The Storyteller

Dominic was forced to stop for the third time in twenty minutes. He ran his hand through his thick ginger hair and bit on his top lip to control his temper. It was an unfortunate habit when he got frustrated. He knew it made him look weird, but it was better than wasting energy on his friend. Dominic pushed his aviator sunglasses further up his nose, making the scattered, pale freckles across his cheeks and nose more prominent. He glared down at Jordan Dean, his friend since kindergarten.

His companion dramatically declared, once again, that he was about to die. He’d plopped down on a boulder by the side of the path, gasping and clutching his chest as if he were climbing Mount Everest without oxygen, rather than a modest slope that rose briefly, then levelled out. The difficult section of the trail lay beyond their destination. The terrain, at that point, became steep and treacherous. They would not be going that far.

“This isn’t how a person spends their holiday. I’m sick of these day tours. Why are they always in the middle of nowhere?” Jordan whined and drank the remaining water that was meant to last the trip.

“Normal people who come to Korea go to Seoul, wander around Myeongdong Night Market. Sane people use up their energy dancing all night in a club in Hongdae or maxing out their credit cards in the Gangnam shopping district.”

Jordan sighed wistfully. “Then again, what would Dominic Mallroy know about normal? I’m sick of these frigging temples you keep dragging me to. This is the third one since we arrived.”

“It was a palace, not a temple.” Dominic ignored his complaints. At that point, he decided it would be the last time he’d go travelling with his old friend. He’d outgrown the boozing and hooking up. Jordan, unfortunately, had an insatiable appetite for both.

“Anyway, I sent you the details of the tour. I even highlighted the 1200 steps round trip up to the ruins.” Dominic smiled pleasantly as the last of the tour group squeezed past them and kept moving up the narrow stone steps. Most of them were twice Jordan’s age and managed to move faster than him, without complaint.

“TripAdvisor said the difficulty rating of the climb was 6/10 and should only take 35 minutes. We are nearly there. Get your shit together; we are falling behind a group of seniors. It’s embarrassing.” Dominic pulled on Jordan’s elbow, trying to haul him up. His backpack was getting heavy and he was sweating. All he wanted was to get to the top.

He’d been excited about this particular tour. Being a history nerd, it ticked all the boxes: there was a noble hero, a villain, drama, betrayal, and tragedy.

Dominic had done his research.

It was the scene of the last stand of the 3rd Prince, Ji So- Hyun, against his eldest brother. At the time, Crown Prince Ji Jung-Sook wasn’t yet the emperor, but his growing paranoia had him imagining rivals everywhere. The long list of contenders for the Phoenix Throne included his brothers.

Historical records suggest that his plan to expel his younger brother from the Imperial Palace was the pivotal incident that finally secured him the throne. That campaign ended in the ruins up ahead.

Dominic had devoured what little information he’d found about the little-known 3rd Prince. From what he had gleaned, the Prince had been more interested in artistic pursuits, not political power. He lacked the social skills of a Royal and, unfortunately, had few supporters in the Royal Court. It made him an easy target.

In a scholarly text written after the brief reign of Ji Jung-Sook and translated into English two hundred years later, Dominic found mention of him. The author described the events as almost legendary, the passages lyrical and allegorical. In the ancient manuscript, the 3rd Prince took on the role of a lonely, tragic figure, betrayed by both the Gods and the Royal Family.

Dominic loved to read about historical titans, and sweeping epic tales of honour and struggle. Dominic often immersed himself so deeply in his latest subject that he’d lose touch with the present. His friends humoured him, mostly.

Looking further up the hill at a tumbled-down section of wall, the fallen stone blocks scattered and half-buried at its base, he longed to touch the crumbling masonry and tread the worn pathways around Palace Nuni naerida, the Palace of Falling Snow. The Prince’s last refuge.

Dominic lived for this stuff, even if, in the end, the tale of the unfortunate 3rd Prince was poignantly unjust.

