Sweet Romance13 min read
How I Stole Lightning and Saved Two Men
ButterPicks14 views
I woke up with someone else’s life in my head and a crown of trouble on my shoulders.
“Estella,” the mirror announced in a voice that was all silk and chill, “you are a princess with enemies.”
The voice was mine and not mine. I blinked at the porcelain reflection and found lips that did not belong to a laundress from my old life. I found silk where my old rough shirt had been, and a memory of being both spoiled and feared.
“I—what happened?” I whispered to myself.
“Now isn’t the time to interrogate your reflection,” Elsie Beard said from behind the door. Elsie was my maid in this borrowed body; she spoke as if polishing a goblet while naming a storm. “Mistress, the carriage waits and the guest has been made ready.”
Guest? Ready for what?
I swallowed and the kitchen of my memories flashed a scene I had read—an old romance everyone in my world had gorged on like festival sweets. In that book, I wasn’t supposed to be me. I was supposed to be the villain; the woman who swept onstage in alabaster robes and bright malice to ruin everything that might make other people happy.
“Someone tried to take her,” Elsie said, peeking in. “Your forehead—blood.”
Blood indeed. My forehead stung. A chunk of skin split and surprised me with red. I had no recollection of falling. Only the sudden, useless thought: this story ends poorly for the woman I’d become.
“I’ll fetch the court physician,” Elsie said, hands hovering like a faithful dove.
I flinched when she moved to touch me, then I fled. I don’t mean fled like a frightened rabbit—no, I mean I went straight up. Seven stories up. The top-floor chamber of a gilded birdhouse where, according to the book, my predecessor had made one last, terrible choice.
I pushed the carved doors wide and found him: Galileo Austin. He lay cased in white sheets, a living sculpture with gray-blue eyes like winter sky crushed into glass.
“...you?” he said, voice one with a thin edge of frost and a sting. He was not well. His lips were stained a bad color, and his lashes were veined with red. “You...are you the one?”
He looked like a god, and gods rarely went easy on villains.
“I—Galileo,” I blurted, stepping forward, knees suddenly less steady than they had any right to be. “You were taken. I couldn’t bear it. Someone did a cruel thing. Let me—”
“You?” His eyes cut into mine. “Is this a trick?”
I reached into my sleeve and, because I am absurd, produced a little jade bottle. I flung it open.
“Drink,” I said. “This will help.”
He hesitated. Suspicion slithered down his spine like a hungry eel.
“I am not so helpless,” he said finally, and swallowed. He was not as helpless as he looked—and neither had I expected him to be.
He recovered some of his color and resolved to leave. He leapt from the wide window like a drifting white leaf.
I remained, breathless, with a new person in the doorway: Casey Bright, the stranger in trousers with a warm smile and hands used to healing. Casey’s eyes were steady and practical as a blade, and she carried a satchel of powders.
“You’re hurt,” she said. “I can bind that.”
“I—no—” I said, and then I did the only foolish thing I could think of. I pulled out my purse and offered it.
“You should not,” she protested. “This is—too much.”
I insisted. She refused, then accepted, then bent my path until I was on her side and she had my hand wrapped in a clean cloth.
That first meeting should have been the kind of thing that sets a hero’s arc in motion. Instead, I felt like a jigsaw piece that had been forced into the wrong puzzle. And that was that—she named what the book had called the heroine: Casey Bright was a healer, a maker of medicine, and in future chapters she would be the one to make other people whole.
Events kept rearranging themselves like patchwork on a table. Lightning struck. Once, twice. The very sky had opinions about my fate.
“I think lightning doesn’t like you,” Elsie said, fanning herself as if the world were a dramatic stove.
One thunderclap blasted the eaves of the birdhouse to splinters. The whole city turned its face like a choir toward the spectacle.
“Fortunate you left when you did,” Elsie said, eyebrows tight. “If you’d been still in that chamber—”
I seized the gift in my hands. A small wooden box arrived from the palace. A palace attendant bowed with all the deformation of someone who had learned to be small in the presence of power.
“This is from his majesty,” the attendant trilled. “It is a ward against thunder. A marvel from the ancient master of storms.”
Inside, a strange staff lay: a length of bleached bone with a dark stone wired to one end. Rusted metal glinted like a fingernail. It looked absurd. It felt like a lie.
I carried it anyway and, as if by choreography, a bolt of purple lightning struck the yard. The bone hummed and drank it like a thirsty child. I squealed and then laughed.
“See?” I announced to the sky. “I am untouchable.”
From the wall between my house and the general’s estate, Galileo watched and his glacier stare made me feel like melted sugar. He called the storm god back to his study and seemed—impossibly—curious rather than wrathful.
