#the queen is seducing the bishop while the king takes out the other king

[ktheist]

━all that is golden | epilogue

a royalty fiction and epilogue for of silver and gold.

muses→ jungkook x reader

genre→ fluff, smut

type→ royalty au / expecting parents au

word→ 2.1k

“do you think I’ll make a good king?”

Sunshine pours through the low window of your room and illuminates the curve-hugging white dress, almost as though it’s adapted a special kind of glow fitting this ceremonious day. The royal carriage adorned in the same white as your apparel and carved with golden intricacy, awaits you in the driveway; the distinct neighing of the stallions piercing through the glass window and into the quietude of your room.

The hairdresser, maids, tailor and mother have all left you upon your request for if it was up to them, they would still be able to pick on the littlest of things like how the veil cascading down your back isn’t symmetrical, or tell yourself to refrain from blowing on the flyway that falls over your eyes instead of the side of your face, in a chiding manner.

This is much grander than what you imagined your marriage to be. Since you learned what the word really meant at seventeen; done for the sake and union of two influential families and not at all taking into account the feelings of the two children of the respective families about their predestined future, you pictured it to be of the most grandeur setting with Barons and Dukes from all over the kingdom attending, your bigger-than-most manor seemingly reduced in size from all the guests that’s arrived and your hair and dressing done by your able maid and personally chosen seamstress.

But this one, you do not have a say in except the “I do” in a few hours and fortnightly, the yes, after a handful of no, to Jungkook in the middle of the night in this very room that you’re about to leave forever.

“No,” you had told Jungkook when you strutted into your father’s office the night of your ruined engagement party, changed from the slightly straining dress into one without a corset despite knowing your mother would not be pleased with the many things that happened in the short span of an hour whilst she calmed the crowd after Seokjin abruptly left in his coach.

“N- no,” once again, you had told Jungkook when he asked for your hand in marriage when you told him you were pregnant after he got you alone after the dinner at the mansion where your mother had crooned and fawned over him, forgetting the initial fight earlier on about your obstinate self.

“Jungkook,” you had sighed when he kissed your lips with a warm hand on your belly that was barely showing after he climbed onto the ledge of your room at after midnight.

But you had held his hand that was on your stomach with both of yours and pressed it slightly harder for him to feel the bump because his touch had been feather light as if he was afraid that he could hurt both you and your child and Jungkook had looked at your hands with his doe eyes as tears pricked his waterline.

“I’m not going to marry you just because I’m pregnant.,” you had murmured with defiance of what you’d heard the nobles whisper that night even though it was the latter that was spread by your own auntie in a form of a backhanded compliment, that became the mother of all rumors, “or because I seduced you with my feral charms, as auntie would put it or because a marriage with the crown prince is a most beneficial one.”

Your mother had a jolly time boasting about her married daughter and lady-turned-princess daughter who she’s very proud of to her sister and your five unmarried cousins when they’d visited the day after as though marrying her children had been the sole purpose of many mothers in life.

There was a flash of something that made your chest concave in Jungkook’s eyes but you chose to look away before you proved what everyone was saying true.

“That’s not why I’m asking,” he had cupped your cheeks in his large hands and bumped your foreheads together lightly before chuckling like a dead weight had somehow been lifted off his shoulders as he utters the one and only reason that he did ask, “I love you.”

“What about our little Seokjin?” You had laughed when Jungkook’s face turned sour and he had dropped his hands like you’d just burned them with mere words because he hated the name you gave the growing child in your belly but you had found the instant change in his expression hilarious, “do you not love him?”

And you had realized what a fool you had been for doing things with spite when you could do it for all the love and the wondrous things and for Jungkook himself. That night, the yes you’d spoken was not just meant for the proposal but also sweetly stumbled out of your mouth with a please as you asked him to fuck you in your bed with your parents asleep just doors away from you and Jungkook had caved in... with the condition that it was done in a missionary style.

And Jungkook had fucked you again on the verge of your wedding day with the same condition as if you were made of glass. The pillow smelled distinctively of him when you woke up to an empty bed and your mother prying the blankets off you and thank god you both hadn’t bothered with undressing when Jungkook pushed your night gown up over your chest with a sort of hunger that made you feel loved.

“My lady,” your maid peeks into the room after a series of rapping on the door, her eyes widening when a bit as she corrected herself, “I-I mean princess, it’s time.

“You may call me by lady if you wish,” you wink at her as you approach the double doors that open up to the driveway with a carriage bigger than any you’ve been on, “no one is going to butcher you for it if the princess herself allows it.”

