Rebirth17 min read
I Returned to Find My Temple, and Everyone Had Chosen Her
ButterPicks18 views
I woke to a sky that did not belong to me.
"Abigail?" someone said. "Is that—"
I opened my eyes to silk, to light, to a hall dressed for a wedding. Red banners streamed like rivers, and every face in the room was turned toward a pair on a dais. The man at the center wore the cold, familiar armor of Aarón Muller, but he wore joy—he wore it in a way I had never seen him wear anything. Beside him stood a woman with my eyes.
"Slow," a voice called. "Hold it—"
The master of ceremony stopped. He frowned. "Abigail Crane?" he said, as if summoning a ghost.
I thought I would laugh. Instead I felt the world tilt.
"I am Abigail," I said. "I have been—"
"She is dead," someone near the front muttered. "We buried Abigail a hundred years ago."
"Dead?" the master of ceremonies repeated, and the room made a sound like paper cracking.
A hundred years. I had given a life to seal a rift, to save the living, and I had slept in ice, and I had spent a hundred years mending a soul. I had returned to the place I had tended for millennia, to the shrines that had once carried my prayers like birds, and there was another on my pedestal, smiling in my stead.
"Who is she?" I asked. "Who is the woman on my shrine?"
"Claudia Cannon," a voice answered very softly.
"Claudia," the woman on the dais said, and she stepped down in a slow, careful way. She examined my face like a piece of china. "So it's you," she said. "So they've finally let you out."
"You mean they let me out of a tomb," I said. "Why—"
"She took your place," a disciple said; his face was pale, but his tone was brash. "She healed people with the recipes you left. She stood in your name when you—when you disappeared."
"She stood where I stood," I said. "She took your offerings," the woman said now, and her hand hovered like a wing. "She wore your name on altars because she looked like you, didn't she? Do you think we didn't notice? They called her 'Abigail' and they laughed and praised, but they were praising the shade."
My hand went to the small red mole at my brow. The mole that had been mine since I was young still burned with the memory of sun. Claudia's forehead was smooth, save for a faint flush; she had a small red lotus embroidered at her shoulder in the statue's robe.
"You were supposed to be dead," she said plainly. "You were supposed to be a story. We kept your place warm for a hundred years and called it worship. You come back and—what right do you have to be angry? You left us your light and your pride. We took it and made ourselves better."
"She lied for the sake of the truth," someone murmured like a prayer. "She saved towns. People knelt."
"You saved nothing," I heard myself say. "You are a thief. You took what was mine."
Claudia's mouth parted. "I was given a choice," she said. "I was given your titles because people longed for the warmth you never gave. They said you were cold. They said you were distant, Abigail. They wanted smiling hands on their foreheads. I gave them that."
Aarón's face was a map of guilty lines. He had been my betrothed a hundred years ago—promised in truest duty, not just custom. He had made a vow that belonged to memory and blood. I remembered spooning river water into the cup he had refused once, the way he had taught me the quiet of eastward tenseness. Now he stood with his hand over Claudia's, and the warmth that had been our future seemed like someone else's memory.
"Stop," I said. "This is not—"
"Mother," I whispered, because she sat among them, smiling the way old women smile when a wedding is proper. She looked at me like someone who had been told a story and then told it again, and then decided the original had been exaggerated. "This is my child," she said to Claudia as if nothing had happened.
Someone moved. A hand slammed on the floor; Case Bailey rose—my former pupil, the boy who had once learned impatiently under my cane. "Abigail," he said sharply, "you are hurt. Do us the courtesy to leave. This is a day for them."
"Do us the courtesy to call me by my name," I said. My voice was steady in a way my heart was not. "I taught you. I kept your hands from breaking. Do you stand now as defender of a stranger who wears my face?"
A laugh like wind cut. "She is not a stranger," Case said. He displayed the arrogance of a man who had tasted the warmth of favor. "She is the present. You are the past. Past gods are bones. Bones do not rule the living."
A barbed thing climbed up my chest—an old hunger I had sealed away with vows and prayers. I felt flinches of fever in my limbs as memory and anger and a nervous, ancient grief jostled for place.
"You call me bone," I said. "Then remember how bones taught you to stand."
Someone threw sand. A spell clipped my shoulder. My muscles buckled. When I went to speak again a blackness, like smoke of the coldest kind, rose from the floor. Longxin—Case Bailey—had always had a taste for cruelty. He flourished mild magics, the sort you save for livestock and loud arguments. He meant to wrangle me into a corner without pain.
"Stop," Aarón said. He seemed to catch himself between two currents. He had not expected me to return, perhaps. He had not expected me to cut. He stepped toward me and his face softened, but he did not step between Case and me.
Claudia's hand lifted and it was like a strike. For a moment everything went slow. The sound of the hall contracted into one small, sharp report.
