Chapter Text
The year 1900:
In a kingdom that existed somewhere between the waking world and the realm of dreams, a child was born to the Emperor and his Empress Ah Duo.
The Fairy Land, as it was known to mortals who occasionally glimpsed its silver towers in the mist, had waited long for an heir, and when the child at last arrived, the whole court fell silent with wonder.
He was, by every account, the most beautiful creature the empire had ever beheld.
Courtiers who had travelled to the furthest reaches of the known world, who had seen the pearl cities of the East and the marble halls of the West, swore they had never set eyes upon anything so fine.
His beauty could not be captured in words. Poets who attempted it broke their pens in frustration; painters wept before their canvases, certain that no pigment could match the moonlit pallor of his skin nor the depth of his dark, knowing eyes.
He seemed less a prince than a celestial visitor—a nymph fallen from some distant, silver planet, sent to dwell amongst them for reasons none could fathom.
They named him Ka Zuigetsu. But people mostly called him Jinshi.
But joy in the Fairy Land is seldom given without its shadow, and so it was with the young prince.
Before his first cry had faded from the birthing chamber, the court physicians and the palace witches discovered, with growing horror, that he had been born under a curse—a curse as old and as merciless as the stars themselves.
No living soul could touch him.
Not his mother's hand, not his father's embrace, not even the gentlest brush of a nursemaid's fingers against his cheek.
Any contact, however tender, however well-meant, brought him searing pain, as though his very skin recoiled from the warmth of another.
And more cruelly still, he could not bear the light of the sun. Its rays, which fell so kindly upon every other child of the empire, burned him as fire burns parchment.
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The Royal Witch, oldest and wisest of her order, was summoned to the palace to examine the affliction.
She studied the prince for seven days and seven nights, consulting the old books, casting the bones, reading the smoke of sacred fires.
At last she came before the Emperor and Empress, her face grave.
She said, "The curse will break when he reaches his twentieth year. The year of 1920."
"And why has this befallen him?" the Empress asked, her voice breaking. "What sin, what debt, could a newborn child owe to fate?"
The witch bowed her head. "That, Your Majesty, I do not know. Some curses are cast with cause, and some are simply inherited from the turning of the world itself. This one, I confess, is beyond my sight."
And so it was accepted, as such things must be accepted in a kingdom built on old magic.
The prince would live untouched, and unseen by the sun, until the year of his majority, in 1920.
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He grew up within the shadowed halls of the palace, in rooms where the curtains were kept forever drawn, where candlelight replaced daylight, and where love was shown not through embrace but through distance carefully, achingly maintained.
Only in the depths of winter, when the sun hung low and pale and lost most of its cruelty, was he permitted beyond the palace walls—and even then, only if he was wrapped in thick layers of silk and fur, veiled from crown to foot, so that not a single inch of his skin might greet the light.
The people of the Fairy Land would sometimes catch sight of him then—a slight, muffled figure gliding through the frost-white gardens, attended from a careful distance by servants who dared not draw near.
They called him, in hushed and reverent voices, the Moon Prince—for like the moon, he was luminous, distant, and forever beyond reach.
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And yet, within his shadowed solitude, the prince nursed a quiet hope that no curse could touch.
Night after night, he would sit at his window, watching the moon climb its silver path across the sky, and tell himself that this could not last forever.
Someone, somewhere, would come.
Someone would look upon him not with pity or fear, but with courage enough to reach for him regardless of the pain it might bring.
He did not know exactly when, and he did not know who.
But he waited, patiently, as only the truly lonely can wait, believing that one day, at last, someone would come to heal him.