Your father dressed in his finest suit and a proud smile makes its way to his face when he sees you while your mother fusses for the maids to lift the back of the dress as you enter the carriage.

The ride to the cathedral at the center of the town is a series of buildings breezing past like colorful lumps through the window and cheers from the people that lined up in the streets to which you waved at with half of your body out of the window as your mother fretted for your status and the baby. How, the simple act can hurt or even cause, without an intended pun, miscarriage is a mystery to you.

You wave some more when you get off the carriage as you wait for the maids from the carriage behind you rush to smooth your veil and add some finishing touches.

“Miss!” A woman in the crowd calls as you recognize her to be the orange peddler whose stand you almost crushed if not for Jungkook and his guard disguise saved you, “Do visit my stand in your free time! Free oranges for the crown prince and princess!”

“Thank you!” You flail your arms as just before the guards begin closing the doors and mute the cheers.

The quietude in the hallway between what you’re born to know in the other room and what you’ve learned to appreciate behind you has echoed loudly in your ears.

“My darling, your mother and I have always known you were different,” your father breathes out and for a moment, you think you see his eyes shimmer with tears but when he opens them, they’re back to their faded color as he smiles down at you and clasps a palm over your cheek, the warmth of his hand lifting up your own lips, “so curious, so adventurous. We hoped you would somehow grow up to be like your sister; a starry-eyed dreamer who wishes for love and a family she can take care of.”

“And yet you ask for the world just like your brother did,” he continues with a softer tone as Daehwi who is part of the wedding planning, bows at you and informs you of the five minutes you have left and you nod before turning back to your father, “we worry about someday losing you to your own curiosity.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” your hand lapses over his as you return his smile with your own before the face of Jungkook’s professor that he introduced upon your audience with the king and queen the day after you accepted his proposal, flashes in the back of your mind, “I’ll just be at the castle catching up to everything Jungkook’s learned his whole life...”

“You really love him,” your father nods more to himself than to you as he lets his hand fall while Daehwi instructs the flower girls and young knights that was recruited upon Jungkook’s orders, to be ready, “don’t you?”

Facing the towering wooden doors and looping your arm around your fathers, you smile as you say the words that you say when the bishop stops and the room becomes deathly quiet; a different kind of quiet than that in behind the doors just now and Jungkook’s shoulder visibly rises as his lips curl in a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes while he holds his breath.

“I do.”

>

The night air nips at your toes and legs when you step out on the balcony where Jungkook hunches over the rail with his head dipped down and donned in the thin silk dress shirt that he must have pulled out from his room-sized closet under the creamy white jacket he got married in. The moonshine pours over him in silver and casts a glow over his frame like the first time you’d meet.

“You shouldn’t be out here,” Jungkook says when he lifts his head from his clasped hands like he’s been praying to the stars and universe for his people, “it’s cold.”

“How can I sleep,” you drape your arm over his back in a side hug, head propped over his shoulder where you peek up to see him fighting the tug on the corners of his lips at what you call him, “when my prince is troubled like this?”

Then the smile drops off his face as he studies the lumps of shadows a few feet ahead where stores, homes and stalls are mapped over the town and a frown pulls his eyebrows together, “do you think I’ll make a good king?”

“My people steal for a living,” he intertwines your fingers together when you place it over his and brings them to his lips out of the need for physicality and you, you, you, “a part of them closes themselves off to the world because the crown has done them so many wrongs.”

“My court is filled with power hungry men who only care for mounting their wealth,” the grasp on your hand tightens as though the thought of those men who smiled at his father and spoke little white lies like it was the absolute truth while he watched in the crowd, dressed as a young noble of a lower rank, brings about a surge of anger, rage for not being able to do anything other than listen, “and it all started way before my father’s reign.”

“To create a garden from scratch, don’t you need first need to pull out the weed?” you lift your head and plant a chaste kiss on his shoulder in assurance, thumb rubbing a circular motion over his rib, “it depends on how deeply their roots go but with the right tool and knowledge, you’ll be able to take them out one by one until you get to plant the seedlings but even then, you’ll have to look out for them day and night while they grow old enough to fend for themselves against the mealies but they’ll grow into a beautiful garden someday.”

Jungkook takes a few moments to ponder on your words before breaking into a smile and dropping his gaze to the ground as though he doesn’t expect for the answer to be that simple yet intricate.

“I think you’ll make a kind king,” just in that moment, a gust of wind blows past you and causes the curtains draped over the doors to sway, motioning you to come back inside; into Jungkook’s room and into bed where you’ve just made love an hour ago.

