The Legends of Kartas | Ongoing

18. CORNERED

The arches of the castle gleamed with luster as Jungkook trod through the halls of his ancestors, glimpsing the vast sculptures of his antecedents in his peripheral vision. Marble stone combined with the everlasting polish of melted ores from the Mines of Haren preserved the arts, and the rays of the sun honed them as they did Jungkook's focus.

His charcoal tunic captured the sun's heat like a magnet, contrasting his emerald pendant sparkling and bouncing on his lean chest. The golden string laced through his silk raiment glinted, and the ends of his cloak fastened under his aureate epaulets held tightly as the layers of the garment crinkled and swelled behind Jungkook's punishing pace.

Hopelessness was what he had felt for the past few days, but he refused to confess it. If his entire life had been a lie, from his father's love to his friends and home, he could spend a handful of his time lying to himself. And he did until his father requested his audience in the great hall. That was when his charade cracked—one preeminent fissure that was a precursor of more that was to come.

He was sure the others would arrive in the great hall, but the notion was false. The rest of the cracks made their appearance when he set foot out of his room. Pacing in the ancestral shrines, he gathered the shards of his mask to the best of his ability with his bleeding hands. It wasn't working, and the frustration was showing.

Ever since he sobbed out all the despair in his heart from that day with Snow and Elias, animosity started pressuring his soul. The belts of his emotions failed to contain the outpour of rage, so he compensated with a meticulously crafted mask that crumbled in the wake of his father's summons.

And there was an adequate reason for his expression of weakness: the sequence of current events was a mirror image of what happened eight years ago following his mother's death. In the past, his father had called him to the throne room after treating him like an invisible entity for two years. Contrary to his belief that his father would apologize, Jungkook was thrown away like a carcass. Then, he was dragged back four years later when his father fell ill.

He assumed the same was about to happen, and perhaps even worse. His father had just returned from meeting his elder brother, Lord Aegus, and last Jungkook checked, their relationship was more than rocky. It was a burnt bridge barely standing over a thousand-meter deep trench filled with decades of discord. It wouldn't be astonishing if his father was in a foul mood and ready to release stress on the closest target: Jungkook.

But Jungkook was well prepared, or he was until his mask decided to fall apart. All was not well, and as he neared the open doors of the throne room, the urge to hold his pendant grew more powerful by the second. Fingers twitching, he padded through the threshold and waited in front of the dais with his back straight. He swore in the corner of his eye, the shadow of his eight-year-old self materialized for a heartbeat before drifting away.

Tears pricked his eyes, and he cursed himself. This was not the time to succumb to weakness, but his rampant emotions thought otherwise. The tears didn't stop gathering, and Jungkook's brain decided this was a perfect opportunity to take a vacation to the past. When his mother was murdered before him, when his father abandoned him, when his friends betrayed him.

But amid the grief was Aegus with his amiable, brown eyes and chestnut hair, with his warm laughter and encouraging words. There was one truth in Jungkook's fabricated life of deception, and that reassured him. His tears dried, and for the first time in days, the anger within him subsided, passing into ephemeral peace. He was ready to face whatever came his way.

His father sat draped over his throne like a rag doll, his features haggard and the hair of his beard graying. Nestled in his hand was a letter engraved with a sigil of a wolf biting grapevines wrapping around its maw—the sigil of Umbra's royalty. A political matter wasn't what Jungkook expected. He surmised it was about Umbra's desire for its independence to be officially declared.