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callireads · 2 months ago

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Review 5: The Korean Myths: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, and Legends

One of the assorted books I grabbed during my feeding frenzy in the library's What's New section the other day.

What do I know about Korea? Next to nothing. What connection do I have to Korea? Next to none. North Korea is the one I was sincerely worried might kill us all in 2017 (🎵2017...you are a fever dream I...did not want to have again🎵), and where the occasional member of a tour group...goes away. South Korea is the one where my friend went one time, where I've heard a lot of music, TV, and film is coming from, and, at least a few years ago, was a real up-and-comer in the beauty community, with the popularity of its products and routines steadily increasing in prominence and accessibility and starting to rival traditional luxury skincare producers like Japan and Hungary. During my glamourous era (2018-ish to 2020-ish), I even tried a few K-beauty products, as they're called, for myself, even though I had too much of a history of my face being shiny for all the wrong reasons for the glass skin trend to appeal much to me; the porcelain doll look is perhaps a little out of fashion, but I'm used to it and it suits me, so I'll stick with that. Some of the products I tried were good stuff, though. Now that my complete and total lack of any meaningful knowledge of or connection to Korean history and culture are well-established, on to the book about Korean history and culture.

I enjoy reading books about mythology generally, especially if I can get hold of one I don't already know anything about, but I'll be the first to admit that such books have...issues. Either they try to boil down mythologies into a series of coherent narratives (which is difficult at best and generally produces a somewhat dishonest picture of what were, after all, traditions from living cultures, developed over long, long periods of time and from many, many points of view), or they are more or less encyclopedias, in which case reading them straight through is not unlike reading a choose-your-own-adventure novel straight through: chaotic and kaleidoscopic, so that none of the bits are linked directly together at all and one only slowly starts to pull together any sort of narratives from the text. That can be fun in its own way, which is the reason I do it sometimes, but it's a difficult way to learn about a totally new mythology. This book, to my pleasant surprise, didn't really fall into either of those traps. It is titled "The Korean Myths," but it is really a short introduction to the history, religion, and culture of Korea, which includes traditional stories and how their role in society has evolved. This format doesn't allow for a great deal of depth on any subject, but as far as I can tell, it could be a good jumping-off point into deeper research on the subject, if one was so inclined.

A few passages I marked for some reason, and whatever I can think of to say about them now:

Another Korean Shamanic ritual is the talchum, or mask dance. There are many individual versions of the mask dance across Korea, but generally they involve shamans donning masks designed to represent social archetypes or spirits, such as 'the general,' 'the bride,' or 'the syphilitic monk.' (62)

I think I marked this one down originally on the grounds of "...that last archetype seems a bit more specific than the ones before it, doesn't it?" Presumably, this is more to do with me being a westerner and raised as a Protestant than it actually being unusual. I found the section on Shamanism quite interesting. It seems it is a living religion even in the present day, and that it has traditionally provided

"a way for the oppressed, such as transgender people and gay or lesbian people to express themselves and their communities. The life of a shaman has historically allowed women - who may otherwise have been outcast due to being widowed or having abusive husbands - to earn money and support themselves and their families...Shamanic rituals also allow for play, and for ridiculing the people traditionally in power in Korean society" (62)

Overall, the book's dealings with gender were especially new information to me. I'd learned in school that Confucian ideals were part of strict enforcement of oppressive gender roles in traditional Asian societies, which the book acknowledges, and that was pretty much it. Learning about the female shamanic tradition in most of Korea and the mirroring tradition of male shamans in Jeju Island added nuance to the situation. Of course, it's also definitely noted that every other major religion or dominant strain of philosophy has tried to suppress these traditions at one point or another, but they seem to have remained remarkably resilient even into the present based on this text*.