“Achoo!” You rub crinkle your nose to get rid of the ticklish feeling before another sneeze hits you as Jungkook shrugs off his matrimonial jacket and drape it over the knitted scarf you wrap yourself in.

Before a sheepish ‘thanks’ manages to escape you, Jungkook’s already bending down for what, you know not until a pair of arms sweep you off your feet.

“J-Jungkook!” You stammer as your arms curl around his shoulders to balance yourself while the man roars in laughter at your reaction.

[elegantshapeshifter]

.:: Dreamwork and the Oneiric Sabbath ::.

In 906, Regino of Prüm writes in his instructions to the bishops (that later will become the Canon Episcopi), the following:

“This also is not to be omitted, that certain wicked women, turned back toward Satan, seduced by demonic illusions and phantasms, believe of themselves and profess to ride upon certain beasts in the nighttime hours, with Diana, the Goddess of the Pagans, (or with Herodias) and an innumerable multitude of women, and to traverse great spaces of earth in the silence of the dead of night, and to be subject to her laws as of a Lady, and on fixed nights be called to her service.”

This cult, as we said several times, from the Franco-Germanic area will extend throughout the Continent, becoming so a pan-European phenomenon, characterized by nocturnal flights, transformations in animals, processions of spirits and witches gatherings. At the beginning of the history of Traditional Witchcraft, TradCraft has almost entirely been a “dream cult”, and only later somebody physically emulated it. The essence of witchcraft is not physical, it’s a nocturnal experience, it’s oneiric, in 906 physical meetings are not yet present as it will happen later.

Initially, witches fly or shapeshift into animals to participate in a spiritual procession, a cortège that proceeds from house to house eating and drinking the banquets that people prepared as an offering near their hearth, blessing, in turn, the inhabitants of the home: this is the procession of "the good women who go forth at night" or Dominae Nocturnae.

Gradually this horde of spirits ceases to move from house to house, and begins to gather in one single place. Even here, however, they eat, drink and make love. The Procession, the Cortège, becomes the Sabbath. Finally, the sabbath will be "ostented", i.e. emulated, imitated in the physical realm.

But the essence of the Sabbath, its origin, is and remains oneiric. The sabbath represents the world of the spirits, the dead and the fairies. Not surprisingly, the Queen of Fairies is often also the patron of witches: there are numerous trials in Scotland where the accused claim to have visited the Court of Fairies, their kingdom, Elphame, and to have also seen some well-knownly deceased human beings.

Also the dead, moreover, often proceed like a cortège: we are talking about the Procession of the Dead or Wild Hunt, led by the Wild Hunter or corresponding female characters who are also leaders of the Procession of the Dominae Nocturnae.

The dead and the witches are also connected to the Spirit Battles or Night Battles, oneiric fights between witchcraft practitioners (like the Mazzeri of Corsica), in which each witch represented their own village, and the loser of these fights caused more deaths for their own village, while the winner a minor number.  At other times, instead, they fought for the fertility of the fields, and it was thought that those who could participate in these battles could also see the dead and their processions (as in the case of the Benandanti of Friuli).

Therefore, the Oneiric Sabbath is not a monolith: it includes the Procession of the Dominae Nocturnae; the Sabbath; the Wild Hunt and the Night Battles. Quoting Peter Gray (a revivalist writer, not a reconstructionist one): "Initiation in dream is thus revealed as the birth rite of witchcraft. Our origin is embedded in the land of the dead and faery, concealed within the ringing hollow hills."

Allright, now that we understand that the primordial Sabbath is oneiric, that all these possibilities exist ... how to experience it? How did they experience it in the past? In the past people lived very differently from us: they slept together, they ate together, worked in the same place and gathered around the same hearth; they listened to the same storytellers, witnessed the same events and the same sermons. Sharing dreams was commonplace, while today it is almost a miracle if we remember a dream when we wake up. The world has changed, and the situational factors that led to a greater number of "witchcraft" dreams are not reproducible, if not perhaps among the Amish (but at that point it would be the Amish people to drive us out accusing us of witchcraft!).

Therefore the most useful techniques nowadays are the modern ones, which work to make us - humans of today - dream. Today we can no longer gather all around the fire to tell our dreams, and forcing our family to do so will not have the same effect of spontaneous sharing that occurred in the past. But there is no problem: we will use a notebook or a tape recorder instead. Today we no longer have storytellers telling us about the Sabbath, we can participate in storytelling events but today's storytellers do not have the same impact on the psyche of those of the pre-television and pre-social media era. But even here, no problem, we will imagine - replacing the storytellers - the scene at the time of falling asleep and during the day.

