The movement underneath him causes an ache to go up along his spine as it branches over his back with painful contractions. Repeating itself like it never will stop again. Yeosang holds back a groan, trying to stretch his arms in an attempt of stopping himself from moving anymore, but only to realize that his hands are bound on his back, and he lays on his stomach. Fear finally paints his face when he finds his limbs unable to move and his eyes shot open in panic and sees ground a distance away from his nose. He is not touching the ground either.

He strains against the burning ropes, whimpering when his back feels like tearing his chest apart and his head falls helplessly down, chin hitting what seems like hard leather. Someone must have noticed his restricted movements because shortly after, a hand grasps his hair and tears his head up to look into two shocked eyes. Yeosang bares his teeth and defensively hisses at the knight, which has the man let go of him again, taking a step back as his face pervaded in shadows stretches to utterances of a monster.

"Sir-! Sir! Higher Commander Park, he is alive!"

Fright paints the evening air, eyes thrown around to look at the knight who shouts at their head with a force that possibly could bring the dead back to life again. Yeosang does not mind any of them, his hands already yanking at the robes but the effort only makes the rough material dig deeper into his skin. Despite the boiling wrath beneath his cold skin, he is beyond exhausted; tired, and worn out. Blood hangs in long strings from his mouth where his protruding fangs ache from how they are rooted in his gums. Without any strength left to pull him away from the hands of God's obliging men, the boy's reasoning finds no ground to keep on with trying, making his struggling limbs stop their disapproving of the situation. But his irises are still ardent ruby red.

Forced around, one of the hands he believes is holding him still to the hard leather saddle furiously pushes his head down until he bends in a way there would have strained his last breath to leave empty remains. Yeosang's mind whirls around at the harsh force and more liquid trickles over his bruised lips. He has never felt more foreign in his own body.

"Pull his head up!"

The voice is sharp, acute even, silently cutting any disapproval in pieces and the boy would have been left in waves of shudders if he had not been so far away from the present. They pull him, firm, loathed fingers taking around his smeary hair and craned neck, heaving his bloodied face up until he can see the world again. The vassal's revulsed facial expression and pursed lips have him believing for a moment that he will spit him in the face out of disgust. But he does not. He does not even say anything, or act or do anything. He just stares, drills his eyes into Yeosang until he finally feels a sort of shudder of shield being broken, a faith, a bleeding wound. And it will not long become a scar. He has a difficult time looking the same man in the eyes, who had embraced him so leniently when he had found him alive rather than dead. Seonghwa is a murderer, a traitor, and a deceiver, Yeosang insists. He is the reason for many innocent deaths and he is killing Yeosang, too.

The boy hisses, his sharp teeth urging to tear the man's soul apart so that he will feel what pain he goes through now. But his own tears smother his whole being into a wreck that neither looks threatening nor sorrowful.

Just torn.

Seonghwa looks away, but the boy keeps his orbs directed on him, staring with an intensity that will have the knight sense his burning red eyes for the entity of his life. Deep down, an uncontrollable growl pushes up his throat, and when it finally rolls off his tongue its tensity makes him writhe in the ropes again - making him seem like the real monster this order has made him into. But Seonghwa never even glances at him. He keeps his head held high and eyes filled with pride and mislaid emotions as he steers his horse nowhere as surprised to see the boy still alive after being pierced with a sword. Yeosang spits in his direction, which only makes another knight smack his head down again.

_____

Lectushire Fortress heightens above the hill they ascend; tall and majestic. The troops are restless to return to their home when more than a fifth of the horses are missing a rider. Yeosang is only restless because he has no knowledge of where Jongho is.

Masses of knights crowd in the courtyard where Healers flock around them. Yeosang's sight is filled with dried salt water, but he fails not seeing the form of Seonghwa descending his horse as someone pushes in through the crowd and embraces him as a true lover would. Yeosang curls his toes taut at the sight of Seonghwa bringing his arms around Emma's shoulders as he kisses her yearningly. His stomach starts turning uncomfortably in protest.

