❝ but you look so beautiful, my new supplier ❞

───

The extravagant chamber platted with silver and gold promised her luxury that a commoner like her could ever afford, silk sheets laid immaculately on the lenient bed but, nevertheless, she wasn't indulged in glamorous material like money and expensive items. Paint of multiple colors and rich of intensity brought life to the cans they were contained in, a tender yet rough paper lying straight ahead of her.

Her twinkling brown eyes subsided into an abyss of the endless drone. She gazed upon the door left ajar, watching the demon of her day inviting himself inside the room. His eyes were drugged with an intense amount of nicotine, strangely addicting.

"What do you even require from a local painter such as myself? Let me go, fanatic!" she roared, resented with the idea of him possessing her artistic side for his selfish needs.

His sword putrid with the fresh blood dangled near his robe as he approached her silently like a marauder. "I seek a simple portrait from you, it's because of the foul arrogance you are stuck here!" he added, justifying his own ignorance.

"Nonsense, you are the arrogant man here! keeping a woman as a hostage against her will, what kind of monster are you?" 

Tae-suk's lips deviously curved with a keynote of the enormity, "Ji-Hye."

Her eyes widened when his sturdy voice spelled out each syllable of her word perfectly, invisible vitality molded into his lips. A sequence of wrath invoked inside her heart judging how dare an ogre like him call out her name as if she was his.

He advanced further without wavering about her consent and she took steps backward, spreading her hands out to grab something that would support Ji-Hye to defend herself.

A container filled with posh black paint attended themselves to her hands, which she briskly swiped and threw at him head-on. The black paint soaked through his velvet hanbok and veiled his naked flesh with the night color. One after another she fired at him, a disarray of manifold colors cloaked his expensive apparel.

That couldn't hold Tae-suk back and only inspired him to deliver her efforts as vain. His hands slithered through the indomitable barrier she built and pulled her waist closer, embracing the proximity between them. The intensity of his breath grew heavier on her shoulder with the vessel of their soul pressed against each other.

"Let me be your inspiration, my painter," he husked.

With the sudden closure between the man she detested, her cheeks were dusted in red due to embarrassment and anger. Ji-Hye's muscles tensed up, acting involuntarily by driving her hands to his chest; pushing him away. "How dare you!" She raised her voice against him.

yes, he was inevitably charming, but that isn't a voucher to embrace an unwilling stranger.

"my, my, what an art I have created! There is still some esthetic side of mine lingering around between the darkness," he dodged her wailings and flipped the emotions down. Ji-Hye narrowed her eyes down to feel the presence of damp paintings attached to her garment, The paint must have affixed themselves when his fresh-painted hanbok was pressed against hers.

The insatiable hunger for art was burning inside his eyes like eternal flame feeding upon the chunks of wood and faith, forever. An inescapable sting in his eyes of a child begging for innocence. 

"Why does that vile heart of yours seek such serenity called art?" She demanded, harsher unlike a question birthed by curiosity. 

Tae-suk once again evaded her controversial questions, pulling a string of new topics to divert her thought into something else. "You were painting the palace and its garden, tell me why? Why would you venture yourself into such risk? For whom did you come this far?"

Ji-Hye corresponding to his spoiled behavior gave him a half-filled answer, "Why should I compile by your questions when you don't compile by mine?"

Tae-suk branded his lips with yet another toxic smile, darker than the cheshire cat. "I found children in my land carrying a beautiful portrait of the palace with them, which coincidentally looks like a replica of your own."

"Were you perhaps, doing this for them? Wasting your talent on the devil spawns?" He bayed, pitching a few droughted papers ornamented with paint towards her. The papers gently like a feather hit the ground abiding by the law of gravity. Ji-Hye picked one in her hands, the familiar scent of home rushed through her nostrils as she remembered handing these paintings out to the children with hopes to see the beautiful palace of their dreams. "What did you do to them?" she crushed the side of the paper gritting her teeth at how twisted he was.

"Nothing, yet," he added.

"And maybe it will stay the same If you grant me what I endeavor."

Ji-Hye couldn't help her facial expression give away her thoughts, switching into a revolted cast. "Don't you dare," her hands reached out to strangle the ogre's neck and as if he anticipated her rebellious actions, he stationed a sword between them. His bipolar decisions only addressed more reasons for Ji-Hye to despise him. The sword's keen tip respired on her neck, once again finding themselves in a threatening situation.

Even in a fraction of a second, she might be in her death bed fighting for oxygen, but still, her eyes were sedated with determination. She acted quickly, letting her thumb finger sink into the blood-seeking sword. Tae-suk's eyes expanded, to see Ji-Hye's fingers bleeding in chronic crimson. The blood seeped through her pale skin, dropping to the ground and papers which absorbed them in.

Her blood-soaked fingers stroked the canvas gently and he stood there envious of the crystal-white canvas. And somehow, her contact to the canvas reminded him of his past.

***

"Where did you even pick this horrible trait from?"

The eight-year-old stood inside the dimly lighted chamber with black paint scattered all around. Tears escaped his eyes and a yelp left his trembling lips looking at his whipped hands, glowing red because of his father's abuse.

"Painting is not meant for gentlefolk and future leaders! You're a man, remember. We don't practice what those beggars and cheap stakes do," his father's toxic masculinity harmed everything.

Tae-suk was still dumb-found, afraid to oppose his all-known father. His hopeless eyes searched for his mother; she was the only light in his life.

"You will be king one day, ruling this whole world! why don't you just listen to whatever I say and follow it as any boy would do?" His father yelled, glaring at his son. "Sorry father, I will do whatever you have to say. I will be king, one day," he replied dejectedly, crushing his wishes.

But, Tae-suk, never wanted to be one.

He didn't want to be a king, capturing the civilian's dream and abuse it.

He wanted to be a painter, a dreamer.

And he never got to be one.