Revenge15 min read
I Came Back to Take My Sword and My Name Back
ButterPicks15 views
I woke dying twice.
"I remember the blade," I said, fingers closing on the edge of a wooden chest that smelled like old iron and rain. "I remember the way it left my ribs and the look in her eyes."
"Who?" Clement Colombo asked quietly from the shadow by the window, but I already knew he knew. He always knew too much, the way elders call him 'the steady one' without understanding how much steadiness hides a storm.
"It was Julieta Crow," I said, tasting the name like a curse. "She smiled and told me to go die."
"She lied," Sullivan Williams said, and his voice was thin with something like worry. "She always lied."
"Then we fix it," Julian Collier said, and he reached out to steady me like he had at the river when I woke as a child again. His palm was warm and real and alive.
I had died on a mountain once, surrounded by accusations and black air that wasn't mine. I had died with my body full of betraying gasping faces, the broken sound of the sword I loved singing as it slid from my fingers. I had died because the place I'd bled for—because the people I had bled for—wanted a scapegoat and not the truth. I had died because the disciple who knelt in my hall called me traitor, and everyone else believed her.
And then I woke in a small body with new cheeks, a new name that smelled like sunrise.
"Who are you?" the three boys had asked when they found me curled in the road like an abandoned bundle.
"My name is Gemma," I answered, and the letters felt foreign in my mouth until I remembered how my own name had sounded in a dying cough: "Yun—" No. Not now. This new name would do. Names mattered. Names were shields.
"Gemma—" Clement had said once, and the way he said it made my chest loosen. "You sleep. We'll bring you warm broth."
"Don't trust them," some part of me said then. "Don't trust anyone." But the little body was hungry and small and she wanted nothing but a sugar hawthorn on a stick. I wanted revenge and I wanted to live long enough to take it, so I let them be kind.
"You will come to the selection," Julian explained, when I learned the rules from their patient voices. "In two months. You'll have two hundred spirit-stones. You can sit in the crowd and see. If you can pass—"
"If I pass," I cut him off, and my voice surprised me by being small and childish and stubborn all at once. "I'll go in."
They roared their laughter like relief. "Of course you'll go in, little one."
I had been a founder once. I had walked with swords and alarmed the heavens. Once, my work had been to teach and to guard. Once, I had called them 'my children' and believed the word easily. I had been an old star that glittered too close to the sun and burned, and when I fell the world applauded the fall. It suited them. That is why I woke in a child’s body with a child's hands and a mountain of memories: to see who really loved me, and who had eaten me.
"You smell of demon-blood," a carter spat as he shut his cart and refused me his eyes when I paid. A stranger's spite sharpens memory. "I don't trust anyone who walks like that."
"That's the old story," Clement said, sitting on the rickety bed opposite me and smoothing the blanket without touching me. "Old stories die hard."
"They do," I said. I had familiar things to mend. I had names to unravel.
"I'll teach you one thing," Sullivan told me, kneading his thumb against my small knuckles after I had learned how to hold the training sword like a child: "You do not run from who you were. You use the weakness you have now."
"What weakness?" I asked, but he only smiled softly.
"Everything," he said. "Because when you were strong you did not see where the cracks grew. Now you will use them to find what hides in the dark."
Two months later, the square was full of people wearing hope and thin robes. The selection was a market of wishes. Men and women queued; old braids and young eyes. The measuring stone hummed with ancestral measure, and people waited for the little stone to show.
They called my number.
"You said you'd be inner," a boy with a loud mouth jeered from the crowd. "What a child thinks, what a child says. She'll fail." The crowd jeered in little ways that cut.
I walked up the steps like a puppet and put my hand on the polished stone. It pulsed. Then it flamed.
"Is that—" someone whispered. "It is!"
The light crawled from pale white toward pink, deeper and deeper. I had taken a pill. I had risked a pain that had once torn gods.
"Explain yourself," Xavier Boyd—long, gray-haired, the kind of head elder who held weathered patience like a blade—said when the light turned red and loud.
"Did you cheat?" Cullen Berry asked, eyebrows honed to accusation.