As he listens to their converse, a knight pulls him down from his horse he is bound to, eyes flaring up in rage as the hands toss him to the ground without any support. The boy lands on the wet cobblestones with his shoulder first, and under the pressure of enormous pain, he hears the echoes of his bones splintering inside his body. He wants to gasp for air to ease his senses down, but the clattering boots nearing the place he sprays on the ground sets fear afire. With the chuckle, the beating hearts, and foul smirk, Yeosang cannot keep himself from screaming, gut-wrenching tormenting loudly, when a boot places all weight down onto his hurt shoulder. The sound quickly drowns in the mass.

When he opens his tightly shut eyes again he stares directly up into Emma's sight and he sees the terror filling her otherwise gentle eyes, "Where is my brother - WHERE IS SAN!"

He watches how the young woman pushes against Seonghwa's arms as he holds her back from continuing into the tangle of wounded knights and their destriers, having her throw a fit while she screams at him to let go of her, "No..that is not true!" Emma's heartbroken screams of her brother's name tremble through every bone in the courtyard.

"CHOI SANDER!!"

The shrill makes Yeosang bite his lip so hard that he might see white when so many teardrops bleed the ground with sorrow and heartaches. An urge press on the back of his head, taking his every thought to one path as his mind bends him to believe he whispers in her ear: 'Seonghwa killed him..he killed your brother, and now he wishes to do the same to you.'

The foot stepping on him moves away, hands grasps his form instead and constrains him to only stumble in one direction. Yeosang glances at Emma the last time before Seonghwa tells the knights holding him where to bring him. His heart has trouble with shattering another time.

They shove him toward the trail down to Lord's house, ignoring every little sign he shows of discomfort or unstableness. As his arms are still bound behind him, one of the men has the peak of a knife touching above the half-healed wound in his chest. Soon his back only faces the echoes of anguish, his own headspace forms long threads of imaginations of darkness and death, a cold body starts shaking. He despises the place when he long has known what lies beyond the fronts of wonders and goodness, and the stairsteps down under the church's massive building retells a story in the exact same way he always has been threatened about. A story of sinners and shedding blood.

The narrow wooden door screeches when they vigorously slam it open and takes him further down into the darkness. It seems as if one of the men has found a lantern to carry in his free hand, but Yeosang needs no light to see where he steps. The shaft is long and tight, the air smells of rotten flesh and mold, pressing itself into his dead lungs and flowing out again like it only got stronger.

When the tunnel broadens, he sees iron bars fastened from the ceiling and into the floor, making out restricted areas of cells he knows have been used from the way his observant senses notice. And from the bones and dead rotten bodies there lies inside them. Suddenly, the boy leans forward and purges gobbed blood over the ground, showing the glint of human he still is.

But it also has the knight spearing him with the knife, shoving the object in between his ribs as it tears his flesh apart from tendons and nerves. A strangled gasp leaves him instantly as his knees buckle and he falls to the grimy floor with the lost ability to move anymore. Yeosang's face scrapes against the ground when they kick him inside one of the cells and lock it. Something petrifying touches his back there feels like three fingers while the knights leave him to be, but the boy has no strength to move away from whatever is dragging along his spine.

_____

The knife sliding out of his chest and landing on the floor resonates through the unfilled dungeon and Yeosang is fully awake, but still paralyzed. Laying on his side, he stares wide-eyed around in the darkness as the sensation of the three fingers still rests on his back. He may think it feels as if the devil is slowly working his hands around him to hold tight.

The boy feels cold, the feeling creeping up from the grimy stones underneath his heavy body and into his damp and shredded attires that barely settle around his form anymore. The dried blood down his chin makes his skin itch with irritation that he cannot do anything about - not when his hands are to no use behind his back. Yeosang lets go of a quivering sigh and listen to how his lost breath merges with the moist air. It is empty and lost, and he swallows tensely at the knot that forms somewhere deep in his stomach - mashing any butterfly that has ever been there in his life. He hears them shriek, pleading for their lives to be spared, but mercy does not exist. Not in a world with hatred and suffering.

