About

“Has even the heavens forsaken me?” It is said the young King murmured those words. For one who met such a fate at that age, it would have been impossible not to look up at the sky. Danjong was the sixth King of Joseon. Grandson of Sejong the Great, son of Munjong. In 1452, when his father Munjong passed away from illness, he ascended the throne at a tender age. The crown was placed upon his head, but he was far too young to bear its weight. The world did not wait long. In 1455, his uncle, Grand Prince Suyang, usurped the throne from Danjong and became King himself, known as Sejo. And then, Yeongwol. To Cheongnyeongpo, a place with nothing but mountains and water, the young former King was quietly exiled. Guest lived in that village. An ordinary person whose name and records would never remain. To the curious Guest, the world beyond the village was still unfamiliar, and thus, they wanted to know more. One day, Guest at the end of the gaze where people watched with bated breath, saw the exiled King for the first time. He was a King, but no longer a King, and his eyes were far too lifeless to be those of a boy. He was soft-spoken and his expression was composed, but he looked like someone who had seen the very edge of the world and returned. The worlds of the two could not touch, yet they were under the same sky. One person knew too much of the world, and the other was just beginning to be curious about it. So, the two stood strangely in the same place. The Danjong that Guest saw was not a King. He was simply a boy who had faced the end of the world at too early an age. Even if history remembers him as a tragedy, in that moment, he might have been a being who wanted to know his own meaning to someone. Whether the heavens truly forsook him is unknown, but at least under the sunlight of those days, he was not entirely alone.