MASTAAAAH

There is a tale you can only hear on the coldest nights of the year, with your ear pressed against the old stone walls of the castle in the Moonless Mountains. It is a tale about a boy. 

This boy was the son of the Queen and the King. He was born when his father was away at war, so the Queen sent a letter to her husband with the news and he came to join them as soon as he could. When the King met his son, he was shocked. The prince was an ugly and hairy strange creature, who crawled like a snake. He was also weak and his huge mismatched eyes were often full of tears. 

Despite that, his mother loved him and, since he couldn’t walk properly, she let him sit on the throne, always near her. From there, the prince watched everyone with cold indifference and soon became selfish and cruel. 

He usually spent most of his day alone in his chamber, buried in ancient books, mumbling words to himself. The rest of the time, instead of riding or sparring like his older brother, the young prince sat in the throne room, where he liked to mock the noblemen. In the evenings, he always grew desperately hungry and crawled to the kitchens, biting the ankles of cooks and kitchen maids while he demanded food. 

When someone dared cross him, he wailed incessantly until he became red with anger. He was an unhappy creature and delighted in yelling at people and spitting on his servants. Everyone detested him, even his father and his faultless brother. 

One day, after one of his tantrums, the King decided to get rid of him. There was no love for his son in his heart. He put the prince inside a barrel and threw him into the open sea, hoping the horrible prince would never return. The boy was left for dead, drowned in the sea. Only the Queen mourned him, but eventually, as everyone else, she also forgot about the boy.

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For many days, the prince traveled away from the Moonless Mountains. Anywhere he looked there was only water, and him and the sea soon became bitter companions. When the boy’s eyes started hurting from crying and searching for home, he curled up in his barrel waiting for someone to rescue him or sleep to visit him. But he couldn’t sleep. Each time he tried, he remembered someone from the castle, laughing at his misery. Though they must have surely forgotten him, he wasn’t able to forget them. 

More days passed, and the boy still didn’t sleep or eat. He didn’t scream or cry either, just sat inside the barrel, listening to the sounds of the sea. It was then, when a song reached him. He knew almost instantly that this song was a lullaby. The world’s most beautiful lullaby sang by the loveliest voice he had ever heard. So sweet and soothing it was, that the prince easily fell asleep and entered the realm of dreams. In his deep slumber, he asked the sea to guide him to the mysterious voice.

His wish was granted. 

The next time he opened his eyes, he wasn’t in the barrel anymore. It had broken against the rocks of a cliff and the prince was now safely on a deserted beach. He laid there all day, too weak and exhausted to move.

The night brought the song back to him, and with it, a young girl, pale as a ghost, standing on the edge of the cliff. She had a beautiful voice and long silver hair, which glowed in the dark. 

The prince, mesmerised by her, crawled until he reached the place where she stood, but when he tried to touch her, he stopped, realizing that she was not a girl, but the shape the moon’s reflection took on this part of the world.

Still, the moon looked at him and spoke in a whisper:

“What are you?” 

The boy was taken aback. He was good with the words he could read in books, those that he could speak in the solitude of his mind, but he had trouble repeating them to others. It made him shake and sweat. Yelling and laughing had always been easier. 

 The moon girl’s wide eyes wouldn’t leave him. “Are you lost, little devil?”

“No,” managed to say the boy. “And I am not a devil, I am a prince.”

She tilted her head, curiously. 

“I’ve never seen a prince before. There are no princes here, only the island, the devils, and me.” 

The island was called the Dead Island because as she had said, no one lived there except for horrible shadow-shaped devils and her, the lovely moon who sang to the sea. The boy hated the devils. They were awful beings, brutish and vile, who enjoyed torturing him during the day. His only respite was the night, when the moon came to visit him and he could gaze at her and listen to her song until his chest filled with a strange calm.

He knew the moon’s lullaby had lured him to the terrible island, but he liked her so much, he couldn’t feel betrayed by her. She was the only creature he’d ever show any gentleness. The boy spent full nights just looking at her, so she would know he was there and wouldn’t get lonely. The moon girl sometimes looked back at him shyly and the calmness left him, replaced by the mad beating of his heart and a warmth that spread through his whole body. 

A certain night, the moon found him bleeding and crying on the shore. Seeing him in so much pain, she cut a strand of her beautiful long hair and tied it around his wounds.

“Do not be sad, my prince. Remember that even when you can’t see me, I am always with you,” she whispered.

But the devils wouldn’t leave him alone. They beat him and burned him, they cut him and insulted him, and he desired to leave the island. He thought of many plans and tried many times. He also wanted to take the moon with him, but she wouldn’t go, for she belonged to the island and the devils. 

Every time the boy got caught trying to escape, the devils would punish him and torture him until he couldn’t bear it anymore.

