The Last Empress

6. My Emperor, My First Love

How do I describe him, my Emperor? How do I begin? Where do I start?

My Emperor.

My King.

My first love.

The only man that I have ever loved.

Where do I begin?

I suppose it began 12 years ago.

In the year 2007, I was 16, and Lee Hyuk was 26.

His face stared at me from the covers of magazines, his eyes smiled at me from the news reports on television, his posters beckoned to me from malls and convenience stores, from street corners and bus shelters. He was there in the dusty school hall, where I stood, staring at his handsome, smiling face, lost in my dreams, my ears deaf to the voices of authority droning on about some utterly unimportant issue when all that mattered to me then, was the image of this beautiful, unattainable man, taking over my thoughts, his magnetic image stealing its way into my besotted heart.

His was a face that belonged to an ancient world, a long ago world, where men wore flowing, majestic robes, and dressed in tall, magnificent hats, rising like spires that aspired to the skies, a magical world, a world that I had only glimpsed at in books and movies; a dreamy, fantastical world, where beautiful men and women glided about whimsically, where archaic, flowery words rolled off strange, unfamiliar tongues smoothly, eloquently, a world that existed only in the realm of my imagination.

His face was beautiful, aristocratic, and sensitive, a face that would be at home among the rows and rows of ancient, blurry faces looking out of shiny, golden frames in a museum gallery, a face that belonged more to the past than the present, a past where danger lurked in every corner, where a man walked the narrow, shadowy alleys, armed with nothing more than a gleaming sword beneath his cloak and steely courage in his heart. He beckoned to me everywhere I went, and whispered to me at night, where I tossed and turned in bed, seducing me with his eyes, his smile, wearing that silent, exquisite sheen of courtesy and breeding, so easily, so effortlessly, slipping into it, as naturally, as smoothly as a second skin.

In 2007, I was 16, and he was 26.

That was the year I became infatuated with him.

That was also the year that he married Empress So Hyun.

She was 24 to his 26, and theirs was a marriage made in Heaven, or so they said, a marriage destined to last this lifetime, and beyond.

As it turned out, it did not last beyond five years.

In 2012, So Hyun died in a lake at the Imperial Gardens. Her body was found beneath a wooden pier in the lake on a cold, wintry night, and the palace issued a statement that she had died of a sudden cardiac arrest at the tender age of 29, and Emperor Lee Hyuk became a widower overnight.

He was 31, and I was 21, and, as fate would have it - if you believe in this sort of thing - it marked the beginning of three firsts for me:

it was the first time that I came face to face with him, seven months after his wife's untimely demise.

It was the first time that I had seen him, up close and personal, a living, breathing person of flesh and blood, as opposed to that shadowy, phantom figure that came to me in the dark, fleeting and ephemeral, dissolving into air at the first rays of dawn.

And It was the first time that I fell in love.

It was his first foray into the glare of public life since his wife's death. He had been away for months in Europe, and the public had mourned with him, and pined for him in his absence.