My Liege And I

Dark

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NB! This chapter may be a trigger for those struggling with mental issues. Tread carefully.

Chapter 51

Bai Yuwen Hong
Bai Shen Hong
Emperor Huizhong

Yuwen Wong woke up to his blood wildly racing, his pulse erratic as if his vessels would burst. He was trying to take deep breaths but no air was reaching his lungs.

Deep breaths, deep breaths. He willed himself to calm down. It couldn't be denied, he was in the midst of a panic attack and riding the tidal wave of spiraling.

A low throbbing pain rang in his head. It felt like ice ebbed permanently on his skull with no intention of going away.

He painfully sat up in the darkness of his sleeping room. His silk sleeping wear clung to his body, wet as if a bucket of water had been splashed onto his body.

His hands clenched into fists as he took deep controlled breaths. He knew the drill, these episodes were not his first. The demons were weaving the same war he fought when his father died.

He began to lie to his brain, coaxing it with the illusion that all was well. Li Lian was still by his side and no betrayal had taken place. The nightmare of her treason was just a dream and she was sleeping in the Phoenix palace.

It took a while but he finally calmed down.

Tiredly, he groaned. All he remembered was his heartbroken self drowning in alcohol till he passed out the previous day. He did no work but hid himself from the world from the afternoon of his wedding day, through the next day, until now, the morning he woke up.

It was for a few minutes that he relaxed into his bed, peacefully, before the dark clouds crept and settled over him with no intention of clearing.

Depression rang in his ears, twisted around his heart and coiled around his neck. Smokes of anxiety blurred his reasoning and swallowed up his sanity. Slowly, he was losing the Yuwen Hong he knew.

Li Lian betrayed him. He fell in love, slept with and married a person from the nation that killed his father.

He breathed out to ease the tension knotted in his stomach, but nothing left him. After meeting Li Lian, he became a free person from such gloom, thus her absence has opened the door of his return to the inner-dungeon of imprisonment.

It was better to be in a physical dungeon, at least that he could escape if he tried, however, he couldn't run away from the dungeon within. It was one with his identity and he couldn't run from himself, could he?

He did not know where to start when thinking of Li Lian. Should he be angry with himself? After all, he chased her and sought her out, ignoring to see sense when he still had the chance. Should he be angry with her? She broke all the simple principles of love. She failed to communicate, to trust and to be honest.

What was to come, he knew the journey all too well. There would be times he felt he loved her and he couldn't survive without her, then a time he despised and wanted her dead. He was going to want her back, yet the next minute he would feel uttermost bitterness and resentment.

He took out his legs from the blankets so he could sit on the bed with his feet on the floor.

"Eunuch Nam?"

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"What time is it?" The room was dark, the outside dark. And so was he, within.

"Replying to His Majesty. It is the hour of the tiger (3am to 5am)."