Rebirth18 min read
I Fell, I Woke, I Took a Red Lotus
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I spat salt water and grit out of my mouth and blinked at a roof that threatened to fall through the sky.
"Where am I?" I said aloud, though my throat felt like dry paper.
A boy with eyes too old for his face leaned over me with a wooden cup and poured water down my throat. He was five, maybe six, all knees and big, terrified eyes.
"You're awake!" he cried. "Sister, you finally woke up."
"I—" I pushed the fog from my head. My body ached as if someone had taken strings and jerked them hard along my bones. I tried to sit. The bed rolled like a boat. The blanket smelled of sun and dust. The house walls were mud and straw; the roof sagged like an old man's back.
"Who are you?" I asked.
The boy grabbed my fingers and squeezed. "Elroy," he said. "Elroy Barber. Sister, you can't leave me. Daddy and everyone only loves the twins. You can't hurt my sister!"
"My sister?" I tried to laugh, but my chest burned. I could not remember how to breathe and a memory like rain slid into me—sharp, bright.
"You're Kensley," he whispered when he saw the scar at my navel, the tiny red birthmark three fingers below the belly button.
The name hit like a bell. Kensley Gustafsson. I tasted a dozen lifetimes. My other life—the life before this life—flashed behind my eyes in cuts and scraps: a palace of sweat and iron, endless training in healing herbs and bone-soldering needlework, a label of heir to a house of martial healers. A trial lab where I made a cure no one should have known about. And a chase across rocks and sea, black-clad men with knives, the cliff, the cold, the drop.
"I jumped," I said, and the memory answered me like thunder. "I used my last medicine to bring someone back. They came for me. I fell."
Elroy hiccupped and pressed his forehead to mine. "Don't go," he begged. "Don't leave me."
"Elroy," I said. My voice was thin. I wrapped my hand around his. "I am not going anywhere."
A loud slam shook the house. The door thundered open and a voice like a rusted blade cut the air.
"Where is that cursed thing? Why isn't it dead?" The woman who came in wore her mouth like a knife. Her hair was tangled, but the hate she carried was clean, like ice.
"Look," she jeered, "the witch lives! I told you, get rid of her. She brought misfortune. She stole our luck."
"Mom—" The twins behind her, a girl and a boy trained in cruelty from birth, smirked. They were small, but their laughter had teeth.
I felt something like an old engine start within me, a cold machine memory turned on. The blood that had been mine in another life—steady, professional, used to pulling needles and mixing potions—came back like muscle remembering a run. I stood.
"Stop," I said. My voice was calmer than I felt. "You will not hit him."
The woman lunged with a broom. The boy shielded me with his slight body. The broom connected with his cheek.
"Don't you dare!" I roared and swung the nearest stick like a weapon picked from old tales. It connected with her arm. She stumbled and began to wail as the rest of the house froze. My hand still shook.
"Dinner is ready," my so-called father grunted from the doorway. He smelled of cheap wine and cow dung. "Stop the fuss. She's just a trouble magnet."
"She's the problem," the stepmother shrieked. "Sell her off and we'll have peace."
"Sell me?" I said aloud. It held a strange taste. I felt more than twelve; I felt the memory of a woman trained to rule a household of instruments and herbs. The world had given me a second chance. I would take it.
When night fell, the house echoed with whispers. Elroy fell asleep wrapped around my arm. I sat in the dark and let other memory drain into me.
"Wake me if he tries anything," I told Elroy. He sobbed quietly and babbled he would watch until dawn.
The next day, while black birds hung like punctuation in the sky, the stepmother and her twins and my father moved like predators through the village; they thought they had plotted my sale. They did not count on the bright, impossible luck that followed me like a stray comet.
I had only the memory of hand pressure, of formulas, of burn patterns and bone heat. I also had a heartbeat in my chest that belonged to another life and a scar that answered to a strange warmth.
A red light woke me at midnight like a camera flash. The mark on my belly flared. The air in my room hummed. I knew what it meant before I moved: I had a thing inside me that made a house appear.
A voice, bright and arrogant, filled my head.
