Revenge12 min read
I Grew Up in the Dark — and I Burned the House That Raised Me
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I learned the names of light and sky from other people's mouths. I learned my own name from the lips of the man who bought me twice.
"Helene Scholz," I say, and the name tastes like a stolen fruit.
"My name is Helene," I tell the old woman who braids my hair in the back room. "What does the sun look like?"
She kneels in the lamplight, brushes my hair, and answers without looking up. "Like warm hands on your face. Like gold that does not bite."
"Will I ever see it?" I ask.
"Not if your father can help it," she says, and her hands are steady enough to weave a crown though her eyes shake.
My father—Eben Pedersen—was not a gentle man. He kept a house where girls were bred like prize fruit: no sunlight, so their skin would be pale as the finest porcelain; lessons in obedience; lessons in songs and strings and how to laugh politely. "Only sons are children," he would say when the lamplight threw his shadow long and mean across my face. "Daughters are ornaments and currency."
"We will make money from your beauty," he promised one night, holding the box that kept the mother-worms. The lid rattled like a small animal.
I did not know the full name for what he used until the auction. "This one lasts," he told a room full of men who had lanterns and leers. "She keeps still. I raised her myself. She will obey."
"Sell her," someone said, and their voices decked the night like flowers tossed at a ceremony.
I had been taught how to sit on a stage in silk, how to be still and sweet. I had been taught to play the zither so that wealthy hands would imagine me delicate and useful. When the bidding began, I did not know how to breathe.
A blow of cold on my skin, then pain like a thousand insects at my chest. I fell and convulsed, and then I knew the mother-worm had been used. I remember white tiles, the old zither falling, the sound of bracelets breaking on stone, and my father's laughter sharp as flint.
"Three thousand," a voice said, and amused laughter chased it.
Then another voice, low and cold, said, "Eleven thousand. Gold."
I stared at the man who bought me. He wore a mask—Atlas Engel—but when he pulled it away to whisper the price to my father, the moon in his face was a blade.
"You have a charm about you," he said later, eyes like winter. "You will be useful."
"Please," I croaked. "Please don't—"
He smiled. "Say my name, Helene."
"My name?" I had never been asked my name like that: a plea, a command, a promise.
"Say it," he insisted, and the box with the mother-worms sat between us like a verdict.
"Atlas," I said, because he told me to call him that. "Atlas."
He lifted the little lacquered box, opened it, and for the first time I smelled the thing I had been taught to fear: the wet, bright stench of instruments and hunger.
"You are mine now," he said, and took me to the house he called Jade Garden.
He had a way of moving that made the servants tilt. He fed me, dressed me, called me by my new name and, at times, simply watched me with an expression I could not name: hunger braided with longing. "You are mine," he said again, and sometimes he held me as if I were something that might break into light if he did not cup me softly. Other times he laughed and ordered the box opened to remind me of the rules.
"Don't test me, Helene," he whispered as the moth-lamps burned. "Don't make me use it."
I learned to obey. I learned too that obedience could be bought with promises.
"When your sixteenth year arrives," Atlas told me once when he lay like a winter sun, "ask for your wish. Choose and you shall have it."
On the day I turned sixteen he asked me in a voice that wanted me to kneel and beg. "Name me what you want, Helene," he said.
"I want the cure," I said at first. "The thing to take away the insects."
"No," he said, and his hand closed on my chin like a clamp. "Not that. Choose something else."
"I want you," I said then, because I had learned the lesson his way closed my mouth and kept me from the box.
"Say my name," he breathed. "Say it properly."
"Atlas," I said, and for the first time he smiled in a way that looked like relief.
The things he taught me after that were not kindness. He wanted me to stand before other men and be a jewel; he wanted me to be delicate for them, loyal to him. He also wanted me to betray them when ordered, to slip inside other houses and gather whispers and secrets. "You will be useful to me," he said. "You belong, Helene."
Then he sent me into a place that smelled of old money and old cruelty: an underground auction that should have been closed. There I was put into a smaller cage, meant to be sold again as a tool for his plots. Again I learned the sound of being sold. This time, something else happened: soldiers broke into the auction like a storm.