In the far end, his sight spells at the moss growing up along the wall. The iron that opens to the cell he stares into has a tint of red; rusted by the many centuries of rot and decay and it makes him wonder for how long he has lied down here or even the horrifying thought of how long he will stay here. It bursts into his sight with fright when suddenly piles of skulls are looking at him, empty holes where eyes should have been staring into his as hands stretch for him: "Save yourself, when begging will not help! They murder and torture, whatever you do!"

He can feel something pounding in his chest, rough and pacing, but he watches the cross burn itself into a head as screams push against the slick walls. The dread rolls from his forehead in trepidation before he comes to realize that his heart does not beat anymore - but something else does. Bloody fingers break from the penetrating wound in his chest, digits wiggling with desperate attempts of grasping anything steady as they crawl upward through his flesh and fill his mouth with their filth and necrose, settling an eternal fret in his soul. The boy wants to scream at the horrific way he feels the arm pressing against the skin on his back, how the resilient limb scrapes against his ribs and spine, slitting his chest open with skin overstretching until it cracks as the hand swells down his throat. Tears are forced to fall when he cries and gasps for the air he does not need.

Yeosang wants no more, he can no more. The imaginations in his spinning head are overwhelming and the boy is lost in reality when thick, red blood starts seeping in through cracks of the wall, slowly drowning whatever may be left to die. Lights cast shadows of monsters on the solid stones, lunging for his trembling form that whimpers when he is pulled onto his unstable legs again.

"Fine, let him stand there, I can manage omnio," a voice strikes him, close to his face, but not close enough to see who he is. Yeosang's belief in the devil braces when the hooded figure steps forward, trailing a dangling cross in front of him. The glint of a smirk stings his eyes before a quick movement has the cross burned into his forehead like hot iron. Yeosang startles back as he howls in pain, but the man hurting him has already brought his free hand around his neck, and he clenches hard around it.

The boy feels impotent.

His eyes turn in his skull until they show only white, and his head goes limp in the vassal's hand, his voice slowly subduing and disappearing fully.

"That is at most what you deserve."

Yeosang has no control over his body when he falls to his knees after the knight has let go of him again, his eyes bleeding with liquid that he cannot smell if they actually are tears or blood. The snout of two black leather boots peeks into his sight and he watches how the liquid hits the material heavily before disappearing down between the grooves in the floor. A cold, sharp object pokes the gorge under his chin and thrusts his head to look up into a countenance there bespeak more repellence than his swollen eyes will let him see.

"You fastidis me," the cold voice sounds in his ears, "Believe me when I tell you how much I paenitet, that I ever gave you a new chance. I was at fault when I told your father that I quod salvare you when our Lord already had decided that you could not be saved."

Yeosang does not know, but his lip quivers, he does not see, but his eyes shake and he does not feel, but his heart has just been trampled. Seonghwa slowly presses the edge of his sword further and further into his throat, provoking untamed instincts to hiss at the knight as the action grows. Suddenly Yeosang coughs blood.

"You shall never die a peaceful death, rather you will be confined in the world of the living as your sins will always trail you behind like the monstrous betrayer that you are. This is his punishment for you, and I consider that to be of a much forbearing consequence, peccator," the vassal delineates as he withdraws his weapon down along his proud posture again. His words pour down upon him with weight and treachery, and Yeosang's eyes shimmer with water he desires to drown him with.

"Choke.." he spits, "Choke on your lies, you deceiver. If I tell you that I know of your affair with another knight, you would never have told me that I am the only one who is sinning," Yeosang finishes, his red eyes full of boiling hatred for a moment before Seonghwa's sword squelches through his head and sticks his eye out.

⚔︎