"You are finally awake," it said. It was not voice like I had heard. It was music and iron combined.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"I am the Red Lotus," it said. "Call me Lotus. You are my owner."
My laugh came out rough. "That's absurd."
"Am I?" the small, insolent light said. "You are a fool, Kensley Gustafsson. You fell like a sparrow and woke in a straw house. You should be grateful."
"How long have I been out?" I asked.
"Time moves funny between worlds. Ten days here, three months where I live," Lotus replied. "You have opportunity. House, fields, tools. I will obey you if you claim me. You can step into my palace."
I swallowed. The palace—inside this black empty plain the Lotus let me see—was a temple-like place grown out of silence. The Red Lotus looped like jewelry in my head and told me the rules. It showed me rooms with shelves of books and piles of white stones and a bathing pool that could burn your bones until they remade themselves. It offered me tools and formulas and a way to train faster than a lifetime, if I paid the price.
"All that sounds expensive," I said.
"It is." Lotus dripped amusement. "But you learned better than most how to be cheap. You already can make hearts mend and bones knit. I will help you become stronger. We begin."
Soon I was moving through the Lotus palace with my hands uncurling knowledge like new leaves. A simple herb that in the village would fetch little became a medicine worthy of a line on a ledger. The Lotus introduced me to a book that opened when I touched it and showed its words in my language. The Red Lotus chuckled as I devoured ways to combine, to burn, to fold.
"Don't be a fool," Lotus warned. "Don't waste your days on pity. Use power."
"I am not here to be a saint," I said. "I'm here to keep my brother alive."
"Good," Lotus said. "We will begin with a small test. Make a basic salve."
I worked through the night, muscles aching, memory and new recipes weaving into one another. The salve glowed faintly when it cooled.
"Not bad," Lotus admitted. "Next, a water to pull out rot."
"You do most of the talking," I observed.
"Because you were quiet in your other life," Lotus replied. "Now you are awake."
I did not know then that any act of creation within Lotus's rooms broadcast a signal far beyond my village. Families who had once kept artifacts and heirs in the dark smelled the wind of awakening. Hands with good practice and bad intent turned toward us. I learned that later, under the weight of eyes.
But first, I had to survive the small, tight trouble of my household.
I woke one morning to the muffled sob of my brother.
"Someone tried to kill him," Elroy whispered.
"What?" I moved like a person with a secret weapon. "Who?"
"A bowl of food at grandma's," he said. "Heena took him. He drank it and fell down."
My stomach folded.
"Who is Heena?" I asked.
My stepmother, Carrie Schaefer, had a way of poisoning with a smile. She had accused my mother long dead of being easy and had married my father for comfort. She had two children and a nest of cruelty. Their names became a study in hatred: Matilde—pretty and sharp—and a twin son who lived in the shadow of Matilde's smirk.
"She set it up," Elroy said. "My grandmother pointed at me. They said I had caused trouble. I was there—she fed me and I ran. Then I slept like stone."
We ran. I ran like a blade to the village. The old woman, Therese Thomas, clutched her chest and sobbed. People watched our arrival like it was a play.
"Who did this?" I demanded. My voice had the cold of a scalpel.
The house smelled of rot. The cup they had used still sat on the table: a smear of dried grain and bile. I tasted the air and my mouth filled with a chemical note that wasn't common to our cooking—rodent poison.
"Your granddaughter murdered a child," I said to Therese Thomas before she could speak. The accusation landed like a stone.
Villagers surrounded us in seconds. Faces that had spat at me for years turned to watch. The stepmother laughed. Matilde curled her lip.
"She made him eat it," Carrie said loud, eyes sharp. "He had been so troublesome. It was for the best."
I wanted to lift her head by its hair and twist. Instead I walked into the center of the square and raised my voice.
"Do any of you have the law on your lips?" I asked. "Do you think the world still works by what your grandmothers taught? Poison is a crime."
"She is only a child," Carrie's voice rose like a kettle. "You cannot blame a child."
"Elroy is our child," I said. "He is my brother. And I will not let him be buried for someone else's greed."