“What are you doing?” I asked, triumph tasting like copper.
“Learning,” he said. “I like watching the world show its tricks.”
People began to stare. A crowd gathered. I preened. I felt like a monarch, which was dangerous behavior for the new Estella Moller.
We learned other things at a pace I could not have imagined. I swallowed the green crystalline shards that had been entrusted to me—wood-spirit gems—and something small and green unfurled where my forehead had been raw.
A seedling sat where a jewel should have been, two crescent leaves shy as a child’s smile. It whispered a name in my mind: the Moon Rose. Skills blinked in a menu only I could see—“Locked—Unknown.” It was absurd and glorious.
“My lady, do not eat your flowers,” Elsie muttered, and I glared at her.
The staff, the seedling, the sudden spike up in power—these things knitted together into possibility.
“Power doesn’t come free,” Galileo said carefully one night. He stood three paces away and looked at me like someone at the lip of a cliff. “If you can know a future, then you strive to change it.”
“So that’s what you would do?” I asked.
“Of course.” He shrugged like it was a simple thing. “If you had proof that the cliff was not an accident but a trap. If the known future is worse than any risk you take to change it, you change it.”
Simple enough in a lecture. Harder when your life is the sack heaped with all the things he did not say.
I began to change the script.
At the Flowing-Fire Banquet they gathered: women like spears, jewels like stars about their necks, whispering sugar that tasted like venom. The book had described this evening as a moment where I, the monster of stage left, pushed a lady in a way that would rip a life out by accident and ruin her entire future.
I was not doing that.
I strode into the water pavilions and saw Lianna—that is, my sister-in-law, here called Olivia in the old notes but now she is Elsie’s friend—carrying the weight of her baby like a fragile moon. A petty noblewoman “Anabel” loosed a slight whose aim was cruelty. I stopped it.
“Who ordered you to behave like this?” I said, voice like a bell.
The woman kneeled, shocked into apology. Others admired me. I loved the small fanfare. I wanted my brother—Daniel Brown, quiet like a cold hearth—to see that I had turned; that I had softened; that I could be the sister anyone needed.
“You should not treat my sister-in-law like a servant,” I told the assembly, and then I did a thing it seems to please people to see: I used my position to enforce a measure of justice.
People murmured. The rival woman left spitting insult.
I arranged for Lianna to ride home in my carriage. She slipped on the back stair and fell toward the ground. I lunged and took her weight. My arm—my arm was cut but healed faster and I felt something like the future sway.
Later I found out the archers had been ready to pounce.
That night, lightning struck me. I thought I would be a corpse but the ward swallowed the blaze. A man on the wall watched in silence: Galileo. Also on that wall was another presence—Beckett Turner, a prince of rare, startling charm who wore dusk like silk.
“Oh,” Beckett said, glancing at me with an eyebrow up. “You seem dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” I asked.
“Beware the kind of dangerous that smiles with a teacup,” Beckett said, and vanished into the crowd like the whisper of a song.
My days slid into a new, fierce pattern. I gathered fellows from the streets—men who had been brutalized by masters and sold for a lifetime of labor—and I set them into land I owned in the suburbs. I was a greedy little magnate with compassion on layaway.
One of them surprised me: a steady-eyed man who called himself Sero. There was something about him that bent toward leadership. He steadied my hand as much as I steadied his wounds.
“He will remember you,” I told Elsie, rounded with pride.
It seemed a small act: buy a slave from the market and set him to work in a field. But small things were all I had, and small things may be what rewrites fate.
Tensions rose. The emperor’s servants worried. An official named Ethan Hassan had been covetous and small-eaten for years, and he took any chance to scrape a triumph from another’s misstep. He received me badly to the court.
“You, Estella Moller,” he spat in the hall. “You presume to alter the order of things.”
“I presume to keep my family safe,” I answered. “If the law is rotten, I will pluck it like a bruise.”
Ethan smiled like a pond in winter.
“You will obey the law,” he hissed. “You will make amends.”
I watched him. I watched his face harden like cold butter.
“You have the ear of the palace,” I told Daniel, who stood at my side with the careful calm of a man who had learned to wait, “but you also have the stink of corruption. Be careful how you tie your horses. Corruption is a rope that takes no prisoners.”
He scowled. He would not like being told things, and he would like me less for saying them.
Then, the worst thing happened.
The emperor demanded swift justice for the assassination attempt at the lantern festival. Because it was convenient, the fingers of blame were pointed at Daniel Brown. He was a casualty of circumstance. A militia sergeant, a crooked informant, and a thick, early morning set of arrests sealed a trap.