So, schematizing, what should we do? 1 - Let’s think of the dream we want to do during the day, and let's take some moments to imagine the scene we want to dream of at night. 2 - In the night, before falling asleep, let's repeat the exercise but let’s totally lose ourselves in the imagination until we get into sleep without even realizing it. 3 - Upon awakening, let’s immediately report the dreams in a notebook that we will have left (together with a pen!) on the bedside table, or on a tape recorder. Even if we had not dreamed of anything, we will still have to write (or speak, in the case of the recorder), so as to deceive our mind, which will pay attention to the dream activity the following days and will allow us to remember our dreams the next times. So when we do not dream anything we will write: "Dear diary, today I haven’t dreamed of anything".

Well, now that we understood the technique, we'll apply it to the various Sabbath themes: a) - To the Cortège of the Good Women; b) - To the Oneiric Sabbath; c) - To Elphame/the Sybil's Paradise, i.e. the Otherworld; d) - To the Wild Hunt; e) - I avoid reporting the Night Battles because they are too dangerous, but if you are reckless and irresponsible, it will be enough to understand the mechanism and apply it here too (at your own risk!); f) - Separate speeches will be: * the shared dream, that is to meet one's "Company" or "Coven" in an oneiric state, and * the discovery of the Animal Familiar Spirit, which will be dealt with on other occasions.

# A: The Cortège of the Dominae Nocturnae

The scene that we will imagine will be that of a night sky, where we will fly - together with other people - riding a broom, on the back of our Animal Familiar Spirit (if it has already been discovered) or turning into him in shapeshifting. At the head of this cortège will be our own Patron Familiar Spirit. Let’s imagine, at this point, that the parade glide and land near a house. Here we will find everything neat, tidy and perfectly decorated. We will proceed all together towards the kitchen. Here we will find ourselves before a huge banquet. Everyone, therefore, starting from the Patron Major Spirit, will eat and drink something, and all together will dance in the house. Once this is done, the Major Spirit will pull out a wooden wand and, touching the house, the inhabitants sleeping in their beds and the pets, will bless them with his/her powers, making a golden light shine out in the house. Once everything is illuminated by this light, which came from the Spirit’s wand, the cortège will proceed again in the air to get to another house where to repeat everything.

# B: The Sabbath or Game of the Good Society (Ludus Bonae Societatis)

The scene to be imagined this time will be a dark forest, the top of a mountain or a hill. By putting the case that the forest has been chosen as landscape, we will imagine a multitude of people, completely naked, around a fire and surrounded by torches. Each of these people, ourselves included, will have a candle in their hands. In front of us there will be our own Patron Major Spirit, to which each person, in turn, will bow with the candle in their hand. Once done, everyone will sit down, eat and drink on the huge wooden tables near the bonfire, on which every wonderful food and beverage will be arranged. The candles that were previously held in hand will now rest on the table in front of us. Once finished to eat and drink, everybody will take their own candle again, and they will dance to form a dance of lights. At the end of the dance, everyone will try to extinguish the candle of the other, but will try to avoid turning off their own, and when all the candles have blown out they will make love in honor of the Major Spirit. The cock will then be heard to sing, the dawn appears on the horizon, and each person will bow again in front of the Major Spirit, before moving away and disappearing into the forest.

# C: The Otherworld or the Kingdom of the Fairies

The scene in this case will be that of a hill, which we will imagine hollow, with a small entry at the bottom. Once penetrated, let's imagine going down a clumped ladder and continuing to descend, descend, descend, now let’s feel fall down and descend, descend, descend. At the end of the descent, we find a gate. Let’s cross it. It is possible to interrupt the visualization here or imagine to arrive, after the gate, in a royal court, captained by two enchanted characters sitting on their thrones, the King and the Queen of Elphame (we can even imagine a single throne, with Patron Major Spirit), and a lot of fairy courtesans and nobles, including also deceased humans.

# D: The Wild Hunt or the Procession of the Dead

Let's imagine a procession made up of penitents with their faces covered and dressed with a tunic carrying a torch, others on horseback but with their faces bowed, and finally a taller and more physically corpulent character, seated on a sparkling chariot filled with precious stones, to guide the procession: the Wild Hunter, who carries with him a club or a stick. All these figures proceed at night from the forest to the streets of the city, sometimes even rising in the air. Among them, we recognize some people that we know that are already dead, and we imagine ourselves parading with them, even us with our tunic, the hood, the face covered and the torch in hand. The face of the Wild Hunter (or the Wild Huntress) will coincide with that of our Patron Major Spirit.