The village buzzed. Someone brought a uniformed officer down from the town. The arrival of the county constable was the thing I had learned to use. The law scares people who thought names and rumors were enough.
In the police station, the questioning began. Matilde's face was pale; Carrie tried to keep her composure. My father, Beau Donovan, paced like someone trying to grow teeth.
"You will answer," the constable told them. "Was poison used?"
They looked at each other. I watched every twitch. I had Lotus's senses now—an invisible hum in my blood when someone lied.
"It was me," Matilde whispered at last. Her voice cracked. She admitted, eyes wild. "I was angry. I put it in the bowl."
The room turned heavy. The constable wrote, the villagers murmured. But the law had to do more than take a plea. They wanted a public end to the lie so everyone would see the cruelty it took to act that way.
"We will bring them to the village square tomorrow," the constable said. "Let people see. Let those who thought to hide behind silence stand witness."
They were brought out like people painted with shame. The square filled. The stepmother shrieked. Someone recorded with a small camera; others leaned in. I felt the weight of every stare like cold rain.
"Why did you do it?" I called to Matilde, who had been the one to hand the cup.
"It was a joke gone wrong!" she screamed. "I didn't mean—"
"You put poison in a child's food," I said, voice low enough that the crowd leaned in to hear. "You took a life with your hand."
"Look at them," Elroy whispered into my sleeve. I felt his small body shaking.
The constable—an efficient woman with gray hair named Juan Mason—read the charges aloud. I watched the faces around me shift. People who had laughed when I was mocked now had to watch as the law took a step in front of them.
"This is the law," Juan said. "This is what our civility asks. You are charged with attempted murder and child endangerment. The magistrate will decide further steps."
Matilde went white. "I didn't mean…"
"You didn't mean a lot," I said. "Do you think apologies will stitch a wound like this?"
Carrie began to cry loudly and take on a posture of injured innocence. Beau Donovan shouted and tried to show he was a man provoked. But the constable called witnesses. The old woman Therese was forced to tell her story of urging Matilde to be "clever" with the girl, and how the family decided to "get rid of" troublemakers. A neighbor produced a pot with the same chemical crust on the rim. The evidence stacked like bricks.
They were ordered to stand before the villagers the next morning at dawn.
When the sun rose, the whole village edged into the square. Voices like wind rustled. My stepmother stood at the center, shoulders shaking with practiced faux grief. Her daughter Matilde had been taken away to the magistrate.
"You poisoned a child," I said simply.
"She was a bad girl," Carrie cried. "She took what was not hers."
"Bad? You used murder because she ate with her brother's eyes on her?" I asked.
The constable made them kneel. "You will confess your intent," Juan Mason said. "You will return any gains you have gotten by your lies. You will take wet rags to your door and keep them there for a month as a sign of shame. You will perform public service for this village for the next year."
An usher held up papers that read like sentences. But that was not the half of it.
Matilde was hauled into the center again, her face drained. "I am sorry," she said, voice thin.
"You are sorry," I said. "You are sorry now because the law makes you say it. What did you feel when you put the cup down?”
"She laughed," Matilde whispered, and the voice made something raw in me ache.
"You laughed because she was hungry and you were not," I said. "You laughed because you were taught to take. You laughed because your mother promised you a life without struggle."
Elroy sobbed. I held him.
"And you, Beau Donovan," I said, turning to my father. "You who sold your honor for a warm body. You who let your children think cruelty is a language. Stand and tell everyone you will not sell what you promised to keep."
Beau's face reddened. "I—I did what I had to do," he stammered.
"Then watch, so you remember the cost."
I walked to the low wooden platform, picked up the stepmother's broom, and scratched words into the dirt with impatience: You tried to kill a child.
People watched as the stepmother's face turned in on itself. A woman who had given me every insult she could find now had no weapon left. Faces that had been neutral now turned to stare. Photographs of the confession spread through the market like a new crop of gossip. Children who had once been encouraged by the stepmother now saw the cost in their elders' eyes.
"Good," Lotus hummed in my head, soft and proud. "You used the law. Use what you can."