Instead, he found himself stuck trying to coax his childhood friend into acting his age and catching up with the tour group. Jordan Dean, otherwise known as JD, refused to move. Dominic gave his backpack another tug and shook the empty water bottle in frustration.

“Stop complaining. We have a week in Seoul after this. You’ll have more than enough time for you to drown yourself in cocktails and and mingle with the locals.”

Another pained moan from Jordan was the last straw. “Fine, you stay here. I’ll go ahead with the others. We’ll pick you up on the way back. It shouldn’t be more than an hour and a half.”

A look of horror crossed his friend’s face. They were a quirky couple. While Dominic was a ginger, with pale skin and a slim build and the dress sense of Where’s Wally, Jordan was ”hot”. It was a word he liked to use to describe himself. He was tall, dark and handsome. A stereotypical sex god.

“You wouldn’t leave me here in the middle of nowhere on my own?” Jordan was one for exaggerating. An air-conditioned tour bus was waiting for them at the base of the mountain, and the village accommodation they’d rented was only a couple of kilometres away. It was not the middle of the Amazon Rainforest.

“Yes, I am. I want to see the ruins. We agreed that this holiday I would choose where we would go and what we’d do. After the last nightmare trip to Vegas, you promised you’d go along with whatever I planned. Remember? That was just after you got us arrested.”

Jordan swallowed what he was about to say. Unfortunately, he did remember vividly.

“When I agreed, I didn’t know I’d be visiting piles of rubble.” Jordan struggled to his feet as if he were ninety instead of twenty-two, and every bone in his body was creaking with the effort.

“You should have read the itinerary I sent you.” JD slowly started to climb the narrow steps.

“Itinerary. Pfft. Who plans for every second of a holiday? He didn’t want to admit to Dominic that he hadn’t bothered to read the email.

“Me. How long have we been friends? You know I like to be organised.”

“Organised. You’re anal. I feel like I’m twelve on a school excursion. Are you going to hand out a question sheet at the end? I wouldn’t put it past you.”

They started moving up the path. Dominic led the way, leaving Jordan to keep up or end up alone on the last section of the climb.

.....

Dominic followed the tour guide closely as he passed through the crumbling curtain wall into the void beyond. Facing them was the imposing inner wall, which was in surprisingly good condition after centuries of weathering.

He hung on every word as the guide delivered his well-rehearsed spiel about how the enclosure was the outer ward and ran around the Palace and was wide enough for three archers on horseback. How the area was soaked in the blood of hundreds of soldiers who’d died there, trapped, unable to breach the secondary wall. In the present, a thick carpet of grass hid the violence of countless battles.

They made their way through the gate into the main body of the Palace of Falling Snow. It was an anti-climax; there was so little left of the original structure. Even with his overactive imagination, it was hard to imagine the Palace’s appearance in its glory days.

Raised stone foundations marked the layout of the smaller courtyards, and crumbling stone lantern posts led the way along worn flagstone paths to the left and right of the main entrance. Ahead of them was a large open area, which was the forecourt of the Prince’s private residence.

From what Dominic could remember of what he read, the inner palace had been built in three tiers up the side of the mountain. A magnificent piece of architecture. The bottom level, which included a large courtyard, reception areas for greeting guests and a garden, was used for ceremonial purposes.

Prince Ji So-Hyun’s private quarters were on the second floor, and the top was solely his retreat, his sanctum. It was said the view from the top gallery stretched to the sea. Dominic imagined that in the Prince’s time, he must have watched his brother’s army approaching.

The mountain continued to rise behind the Palace. The landscape in one text he’d read described the backdrop as rugged peaks, lush and green in summer and snow-covered in winter; another, more poetic description recounted a scene "Untouched by Human Struggle."

That was two centuries ago, and its beauty had worn away. For a time, the locals had claimed it was cursed and that the mountain was home to vengeful soldiers left unburied or mourned. But the booming tourism industry in the area changed their attitude. Its calamitous history became marketable, and the site lauded for its historical significance. Now it was a popular destination for those wishing to take the road less travelled.

