Omnium Rerum Principia Parva Sunt

'The beginnings of all things are small.'

The skies over Seoul are dark and grim, scudding and roiling with the promise of storms.

 Clouds tower over skyscrapers like ghostly sceptres of white, the city lights barely managing to pierce through a hazy veil of dust and black soot.

The streets are still busy, choked with cars and trucks and broken people. The hot tarmac pulsates beneath his feet with an energy that seeps through his skin and thrums through his veins, amber gold and heavy like liquor sloshing in a glass.

The street lamps flicker like fireflies, illuminating shadows and drowning light. They create their own pantomime of dancing silhouettes and dizzying umbra, of dark spaces and white vacuum, and they pull him in with little effort.

* * *

He is alive in a dying city. A city of corruption, vice and sin. A city that does not care for justice,  a city that revels in its evil, proud and unabashed, a cold and cruel and calculating mistress.

Seungyoon has been enslaved to her since the moment he was born, and like many of her denizens, he knows that he cannot escape.

So he learns to accept her, her knives and barbs and steel knotted wire.

He learns to accept her tyranny and her injustice, learns to receive her abuse and her criticism, learns to bend and bow and beg until she gets tired of him and let's him live.

* * *

Living in Seoul is difficult.

It demands hardships and harassment and ritual sacrifice. 

It does not give a lot in return.

* * *

Seungyoon sighs as he trudges wearily up the steps of his housing estate, a dilapidated block of flats hidden away in a filthy corner of the city. 

The stench of broken sewer piepes and stale cigarette smoke permeates the air. Luckily, the  municipal workers had come along to hose down the walls the previous night, so the odour of urine isn't so apparent. He's very grateful.

He stumbles across a man sprawled out on the landing lying splayed in a pool of suspiciously dark liquid that he hopes is beer and not blood. He manages to catch hold of the bannister in time, but not before banging his shin on the hard, unforgiving stair. 

There's a sudden, excruciating moment of pain.

Blinking back tears, he hobbles down the corridor towards his shoddy, one bedroom apartment. The door creaks open on rusty hinges, a fleck of mint green paint falling from the peeling frame as soon as he slams it shut.

* * *

He glances around his home. The ceiling is damp, spotted with mould. There's a bed, a sordid affair in iron with a military issued mattress, smothered in dir