There was a man in the crowd who moved differently from the rest. He had an even face and a clean voice. He stepped close and asked, "What is your name?"
"Helene Scholz," I answered on reflex. The name felt like a talisman.
He unlatched my cage. "Come with me," he said. "My name is Desmond Sandoval."
"Why?" I whispered. "Why take me?"
"Because it is the right thing to do," Desmond said simply. "Because you are not a tool."
He was earnest in a way that made me ache. He took me to his mansion, cleaned the dirt off my skin, and put me in a dress the color of river water. He walked as if he knew how to hold the world steady.
"You will be safe here," he promised.
"Are you a prince?" I asked.
"I am the man who will wear that crown one day," he said. "I—Desmond—will make this right."
I told him about my sister—the one I had called Baixue. I held in my hands a small crooked jade pendant Baixue had given me the night she left for the same market my father taught her to sell herself in. "She was kind," I told him. "She had no armor in her."
Desmond's eyes went hard, and for the first time I saw a weapon where none had been a moment before. "Who did this?" he demanded.
"Atlas Engel," I whispered.
"Atlas Engel," he repeated like a prayer or a curse.
Desmond took me into his confidence. "Helene," he said. "Will you help me untangle them?"
There were nights when he taught me to read, to write, to speak like someone who belonged to more than a cage. He would sit across from me with a brush and demonstrate one bent stroke after another.
"Copy this," he would say, and I would try.
"Again," he would coax when my hand trembled.
One day he killed a whole terrible order by his decisions—one that ripped favor from a general who thought he could play the kingdom like a drum. "We will overturn what keeps you in dark rooms," he said. "We will burn the rackets that built this."
I believed him with an odd clarity that felt like the first morning after a long dream.
We burned the houses: not men, not women—but the systems, the contracts, the bones of the market. It was quick and terrible. It was fire that ate the lashings the way a new sun eats fog. When we returned to the place where I had lived my first years, I found something worse than the smell of smoke; I found my father's head arranged like a grotesque punctuation mark across the yard.
"Helene," Desmond said, and he had my pendant in his hand, and his face was a map of grief. "Tell me everything."
I told him the whole thing. About the mother-worms in their box. About the auctions. About the man who had been my keeper and who had taught me to say his name like worship.
"Then we end him," Desmond said.
We did end the system. We destroyed the houses and burned the contracts and smashed the jars. We believed that would be final.
Atlas Engel was not finished.
He found me on the road as we walked away from last embers. He had come back from a place I had thought distant, and he brought with him cruelty sharpened by humiliation. He cornered me just outside the tents where Desmond planned a show of mercy for the women saved from the houses.
"You think you can take everything?" Atlas hissed. "You think you can take my work? My life?"
"Atlas," I said, and the name of him on my tongue tasted of a man who had turned his hope to ash.
He did not answer with words. He bound me and dragged me into the city and into the place he had loved to call home: a hall where officials and merchants had once admired his cruelty as a kind of art. They had not expected the showdown.
When the city heard that Atlas Engel had been caught, the market came to watch.
"Bring him forth," the herald said.
"The man who carved lives into bills," others snickered. "The mad broker."
Atlas was made to stand in the square. His hair was unkempt, his hands trembled. They had taken the lacquered boxes from his rooms—empty now, glossy and dead as fish—and set them on wooden stools in front of him. Desmond stood nearby, not in a robe of vengeance but in his formal colors. He had a face like a judge and a heart like a man who had once loved poetry more than war.
"Atlas Engel," a voice called, and the city waited.
Atlas laughed once. "You will parade me like a beast, and it will make you feel clean," he said. "Do you think that will mend what you have broken? You'll stitch grief into a crown and call it justice."
"Stand quiet," Desmond said. "You have cost lives. You deserve to account."
I stepped forward because something old and furious lived in my chest. "Tell them," I said. "Tell them what you did. Tell them what you taught the merchants. Tell them how you used the box."
Atlas turned his face to me then, like a bird finding the last worm. "You betrayed me," he whispered. "You are why this is ruined. You chose him."