The tour group gathered around the guide. Jordan at Dominic’s elbow rudely blew a not-so-subtle raspberry into his ear. He made sure Dominic knew he was not impressed. “This is what you dragged me here for?”

Dominic turned, ready to tell him to be quiet, then saw the faces of the other tourists. They were nodding in agreement with Jordan. After the long climb, everyone expected more.

‘What a prosaic group of boring farts.’ Dominic kept the thought to himself. He turned back and surveyed the desolate area where the raised, sturdy foundations, the bones of the doomed palace, rested not in peace but in restless slumber.

He pulled out his phone to take photographs of anything and everything. It was a habit of Dominic’s. He thought it was the small details, the ordinary stuff tourists overlooked that made historical sites like this come alive for him.

Clicking randomly, he finally focused straight ahead. Looking at the small screen, he finally realised what he was looking at. The significance was probably lost on everyone except him and the tour guide. Dominic found tears suddenly well up, bile burning his throat as he pushed the intense emotions down.

He kept taking photos and moved away from the group as he regained control. He knew that even by his standards, he was overreacting.

The tour guide moved the group forward; he could hear him start to tell the sad tale of the 3rd Crown Prince. As he pointed at the sight, the emotive words put what they were looking at into context. The sad ’oh’s and ‘aw’s grew louder as the guide recited his melodramatic story, which was guaranteed to pull at the tourists’ heartstrings.

For Dominic, it felt as if his words had woken the old stones from their slumber, and the lingering spirits turned their dead eyes at the group. He stopped listening and started walking closer to what had appeared at first glance as a set of wide stone steps leading to a terrace, at the back of which was a rockpile of enormous weathered boulders and vegetation sloping up the cliff face.

As Dominic climbed the first step, he could hear the guide coming to the end of the story. The part where he described the harshest winter in the region’s history and how it had helped the 3rd Prince keep his brother, the Crown Prince, at bay, but how, in the end, it turned on him.

As Dominic stared at the eroded cliff face and the centuries of debris collected at its base, where once the Palace’s two top tiers had been. He felt an unreasonable anger at the cruel twist of fate that had befallen the Prince.

Beneath the boulders, the mangled trees and coarse vegetation that grew in the cracks, a large portion of the Palace of Falling Snow lay buried. Not only the Palace, but also the 3rd Prince, Ji So-Hyun. It was his tomb.

As Dominic crossed the terrace, he didn’t notice the signs that said the area was unstable. He didn’t hear the guide’s warning against getting any closer to the cliff face. His mind was far away, imagining a multitude of things. Dominic felt as if he were being pulled along.

Just before a small cloud of dust appeared high above him and, underfoot, the ground trembled, Dominic noticed something red half-buried at his feet. The deep crimson stood out starkly against the dust and rocks around it. As curious as he was imaginative, he bent to pick it up. It took a little force to dig it out and pull it from where it was embedded, possibly since the time of the 3rd Prince. His romantic nature imagined that it had been buried there since it fell from someone’s pocket. He wondered if it had held great sentimental value to that person?

Dominic placed the small object on his palm and blew the dust off it, turning it this way and that. It set his heart fluttering, and he came up with one scenario after another about its owner. If his guess was correct, he had found a tiny treasure.

He didn’t hear Jordan yelling his name. Or the loud crack overhead.

The beautiful object sitting in his hand had him mesmerised. It was an ox bone, ancient, yellowed, and sealed at both ends with dark red wax to keep the contents safe. A character was carved deep into the bone’s surface. Normally, ox bones were used for divination, but this one looked different.

When Dominic finally looked up to wipe the dust that had fallen on his face, and coated his fine ginger hair, it was too late to run. However, he did hear Jordan scream his name just before the cliff face came crashing down on him.

Footnote: Fictional Prince and Palace.