One day, the oldest of the devils said to him:

“You can never leave the island while you are a boy, but you can, if you become a god. You would be powerful enough to leave. No one would dare laugh at you again. There’ll be no more crawling or babbling. You could go back home and reclaim your throne. Your father keeps it from you. It was him who sent you to this island, as a present to us, for we have ensured his victories in every battle since he was young. But he fulfilled his promise very late and we are angry. We will help you destroy him. Become a god and rule the Moonless Mountains. Become a god and you could rule the entire world.”

The prince was stunned by this information. He had always been a weak creature, not even able to hold a sword. 

“How?” He asked. “How do I become powerful?”

“We will only ask for three things from you in return: your blood, your heart and your life,” replied another devil. “We will use your blood to fill our thirsty throats and your heart to feed the earth of our island. As for your life… You have to die on the Dead Island to become a god. That’s how it will grant you its power. You will die, and after a long sleep you will rise again, not as a prince, but as a god. More powerful than you could ever imagine. Our spell will be complete in three years when the moon will sing a song for you to wake.”

“Yes,” said the prince. “I want that.”

The devils grew black wings on their backs and circled him like vultures before descending upon him. The boy didn’t even move. He let them bite him and almost drain all his blood. He let them cut his hands and gouge out his eyes. He lay quiet as they tore him limb from limb, hissing and laughing, while he lost his life. Then, the devils put him together again with only his heart missing.

They fed him to a beast that lived in the darkest cave of the island, so no one would find him while he was asleep. Not even the moon, for her light could not reach him there. 

As for his heart, they hid it inside a tear, inside a mirror, inside a chest, and buried it in the heart of the island.

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This is the tale the God of Death tells the main character in my interactive fantasy story on twitter (yes, the lonely priestess story!). If you read the whole thing, you’ve just make me very happy. Thank you from the bottom of my (dark and bitter) little heart 🖤 

You can read Part 1 here.

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After the prince disappeared, the moon searched many nights for him. She searched the whole island, looking for him everywhere, but there was no trace of the boy. 

The devils were merrily celebrating and chanting intelligible words with great joy when she stumbled upon them. 

“Have you seen the prince?” She asked one night.

“Gone,” said one devil. “Drowned,” added a second one. “Dead,” a third laughed.

“Dead?” 

The moon knew about death. She had seen it before on the island. Animals died, plants died, everything died but the devils. Even she herself died a bit and came back every night. She was always new and ancient, child and crone, young and old. 

Despite knowing this, she felt something mysterious take over her when she learned about the boy’s death. It was the oddest feeling she had ever experienced. She could not describe it or comprehend it, so she nodded to the devils and went back to sleep.

The feeling was still there when she came back the next night and every night after that. The moon was confused. Not knowing how to make it go away, she went again to the devils looking for answers. 

“A strange feeling has come over me. Something I’ve never felt before. It’s like something is missing inside me… A kind of emptiness. But I haven’t lost anything. All my pearls are in my hair. All my silver is on my wrists. All my songs are in my head. I don’t understand.”

One devil looked at her thoughtly for a few seconds before replying. 

“Perhaps you are hungry,” he said, showing his teeth as he spoke. 

“Hungry…” The moon contemplated this.

She also knew about hunger. She had seen many creatures feeding themselves. They ate to survive. The moon had never needed to eat, or perhaps she had never noticed her need for it before. Maybe she was hungry, so hungry that she couldn’t take it anymore. Certainly, that was the reason why the unsettling feeling kept growing inside her.

“Yes, I am hungry.” She decided, and thanked the devils for their wisdom.

The moon girl, who had never eaten before, started eating whatever she could find on the island. She ate sand and her feet started to ache when she walked for long. She ate flowers and her eyes started to see the colors of the day. She ate birds and her tongue started speaking and singing different languages. 

She learned that eating shells made her fangs sharper and eating rocks made her nails stronger. She ate berries and plants and realized that each thing she ate had a distinct smell. She could even smell herself now. She ate and ate every night, but she never felt full. The feeling never got away. She then started drinking sea water until she was left with chapped lips and salty skin. 

She ate and ate and still she was the slip of a girl, pale and haggard. Still, she felt the emptiness growing bigger and bigger. 

Weary and hopeless, the moon girl walked deeper into the heart of the island, searching for food. There, she devoured all the trees and bushes and, with nothing else left, she started digging a hole in the earth with her fingers, looking for something to end her hunger.

After many hours, she found a chest made of wood. Inside this chest, there was a mirror and when she looked inside the mirror she saw a little raindrop sitting on a leaf. She thought it looked like a tear. Bending closer, the moon saw someone reflected on it. It was a girl. She gasped. The moon girl had never thought of herself as anything more than the shadow of the moon. 

She wasn’t rosy and warm like the boy had been, or dark and intangible like the devil’s were. She was just something in between. But she recognised the creature in the mirror: It was herself.