“Daniel,” I said, folding my hands, heart a literal stone, “tell me what happened.”
“I worked the case,” he said. “I ran the leads. I did what I could. They want a fall guy.”
“We will not allow it,” I said, my voice like a whip.
I arrived at the courthouse with a carriage and a rearguard of guards. Ethan Hassan sat at his carved bench the way an aristocrat sits upon a throne made of someone else’s bones.
“You have no right,” he said.
“I have the right,” I told him. I upended the paper they wanted Daniel to sign and I tore it into ribbons. I called the palace guards. I called for witnesses. I called the emperor’s attention like a peal of bells.
Ethan shrieked. He pleaded. He fumbled. He made a sound like a defeated animal. He begged for mercy in a place where mine had hard edges.
“Let him go!” I cried, voice loud as lead. “You have made games of justice. You would strip a man of his life to advance your coins. We will have no such tyranny.”
The court was crowded. Courtiers craned their necks. Men pushed forward with their mobile boxes—those small glass frames we call “memory lenses”—and recorded. This is the scene they had wanted: a drama.
Ethan’s expression changed. First, it was smug—he believed in his own smallness. Next, he grew suspicious—like a fox hearing more dogs than it knew. After that, he tried to deny anything but could produce no proof. Then his mask slid and desperation took over.
“Look at me!” he howled. “I have done this under the emperor’s eye. I—”
“You lie,” I said. “And now you will be judged for that lie.”
I did not carry a sword. I carried public will. I demanded that he renounce his office and stand trial by the people he had betrayed.
The crowd gathered like a tide. Fingers pointed. A man shouted: “Show his ledger! Show his gifts!” Another woman gasped and dug out a receipt she had seen once on Ethan’s table—a sealed envelope. Someone held up a scrap of parchment with signatures.
He had been very careless.
“Guards!” I called softly. “Bring the ledger and the witness who served him his bribe.”
“Never,” Ethan snarled. “You cannot—”
But the ledger was produced by an official clerk who had a conscience that morning. The crowd leaned in. The record unrolled like a snake of paper and every name was there.
Ethan’s face went from pale to mottled to ashen.
“You—” he stammered. “You do not know what you are doing! I was acting for the good of the realm—”
“For the good of your purse,” I said.
He laughed a brittle, ragged laugh and lunged for his papers. Guards stepped forward. The crowd hissed.
“Look!” shouted someone near the back. “There are men he paid to keep the mills and fields under his influence. There are others he sold protections to!”
Women wept. Men cursed. A child with a sling snapped his fingers in approval.
“You framed you a man of the state,” I told him. “You married yourself to money. You cooked your accounts and sold your conscience. Now you will stand where you placed others. You will be humiliated and your titles will be taken. You will lose everything. And you will do so before the very people you intended to shame.”
Ethan’s reaction was a sequence: first confident arrogance, then disbelief, then flung denial, then the thin, high keening of a cornered animal. He begged. He offered to return funds. He offered to kneel. He offered to implicate others.
“You don’t understand,” he cried. “I served orders—”
“Orders?” I echoed, eyes like flint. “Whose?”
Instead of answers, there came the small sound of cameras and the rustle of paper. The crowd wanted spectacle. I gave them spectacle.
“Ethan Hassan,” I said, holding up the ledger so the world could see, “you will be stripped of your honors and publicly shamed at the market cross. You will not be spared.”
The crowd roared like harvest thunder. They loved it. They had someone to hate again, and now they had someone to watch lose everything.
He was dragged out like a prize boar. People lined the street to see him brought to the market cross. The commoners, who had been beaten and starved by people of his class, came out in hoots of pleasure and carnivalesque glee.
The punishment was not a private verdict. It was set to be a public unmasking, a long display of humiliation.
They took him to the highest step of the square. Merchants put their wares down. Mothers shielded children's eyes. Men with long memory murmured curses and clapped like the tide.
“Tell them the charges!” I ordered.
The herald proclaimed: “Ethan Hassan, by public ledger and witness testimony, you are condemned for bribery, for perversion of justice, and for profiting from miseries. By the will of the people and the order of the emperor’s court, you shall be stripped of office, fined, and publicly shamed.”
He tried to speak on his own behalf. He was allowed to speak; we do not pretend justice is simple.
“My lord, you know not—” he began.
The crowd hissed; they were not kind.
“Ethan,” I said, and this time my voice was softer, “call your own record. Open that ledger. Look at every name you have bought. Tell us why you did it.”
He squinted at the handwriting as if, suddenly, it belonged to another man.
“Reckless!” someone shouted. “Shame him!”