"That was for the years you took," she said, and her hand was trembling. She had tears on her lashes.
"They claimed you," she said to the crowd, "and they made me their Abigail. I was never your pretender because I wanted to be. I accepted what I could for safety. You call me vile. You call me thief. You think your return can sweep that away."
"You struck the goddess," Case said, with a grin that was meant to be triumph.
Someone in the crowd—we thought them friend—stepped forward: "She must be bound. She must be judged."
A chill wind moved across my back. My hand became a fist and I realized I was bleeding at my lip.
"I am Abigail," I said. "And I will not be bound by a small man's theater."
The hall stilled at my tone. I felt something like the old power spiderweb through my limbs—the ember of all that I had been, how I had tied my fingers to the world to keep it from cracking. I thought of the ways I had buried myself to hold a fissure together, of the ice that had kept me silent and the hundred-year sleep. I thought of the offerings on the altars—my name meant to be a bulwark for strangers—and then I remembered the bow that had been passed down by my father's line, the old relic hidden somewhere in my memory.
"Do you remember the bow?" I asked them. "Do you remember the sea of light that came when I used it to seal a breach?"
They did not answer.
Claudia's lips trembled. "It is not for you to—"
"It is mine," I said flatly. "This thing that calls me Abigail is mine. You used my name and the people followed. I taught healing. I fed the hungry. I do not owe you my worship, but neither will I let you play goddess with my life."
They murmured. The room had become a hive of small murmurs.
Case was proud—too proud. He stepped forward. "Bind her," he said. "She is raving. The old magic will take her."
"Bind me?" I repeated. I felt something inside peel open. The rumor of old pain, the memory of every humiliating minute, turned to a hard bar. "If you will bind the one who binds the world, bind yourselves first."
Longxin smiled. "Then we'll see you rattle."
He cast a light chain. It clung to the air and tried to close like a noose. It brushed my wrists and found only the dust of a god who had slept. The chain caught and fizzed. The magic recoiled. Longxin's swagger faltered. I saw something run across his face: surprise.
He had expected me to be smaller, a cracked idol. He had not expected the storm I had slept through.
I breathed.
"People," I said, loud enough to carry to the windows. "Do you remember why I sealed the rift?"
"Because you gave your life," murmured someone.
"Because she did," another answered, and his voice trembled with more sincerity than their silence deserved.
"Because I died so you might not," I said. "And when you thought me gone, you put my face on a statue and called it the same prayer. You thought worship was a garment. You were wrong. The world is not a gown to change when it fits better on another."
Longxin laughed. "A fine speech. Rouse the masses with words. Then the world will love us, Abigail."
The crowd edged closer. The old pride in their faces changed to curiosity, and then to interest. They had fed on the drama of the day like birds. That interest turned like a blade.
I picked up my voice and said, "Show me your hands. Show me every offering you've given to the temples with my name. Show them all."
Aarón started to step forward, but someone else—an elder—clapped a hand. "It is unusual," he said. "But if she asks—"
Crates were opened. Boxes emptied. People pulled out ribbons, burned incense, lists of names, ledgers. The candles in the hall guttered with their presence.
I let them. I let them self-justify themselves into revealing their choices. Each thing they laid out was a small betrayal: names of children who had been prayed for instead of me, medicines distributed by hands taught to mimic my touch, promises offered for my return and then rescued by a face that looked like mine. It was an economy of memory, and every coin showed where they had traded me away.
Then I did the thing no one saw coming. I asked for two witnesses: Aarón Muller and Case Bailey.
"I will let you speak your truth," I said to them both. "Speak where all can hear."
Aarón came forward. He had that look of a man whose life had been tidy and then unstitched. "We were afraid," he said. "We were afraid to ask the heavens why you did not return. We were afraid this world could not hold you. We found comfort in Claudia. We thought—"
"You thought I was gone," I finished.
"Yes," he said quietly. "We thought the world was safer with her in your place."
"Was she offered everything?" I asked, leaning toward Case. "Was she given vows and rings? Were there bargains struck in the dark? Did someone decide your worth was less than your shape?"
Case did not look at me. He looked at Aarón instead. "Abigail," he said. "You were gone. We chose what kept the world less terrified. We chose the salvation people wanted."
"You mean you lied," I said. "You chose comfort over truth."
Case blinked. "We—"
Someone laughed. A high, incredulous sound. Claudia's hands were at her throat, and she looked like someone watching a play she could not quite learn the lines for.
I stood very still. The hum of the room slowed. The old power, quiet and cold, came back into me like tidewater.
"Case Bailey," I said. "Where were you a hundred years ago, when I bled in the ice? Where was your fine brand of justice?"
"I served the temple," he said. "I prayed."