The last line I excerpted there, about play and ridiculing the people traditionally in power in Korean society, mirrored another theme that ran throughout the book, which was the value placed upon cleverness and trickery as traits. It seems to me, based upon my current knowledge, that there's a lot to be read into a culture's view on those things. From what I've read, the ancient Greeks also considered it perfectly admirable to be the cleverest and even most under-handed person in the room, but that it was for very different reasons. The book here presents Korean mythology's focus on cleverness as a reflection of the peninsula's history of both a very strictly-ordered society and of a lot of outside oppression that attempted, without success, to suppress and even eradicate native Korean culture multiple times. In Greece, it seems to have been more a matter of the culture's interest in individual excellence - Odysseus became a villain in the Roman and Elizabethan writers' hands, but the fact he was the best at what he did was more important to his original culture than whether or not this or that action was ethical. The competitiveness between city-states drove the Greeks to some great cultural accomplishments, but also played a pivotal role in their downfall, when each state's preoccupation with itself made it impossible for them to form a stable enough alliance when larger outside forces threatened them all. The Romans were more focused on the collective, and this allowed the creation of an enormous and surprisingly modern, in some ways, empire, but culturally, the general perception is that Romans made history, but their culture was just a cheap rip-off of Greece's. It was actually more complex than that, but the fact remains that we do seems to have trouble discerning what, if any, original myths the civilizations native to the Italian peninsula might have had before Rome, as those that survive were generally so well-conflated with their nearest Greek equivalents. The Villain Odysseus was, I think, particularly pronounced in Elizabethan drama, once the Renaissance had gotten well underway and knowledge of the Greek stories had made its way as far north as Britain, and that interests me because of something I read last year, which was a book about the practice of dissimulation in European cultures in and after the Renaissance. Apparently, it was completely expected that you would have your private, individual thoughts and opinions, but also just as completely expected that you would adhere carefully to the social consensus on what to actually say, and openness was not considered a virtue. This makes it interesting that the supreme trickster himself, the master of dissimulation, was not viewed with favor - reflective, perhaps, of the buildup of tensions which eventually led to the reactionary cultural backlashes seen in the rise of Puritanism and witch hysteria and the like, though I don't have enough information to be sure that idea could float. Just something to consider looking further into sometime, along with looking into what traditional Spanish culture has to say about this - because one thing Korea, Greece, and Italy all share is their peninsular nature, and recognizable humans existed when Britain was still a peninsula instead of an island, if I remember my reading about prehistoric Britain from last January correctly. Italy became the great fractured state of the Renaissance after Rome; the British Isles started out as a patchwork of tiny kingdoms before eventually unifying into the center of one of history's Major Empires. Korea and Greece, however, retained, to different degrees, the tendency to split up into smaller units more often than not, but also to have a much larger impact on broader culture than their sizes would suggest. My history education was lacking in many respects, but I was taught that the great imperial states that formed the prototypes for modern superpowers were Rome, France, Spain/Portugal, and England, so now I need to brush up on and go further into Spanish history sometime.

Of course, all of the above are thoughts formed as I read and typed, so there are doubtless inaccuracies and misconceptions that wouldn't be there if I was presenting a thesis. This is even more likely in light of how little I know, just in general, about Eastern history. Just some notes on what to maybe look into some other time, when I don't have fourteen library books on different topics out and after I've also done a lot more reading on Korea.

A final note: Princess Bari. I would totally read an epic fantasy which used that myth as one of its templates.

"Karma means 'action,' and the process of karma is a complex causal chain of actions and their consequences that continue into subsequent incarnations. While the burden of karma is avoided in Hinduism by following one's dharma - the social and spiritual duties specific to one's caste and station in life - Buddhism rejects the caste system and introduces the idea of a universal Dharma that applies to all individuals equally. A key concept of Buddhism is dukka, a Sanskrit word usually translated as 'suffering.' This is the idea that suffering is inherent to all life - to every being in the universe...the Four Noble Truths are presented as a rhetorically coherent argument: there is suffering, suffering has an origin, there is an end to suffering, and the way to end suffering is by following the Eightfold Path." (80)

I feel like much of this wasn't entirely new information to me, but that I originally learned it in an even more boiled-down form in about seventh grade, when we focused on world history and cultures in Social Studies, and...that was pretty much it. I definitely did not learn the next bit in the text, which is that Buddhism has deities. The idea of suffering as the inherent condition explains, perhaps, some of why Korean media is currently enjoying a surge in global popularity: it's a theory that's easy to believe in, in present times. I'd say it's a theme of my own writing, even, except for how my characters usually lack access to any way out other than to cease existing altogether. Yeah, my work's...cheerful like that.

"Korea has a complicated relationship with the supernatural. The societal norm in Neo-Confucian Korean culture was to suppress 'superstitious' beliefs, in accordance with the thinking of Neo-Confucianism's founding philosophers. However, when there were issues on an individual scale, the first thing a family would do is consult the local shaman. James Scarth Gale, one of the first missionaries to translate Korean literature and folk tales into English, noted that Koreans - particularly scholars, who were his closest contacts - were hesitant to discuss supernatural matters in public, but held strong beliefs in them privately...the tension between rejecting and embracing the supernatural persists in Korea today." (105)