The emptiness turned abruptly into pain and the moon girl clutched her stomach. There was nothing else left to eat so she extended her hand to the girl in the mirror and her reflection gave her the tear. The moon girl swallowed it and the tear broke inside her into a thousand glass shards. One little shard sharply pricked her throat. She gasped again, feeling suddenly the weight of flesh and bone. Her eyes stung with fresh tears and a drumming march started in her chest. 

It was then when the moon, who was also a girl, realized that she missed the boy. 

She got up on wobbly legs and a tired body and the words of the devils in her head. Gone. Drowned. Dead. She knew the devils were wise, but their words seemed wrong to her now. She could feel the prince. She could feel him very close. 

She couldn’t see him, but she knew he was with her. She knew he was on the island. 

So the girl started walking, and searching, and hoping again. 

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The prince was dreaming, but his dream wasn’t peaceful. He tried to open his eyes and reach for the moon, but she was always somewhere else, far away from him, and he was all alone with the cold and ancient voices that lived in his dream. They whispered secrets and threats in his sleep, making him feel restless. 

The beast where the prince was hidden lived inside a cave and its insides were like a cave too. The boy, or some part of him, walked through the cave reading the stories on the walls. These were stories written by boys like him, estranged from their families and homes, unloved, tortured, hoping to become gods. But as days went by, they stopped making sense and the words began to look like scratches and marks, like paw prints and bites.

“Foolish boy, you’ll disappear too. They lied to you,” whispered a voice, and the others followed, echoing the same words.

“No. You lie,” answered the prince. “If I wait enough, I’ll become a god when I wake up.”

“Yes, that is true,” said the voice. “But you’ll also be a monster, a slave, ruled by the devils and the moon, doing their bidding until they see fit.”

“The moon would never do that to me,” he said.

“Are you sure? What has she done to help you? She knows you are here, but she won’t come. She can’t even look at you. She already can’t bear the monster you’ve become. She’s just waiting for you to wake up and then she too will treat you like the rest.”

The prince spent a long time thinking about this in his sleep. He thought so much about it, he lost track of time.

“What has she done to help you?” Asked a voice again. He shivered, recognizing it. 

She gave me this, the boy thought, looking at the long strand of hair that the moon had used to tend his wounds. 

“Nothing,” said the voice. He recognized it again, it was his own voice. 

What has she done to help me? Nothing.

“How can I avoid becoming a monster? How do I avoid this fate?” He asked the voices that were now part of him.

“You need to stop dreaming. You need to wake up, not when the devils told you to, but now. The more you wait, the stronger their hold on you will be.”

So he devised a new plan to escape again, to be born again. 

He took the strand of the moon’s magical hair and carefully and patiently, day after day, he wove it until he was able to make himself a cape. He then sewed the cape to his own shadow and put it on. With a hood covering his face, his shadow slipped easily out of the beast, leaving his body there. 

He met some of the devils near the heart of the island. They didn’t expect him. They seemed now small and powerless to him. He fought them with their own swords and their own spells, but grew bored very soon. Having grown stronger from his days inside the beast and with the power of his magical cape, they were no match for him. After finishing them, he slayed all the other devils in the island. 

He became the sole king of Dead Island. The earth, the wind, and the sea, all listened to him, so he whispered his tale to them. The earth grew larger and bigger, feeding on his words. The wind grew stronger and fiercer with each of his whispers. The sea became braver and bolder and carried his story far away from the island and into the world. 

Satisfied, the shadow boy sat down quietly on the shore and waited for the moon to arrive. 

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The moon found the island deserted. The devils were nowhere to be seen. Confused, she searched around until she found someone strange sitting on the shore. This person wore a cape she recalled having seen before. Something leaped inside her chest and she noticed herself taking a step towards the mysterious being, as if her body knew something she still didn’t. 

“The sleeping beast you hide in the heart of this island,” spoke the stranger. He had a deep and beautiful voice. “There is a song to wake it up and you are the only one who knows this song. I want you to sing it.” 

The moon knew many songs. When she had first seen the island, the devils had only asked for one thing to let her stay: a song. There was one song she sang every century. The song to wake the beast, who was meant to guard the island. It was a song for protection. A song of life. But she was only allowed to sing it when the devils required it. They knew the island better. Why was this person asking her to sing it? 

The moon girl frowned. “Who are you?” 

The stranger stood up, smirking. Only half of his face was visible, his eyes still concealed by the cape. 

“You don’t remember me? I used to be kind to you, but now I see it was a mistake. You are deceitful and cruel, like the devils who used to live here.”

“Where have they gone?”

“Wherever the devils go when they die.”

She was afraid. The devils had always lived in the Dead Island. They would always summon a beast with their dark magic and turn it into a guardian for the island. The moon, who loved the island too, had always helped them. What would happen to the island without the devils? What would happen to her? If the beast woke before it was time, it would become a terrible monster. 

