Work Text:
Dancing has been an integral part of culture since the beginning of civilization. People dance to have fun, tell stories, achieve self-actualization, and convey emotions. The most ambitious dancers, however, spend years perfecting their skills and hope for a chance to dance for a god. After all, there is no greater honor. It doesn’t matter if it’s the god of lightning, the god of life, or any of the others. A god is a god.
Kim Jongin dances for a forgotten god.
When he is six years old, Jongin meets the god for the first time at the Festival of Heavenly Fire. He can remember sitting on the third-floor balcony of the inn with his parents and sisters, watching the parade that is marching through the street below. A masked performer in robes of red and gold, representing Lord Heavenly Fire, stands at the center of the parade, swinging a sword in a re-enactment of the god slaying demons. Vendors line the streets with carts and tables decorated in red, orange, and yellow. They hail the passerby, showing off various goods that range from kites to candles to pumpkin pancakes. In the distance, devout followers of the Heavenly Fire set off fireworks from Twin Phoenix Temple, lighting up the night sky with orange sparks.
The city is packed and busy, and most people are preoccupied with enjoying the food, fireworks, or parade. Therefore, no one notices when six-year-old Jongin, entranced by the row of orange paper lanterns stretching from the balcony to the shop across the street, reaches for the closest lantern. His fingers are too short and stop a few centimeters away from the lantern, so he stretches as far as he can and leans over the railing.
His parents are marveling at the performer, and his sisters are ogling the group of handsome young men on the next balcony, so by the time someone notices what Jongin’s doing, it’s too late. Jongin hears his mother shriek and someone else yelling to be careful just as he loses his balance and falls from the balcony.
Wind whistles past Jongin’s ears as the world becomes a confusing mesh of colors. His mother’s screaming echoes around him as the ground rushes up at him with alarming speed.
He never hits the ground. Instead, Jongin lets out a huff as strong arms catch him. Plum red robes obscure his vision for a moment, and then Jongin is looking up at the face of his savior. Shadows from the lights around them dance across the man’s pale face, and a few strands of inky black hair sway as the man lands lightly on the ground.
The man looks down at Jongin, and even at such a young age, Jongin notices the underlying aura of divinity in the person’s eyes. It renders him silent in awe. The kindness and warmth emanating from the man, combined with the comforting voice that asks if Jongin is okay, is so compelling that it aches.
Jongin doesn’t realize that his parents and sisters have arrived until his mother pulls him away from the man. He clings at first, seizing handfuls of the red robes, but his parents hurriedly pry him off, spouting endless apologies and thanks to the man. Still dumbstruck, Jongin doesn’t hear any of what his parents say, too preoccupied with his staring.
The memories become fainter after that, but Jongin can remember the man cutting down a lantern and giving it to him before vanishing into the crowd. Jongin’s parents bow as the man’s form disappears, and Jongin hears his father say, “Please guide us on a path of passion, pride, and prosperity!”
Lord Heavenly Fire’s presence is long gone, but that day, something changes within Jongin.
It starts as a strong admiration. It’s not uncommon for boys, especially those Jongin’s age, to idolize the gods. They insist on collecting trinkets that range from candles to talismans to paintings. As long as it is related to the god they idolize, they will want it.
Aside from the lantern, Jongin also manages to amass a few prosperity talismans, but those are nothing compared to the garden of fire lilies that Jongin begged his parents for. It takes a while, but the flowers eventually bloom, filling a small corner of the yard with bright-orange petals. Jongin takes care of them with a diligence that other children his age lack, and it leaves his parents and sisters gaping in surprise.
But the biggest shock is when Jongin asks to learn how to dance.
It’s no surprise to Jongin, who has wanted to learn how to dance since he was five years old. He had mentioned it to his parents back then, but they had brushed it off, saying that boys don’t need to learn how to dance. This time, however, Jongin doesn’t want to dance just because it’s something that he is interested in.
He wants to dance for Lord Heavenly Fire.
His parents still put up a fight, but Jongin is adamant, and even if they don’t agree, he plans to sneak to Twin Phoenix Temple and persuade the preceptor to allow him to learn. However, his parents eventually give in. At age eight, Jongin starts learning how to dance from Preceptor Zhang.
For three years, Jongin establishes a routine of helping with chores around the house, tending to his garden, leaving fire lilies for Lord Heavenly Fire in Twin Phoenix Temple, and practicing dancing. When he is ten years old, the routine slowly begins to break down.