But the story did not end in a single morning. The world beyond the village that smelled the pull of a strange artifact began to stir. Families who had locked away relics and heirs caught a scent of our Red Lotus flare in the east wind. Notices passed between tight lips. The House of Shadows—lineages who had secreted artifacts for centuries—sent scouts.
Two men, strangers in military clothes and dry snow in their lashes, arrived in our valley some weeks later. They were tall and precise and moved like machines when they read the world. Cedric Pereira was one—tall, dark, eyes like stone. Guy Said was the other—lighter, loud, his smile never warm. They watched us from a distance like predators study a rabbit.
"Who are they?" Elroy asked, clutching a red scarf.
"I don't know," I said. "But they look like trouble."
They did not come for the children; they came for the rumor of a Red Lotus call. They asked about miraculous medicines. They asked about a girl in a poor house who had bread and coins. They told stories of relics and treasures and offered money in a way that smelled like a trap.
I knew how to take offers and make them safe. I also knew the danger of letting strangers buy what they could use to dominate others.
"Why are you here?" Cedric had said the first time we met him near the pines. He stood taller than most men, eyes like knives.
"We're searching for something," I said. "So are you."
"Your words are clever," Guy Said said, with a twist. "You sell herbs. You can sell it to us or to the city. Which will it be?"
"Not to you," I said.
Too proud, they thought. Too young. Maybe both. They left with a move like a promise.
It was the city sale that began the true turn of fate. I took a handful of our harvested roots—ginseng-like, rare and old—and walked to the market. I sold them to a kindly apothecary named Juan Mason in the city; he called them acutely old and worth more than the small town thought.
"You should be careful," he told me as he wrapped the last root in oil paper. "There are men who follow riches. You don't seem the type to lose what you build."
That night, someone tried to take out my storeroom. They came with knives and boots and no speech. They underestimated what it means to be a woman with a red mark and the memory of another life's hands.
They found me awake. They found me with a bow I had forged from an old tree and arrows sharpened in the space of pain. I shot into the dark without counting. A man grabbed the door and a light flared.
"We're taking those roots," said a voice like gravel.
"Not tonight," I said. I let not pity but will answer.
They fled into the woods like dogs.
But the arrival had made the watchers stir. The House of Shadows sent a man in a white beard and hard eyes—Tucker Erickson—who owned a house in town and kept secrets like taxes. He came to my new, small house, the one I bought with city coins, and looked at the courtyard and the red tree I had planted there.
"You have a glow," he said in a gravel voice. "It came to me in a long dream."
"Because a red light chose a weak body," I said. "So it goes."
He laughed in a way that made the air taste of velvet and iron. "One day, child, you will leave this place. The world will know you. But you must learn to hold things lightly. Even Red Lotuses can burn."
The lot of us changed. Elroy learned letters. Under the tutelage of a school head, Therese Thomas—no, she was the old woman in the village—no, the school head was a different woman: Therese Thomas had kept her distance. The principal in town, a quiet woman named Therese Thomas in our papers, watched him read and cried over his progress.
"Your brother will be more than we imagined," she said quietly, and I told Lotus to be patient like a stone.
Lotus taught me more. We pulled the filth from my bones in its hot baths and it taught me cultivation—how to draw quiet breath into small valleys of power. I burned herbs and taught Elroy the rudiments of scanning air for lies and of making a bow string with peat and thread.
Then one day, in the depth of the mountain when I went to harvest during winter, a man fell from the ridge. He was greyed and broken. I patched bone and wrapped his leg in wood splints and draped him with woven cloth.
"Who are you?" I asked when he woke.
"Gilbert Galli," he said, voice like daybreak. "I was hunted. Thank you."
"You're welcome," I said. "Sit up and eat."
He laughed when I cooked a soup without salt like a maestro and drank it all like a king learning to be mortal.
"You look like a man with enemies," I told him.
He brushed my fingers aside as if a shiver of something else pulled him. "And you look like a woman who calls mountains home."