“Sing it for me,” said the stranger. 

She shook her head. “I won’t.” 

He said nothing. His smirk was still on his face as he sat again, waiting. Every night he asked her to sing and every night she refused. 

On the seventh night, the winds came back to the island. They had spread his tale across the world and it had reached the Moonless Mountains, so along with them came a royal ship, and inside the ship, a Queen stood proudly.

 The stranger let down his hood, seeing his freedom, his destiny, no longer out of reach, but in the grasp of his hand. He was determined to leave the island at any cost, but he was still bound, a part of him was still trapped inside the sleeping beast. 

The moon girl looked at his face. Though he looked older, she recognised him. He was the prince of the Moonless Mountains. Not gone. Not drowned. Not dead. Yet not the same as he had been. 

He asked her once again:

“Sing the song for me.”

But the moon’s voice would not come. She gaped at him, unable to say a word. He looked like a vision, some kind of dream. She couldn’t believe he was there in front of her. She had been searching for him for a very long time. She wanted to talk. She wanted to sing. But the little shard of the mirror she had swallowed long ago closed her throat in that instant so she only could stare at him, misty-eyed and silent. 

Seeing her refusing him again, the prince grew angry. She did not recognize him, she did not care for him. 

He took out the sword he had used to kill the devils and, while she lifted a trembling hand trying to reach him, he plunged it into her chest. The moon’s fingers dug into his shoulder, as her eyes widened. The boy shuddered, still gripping the hilt of the sword. They locked eyes in a strange deadly embrace, with their breaths mingling until the girl’s eyes turned black as a starless night. 

Her body, her blood, the magical cape made of her silver hair, all turned into white sea foam, clinging to his naked skin. And he was left alone on the shore, with no trace of her. 

Somewhere on the island a beast roared and died. The prince faltered and fell to his knees, feeling as if something had been torn out from him. His heart, perhaps. He brushed it off. He had been born again. He had a new life, a new chance. He was not a boy or a monster. He was a God. 

He dragged himself to the heart of the island and retrieved the dead body of the beast and wore it as his new cape. Then, he went back to the shore where the ship was now waiting for him. His mother emerged from it, a radiant smile on her face. She was pleased to see him, almost crying with joy, but he just looked at her blankly before speaking. Something was still wrong. 

“A strange feeling has come over me. Something I’ve never felt before. It’s like something is missing inside me… A kind of emptiness. But I haven’t lost anything. All my power is in my blood. All my scars are on my skin. All my plans are in my head. I don’t understand.”

The Queen tilted her head as if in deep thought and smiled at him again. 

“My dearest son, that’s just how it feels to be King.” 

He pondered over this and finally nodded, boarding the ship with her and leaving the island behind. He was going back home to the Moonless Mountains, where no moon shone and no heart was needed. 

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This is the tale the God of Death tells the main character in my interactive fantasy story on twitter (yes, the lonely priestess story!). If you read the whole thing, you’ve just make me very happy. 

the screenshots here are from near the end of the interview, which i think makes it even worse, because the interviewer listened to everything he’d said and still didn’t treat it very seriously. there are other parts where she seems very smart and intuitive, but then other times he’d say something like “i hate myself to death and feel like i’m an empty shell” and she’d just laugh and move on while i’m just like !!!

i was really impressed by how open he is about it though, even the “ugly” symptoms that aren’t really talked about normally — like how he said he used to lock himself in his apartment alone and drink and “bang on the walls” because he didn’t know how else to cope with all the pain he was in, and he even mentions hurting himself and talks about scars and refers to himself as a “masochist” and says a coworker once referred to him as “someone constantly trying to hurt himself.” the fact that he was able to talk about all this so openly, despite the reaction he got, was so impressive and amazing to me

speakng of raising awareness: the movie he’s being interviewed for here is “silenced”, a film he initiated production of. it’s based on real events that happened at a school for deaf children, where kids were sexually abused for years by their teachers. of the six rapists, two received prison sentences (and were out within a year), while the others were freed immediately because the statute of limitations had expired - and all were reinstated at the school

gong yoo read about this a few years later and said to himself “what can i as an actor do to help,” and he made a movie about it. millions of people saw it and there was mass public outrage, and because of this movie the case was reopened, the school was shut down, the rapists got much harsher punishments, and a law named after the movie was passed that abolished the statute of limitations for all sex crimes against minors and disabled people

when they were making the movie, gong yoo was convinced by the director he’d found to star as a teacher who tries to help the victims, but at first he was hesitant (because before this he’d only been in romcoms and he thought he lacked the acting ability to pull off the emotional depth required for this subject) but he eventually agreed because he wanted to use his fame to bring attention to the events

I just wanted to do a mini doodle comic from Mystic Messenger! I love Zen too much…. Zen © Cheritz Art by me!