"I took a blood-wash pill," I said, and the world got very quiet. "A top-grade one. I took it because otherwise I'd never be seen. I took it because I wanted to be seen."
"Who gave it to you?" Isaac Bates asked softly. There was a way doctors ask about wounds, and he asked it.
"A cloaked old man who smelled like old books sat by the road and put it in my cup," I said. "He said: 'If you want another chance, take this and weep as you change.'"
They argued. "Impossible," some said. "Where would such a pill come from for a girl without a family?"
"He would not have given it without price," Isaac said. "Washing the root changes a thing you cannot make unbroken."
"I will pay the price," I said. "I will pay it with a life that remembers."
They made me an inner disciple anyway. They called me their little sister, and I let them call me that because it let me sit closer than any stranger.
"You're sure you want to be with us?" Julian said when he wrapped my small shoulders in a cloak the color of old snow. "Being small will make them kinder. Being small will make them stronger, too."
"Do not be foolish," Sullivan said to him. "She will make sure we are the stronger ones."
We returned to the hall and they made a pink room by mistake and asked if I liked pink. "It is an ancient color of spoons," I said with a child's mouth. They frowned and did not understand, and still they fussed. They washed my hair, put toys at the end of my bed—little grass rabbits Clement pretended to cherish and Sullivan trimmed with reverent hands—and there were many promises.
They promised warmth. I promised my sword a clean place.
The days were a lesson in patience and deception. I learned to step small, to keep the great memories soft like coals under ash. I learned the taste of being looked after, and it shook something like tenderness.
"One day you will want the sword," Julian said once, when we were alone between training and supper. "You will want to stand and be as you were before."
"Do you think that is what I want?" I asked, and he gave me that odd look of boys who are kindly but suspicious.
"I think you want the truth," he said. "And whatever else you want, we'll go look."
I trained when I could. I made potions with Isaac when my hands did not shake. I tried to keep a child's laughter and my old voice. I learned how to hold a plate and how to hold a blade. Being a girl again taught me another skill—the delicate art of being underestimated.
"You'll be marked here," a voice like frost said once in the mountain glades. The man who had saved me before—the demon who spared me—came once more, his cloak hooded and his eyes like a place I didn't quite remember. He would not give me names. He only said, "Don't let them read your scars too soon."
"I will not," I said. "I will hide them until I can show them who took the knife."
He grunted once and left. I did not see his face clearly, but his name was carved in the way the sky chills when he left.
Months passed, but I refused to say the word "months" as a narration because the rules of stitches between lives are cruel. I moved forward instead with blades and small words.
"Gemma," a voice called at the practice ring one day.
I looked up and saw her. Julieta Crow stood at the edge of the ring in the robe of the sect leader, the religious warmth of embroidered leaves on her skirt. She was beauty personified: a face wrought with a mildness that could cut glass, and eyes that always found the weakest knot in me.
"You are very young," she told me, and those around her bowed, and I kept my small voice like a bell. "Do well."
"She lied," I said to myself as I bowed.
We trained on the mountain and I watched her teach. She had the patience of a reaper and the smile of a thief. I watched her praise students and saw her take others out alone. I watched her light candles and make offerings. I watched from corners.
"She is watchful," Clement said. "She gives sweets then takes the moon."
"She had my sword once," I told Julian one night, touching the place where my ribs would be if I let myself remember.
"She had many hands on your blade," he said. "Not all of them were kind."
I held my tongue. If I wanted to drag shadows into the light, I had to do it in public and with proof.
It came sooner than I planned.
The Market of Commemoration is where men like Julieta sing their best songs. There, elders meet, and men take oaths. The hall was full for the semiyearly convocation, the kind of festival where the sect leader gives a speech and the whole valley bows.
"What a sea of faces," Julieta said into the podium, voice soft as rainfall. "What a good time."
"Speak of truth," Xavier said from his seat—he had a look now as if he wished for better weather. "Let us speak of truth here today."
I waited in my seat. My friends sat like wolves around me: Clement at the back, Julian at my side, Sullivan with a look of quiet bread. I had placed a thing in this, a heart torn from pages no one had read and sewn to a map.