This resonated with me, I suppose because it reminds me a bit of something familiar. The tension is much less that what's presented here, but I was also brought up in such a culture. The South holds outwardly to a view...broadly along general American lines, a view close-ish to the Enlightenment, but we all grow up on different fare at home from grandparents and great-aunts and such. Ghost stories and rigid superstitions (New Year's Day is a particular one - you must eat peas and collards to ensure you'll have money in the coming year, and you must not wash clothes that day, because if you do, you're washing out a relative and someone in your family will die - everyone says they don't believe it and are just being safe rather than sorry, of course, as if it were a joke, and families as dysfunctional as mine even make dark jokes along the lines of "now, if I could decide which relative I was washin' out of the family, that might be a different story...", but everyone goes to a lot of pains to remind everyone else that New Year's is coming, is all I'm saying) and tales of inexplicable events...the big ghost tours you see, Charleston and Savannah and the like, or the endless books on [State] ghosts you can find tucked away in odd corners of any Cracker Barrel restaurant, those are, let's be honest, at least 90% a tourist attraction; they stop only thisfar this side of a grift because I assume the people purchasing the tours and books also know it's all just for entertainment. If y'all want to give us your money, we'll roll you around some streets in a horse-drawn buggy at night and tell some spooky stories without complaint. Heck, we even occasionally participate in such things ourselves while vacationing in the Old Cities. I imagine people up in Lovecraft Country or Hawthorneland do something similar. It's a bit of harmless fun for everyone. However, I know people who genuinely will not set foot in cemeteries after dark, because they are really afraid of ghosts. My mother has always said she doesn't understand that view...not because she doesn't believe it's possible, but because if she went up there and saw Pawpaw and Daddy and my uncle Hugh and a few of our cousins who are all buried in the same cemetery were sitting around playing poker and looking like they did when they weren't sick and getting along, she can't imagine why she'd be frightened of them instead of glad to see 'em again (bah, I've made myself cry just writing that sentence). We still observe the birthdays of the dead, and take them gifts of a sort by changing out their flowers regularly through the year. It's a Christmas tradition on my mother's side of the family for the women whose fathers have died to slip out of the Christmas Eve get-together after dark, where we put lighted Christmas trees on the graves and also literally someone buys a beer just so we can tip it out for 'em, even though none of us drink the nasty stuff. I'm a pretty rational person, but my grandmother (whose only childhood medical treatment came from an herb granny) has repeatedly told such a vivid tale of seeing someone faith-healed from paralysis when she was a girl (scaring her half to death at the time, as she was fourteen and just keeping the babies of the prayer group out of the way) that it's hard for me to completely disbelieve in such things, no matter how much I know about placebo effects and psychology and how weird the nervous system is or even how many people are, er, just plain overt, proven con artists. If you ever go to a hotel in the U.S., you'll probably find a Bible in the drawer of the nightstand in your room; those are put there by the Gideons, an organization who, as part of their fundraising efforts, come as guest preachers to churches and tell all sorts of wild tales of what sound like borderline magic in their oddly stereotypical missionary efforts in the traditional places, all swearing they are true, and people eat it up to this day.

Now, why am I telling you all this, friends? 'Cause y'all are most of my contacts with the outside world. Not many people will admit to a lingering bit of belief in that sort of thing today, just in general, but in private...y'all, I read Scientific American every month and have never been exactly shy about admitting how little connection I feel to the local culture and regularly make my whole family sincerely worry that I'm going to Hell for asking too many questions, and yet there's still some stubborn little corner of my mind that can never feel one hundred percent certain there's no such thing as miracles and folk magic. This does my OCD about as much good as you'd probably suspect, but that's...a different story. Point is...it's just interesting to me, how many points of commonality there can be between what we'd initially think of as very, very different cultures. It's the same with jade - this book mentions the Korean and Chinese beliefs associated with it, which happen to be pretty similar to those held by ancient Mesoamerican societies, on a completely different continent and with an ocean in between them. We get the same ideas, here or there, over and over again, and they linger no matter how sophisticated or advanced-beyond-others we might tell ourselves we are. This is one reason why racism is stupid as well as wrong...but that's also a different story. This is all just an observation.

The next section of the book is mostly about actual myth-stories and magical creatures and whatnot, so I'll spare you all my notes on those and go on to the notes about the modern Koreas at the end of the book. Let's start off on a very merry topic, North Korean propaganda!

"One comic in particular, the 186-page Great General Mighty Wing (1994), stands out...Mighty Wing is precisely the sort of thing Kim Jong-un, the current leader, would have read as a preteen, and its embedded slogans reveal the sort of brainwashing he would have experienced at that age" (181)

For one thing...wow, apparently I'm a lot closer in age to Kim Jong-un than I thought I was? I was a year away from learning to read in 1994, so he's definitely a good bit my senior, but apparently was not an adult at that time. Well, Ericksson did say middle age begins at 35, and I'm getting awful close to that. This all is so much yammer about nothing, though, compared to the other thought I had about this passage, which is how the world might just be what it is because we expected our villains to be smart.

The Star Wars prequels were released in my childhood, and, like most children watching them, I hadn't the slightest inkling how political they really were - and I was a pretty bright kid who was trying to follow the plot and joined in with the adults in finding Jar-Jar annoying! As an adult, though...they reflect, I think, the same basic assumption that made it surprising to me that the book would posit that Kim Jong-un was as much a victim of brainwashing as anyone else in North Korea. See, in my head, if I was going to set up a dictatorship based in a cult around me and my family, it only seems natural to me that I would want to make sure that me and my heirs didn't get too high on our own propaganda supply. If you believe it yourself, after all, you automatically have a lesser degree of control over it than you would otherwise, plus you're going to make stupid decisions by default if you think you are really that special. Palpatine, in his younger years at least, is a villain who makes sense to me: he's completely cold-blooded, brilliant, manipulating other people's emotions until they hand him so much power that they end up unable to take it back. He and Christopher Lee Count Dooku never believed in their respective sides of the war at all; it was all a game to them, they were always on the same side, which was their own side. Palpatine fell when he got arrogant: when he started to assume he was a living god, and that of course it would never occur to Vader to turn on him. He knew, good and well, that the final steps of his plan only played out as smoothly as they did because he was able to spin this mentally unstable person around like a top by exploiting his obsessive attachment to one woman. Why, exactly, did he think it was a good idea to try electrocuting that woman's son in front of the guy? On one hand, he could have reasoned that Vader might have happily latched onto the notion that Luke and Leia killed Padme by being born...despite the twenty-odd years he'd spent up to that point obsessed with the idea that he'd personally killed her and his own child...and how Vader had clearly reacted to the idea that Anakin Skywalker's son had survived, and how that kid is the closest thing to Padme he can ever get again, given that there's no reason why her consciousness would have survived becoming one with the Force and therefore no afterlife with her to look forward to, and how he'd literally just been talking about how, now that he knew Luke was a twin, he'd be just as happy to have his daughter ruling beside him as his son....