It starts as mere rumors. One of the neighbors stops by their house to talk to Jongin’s mother, and as he listens in on the conversation, Jongin overhears something about a little boy who had developed black boils all over his body. The boy isn’t anyone from their city, but Jongin’s mother still harbors a worried frown on her face for the rest of the day. Jongin, too preoccupied with his devoted worship of Lord Heavenly Fire, easily pushes the matter from his mind until Preceptor Zhang brings it up several days later.
“I will be leaving in two days,” Preceptor Zhang says amidst protesting whines, “There are people who need help.”
“I thought you were a teacher,” one of the older children says, “not a doctor.”
Preceptor Zhang just chuckles. “I only teach when there is nothing else to do.”
True to his words, the preceptor leaves in two days, and that very same day, a screaming woman dashes through the street as though the gates to the spirit world had opened and unleashed a horde of malicious ghosts after her. As she sprints past Jongin, he sees that her left arm is covered in black boils.
From that moment forward, it seems as though the plague has become an unstoppable force, tearing through the city like a ravenous beast. From the confines of his home, Jongin can constantly hear the cries of the infected as the boils on their bodies burst and their flesh begins to rot. Doctors hurry from house to house to no avail, and it doesn’t take long before they become sick as well. In a matter of months, the colorful city is reduced to a place where the half-dead writhe in pain in the streets and the healthy cower in their homes.
Jongin, along with his sisters and mother, is banned from leaving the house, so he builds a small and rickety shrine for Lord Heavenly Fire in a corner of his room and prays before it every evening.
“This one kneels before Lord Heavenly Fire and asks that he shields us from disease and misfortune.”
He offers a fire lily with every prayer, laying the flower in front of the small pot of incense.
With each passing day, things look bleaker and bleaker as the death toll rises and fear runs rampant. The air stinks with the stench of decay as rotting corpses pile up in the streets. Nobody wants to bury them and risk getting the plague themselves, and thus, those who are not yet infected start to think that they’re going to spend the last of their days getting choked to death by the horrid smell.
However, just as all hope is lost, a golden light splits the clouds and a great tremor shakes the earth. An unseen bell sounds, and as the clear note echoes through the air, Lord Heavenly Fire descends from the sky amidst a whirl of red, orange, and gold. He stands before the people with his unmasked divinity, looking every bit the god that he is, and the hope that had withered away with time now sprouts anew.
With rolled-up sleeves and a cloth tied over his nose and mouth, Lord Heavenly Fire starts cleaning up the corpses in the street. He doesn’t ask anyone for help, but somebody gives him a cart to transport the bodies with. Peeking out from behind the front door, Jongin watches as Lord Heavenly Fire carefully piles the bodies into the cart and starts rolling them away.
“If Lord Heavenly Fire has descended to help us, then everything will be alright soon,” Jongin’s mother says over their meager dinner that night.
Things do get better, or at least it seems they do. The death count starts to drop, and infections don’t spring up as often as they did before. Invigorated, the people praise Lord Heavenly Fire’s efforts and eagerly wait for the day the plague disappears completely. Jongin prays at the makeshift shrine every day and thanks Lord Heavenly Fire with as many fire lilies as he can provide.
One year passes. Then another.
By the end of the third year since Lord Heavenly Fire’s descension, the plague has come to a standstill. Even with Lord Heavenly Fire rallying groups to set up camps for the sick, a cure is still yet to be found. The people, whose fickle minds have long since forgotten how Lord Heavenly Fire had slowed the death rate, are now impatient for a solution.
“Lord Bountiful Life is working his hardest to develop a cure,” Lord Heavenly Fire says when people demand to know why there has been no progress in the battle against the plague.
“Lord Bountiful Life has been working on a cure for three years,” Jongin’s father growls after returning from his own interrogation of Lord Heavenly Fire. “How long does it take to find a solution to this disease? If you aren’t competent, then just admit it and let someone else take over!”
Jongin hunches over his makeshift shrine as his father storms away. When the footsteps fade, Jongin glances at the silent hallway and then looks at the crumpled fire lily in his palm. He lays it on the shrine and sends a prayer to Lord Heavenly Fire, asking for a cure so that his sister can come home.
In the end, the heavens take his prayer for a joke because his sister passes away the very next day.
Jongin, in his fit of grief and anger, takes down the makeshift shrine. He isn’t a little boy blindly worshipping a god anymore. After all, what kind of god can’t even save one person’s life?
It doesn’t matter if it’s Lord Heavenly Fire or Lord Bountiful Life. They are all useless!