"People of the sect," Julieta smiled at the crowd, and the room leaned forward in love. "Today I will tell you of our history and the wrong things done to us. Let that reparation be made."
I let it begin. She droned. She spoke of sacrifice and the great betrayals and I faked tears like a child who has read the lines many times. I let the music move, then held up my palm.
"Stop," I said.
The room understood me because the inner disciples are taught to answer. The sound hushed down like fabric. I walked to the center.
"Gemma?" Julieta's voice slipped, the first crack in her porcelain. "Little one, what are you doing here?"
"I am speaking," I said into the silence, and I let the things fall into place like stones in a river. "I have nothing to gain from standing here if I wished to see my old life vanish." I drew breath and the crowd smelled the salt of my mouth. "But I will not allow miracles to drown the dead."
"What do you mean?" Julieta's smile dulled. Her hands were pretty and calm. Her face said 'no' slowly.
I lifted two objects. The first was a scrap of a letter, brown around the edges with a stamp in a hand I remembered: the mark of a demon-smelling traveler. The second was a ribbon of shadow, a recording cord that hummed as if it had been waiting for a voice.
"This is a letter that says the leader will be given a way to 'soften the sect' with gifts from outside; the writer thanks a 'certain practitioner' for allowing access to drains and gates. This is a voice that says: 'We will call the blades ours. We will feed the hungry with bones.'"
They listened. The elders looked at each other. Julieta's pupils narrowed.
"Where did you get this?" she asked, teeth tight.
"From the one who did not like to be thanked," I said. "From the map that travels under the bed and the letter in the waist. From the one who told me to take a pill and forget my name."
"That's a lie!" Julieta snapped, and that was the first step: smug.
She laughed cleanly at us, a dry little laugh that smelled of lacquer. The crowd shifted; some smiled because their leader smiled.
"Insinuations are cheap," she said. "Where is the proof? Who will carry this falsehood to me?" She flicked a finger, and two guards moved forward to seize me.
"Not yet," I said.
From my friends—Clement had put a small rune against the guard's wrist. Sullivan had placed a charm on the dais so that voices could be drawn. Julian had hidden an iron tooth under the lectern. They had covered me carefully.
I lifted a small slate and spoke the binding that made its face glow. I placed the recording cord into the center of the hall and let its memory unspool, like a fish from a net.
The tape played. Julieta's private letters hummed sharp. Her voice laughed, then plotted. "Feed them lies. Feed them the tale of the traitor. Feed them the truth wrapped in a lie. They will never see the knife unless they want to."
Her mouth opened. Smugness turned toward a frown.
"What is that?" someone called out.
"It sounds like Julieta Crow," another voice said.
"It cannot be," a woman near the front whispered.
"Hold it," Xavier barked. "Let me see that recording."
He reached with long fingers. The sound clip repeated. It was Julieta's voice and she was instructing someone to plant a paper in my sleeping room and to let the others find it. She was careful, smug, delighted even, at the prospect of removing 'a cancer' from the sect.
The first change came as a slackening in her jaw. She had thought she had a theater. She had thought she could expect applause for every "sensible" action. Instead, she watched a room turn.
"This is edited," she said. That was denial.
"It is not," I said. I had a second object now, a folded scrap of an old jerkin. I pulled it open. It was stained with a poison no one in the hall wanted to name: the same blackness that had been in the dry corpses six centuries ago.
"It is the corroded scent of the flayed essence," Isaac said, voice taut. "This is the mark of the ones who fed on people. If she was using it, she was not only lying—she was murdering."
Her eyes flicked. I watched the tide of faces. The crowd had moved in the way of storms; curiosity first, doubt, then the slow, unsweetening realization. Phones—as they called them, those little shining panes—lifted to record.
Julieta's face turned white in stages. First, the color drained; then her posture crumpled like paper that had been left in rain. Her hands flew to her mouth. The guard in front of her faltered.
"Fake!" she cried. "It's a trap! I knew someone would do this. This is an assault on the leader—"
"No," Xavier said, and he had the single voice of power that makes a room still. "You are asked to answer, Julieta Crow. These are your words."