Yeah, real smart move, there, Sheev. You knew that Vader had no motives for living except to kill anything that threatened his attachments. You have that fun feeling-sensing ability, so you have to know that any efforts you made to convince him that killing the brat would avenge Padme or something were not working. You'd seen Anakin come close to killing you before, even, when he first found out what you really were - and you'd just betrayed him, which in Anakin-land is the worst thing anyone can do and which is the idea you used on multiple levels to turn him against Obi-Wan, by telling Luke to promote himself to apprentice by killing Vader the same way Vader had promoted himself by killing Dooku, so long before. What did you think was going to happen, dude? Answer: you didn't, because you'd given in to the megalomania, started believing in yourself too much and thinking too little, and, accordingly, you promptly got murdered. Sic semper lost-his-edge tyrannus.

Then, though, we get to the real world. We get a dangerous populist in power, here in the States - and he's a probably-half-insane, not-that-bright-to-begin-with buffoon who seems to actually believe in his own hype, at least on some level. Evil was supposed to be smart while it persisted - to have a mind of metal and wheels, to borrow a description from Tolkien - and to fall when it got emotional, because Good Emotional may lose to a brilliant schemer, but never to a Bad Emotional. It's much of the philosophical basis of traditional American anti-intellectualism (which...don't get me started on that subject)...and it seems that it isn't how things are actually working out. The sound and fury of tales told by an idiot ended up signifying far too much. Last time, 2016, I assumed McConnell and Pence had engineered the whole thing and would keep their grotesque frontman on a short leash - assumed they were the Palpatines who I really needed to look out for, the ones who'd 'save' us from their patsy when the moment was right in order to become beloved wielders of far too much power after they got all their use out of that surly overgrown infant and discarded him. I was dead wrong about that. And now I am presented with the idea that another Nuclear Idiot might also believe in his own hype...

...y'know, I didn't really need any sound sleep for the next couple decades at least, sleep was always kinda overrated anyway, the only dreams I've ever been able to remember were nightmares before I had this disturbing thought in my head, so I'm not really losing anything here, am I....

"K-pop groups like Blackpink and BTS are directly responsible for the phenomenon of 'Koreaboos' - devoted fans who immerse themselves in Korean language and culture in order to be closer to their idols. The term 'idol'...is appropriate for the famous K-pop celebrities because they are not only objects of worship, but also, in a sense, false gods. An idol adored by fans is a carefully constructed and managed persona into which a production company has invested millions of dollars over the course of their rigorous contract, which may be for up to thirteen years. Everything about Korean pop idols, from their weight to their fashionable wardrobes, immaculate complexions and virtuous personalities, is monitored and controlled in order to encourage the creation of parasocial relationships, ultimately a source of revenue" (214)

A tiny, tiny part of me is just amused to see the term 'Koreaboo' in a real, completely serious book. More of me, having already gotten into a quite serious mood by this point...

This shouldn't be surprising, really. We've always known this. Judy Garland and Shirley Temple were treated horrifically; the waves of child stars and children of mommy vloggers who are coming of age are letting us know that it's not just highly trained industry professionals who do this kind of thing. Anything and anyone that seems too perfect, is. Why do we have this impulse to believe otherwise - to believe in the mask? The...year before last, I think, I was reading a book titled Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (Jon R. Snyder), which was about how, in the Early Modern period, everyone (at least in the kinds of circles we have extensive written records about; I doubt the same is so of Average Joe Early Moderner) assumed that everyone else was always carefully arranging their public presentation to meet clearly-outlined social expectations, and that your private thoughts and feelings were your own; naturalness was not seen as a virtue, but as rude, boorish behavior. I realized, as I read this book, where I'd gone wrong when figuring out how to mask neurodivergence as a girl: I based my tactics mainly on ideas drawn from fantasy novels based on the Early Modern Period, and thought dissimulation was what everyone was always doing currently as well. This obviously has combined poorly with the current culture of fake openness. It's why I've been so baffled by the amount of buffoonery in politics, and how people think this is "being honest" and not just, well, rude, boorish behavior. I don't really have a conclusion for this, unless I'm allowed to make a joke about "bring masking back for the neurotypicals again!"; again, think of this entry as me sitting down with you and a cup of tea, just talking as I go along.

"The myth that beauty and virtue go together is already perpetuated by classic folk tales and literature...and further amplified by an underlying cultural belief in physiognomy - certain facial proportions and shapes are said to reveal character traits like intelligence, honesty, loyalty, and compassion, but when such standards are then combined with Western media ideals, the result can be a face whose appearance is unnatural and perhaps even uncanny. In fact, the 'ideal' Korean face is now the 'egg-shaped' face, which ironically resonates with the terrifying figure of the egg ghost [a monster which appears to be a woman weeping from the back, but when a man tries to comfort her, she turns around to reveal she has no face at all]" (216)

This is sad. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here - we made them out of ourselves.