"Prayer is not food, Case," I said. "And prayer is not armor. When I lay down my life to seal what would have eaten your fields, where were you?"
"I—" He looked for the right word and found none. The room grew tight.
"I taught you to tend wounds," I said. "I taught you how to bind broken bone without scarring the soul. You learned to reach for mercy. Where was mercy when you helped pull my name off an altar and put another's face in its place?"
Case's face had gone pale. Around us, people shifted. The crowd had become spectators, and in spectators was judgement.
"I bound you once," I said. "You will see the justice you loved in practice."
For a long minute no one moved. Then Case made the mistake of laughing. It came out small and thin.
"She will not. She has gone mad," he said.
I moved like a shadow. I had no need to throw a word. The hall smelled of incense and old things. I reached into the old place that had been mine, and in the silence I found that which could not be forged: the memory of the divine bow my father had kept, the heavy, living wood of it, and the way it bent with a grief that was not mine alone.
I drew it like a breath.
"Please," Aarón said, and there was an ache in him that had nothing to do with ceremony.
I stood with the bow. The light in the hall changed—it found angles it had not seen before. The bow's string thrummed like a far bell. I aimed not at a man but at the truth.
"Tell the people the story of the salvations you bought," I said. "Tell them who made your fences and why you fenced them."
Case stepped back. "You cannot—"
"Watch," I said, and I let the bow sing.
A narrow ribbon of light shot forth and touched Case's chest. It did not pierce skin; it pierced pretense. In the space of the light his face contorted: bright arrogance to shock to pleading, to a ghastly, exposed shame. The room heard the sound of something cracking—a private armor of hypocrisy.
"I—" Case whispered. "I didn't—"
"Did you feed the poor with my recipes and call them your own?" I asked. "Did you convince towns you had rule when you only had the courage to hide? Did you press your palm on the forehead of a child and call it Abigail's blessing?"
The light went out and the truth remained. People recoiled. The ledgers they had opened shook in wrists that now trembled. Case tried to hold himself upright. He raised two hands like a man defending a castle of cards.
"Please," he said again, the word thin. "I was—"
"Please nothing." A woman in the back, one of the older devotees who had known me before the sleeping, spat. "You took her name because it made you bigger. You stabbed her in the dark."
"Remember how he used to laugh at the new gods," someone else muttered. "How he smoked after prayers like it made him cleverer than the vows."
Case's breath grew ragged. He tried to run, but two of the temple's younger men—people who had always come to him for lessons—stepped forward. They grabbed his arms, their hands small and suddenly not tender.
"Case," I said. "You broke the line we hold. You tried to cut us loose. For that you will be unraveled in front of those you hurt."
They dragged him to the center of the hall. I raised the bow once more. This time the light did not merely reveal; it shaped.
"Let him feel for them what he refused to feel for me," I said.
The bow's shadow opened like a fan. A ring of white fire—not cruel, but absolute—blooms where the arrow touched the air. It enveloped Case's limbs like a trial. The fire did not burn to kill at first; it burned to unmake his lies. The crowd watched with hands half over mouths as Case's smugness melted under the scrutiny of his victims.
His face cracked open into all the masks he had worn. He saw himself as a thief, a traitor, a pupil who chose his own rise over his teacher's memory. He screamed—and the screams changed as people watched because the pain in him turned to regret, then to denial, then to pleading.
"Stop," Aarón cried. "This is too much."
"Too much?" I answered. "He stitched himself into the world's wound. He will be torn out the way he sewed himself in."
The people who had once smiled at Case's cleverness now opened their mouths to name him. The older woman pronounced it—"Traitor!"—and others echoing her. Phones—no, small lacquered tablets and ceremonial tapes—began to record. Some cried. Others whispered and then laughed cruelly. The spectacle was ugly and also necessary. Longxin's high posture shrank to a broken thing.
Case slid, then fell, then grasped for a mercy that no longer existed. He clawed at anyone within reach, so stunningly human now, so vividly fallible.
"Please," he begged, and for the first time no one wanted to help him.
The white fire softened to a light of unmasking, and then it withdrew. Case lay on the floor shaken, broken like a plank snapped. His pupils dilated. He could not bear the eyes on him. He tried to rise and could not.
"They will take you to the runes," I said. "They will strip you of title and power. You will be bound under the old laws in public, with every hand that learned your ways there to see it. Let it be known that the one who took a place he did not earn will lose every favor he took."
Two temple guards carried him away. The crowd turned into a chorus—some wept for the goddess they felt they had betrayed, some cheered in the cruelty of witnessing a small man unmade, some recorded with wooden boxes and breath.
Claudia stepped forward slowly. She had been trembling the whole time. Her eyes found mine. "I'm sorry," she said. "I thought it was right."