Yet, one week later, Jongin rebuilds the shrine, this time in the space under his bed. He doesn’t want his parents, who now resent Lord Heavenly Fire so much, to find it and destroy it. This time, as he leaves fire lilies every day, he doesn’t pray to the image of the untouchable god in his head but to the immortal man who is doing his best to help even though his followers are turning their backs on him. When Jongin had gone to discard the talismans and the lantern, he had seen Lord Heavenly Fire standing before an unfamiliar god, head bowed and shoulders shaking. Jongin had been expecting him to be lamenting his loss of followers, but upon eavesdropping on the conversation, he only hears Lord Heavenly Fire say that he wishes he could do more.
Now that Jongin thinks about it, isn’t Lord Heavenly Fire the one who has done the most since the plague started? He had worked alone to clean up the streets and bury corpses, and his efforts are the reason why the plague has slowed. Yet, the unsatisfied people are shameless enough to sit around and demand for him to do more.
Jongin is fifteen years old when followers of the Heavenly Fire start to dwindle, turning away in favor of seeking a more capable god.
Jongin, however, goes to Twin Phoenix Temple and officially becomes a Heavenly Fire dancer.
When Jongin is seventeen, Lord Bountiful Life descends from the heavens to deliver the cure and put an end to the plague, and as the last of the black boils fade away, Lord Heavenly Fire disappears as well. Since he has almost no followers by the time the plague ends, everyone assumes that he had dissipated due to a lack of divinity. Without divinity, it becomes too difficult for a god to remain in this world, and many choose to vanish quietly.
However, Jongin does not stop dancing. He refuses to stop. It doesn’t matter if people sneer or make a mockery of him. It doesn’t matter if people turn and walk out when they see him in the temple. It doesn’t matter if people pretend to not know who Lord Heavenly Fire is when Jongin tells them whom he is dancing for.
Even if Jongin is the only one who still remembers, then that is enough.
Now, at twenty years old, Jongin stands in the temple, a pair of red fans clasped in his hands. The sleeves of his robes trail on the floor, rising and fluttering like orange butterflies in the occasional passing breeze. Muscles tense, he waits.
The tension snaps with the first note from the zither, and Jongin begins to move, sweeping from one side of the stage to the other. His clothes float around him with every spin, emphasizing a grace and elegance that silences the crowd watching him. Awestruck gazes follow Jongin as he snaps open the fans and waves them, and the strips of cloth billowing from the ends of the fans accentuate the motion. The people are mesmerized, leaning forward in their seats as they watch a routine they have never seen before.
Of course they have never seen it before. Jongin had just created this dance last month and is performing it in public for the first time.
He pours his heart and soul into the dance, conveying his memories of Lord Heavenly Fire before the latter’s fall from grace, and when he finishes, there is a smattering of applause from the onlookers. As Jongin steps off to the side, he hears some of the comments floating around.
“…never seen that before…”
“The fans were very pretty…”
“…one of the most graceful plays I’ve ever seen.”
Jongin’s lips thin, but it’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. As long as it bears the colors of Lord Heavenly Fire, people will downgrade it. A dance becomes a play. A god becomes a failure. However, Jongin will not stop his worship, no matter how many backhanded comments he gets.
As he is heading towards the back of the temple to change, he notices someone staring at him. The person is sitting alone, and a black cloth is tied around his nose and mouth. His expression isn’t one of thinly-veiled contempt but one of pleasant surprise, as though Jongin’s dancing had been better than he expected. Unfortunately, Jongin doesn’t get a chance to examine the man’s face before the folding screen blocks the man from Jongin’s view.
Jongin can hear the people leaving as he changes back into his comfort clothes. He waits until the chattering moves out into the street before he steps back out from behind the screen and freezes.
The man who had been staring at Jongin is still there. He is facing the altar, so Jongin can only see his broad back, the sword wrapped in white cloth, and the long tresses of black hair that cascade down to his waist. Now that the man is standing, Jongin realizes that he is quite tall, even though his head is bowed.
As Jongin watches, the man places something on the altar and turns around. Jongin jumps, a little embarrassed at having been caught spying, but it’s too late to try and hide. The man sees him too and pauses. Then, the corners of his eyes crinkle a little and he nods his head in a greeting. Without a word, he sweeps out of the temple, black robes billowing around his ankles like smoke.
Jongin blinks at the doorway for a moment, wondering if that person is someone he has met before. Remembering that the man had left something behind, he turns to look at the altar, and for a moment, he thinks that the splotch of orange is a hallucination. However, as Jongin approaches and reaches out to touch the petals, he knows the smoothness between his fingers is very real.
He lets go, and the fire lily bobs in a friendly greeting.
Lord Heavenly Fire is still here.