"I chose a man who taught me to read," I answered. "I chose a man who taught me to heal. I chose a man who would burn what caged us rather than buy from it."
"Burned me," Atlas said. He raised his chin as if in a toast to madness. "Then watch me burn."
They dragged him to the center where the boxes had been. He looked around and finally saw what he had made: the women he had traded, the bargains that were inked in their bones. They had come: some with faces unmade by suffering, some with eyes like cold steel. They had come to be witnesses.
"Tell them," Desmond urged me.
"I will," I said.
So I spoke for hours. I told them how Eben Pedersen had taught us to call the dark home. I told them how the mother-worms were kept in boxes carved with the names of men who thought themselves kings. I said the names out loud: "Atlas Engel put the worms in boxes." "He traded cure for obedience." "He bought us with coin and sold us to the hands that liked to hurt."
The crowd reacted like a sea. "Shame!" someone cried. "Shame!" a chorus followed. Phones did not exist then, but hands pointed, and tongues clapped loud enough to drown small objections. People who had once laughed at my father's jokes now twisted; some spat; some wept.
Atlas's face changed. At first he found a smile like a blade; then a flush of anger; then incredulous denial. "You lie!" he snapped. "You were mine! You taught me to value—"
"Value what?" a woman from the front row shouted. "Your toys? Your jars?"
He turned on her. "You were bought with gold," he spat. "You were sold to me by barter. I gave you a life."
"You gave us broken cages," the woman said. "You gave us names on paper."
The expression that dragged across Atlas's face was a slow unpeeling. The crowd watched him unstitched: glee, shock, denial, collapse. He tried to retake control. "You are playing a story!" he cried. "You will not leave me in darkness!"
"Look at him!" someone cried. They started throwing things. Small stones at first, then rotten food. Laughter, jeers, the city letting out a sound like relief.
He did not keep his composure. Atlas staggered, then lunged at Desmond. Hands took him. "Arrest him!" someone shouted with a voice that did not wait for someone else to act.
They hauled him to the plinth. He tried to twist free. "You think your burnings will give peace?" he hissed at me, and for the first time real fear flickered in his eyes.
I looked at him hard. "You turned human beings into ledgers," I said softly. "That is not a life. That is weight on a scale."
Then he did the only thing he had left to keep some control: he tore a small bottle from his belt—the last of his old instruments—and smashed it on his own palm. "I will not let them make me a puppet!" he shrieked. Blood ran down his hand.
The crowd saw the blood and went silent for one breathless moment, as if the world could still be turned with the force of one display. Then the storm rose again—no one moved to stop them. Some wanted to see him taken alive; others wanted to feel the justice like a burn in their palms. Atlas's eyes sought a familiar face—someone to forgive him—but there was only emptiness.
He started to speak, voice thin and raw. "Do you know what it is to be numbered?" he asked. "Do you know what it is to be always the inferior? I made a world that listened to me."
"Hear us," came a voice like a hammer. "You listened to yourself."
He lapsed into long, broken sentences, a man whose pretended reason had been unstitched. "I only wanted to be loved," Atlas said. "I wanted to be like the prince."
"Is that all?" someone mocked.
He sank to his knees. First there was denial; then bargaining; then a terrible, animal pleading. "Forgive me," he cried. "Forgive me, Desmond. Forgive me, Helene. I will tell everything—please—"
People in the crowd hissed and spat. Some covered their mouths. A few recorded everything with small glass boxes; others simply stared. The public had become a jury and a gallery.
Desmond stepped forward. "Atlas Engel," he said, voice calm as iron. "You will stand trial. The city will hear the women. You will be judged."
Atlas's face twisted into a grin like a wound. He laughed once, high and broken. "Judge me?" he said. "I was judge and jury. I was the trade."
Hands closed on him. They bound his wrists and marched him off to the place that would hold him for the official hearings. People did not cry mercy. They had seen the jars, the boxes, the ledger entries with names that sounded like the cries they themselves had swallowed.