He staggered through denials: “You do not know the pressures of court! You do not—” Then he tried to hurl accusations at others to save his skin.
That is the order of guilty men. They will throw as wide as nets. People who had once feared him now remembered the paper he had offered them. A clerk who had taken a coin stepped forward and said, “I took gifts. I have been paid in turn.” Others came forward. Some confessed to small crimes; others to small kindnesses.
The crowd turned from spectacle to fury. People took up stones—small arguments—and chucked them at the corrupt. The guards, who had been uncertain, were now emboldened by the voice of the people, by the emperor’s hand that had suggested we purge, and by the righteous gleam of their own tired morality.
Ethan's demeanor changes were detailed and ugly: he had the beginning—calm flattery; then surprise when the ledger was produced; then denial; then panic when his associates confessed; then wrestling with reality; then clinging to the emperor’s name; then pleading; and finally despair. His face cracked like old paint and finally he wept.
“Please,” he said, voice tiny like a snapped reed, “I can repay. I can—”
“No,” I told him. “Your repayment is public censure. You will be shamed in the market while those you harmed witness your fall. You will be stripped and paraded.”
The crowd loved the sight. They cheered. They recorded. They shouted curses that tasted of long-held grievances. Even those who had once feared him laughed like children who had found sweets.
And yet, amid all this satisfaction I felt a new unease: the act of taking down one corrupt man in public did not alone erase the system that made him. But it was a beginning. And beginnings are dangerous because people make up new endings to test.
I watched Ethan dragged away, hair in his hands, as the city spat at him. People photographed him. Someone set up an impromptu stage where he begged forgiveness. People clapped. Vendors sold broadsides. Children scribbled caricatures.
“You have sent a message,” Galileo said quietly as we watched from the balcony. He had come without announcing himself.
“Yes,” I admitted. “One voice is louder when there are ten thousand ears.”
“You will make more enemies than friends,” he observed. “And not all of them will lose to spectacle.”
“I know,” I said. “But they are looking. Now they know I am not merely a costume.”
Galileo’s mouth twitched. “You have thrown lightning and gathered men.”
“The staff helps,” I said, and for once I did not hide the pride in my voice.
He smiled, small and rare. “It does.”
That public punishment was loud and messy and exactly what the world needed at the time. But the world would not stop needing justice; it would always demand it. I learned that a leader must also pick her fights, and that spectacle was a tool that could turn a tide, but not build a bridge.
The rest of my days, if I have any say in them, will be spent building bridges.
I climbed higher in power than anyone had thought possible for “the spoiled woman” in the book. I made allies: Beckett Turner the prince who had once been a rumor; Daniel Brown the brother who learned to trust; Casey Bright, the healer in trousers who became my friend; Sero who became an honest manager of fields and a man whose loyalty steadied others.
Galileo watched like a quiet moon and, as the months stitched onward, something like a strange warmth crept near my ribs when he was near.
One night, he caught my hand as it hovered over the bone staff.
“You rely on the ward,” he said.
“I rely on my wits,” I answered. “And, begrudgingly, on luck.”
“Then be brave when luck runs thin,” he said. “Be brave for yourself.”
“You think I can be brave?”
“I do,” he said. “I saw you push yourself into the path of a blade to save a man. That is not a villain. It is not the woman in the book. It is you.”
I wanted to answer something witty and clever. I wanted to answer as the woman in the book would, with cruelty and a net of small deaths. Instead I said, simply, “Thank you.”
He surprised me then by drawing close and placing the back of his knuckle against my cheek. It was small and intimate and precise.
“You are soft where it matters,” he said.
“Then stop being cruel,” I said, and he laughed like snow settling.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps we will teach each other.”
I am writing this because I woke up in a body I did not own and decided to keep it. I am writing because I fed a seedling wood-crystals and it grew into a tool that spoke with me; because I stole a staff that took lightning and wrapped it in the way a mother wraps a child. Because I made a spectacle and used it to unmask a man who had hidden his filth behind law.
The city remembers me as a villain in old stories. The market now knows me as the woman who took a corrupt official to the square and made him bleed in public.
“Will they forgive you?” Casey asked once.
“Some will,” I said. “Some will never forgive a villain who decides to stop being a villain.”
“But you are not her,” Casey said. “You never were.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe not.”
I do not know where the story ends. The book has one ending. I have another. When the moon drops down like a coin and the little leaves of the Moon Rose shake in a wind that smells like thyme and lightning, I pick up the staff and laugh.
The staff will hum. The leaves will thrum.
“Next time you try to break someone’s life,” I tell the wind, “you might find the world has other plans.”
And the world answers in thunder.
The End
— Thank you for reading —