He learned, and we shared a spring and a long conversation about men who built empires with other people's medicine. He told me of scouts and lines of men that he had seen, of a party that had once tried to corner a resource like ours. He called them names as if calling them would make them small: "Collectors," he said.
"When they come," Gilbert said one night by the fire, "they will not ask. They will take or they will break. You must be ready."
I laughed. "Did you think I was not already ready?"
He nodded. "You are dangerous in a sweet way."
There were other moments: working the town market with a cart of roasted deer, teaching Elroy to shoot, standing in front of my old village and turning their fears into a lesson about law. There was also revenge, small and slow: the cigarette brand names I put into the mouth of a cruel cousin's fiancé until he coughed and ran off, the paper I taped to the stepmother’s door that named her "poisoner" until she had to scrub each wooden plank clean before daylight to keep her name from the ways of gossip.
But one punishment I refused to let be small. The men who had tried to steal our roots returned under the banner of collectors, led by a man with a face like a clock and patience like frost: Adolfo Guerrero. He had money and a laugh without joy.
They came in a winter of iron-gray skies and tried to make me barter the Red Lotus.
"You have an artifact," Adolfo said. "How much to sell it? Name your price."
"Freedom," I said. "Name yours."
He laughed and walked away. Later that week, he returned with his men and a public show.
"You will make me choose," he said, and the town watched as if a theater had opened.
I did not hand over my space. I let him take what he hoped—the market's fear. He tried to make me give up my house by force. He failed because I had already sown the village's sense of justice like seed. It was the village school head who called the constable, and Juan Mason, the same doctor-constable who had tended to the poisoned man in the drug shop, came again with officers.
Now, because the law had helped us once, it helped us again. But the reward was not only the law. Adolfo was stripped of his claims publicly. The men who had followed him were led through the market with a bell hung around their necks by the constable, reading the charges aloud: attempted theft, intimidation, conspiracy. People spat into the dust as if cleansing. Adolfo, who had always bought silence with smiles, now stood without his coin. He pressed a paper into the hands of a witness that would ensure he left the valley bruised in reputation for years.
We had a different punishment for those who had wronged us within the family.
When the magistrate decided, in the square, it was not merely the sentence that burned into memory but the way the sun caught the dust on their faces. Matilde was made to publicly share the truth across the square and apologize to Elroy and every child who had been taught cruelty by her example. But that apology was not the punishment. The magistrate added an instruction: Matilde must spend a year under the care of the woman she had sought to harm, feeding and nursing Elroy and his needs under supervision, while the village judged and witnessed daily.
Carrie, the stepmother, was given clear terms: public confession twice a day for a week, then one month of daily community service where she cooked and cleaned for the elders she had scorned and attended to the sick with my instruction. She would be barred from administrating any family decisions; a trustee from the village would manage household provisions. Her money—already meager—was levied to pay for Elroy's medical expenses and the cost of his hospital stay.
Beau Donovan's punishment was peculiar to his nature. He was forced to sign a document that severed his legal rights to sell his children or make marriages for gain. He would be stripped of any claim to Elroy's guardianship unless a court later proved he had worked to restore trust. The villagers sat and watched him sign in the dust, his thick hands shaking like a drunk's.
When the news spread, the reactions varied: some cheered. Some cried for mercy. Some—once the people who had fed on our shame—stood silent and small.
But the most devastating punishment was social. The stepmother's neighbors refused to buy her bread. The cousins lost their place in marriage markets. People who once smiled in passing now kept their distance. For those who traded on favor and whispered bargains, the market closed like a heavy eye.
"It hurts," Matilde mouthed the first time I saw her—but it was hollow, as if a bell rung from far off.
"It should," I said.
"They were cruel to you," a middle-aged woman whispered. "But what if the law makes them crueler?"
"The law holds them while we watch," I said.
"Does that make you kinder?"
"It makes me responsible," I answered.
The long punishment became an object lesson. It was a thing the village would tell their children about, a legend about an awkward girl who grew into someone who could call the law—and which, in the end, the law listened.
"You wanted them to be punished," Lotus hummed like a sly wind. "You wanted them to see consequence."