Just another musing here on culture, this time on a difference in culture. Growing up, I was taught that it was borderline disrespectful to go out looking like you were showing your 'natural' face; the current no-makeup makeup trend was a complete no-go, since carefully doing one's hair and make-up and dressing up to go in public was a sign that you were the Right Sort, a woman who respected herself and others. I still refer to putting on make-up as "putting my face on" - I feel dramatically more confident when I have substantially altered my face's appearance, emphasizing the good points (eyebrow pencils and mascara are wonderful products, and I'll stand on that one; I have good eyebrows and eyelashes naturally, but they're almost completely transparent unless I apply cosmetics) and downplaying the ones I dislike and making some things visibly artificial (come for my eyeliner and lipstick, see what happens). My behavior changes without me even thinking about it. It's sort of horrifying, though, to think of having plastic surgery to make me always look like I had my face on - if I always look like I'm in public, when am I supposed to be in private? How would I survive in a world where there was no such thing as private, where life really had to be lived as though one was in the public eye at all times? Is that what we're headed for, and if so, will we figure out it ain't gonna work before we drive ourselves completely mad?

"It is not certain whether Bandi is an individual or a group of writers, but the layers of symbolism contained int he pseudonym attest to the fact that Bandi is a highly trained and talented writer who has also carefully studied the mechanics of propaganda. On its surface, bandi is a colloquial term for a firefly. But the first syllable, ban, means 'half,' and it results in many thematically relevant words with ban as a prefix. Bandi sounds similar to bando...meaning 'belt,' which may symbolize not only the DMZ that divides the peninsula in half but also a leather belt used to beat people. Bando also means 'halfway' and 'peninsula.' Bandi also sounds like bandae...which means 'the opposite' or 'to oppose, signifying a denouncement of the state as well as recalling the beginning of the phrase bandeusi...which means 'right away', 'directly' and 'without fail.' One of the unexpected readings of the first syllable comes from [a Chinese character] which means 'food' or 'to eat,' resonating with the theme of starvation during the great famine of the mid-1990s. This intense layering of meanings is characteristic of a poetic writer, but also suggests the possibility that Bandi's identity was created by the dialogue of more than one individual. The layered meanings in the pseudonym are also a clue that Bandi's prose and poetry contain a similar dense encoding of meanings, used to reveal the oppression of the very state that trained him" (221)

There are two recurring themes throughout the book when it comes to Korean culture on the whole. One is syncretism, deliberate melding of different elements from different places and times to create an adaptable, living whole. Another is how layered the Korean language apparently is and how this shows up in its literature. As someone who loves playing with words in that way, I'm now extremely tempted to go read some Korean literature, even though goodness knows I'm probably not capable of learning enough Korean to do so and therefore wouldn't get to enjoy the effect anyway. I still admire the technique, though.

"A unified Korean peninsula could also potentially destabilize relationships between the global superpowers. What if a unified democratic Korea, with political pressure from factions maintaining the current interests of the North, were to shift its allegiance from the United States to China, creating a major blow to US security in the Pacific Rim?" (226)

Again, just something sad. They're inescapable at this point, but I have often wondered if we wouldn't all be better off if there were no global superpowers, no massive unwieldy states trying to force uniformity and cohesion onto too many distinct groups or trying to use independent states as puppets and proxy actors. I was, though, born into the world of the superpowers, so what do I know? I can only imagine a world without them, and who am I to say my imagination would come to the correct conclusions? Much of this now extremely long post keeps coming back to all the ways it hasn't been before.

*I include the 'based on this text' because I haven't read any other sources to confirm it yet. My guess is the book is accurate enough, but if I've learned one thing in all my readings in history and comparative religion and mythology, it's that the only way to getting an even vaguely clear view in this sort of area involves reading closer to twenty sources than to one source.

#bookblr #books #books and reading #reading #2025 reads #book review #mythology and folklore #korean mythology #south korea #north korea #star wars reference #macbeth reference #american politics #this got long #musings #ramblings

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hislittlesparklejumpropequeen · 5 months ago

Text

As my emperor wishes

Summary: Emperor Geta and his brother Emperor Caracalla get into one of their usual arguments. Emperor Geta sends him a gift as an apology; you. Warnings: vaginal sex, kissing, bodily fluids, blood, creampie, mentions of killing, sex work, prostitution, drinking, oral sex(f receiving) emotional sex Emperor Caracalla x female!reader

Word count:3.7k

Non-canon events

Since the moment he was born, his younger brother, Geta would always push him down, get on his shoulders and collect all the power he could. For Geta, and for everybody ever, he was just a fool. A fool with a wicked smile and rich tastes that could be easily entertained and kept busy with other matters that did not involve any politicking. He did enjoy his time with his companions and wine and gold. But he could always feel the eyes of people on him. Those pitying eyes that saw him as an idiot and nothing more. It was always Geta who got to get everything in the first place. Best fabrics were shown to him, best armours were forged for him, most luscious whores sent to him, and he had the say in senate before him and after him.