That day, Atlas's punishment was public in exactly the way such punishments must be: his name became a caution. Men who had laughed at auctions found their names called in the streets. Merchants who had lined up for goods that came with small cages were confronted by wives and daughters who now knew the cost. The officials demanded accounting, and the ledger men counted with trembling hands as the women spoke.
Atlas's reaction changed in the square from anger to disbelief to humiliation to a final collapse into pleading. His voice was hoarse. He begged for bargains, for bribes, for the mercy that would return him to the old markets. No one gave him the comfort of denial. They offered the only thing they could: witness and truth.
And in the end, as his life unraveled under public scrutiny, Atlas had a last, blank look of someone who had misread the world. He took his own life in a small, private room before formal sentencing—a desperate act that denied the city the finality of the law he so much feared—and in the morning some in the crowd whispered that he had been granted the mercy of silence.
But he had received the punishment that mattered: exposure. He had been shown, to the very faces he had once mocked, as a man who built his power on cages and boxes. The crowd had watched the mask fall; they had watched the man beneath, and in those watching eyes there was condemnation and a small, hard kind of peace.
When I collapsed later that night, all the noise went thin in my ears. "Helene," Desmond said, catching me like a net. "Stay."
"I will," I whispered. "Until we finish it."
They gave me medicine. They sewed my wounds. They tried to heal the holes the mother-worm had torn in me. In my chest, something ached and gave me a strange calm: a knowledge that what I had been through could be used to change the world.
Desmond kept his word. He rose to power. He ordered schoolhouses opened for girls. He closed the auctions and declared the jars contraband. He set up commissions. He took the jade pendant my sister had given me and asked me to put it into a small box in the palace garden where he buried her memory with gentleness.
"Will you marry me?" he asked one afternoon, voice very small, as if making a private offering.
"I am not built for promise," I said. "I am built of scars."
"You are built of strength," he countered. "Be my partner, and help me rewrite the ledger they used on human lives."
"I will help you," I said. "I will help, as long as my hands can hold a pen."
So I did. I became a woman who taught others to read the soft shapes of letters and heavy laws, to count not in people but in rights. I taught girls who had been kept from light how to ask for daylight itself. We opened schools; we argued with magistrates; we cut tax burdens that kept families from feeding daughters' dreams.
And yet the worms' legacy lingered like an old stain. My chest sometimes burned with a memory of loss. The mother-worms were gone, but the echoes remained. In the final months of my life, when pain would come like sudden stabs and the doctors could not find the cure, Desmond would hold my hand and read aloud poems while the palace lamps blinked.
"Do you regret it?" he asked once, when I was thin and the ink on my fingers smudged shamefully.
"I regret being born into a place where my worth was a price," I said. "I regret that my sister died because she believed love could save someone who only knows to own. But I do not regret that I learned to live."
He kissed my forehead. "Then rest," he said, and I felt him like a presence steady as a column.
On the last morning, I saw my sister in a dream: Giavanna Howard—my Baixue—wearing a gown of frost and laughing at the sky. "You came late," she said, but there was no anger.
"I tried," I said.
"You did what you could," she said. "Now sleep."
I woke to sunlight for the first time. It was coming through a small window in the palace infirmary, a thin, honest beam. It lit the gold-lotus scar at my nape—the small mark our father had forced us to receive like a brand—and for a moment I felt both pain and grace.
"Helene," Desmond whispered, eyes streaming. "You will be remembered."
"I know," I said. "Teach them well."
I had one last thing to do. I took the crooked jade pendant and I placed it in Desmond's hand. "Take it to Giavanna," I said. "Promise me you will not let the world forget her."
"I promise," he said.
The light was a warm hand. I closed my eyes on it. The lashes were the last thin line between the dark that had made me and the day I had helped build. When I went, it was gentle. I left behind schools and names and a list of laws. I left behind a wound that was salted and then closed. I left behind a story that would be told by children who would never have to fear the auctioneer's call.
And in the palace garden, between the stone markers, my pendant and Giavanna's name sit together, buried under a soft mound of soil and the tiny white stone that reads "Helene Scholz — who taught us to read daylight."
The End
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