She staggered, then steadied. Her smile came back for a second, thin as a thread. "I gave commands for safety!" she said, and the 'safety' rang false like a cracked bell. "I ordered them to search for signs of demonic influence. That is all!"
"That is not all," Isaac said. "You told an outsider to plant false correspondence and to manufacture evidence."
"You're all conspiring!" Julieta screamed suddenly, and the scream spilled all the illusions like spilled water. Her face was the last bright thing before light breaks under ice. "You're all against me! I did what I did for the sect!"
Her voice turned shrill. She covered her face and then threw it back, naked with a look of terror. She was no longer an image crafted of cloth and humid breath; she was a woman watching whirlpools spin from her hands.
The crowd moved. People murmured and leaned and the side of the hall gathered like winter. Phones came up and recorded the tilt and fall of empires. Julieta's guard tried to grab her sleeve but even they no longer looked like shields—just men in a play they hadn't rehearsed.
"Julieta," I said, and my voice did not shake because the child voice is a good mask. "Did you do it?"
"I—" She swallowed and her lips trembled. "I ordered the surveillance. I asked for proof because I feared—" She swallowed again, now small and cracked. "I feared there were traitors."
"And you fed the traitors?" I pressed. "You fed them lies and you took away their names? You fed them a story about me so you could—"
"You don't know," she wailed, and the wail folded into weeping. Weeping is an ugly thing when arrogance dies because it shows the human seam.
She fell to her knees then.
"Please—please! I did what I did for the sect!" she begged, voice raw. "I was afraid! I never meant—please, I gave it to them so they would do as I said! Please, forgive me—"
People began to clap, in a terrible slow way, like the sound of seals opening. Some hands wanted to applaud the unfolding of justice. Some hands wanted to applaud the spectacle. Some hands wanted to record. Some hands shouted for restraint.
"Is there anyone who remembers the dead?" Clement called out, his voice as plain as a hammer. He stood. He took Julieta's head and made her face the hall as if that could weigh her words.
"She is asking mercy," another cried, and the first change in the crowd came when someone pulled out a recording and replayed the message where Julieta had called the orders as 'necessary sacrifices'—and the second part of the message, that she had told her buyer that "a few corpses" would not bother the sect, that "they would be good examples."
"That's not true!" Julieta screamed, and the seconds of denial spun into something thicker. She looked around, sticky-eyed and desperate. "I thought they were only falsified tests! I did not—"
"You lied in the face of corpses," Clement said. "You corrupted the sect's work. You fed men lies and told them to make those lies true."
"Please," she whimpered, collapsing with her forehead to the floor. "Please—"
Phones were up; someone laughed; someone sobbed; someone held out a hand but withdrew it like a man who has been made poor. The elders consulted and the outer world leaned in.
"You were smug," I said, and I let it hit the air like stone. "You smiled at your plan. You were calm, as if you were laying a garden. Then you were shocked when it came to light, and you denied it. Then you collapsed. Now you beg."
"Please," Julieta choked. "Please—"
"Too late," Clem said quietly. "Not too late for justice."
The punishment that followed was public and long and needed to be. It was given in the way the mountain judges things—by recounting, by making witness after witness stand, by showing the dead as they were found and the tapes as they were recorded. They had to see the color of lies as if it burned on the tongue.
First came the smug. They played Julieta's earlier private recordings where she praised the plan, where she was bright and calm and elegant about removing a 'problem' for the sect. She watched them. Her face did not move at first; then it did, the mask tearing at the edges.
Then the shock. Her fingers loosened at her lap. She had not expected a child to play this card. Her pupils widened and turned fish-eyed. The slogan of her speech turned to a whisper. People muttered as the facts split the sky above her like oil.
"Not possible," she murmured, the syllables wet.
Then denial, in the harshest way. She named editors, foreigners, demons—every conspiracy she could think of to keep her hands clean. She accused the elders of plotting. She accused me of forging evidence. The denial had a smell of glue in it; it stuck and came undone under weight.
Finally she broke. Her hands went forward. She crawled and made a plea—an ugly, animal plea of "please don't kill me" with a voice that used the smallest words. She wailed and begged. The crowd made space for her to crumble and the guards were instructed not to manhandle but to hold.
