It was late, and the house was dark and still. Shadows danced around the study walls as Father Won sat silently hunched over a hand-drawn chart on old brittle parchment. He had been translating small blocks of foreign scriptures from the extinct or conquered past. Three candle flames repetitiously wavered as Father Won exhaled. Some of the characters on the chart had gotten wet at some point and had blurred into evaporated inkblots. Dried blood spatters had cracked and fallen off, leaving stains of their own across what Father Won thought to be the original map of his ancestors’ vaults found over the last 300 years, claimed from the Hun. He stared at a particular block of scripture with many corridors leading to it, trying to remember where he had seen the symbols before, in which book they were, how old they were, and in the end wondered why he couldn’t remember. Reaching under his glasses, he squeezed the bridge of his nose and leaned back in his chair. After rubbing his eyes he looked up and around the room, trying to focus on some of the larger print titles of the books on the shelves at the far end of the room. Above the shelves of books, pictures of his forefathers surrounded the room, each painting telling a chapter of the bloodline from the beginning and through the generations. The oldest picture was of an enormous, armored warrior king being slain by one of the Won forefathers. A gold key on a chain flung out of the falling king’s armor—the first key. Father Won grabbed the chain around his own neck and pulled out the same key.
His wife hobbled into the study and asked, “Are you coming to bed, or are you going to stay up all night again?” She saw the key in her husband’s hands.
He looked at her and calmly put his key back inside his shirt, replying, “No. I’m done here for the night. I’m getting stumped by some of the symbols. My head is fuzzy, and I forget where I’ve seen some of the characters before, or what book they’re in, and sometimes what part of the continent they belong to. It’s driving me mad.”
She huffed at him and said jokingly, “You are mad.”
Father Won grunted out a smile and nodded in agreement.
“You’ll do what you can, and your sons will help you. Everything takes time,” she said, trying to be comforting.
Father Won continued to smile at his wife and her supportive ways. Behind his smile his mind flashed to regret for not telling his loving wife that their first born was no longer amongst the living. “I wish I knew a linguist. They might be able, at the least, to point me in the right direction.”
“That would make it easy, wouldn’t it? Too bad you don’t trust Mr. Bower. You understand what will happen if you share information with him?”
“Yes, woman, I understand,” Father Won snapped.
She moved around the room, tidying up loose books and placing them back on the bookshelves where they belonged. She finished up, walked behind her husband, and lightly massaged his shoulders while looking down at the chart on the desk, “You cannot expect to solve a 300-year-old puzzle overnight. Be patient; tomorrow brings new light. Come on to bed.”
Father Won pointed at the chart and said, “I’ve been looking at this chart longer than I’ve known you, wife, but you’re right. I’ll be up soon. I just have to put these things away.”
The agima kissed Father Won on the top of the head and turned to walk out of the study. She shut the double doors behind her, and the house went silent again.
Father Won sat quietly for a moment with his eyes shut, listening to his own breathing. His heart was healthy, and his lungs were clear. He suddenly leaned forward and began delicately rolling up his old chart to put it in a protective tube. He walked it over to a safe behind a picture of one of his ancestors sitting at a desk toiling over the same chart he was locking up. In the picture there was a woman standing obediently a few paces behind his ancestor’s chair. Her head was partially bowed. The ancestor had his hair pulled back into a standing weave, held up with a horizontal piece of bone. There was a lit oil lamp on the desk for him to study by. Father Won looked into the background to his ancestor’s painted shadow. He knew the combination of the standing weave and the horizontal bone silhouette appeared as a sword or knife handle with the blade buried down his forefather’s spine behind the collar of his robe. Father Won looked at the woman again and affirmed that only the family Un Jang Do sheath was clasped around her neck and that the handle section was absent. He put the chart in the safe and looked up at the painting once more. He began strolling around the study with his hands clasped behind his back, looking at some of the other paintings on the walls. He looked at the original painting of the first of his family nobility, a painting called “Victory.” It comforted him to know that most people never really looked into the background of the painting because they were so impressed with the two larger-than-life main characters. There was a forest behind the Won warrior and a gray castle wall behind his adversary. Three archers stood on the wall with bows drawn and pointing towards the battling pair. Looking closely Father Won could detect the slightest angle difference in one of the archers’ projected flight. The archer was pointing his bow at his own king, while the other two were pointing their arrows at the Won warrior. Father Won turned on a light so he could see more clearly. He grabbed a chair, put it in front of the painting, and stood on it to get a direct look at the detail. Two archers had their arrows drawn in their bows and heads slightly turned towards the third archer, who just held a bow. His arrow had already been released and taken flight, piercing his own king below his raised arm and swinging sword. The Cho king simultaneously took a mortal blow from the blade of the Won warrior. The feather flight of the arrow was camouflaged granite gray and imbedded, faintly outlined, in the same color castle wall. Both warriors were bloodied and wounded, but victory was eminent for the Won. Two more subtle shadows stood amongst the trees behind the Won warrior.
Father Won got off the chair, backed up to the light switch, turned it off, slowly walked to a bookcase, and pulled out a picture book containing all the paintings of his ancestors and another book of his ancestors’ chronicles. He set them on his desk near the three candles and began flipping through the pictures. He began taking notes on each picture, not so interested in the obvious, but scouring the backgrounds and consistently finding another person’s partial silhouette mixed in with the shadows and the instrument of death, coinciding with the manor of death in the ancestors’ chronicles. The pictures told the story of how his ancestors lived as well as how they died.
It was getting light outside when Father Won shuffled out of his study with his head down, pondering the refreshed insights that cast dark questions into the roots of his family tree and the potential knowledge that may have passed down through unknown others as it did through his family.