Timeless Love - [one]
[background information]
Korea is a developing empire, expanding from it's home island into China. With their superior weaponry, the unsuspecting, underdeveloped farming communities are incapable of defending themselves, and the expansion continues with success. While some find no need to conquer by violence, other military figures have only thoughts of total conquest on their minds, and tear families away from their homes, torching their villages and take inhabitants as prisoners, selling them off into slavery...
The captives were dragged forward, forced to form a line before the wealthy lord. He looked on in distaste as the slave-traders roughly handled the stragglers. But who wouldn’t pity the poor souls? Each of them were nearly starving to death and dehydrated, taken forcefully from their home villages. They were dressed in wind-tattered clothes, thin and flimsy; a meager layer of material that hardly protected their chapped skin. The shoes on their feet were, by now, worn down flat as rice paper. If they were lucky. Those less fortunate trudged along barefooted; the soles of their feet torn ragged and bloody.
The lord inspected the miserable line with dismay. He was searching for a healthy, working family…not a pack of famished skeletons…
And then one person caught his eye; a child to be exact. The young boy gazed up at him with unblinking, glossy brown orbs. Lord Sangwoo felt himself caught in the child’s empty stare. It was like his soul was being searched for kindness - for a tiny ounce of sympathy in his heart.
The lord tore his eyes away from the boy’s face, and instead, turned his attention to his frail hands. The child’s wrists were bound tightly - mercilessly - just like the whole lot of them. Tighter than the rest, the coarse rope bit into his wrists, shredding the delicate skin beneath. A small stream of blood trickled down into his palms.
”Hangeng.” The woman beside him whispered warningly, and the boy dropped his gaze from the man, examining the sticky red fluid on his hands instead. Lord Sangwoo glanced at the woman, and caught a pleading look in her eyes before she hurriedly looked back down to the floor, remembering her place. The man to her right stood still as a rock, swallowing hard in nervousness and staring straight ahead. He glanced at the woman too, and then to the boy named Hangeng. The lord remembered his own family back at home, and thought of how these three might be torn apart without his intervention.
“Them. Those three.” He said finally with a gesture, and the traders unbound them.
“The…the boy as well? He's so young...how could he be of use to you??” one man asked curiously.
“Did I not say the word ‘three’? Are you incapable of counting??” Lord Sangwoo asked bitterly, and handed the money to the other slave-trader, untrusting of his partner. They loaded the remaining captives and departed in their ramshackle caravan.
The lord, two accompanying soldiers, and the three family members walked a little ways from the spot of the transaction up a gentle slope, where they saw Lord Sangwoo’s residence just a bit farther off. As they approached the modest, but formidable walls, he finally addressed his new servants directly.
“What is your surname?” he asked the man.
“Han.” He said with dignity, and the lord nodded.
“Lao Han, welcome to the Choi family residence.”