He was so deep into this hellhole that he did not know how to get out of it anymore. His brother possessed all the power of Rome while he had to pretend to be busy with more foolish tasks. He took a sip of his wine as the cool wind of Rome brushed his burning skin and made him take a deep breath in. He was feeling the walls closing in on him and crush him in his chambers. He was wide awake in the night as their subjects were already deep in their peaceful sleep. As he was trying to bring his thoughts and mind together to find some tranquility from the voice in his head that kept him awake, the doors of his chambers were knocked. He sighed in annoyance and called out for person to come in. He wondered what stupid matter had occurred in the night so that they were bothering him.

His doors opened and he heard small pair of footsteps enter his bedchambers. Yet footsteps didn’t reach to the balcony that he was at. They stayed near the door and waited for him turn around. His aquamarine eyes looked back in wonder to see who it was. He was expecting one of the servants or guards that he had always seen in the place, yet it was young woman that he had never seen before. She was barely dressed in the soft looking, maroon-coloured fabrics that were wrapped around her body. Her hair was down, so different than the hairstyles that noble women of the Rome would wear, and he would see everyday. She did not have any jewellery or anything particularly that would show wealth and power. She was almost bare in front of his eyes.

“Your majesty.” You said with a soft voice that made him shiver in the chill of the night. “I’ve been sent to you as a gift, by your brother, the emperor Geta as a gratitude of your service to the state of Rome and your support to him.” You spoke out the learned sentences that were especially taught by your master. The smile on your lips made him part his lips and suck in another deep breath.

“Geta sent you?” He asked, echoing your words as he walked into his chambers and went to fill his emptied goblet with wine. You took courage from him not sending you out immediately and being calm, so you slowly started to approach him.

“Yes, your majesty.” He remembered their argument from hours ago where they both used hurtful words to one another. Geta knew him better than anyone so he was skilled in hurting him deep as he could. He knew his weaknesses and his soft spots. All his insecurities that he could not share with anyone, his secrets that he kept to himself and struggles that he could not get over. Geta was clever and he loved mocking him. So, it was not unusual for them to argue and Geta to send a gift as an apology after. He was gifted with whores many times. Pretty girls, pretty boys, common looking ones, exotic ones, well trained ones. Yet when you finally came near him, he looked at you carefully for the first time and he saw something he has never seen before, pure perfection. You looked at him with the gentlest smile he was ever seen, and your eyes were gentler than your smile if it was possible. He looked at your figure, your visible breast and curves that made his heart skip a beat.

“There is no other with you.” He said, realising that it was only you that Geta had sent. You nodded.

“Yes, your majesty. Emperor Geta chose me himself. Specially for you.” You said, your voice quiet, almost whispering as you got closer to him. You realised his knuckles around the goblet had turned white when there was only a step distance between two of you. His shoulder and arms looked tense.

“Why is that?” He raised an eyebrow with your words. Your smile widened when you took the goblet from his hand and took a sip of his wine. The little drop that escaped your lips trailed down your chin to your neck. His eyes followed the little, red drop. His mouth watered at the sight of your exposed neck.

“His majesty will be my first man, if he wishes it to be tonight.” You said when you offered him the goblet back. He took it and pressed his lips exactly on the spot you just drank from. The warmth of your lips was still lingering on the metal. He felt his manhood twitch under his nightgown.

“You never been with a man before?” He asked, almost not believing it. You nodded and saw his eyes shine with excitement and something you could not quite name. Something that look primal, animalistic that made him looked scary for a second. And for the first time since you entered his chambers, he brought his fingers up and touched you by softly caressing your arm with his fingertips. The touch was so light that you barely felt it. Yet he felt the coldness of your skin that was most likely affected by the chill of the night.

“I’m going to be your first.” He spoke to you or to himself, you did not know nor cared. He drank the last bit of wine and tossed the goblet somewhere you could not see. Then took your hand and led you to the enormous bed that was in the middle of the room. The sheets were not tidy, made you think that he had tried to sleep yet failed before you came to his chambers. You wondered what kept him awake. He sat down and looked up to you, his eyes looking shiny under the moonlight. He almost looked innocent.

“How does my emperor want it to be tonight? This servant of his majesty learned everything there is to know.” He bit his bottom lip when you finished talking and waited for his commands. Did he wanted to toss you around and just use you like a hole? Did he wanted to care only about his own satisfaction and listen to your false noises and praises for the whole night? He looked up to you again. The way you looked so beautiful and ethereal while you were looking down at him. Your eyelashes framing your enchanting eyes that were full of softness, your lips curled upwards and looking so kissable. He found it strange that he wanted to kiss you. He had never desired to kiss any of the whores he spent his nights with.

“I wish to-“he stoped and took another deep breath. You gently cupped his cheek and saw his eyelashes shake as you touched him. Your hands felt cooling and comforting on his skin that was on fire.

“I want to make love.” He said and a sigh of relief left his trembling lips. He did not remember the last time he looked so vulnerable in front of someone. He had always tried to smile without any care, pretend to not hear his brother’s cruel words, fuck his way into banquets and brothels, drink his days away.

