his time of need, perhaps a little more dramatic than was necessary, but he figured some desperation wouldn’t hurt.

Hyung, you have to believe me. I don’t know anything about what happened. There must be some mistake somewhere. I beg you, please speak for me at the trial. I don’t know what else they’re going to fabricate if you don’t.

Kim Gyuvin

He folded the letter up and enchanted it, as usual, so only Minwoo would be able to read it. It was late into the night when he finished writing, and he reminded himself to pass it to Chungho to send out the next morning when he came around to do his morning checks.

But when the morning came, he knew his letter would never reach Minwoo. He awoke to the sound of people talking in the corridors, much louder than the usual noise of the one prison guard pacing up and down, and he peeked out of the doorway to see what was going on. A flurry of activity breezed past his door; cultivators dressed in Seven Star Manor’s signature red and white filed quickly down the corridor, so many of them it seemed like they were neverending. One of them was left standing just outside his cell, when the crowd had cleared, and Gyuvin ventured a question.

“What’s going on? Where’s the prison guard?”

The Seven Star Manor cultivator looked over at him briefly. “New system. The Coalition ordered for Seven Star disciples to take over guarding the prison from now on. Apparently there were rumors that there was some…unauthorized communication entering and leaving the Fortress. Can’t have that happening, can we?”

Gyuvin’s heart froze, though he tried his best not to wear his emotion on his face. “No, we can’t,” he agreed, nodding. “So what happened to the old prison guards?”

The cultivator shrugged. “Don’t know. They must have gotten reassigned to other positions. They won’t be back here until the Coalition decides the danger’s gone, anyway.”

He turned and headed down the corridor, presumably to start his patrol, and Gyuvin let the letter fall from his hand, unheeded. If the Coalition had ordered an overhaul of the system, it meant his chances of getting his letter to either Chungho or Gunwook were virtually shot. It meant he was now, truly, no longer able to contact anyone.

It meant, he made the late realization, that Minwoo was never going to hear back from him, and he was going to take Gyuvin’s lack of response as an admission of guilt. It meant that he was going to be publicly exiled from Meteor Court, denounced as a traitor, just like his father had been more than a decade ago, and that when the time came for his trial, he would be known only as a traitor who had been cast out of his sect, and a murderer who had broken a cultivator’s honor code for his own personal agenda. No one would speak for him, not even the sect that had raised him, because why would they bother to defend someone who’d, in their eyes, already admitted his own sins?

Gyuvin collapsed onto his knees in the middle of his sparse prison cell deep in the bowels of a foreign city, and for the first time in his life he found himself devoid of all hope. He prayed that death would come for him and for a long time he stayed there, until his knees ached from the unyielding stone floors, thinking of nothing else. 

would you guys prefer updates to be spaced out as i’ve been trying to keep them, or more often? also, i’d love to hear what you guys think about the story so far! comments motivate me to keep writing <3