"Don't touch her," someone shouted. "Let the law do what it must."
Phones recorded. People made notes and took photographs and shoved them into the world like a blow of wind. Some people cried; some recorded for entertainment; some filmed out of devotion to truth.
"It is right," Clement told me later, his face hard and wet. "She must be held to answer. She must lose the privileges she used to kill."
"She will beg," Sullivan said. "She will promise anything. People always do when fortune slips through their fingers."
"She will remember," Julian said. "And there will be witnesses."
There were witnesses. There were names of the dead, and there were the words that Julieta had said earlier about 'waking the gate' and 'feeding them to heal the rest'. She had spoken like a surgeon who planned to cut out gangrene, but the gangrene were living men. The tape did not lie.
When the elders pronounced her stripped of rank, it was quiet and terrible. She was taken from her seat with hands and men and the entire hall watched. Where once she stood as leader she now walked like a woman whose shoes do not fit.
"Look," I told them when it was done, and I showed the old sword I had hidden—my Broken-Sky Sword—wrapped in cloth. "This sword is not only something that once loved me. It is a witness."
They took the sword and tested the rune scars and found the same mark of a hand that Julieta had used to put poison on blades. People gasped. The crowd murmured. Julieta's final reaction moved from the pleading to a hollow sound that was less human than frightened.
"She wanted me dead," she had said in the recordings. "She was making us pay for being kind."
"And now you will pay for making us use kindness as a weapon," Xavier said. "You will be judged."
They bound her in public to a post as people watched. She had been mighty once and now she looked small and terrible. Phones recorded the stream of it. Men who had cheered for her now spat. Women who had trusted her turned away. A few old friends—faces I once loved—stood like stones while the crowd did the necessary work.
"Please," she said at last, and it was a thin voice. "I will do anything."
"Do you plead for leniency?" Isaac asked, and his tone carried the centuries.
She said yes until she had no breath left. That is how some punishments start—the begged-for mercy is the lever. Then the elders read the charges against her: betrayal, conspiracy, forced murders, creating false evidence, colluding with outsiders. They called witnesses. They produced the recorded messages. They named dead men and women who had gone missing because of the orders she had given and the men she had bought.
"The law will not be soft," Cassandra—no, not Cassandra—Xavier said. "We do what we must. The sect honors the memory of the dead."
"Shame," the crowd said, and a hundred voices agreed.
She knelt on the stone floor and the courtyard felt like a pit. The punishment was public not to humiliate in a petty way but to show a lesson: that those who would murder by paperwork would have to answer in the daylight where all could see the stain.
When the tongues of the crowd had had their fill of spectacle, I sat on the steps with my hands folded and watched a woman I had once loved as if nothing at all. It was not enough. Nothing would be enough. But it was a start. A wound needed an honest setting if it was to scar into something that made sense.
Afterwards, men would whisper and write: this was the day the sect remembered its sins. Or they would forget. Stories are like knives—they cut both ways. I only wanted to know one truth: that the man who had tilted the scale in Julieta's favor was known, and the name would find its way to the right ears.
In the weeks that followed, I kept a child's laugh and my old heart like two instruments in the same chest. I trained, and I asked questions. I walked the mountain and peered into old rooms. I found a ledger with names and dates and the signature of a buyer from across the valley—one who had met Julieta in the months between the corpses. It led me farther than I expected, to a man who had promised power and harvest.
I learned that power corrupts only when power is unchecked, and that love is often not brave enough to be honest. I learned that I could be small and still smash a long-cherished armor on the right hammer. I had my sword, and I had my name.
When I finally took a walk alone on the ridge above the valley with my old blade at my side and watched the sun break across the fields, I felt the weight of time settle.
"The sword remembers," I told the wind. "I remember."
Clement sat beside me silent. Julian blinked. Sullivan hummed a bright, private song.
"This sword will not forgive," I said.
"Nor will we," Clement said softly.
I wrapped my child's hands around the pommel of the Broken-Sky Sword, and for the first time in a very long time, I let the sky and the blade and the name I once had meet in a single, clean line.
And that is the day the sect remembered the taste of my blade again.
The End
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