"I wanted him safe," I said. "For the rest, I wanted them to understand the cost."
Life moved on like a river that never stops worrying a bank. We planted fruit trees in the space. The Red Lotus kept shapes in its chest and showed me how to fold green things so they bore seeds fast. The small orchard grew. Elroy learned to tie a bow and to read and to be quick and sharp in his eyes. He learned the chords of reading that allow a man to carry a community on his back if he ever needed to; his letters became a sword.
Gilbert left eventually, with a promise like a shadow. He hunted for a while and then went to the country of collectors to act as a witness to threats. He later sent news of far-off storms and men who bought laws and bought people. He sent me a small carved stone that fits in my palm: for luck and for speed.
Years folded in the way fruit ripens. I kept my head down and my hands busy. The Red Lotus pulsed and taught me small things—ways to stitch fortunes out of small dangers. I grew stronger in ways I had been taught in a life that tasted of iron and learning. I kept my promise to Elroy: he had his books and his warm bed and the right to decide his path.
"Will you ever leave?" he asked me once, older and steadier.
"Where would I go?" I asked.
"Anywhere," he said with childish hope.
"To the place where the Red Lotus is king," I answered. "Maybe one day. If I go, I will make sure you have enough letters to buy a good life."
I still woke sometimes and found the red mark burning in its little private way. I still slipped into Lotus's hall and felt like a queen without a crown. We trained and we traded and we watched the men who walked like wolves lose their teeth in the town. We watched as the law took the greedy and made it plain.
One evening, when the sky was the color of old paper, I went to the courtyard of our house—Dawn Garden, the name I had given it because I liked the sound—and sat where the sun touched the stone.
"You're doing well," Lotus said softly.
"Do you ever call me by what I was once?" I asked.
"Old names do not serve you," it replied. "New names fit better."
I thought about the cliff I had fallen from twice—once in the life that made me, and once into this second body—and I thought about the circle I had stitched around a boy who needed a sister to survive.
"One day," I said into the falling light, "someone will try to take more than my roots. Someone will try to take the Lotus. Then they'll learn what happens when mountain girls get wise."
Lotus hummed and folded itself into my mind like a map. I closed my eyes and let tomorrow come.
When the next storm rose and the collectors came again—bolder, hungrier—they found not a frightened girl but a woman with a house, with a law behind her, with a clan of villagers who had seen what happened when they turned their faces away. They found a woman who had felt what it was to be thrown away and had decided that nothing would be taken without public witness.
They fled. The collectors ran like dogs from the light.
We kept the Red Lotus like a secret that is not told aloud: living space, a place of growth and medicine, and a fierce, tiny guardian. The town called our courtyard "Dawn Garden" and sent children to watch Elroy thread arrows with his hands. The women who had once spat on me came slowly to borrow a cup of sugar and then, gradually, to ask a question about how their children might learn to read.
On the first day when Elroy stood at the schoolyard and recited his essays aloud, I stayed in the doorway rubbing lotus oil between my palms. He lifted his head, and his voice made the morning soft.
"One day," he said, as if promising what he could not yet know, "I will protect you."
"I know," I answered. "I taught you how."
We laughed, and the Red Lotus hummed like a pleased thing.
When night fell and the red mark at my navel stopped simmering for the day, I reached into the darkest drawer and placed my smallest talisman there—the tiny copper ring my grandfather had given me in that life where I had been someone else. I closed the drawer on something that was both memory and promise.
The Red Lotus pulsed, and I felt its strange contentment. I had been thrown off a cliff and landed into a house of straw and bone, but I had climbed up a different mountain.
"Keep your roots," Lotus said, half warning, half comfort.
"I will," I said. "And if anyone wants to take them, I'll make sure the world sees."
I looked at Elroy, sleeping with his head heavy on a pillow like a child who had eaten enough to dream. I looked at the old tree in Dawn Garden, lit by a moon like a coin.
"One day," I whispered, "I will take you higher than this town."
But for tonight, I kept my hand on the red mark at my belly and let the Lotus hum me into sleep.
The End
— Thank you for reading —