“As my emperor wishes.” You said and the wrapped fabrics on your shoulders dropped to your feet with one swift move of your fingers. His shining eyes found your breasts, your belly, your loins and lastly your eyes again. He looked like a hungry lion, and you were his meal. The thought made you tingly between your legs. His uniquely pale cheeks were flushed red, and his breaths were quick, raggedy. You wondered if it was you who made him like this or his won infamous ‘madness’?

“Beautiful…” he whispered, his voice coming like a scared child, a broken man. His fingers found your hips and he brought your figure closer to him. His head, his mouth was right next to your womanhood, his warm breath hitting your pubic bone. You felt the force on your knees failing you, yet you managed to stand still. He opened his mouth hesitantly and his pink, shiny tongue touched your skin. The warmth of his mouth made you breathe out in shock. His tongue danced on your pubic bone and went down to your lips. His mouth covered your pussy, his tongue parting your folds and finding your clitoris. The tip of his tongue was playing with you cruelly as his hands were tight and rough on your hips. You cried out, begging him to show you mercy. And all you got back from him was a chuckle that sounded teasing and mocking.

He moaned into your folds when your fingers found his ginger-blonde hair and pushed his head closer to your little heaven. His nose and mouth were almost buried into you, and you wondered if he was out of breath between your legs. He slowly turned his attention to your already leaking hole from your clitoris that was swollen and throbbing. He dipped his tongue into you, collecting all your juices as his nose was stimulating your clitoris. The taste made his dick twitch and pulse painfully. You saw his seed leaking out of his red, tumescent cock that was rock hard.

“Mercy, your majesty, mercy!” You moaned out as he was still eating you like a man starved. He brought his face away and you saw your juices covering half of his face. His eyes were dropped, and he was breathing fast when he looked up to you again. You saw his eyelashes wet from his teary eyes. You did not want to wait any longer. You were so sure that it was going to be about his pleasure tonight when you were sent to him yet the moment he laid his eyes on you, you wanted him to touch you in places no one has ever did before. Your lips finally met for the first time tonight when you positioned yourself on his lap, in his arms.

His mouth captured yourself immediately, his tongue entering trough your lips and finding your own tongue without wasting any second. You tasted yourself on his tongue when he was whimpering and pushing his crotch up to you desperately. Your wetness coated his cock as he was grinding against your folds, moaning into your mouth. His hand grabbed one of your breasts and his burning fingertips played harshly with your nipple, twisting it, pinching it. The closeness made you dizzy, and you felt all the thoughts on your mind disappear in moments. It did not matter that it was an emperor that you were kissing in this moment. You were woman and man, aching, thirsty for one another. You were in your most human form, and no one could ruin this for you.

His lips traced down to your neck when his fingertips found your leaking, clenching hole that was trying to take something in. He started to suck and lick on the sensitive skin of your exposed neck as his fingers were playing with your entrance. Your arms were wrapped around his shoulders, nails scratching his back as he slowly entered one finger into you. You heard him hiss into your skin when your walls clenched around his single finger. The feeling was immense. You have tried it yourself before, yet your fingers were nothing compared his single digit that made you breath deep and quick.

“Your majesty!” You cried out when his finger started to pump in and out of you. His motion stopped immediately when the words left your mouth. With that you froze in fear. He looked up to your eyes, your eyes that were teary just like his own, looking at him with hunger and impatience.

“My name is Antoninus.” He whispered to you when he broke the eye contact and pressed his head against yours. You gasped when you felt his tears rolling down his cheeks and drop down to your collarbone. Your body was pressed right against him, feeling his shaky, trembling hands on your hips, feeling his hard cock against your entrance, and hearing him sniff. He was crying like a little boy in your arms. Was he always crying when no one was looking? You wondered. Yet you kept your questions to yourself and cupped his cheek to make him look at you. He looked so human with tears in his eyes, rolling down his face, his raggedy breaths leaving his mouth rapidly and his lips glistening with your shared spit. You smiled softly when your own tears started to spill, because of the tingly, burning sensation in your belly or because of the heaviness in your heart, you did not know.

“I look at you, and I see you.” You whispered, almost afraid of the ears of walls and ground of the palace as you took the head of his cock into you slowly. His eyes widened and he threw his head back with a sob. With that his back was welcomed by the mattress of his bed. In this new position, you took him deeper and deeper into you, almost sending both of you over the edge. And when he was fully seated into you, your toes curled with the stingy, painful yet addictive sensation that was building a pressure in your lower belly. Your spine arched like a cat when his hands found your hips again. He grabbed your folds softly yet still reminding you of his strength and lust.

You waited for a moment to let yourself adjust to his length as he was caressing your skin from your hips to your stomach to your breasts. His fingers collected the small sweat drops between your breasts that escaped the wind of the Roman night that was blasting into his chambers. He looked up to you like you were a goddess. In this moment, with his cock in your wet, tight hole, hair down over your shoulders, nipples hard and hips quivering, looking down at him with those eyes that made his heart skip a beat, you were a true image of Venus.

“By Jupiter!” His voice echoed in his chambers when you started to move, up and down on his cock. He held onto your waist like you were the last thing in the world. Your walls were stretching out to make a room for him in you, making you a crying, moaning mess on him. Your hair bounced on your back as you quickened your pace, the noises of skin slapping on skin filled your ears and the sounds of your wet hole squelching around his throbbing member made you blush. You felt him thrust his hips upwards, trying to not have any moment of his cock out of your heaven and the thought of him being so eager for you made you smile in bliss.

You could feel his balls slapping the skin of your hips as he held you by your waist and made you stop to only continue himself by snapping his hips upwards to your loins with an immense speed that made your eyes roll back into your head. Your clit was burning from the friction of his thick, light brown hair. He looked down at your joined parts and saw the small amount of blood simmering both on your and his skin. He pulled his hips back, ignoring your cries of displeasure for a moment to look at his glistening cock that was covered in your blood, juices, his seed and sweat. The view made his stomach tighten in ecstasy. He collected some of the spent that dripped down to base of cock with his fingertips and brought them to his mouth. Then his tongue licked his fingers clean as he looked deep into your eyes and dived his cock back into you. The scene that took place in front of your eyes was your last kick before your legs shook, noises you never heard from yourself left your mouth and your walls tightened around him painfully. He moaned with you and followed you not long after.

You pushed yourself down as he pushed himself up in the heat of the moment. Your skin and bones crushed into one another, and finally you felt his seed shoot right into you. The warmth and the heaviness of his spent made you clench more and more with the urge to milk him. He threw his head back to catch his breath. You were panting like a dog on top of him, walls still tight around his softening cock that kept twitching in you.

“Come here.” He said with a stupid smile on his face and grabbed your arm to pull you down to him. He planted a long kiss onto your lips as his hands started to caress your back with affection that you would never expect from him. You heard him sigh when you felt the cold breeze on your sweat covered back that his fingers were drawing invisible shapes on.

“It never felt like this before.” He whispered, looking up to the ceiling. You looked up to him, seeing him swallow down few times before he looked back at you. There it was again. That innocent boy. It was like he had two different people in the same body. The one that you had your arms wrapped around and the one that had lips wrapped around his cock as he watched people mutilate one another.

“Rome is ours, palace is ours, throne is ours, crown is ours, power is his, and yet you’re mine.” He turned to you and said, tears filling his eyes again. You blinked few times, not knowing what to say. You could feel his spent drip out of you as he was still in you.

“Sometimes I wish that he never existed.” His voice sounded guilty for feeling that way. They were brothers. They had shared a womb together and came to this world together. Geta was the first alive being he knew. They played together as children, trained with swords together, ran off to a brothel in the middle of the night for the first time together. He remembered the times Geta would take the blame for the things he did even tho he was the younger. Geta had always been braver than him. Smarter in some sense. He did not trust anyone but him. Yet Geta was cruel. Not just to others but to him as well. He wished to go back to times when they loved one another without any doubt.

“I wish he was dead.” He whispered not caring if you head or not. Then rolled over to the side of the bed to and closed his eyes. You looked at his naked back, the scars that were work of your nails were red and looked like they were going to stay there for few more days. His breaths were calm and steady, reassuring you that he was falling asleep.

“Don’t leave.” He whispered when he felt you move beside him. The words made you smile, and you went to kiss his cheek. After a moment of silence, he was defeated by his sleep again. You left the bed quietly and walked to the small table to grab a goblet of wine. After looking at this sleeping naked form for the last time, you sat down at the balcony with your wine.

The night was calm and cold. The sounds of birds that were waking up slowly filled your ears as you drank your wine. You could still feel his hands on you. His seed was dripping down your leg and your hips were burning from the marks he left on your skin. The small, enslaving soreness between your legs sent shivers down your spine, making you shake as the cool wind made its way trough your damp hair. You remembered your conversation with the man who sent you to these chambers earlier in the day.

“The moment you get a chance, slit his throat. With a knife in his room or a piece of glass. Anything.”

Macrinus’s words echoed in your ears. He wanted to get rid of the emperors and it did not matter which one was first to go. Would Caracalla get suspicious of his brother sending him a pretty, untouched girl as an apology? He did not even give a second thought to it. But did you want to do it? Did you want to slit his throat in his sleep when he fell asleep with the euphoria from your cunt? He liked you, it was obvious and if you moved smartly, you could be more than just a one-night whore. Would you be something after killing him and staying loyal to Macrinus that basically bought your master because of his debts? Would you be safe? Would you be respected? Would you be loved and needed?

Yet the man who became your first tonight needed someone to save him. Someone to save him from his brother. You got up and left his chambers like the serpent under the flower.

Next week, Geta was murdered in his chambers after an encounter with a whore. The same whore that you saved from getting beaten up for stealing bread from the imperial kitchens, the one that owed you her life. The one that you saw after leaving your emperor’s chambers and the one that cried and fought against killing emperor Geta. The one that cried of fear for the whole night as you returned to his chambers and slid into his arms.

“Don’t ever leave again.” Caracalla said with a sleepy voice as he buried his face into the crook of your neck and inhaled your scent.

“As my emperor wishes.” You said, remembering the girls frighten face from minutes ago and wrapped your arms around his relaxed shoulders.

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