"You were given my life and called it a gift," I said. "Today you must answer—not for being human, but for being willing to let others stand in your stead without speaking was your choice. You will stay in your place, but you will be made to do the work you took. Healing is not spectacle, Claudia. It is work. You will teach and you will not be praised until you can bear the weight."
She nodded like a woman taking a bitter herb.
Aarón came near my side then, and for the first time he held his head like a man who had not lost everything but had found the line he ought to have guarded.
"Abigail," he said, "I am sorry."
"Words are the beginning," I told him. "You will have to show it."
He reached for my hand. For once, I let him.
The punishment of Case Bailey lasted beyond the day. The story followed him as a warning. He was publicly bound in the old halls, stripped of the small honors he had used like coins. The ledgers of promises and prayers he had diverted were read aloud, their names called, and families came to speak of the nights they had prayed and not been answered. Case's denial turned to pleading, pleading to a hollow acceptance, and finally to the brittle silence of someone who is empty inside.
He thought himself clever. He learned he had been small.
The crowd left in pieces. The great wedding dissolved into whispers. Claudia left that day with fewer laurels and no robe. Aarón took his vows back, not because they would restore what was lost, but because he needed to be the person who had been promised.
I stayed by the shattered pedestal. I touched the place where the statue of me had stood and found, under the dust, a token—an old, tiny charm from the days I had taught a village to plant against famine. I folded it in my palm like a pact.
"A thousand years will not hide the truth," I said aloud to whoever would listen. "And a thousand offers cannot replace what we have owed to the world."
That night I left the wedding hall. I went down toward the city, past lights, past people who now whispered differently when they saw me. In the dark narrow streets I met a man by the temple steps—a pale, strange man whose bones seemed to be carved of moonlight.
"You're awake," he said.
"Youssef?" I asked, for the name had been a whisper in my sleep, a presence at my door when I had kept the world from collapsing once.
He smiled, and for an instant his face was the small skeleton-child I had fed red fruit to in another life. "You look like you've been reborn," he said. "If anyone should judge you, let them judge with skin on their hands."
I looked at him. "You have been a faithful watcher," I said.
"And you," he said, "have been late." He knelt and adjusted the ribbon at my hair, tucking something into my braid—an odd, knotted blossom—a small, stubborn trinket of the underworld. The scent of it was like woodsmoke and winter.
We walked out of the city toward the broken sea. The world reformed itself as we moved, and in the east sky the idea of a sun rose.
"You will not walk back into the courts with me," he said softly. "Not yet."
"Do you speak for the dead?" I asked.
He gave a crooked smile that was not gentle and yet held me against the wind. "I speak for the world that remembers you without calling your name. The dead remember you. The living must be taught."
"So the world is to be taught by blade?" I asked.
"Not by blade," he said. "By truth, and when truth must be sharpened, by a bow you can draw."
We walked in silence along the sea rim while the wind cleaned the last of the wedding banners from the air.
Later, when fires and sickness began to stain the earth, when the priests came with trembling hands and old conjurations and with them claims that I had been corrupted, I had men like Case Bailey's disgrace behind me. That disgrace was the beginning of a longer reckoning. I would not be defined by what I had lost. I would take back everything that belonged to the living and the dead.
Claudia stayed in my service, more honest with every day. Aarón began to rebuild what he had damaged. The temple regained petitions, and the people learned that worship is not a costume but a craft.
And there, at the end of a long season, when the rifts cracked the world again and dark things crawled from the ground, when the air tasted of iron and the rivers carried ash, the terrible duty I had once carried rose again.
"You will go?" Aarón asked me quietly as smoke drew like a hand across the night.
"I will," I answered.
"You won't go alone."
Youssef's hand found mine in the dark. "I will go with you," he said.
"Will you burn with me?" I asked.
"I will sing in the fire," he said.
We took the bow. We walked in pairs through the war of light and ash. The old gods had been tentative, and the new gods had been greedy. The monsters from the rifts had names like hunger and fever. Towns folded like paper.
When we reached the main fissure, many were there to watch. The line of gods and the line of sinners looked on. People who had once cast their offerings into other hands planted themselves in the dirt and did something better: they knelt and lent a small piece of their courage.
"You will do this for them?" Aarón asked.
"I will," I said. "For those who prayed and never asked why."
Youssef stood behind me, safe as a shadow. I fit my fingers on the bow. It was heavier than I remembered—it hung with the weight of every promise I had held. I pulled. The string sang like a sword. I did not aim at a creature. I aimed at the canopy, at the thick bruise of cloud that smothered day.
"Together," Youssef murmured.
"Together," I answered, and the bow went.
The arrow was a comet. It tore the dark sky and the heaviness of the land and the old contempt like a curtain. It traveled through smoke and ash and broke the covering. When it went free, sun poured. Not like the shy blessing of normal mornings, but like a crown: hot and clear and righteous.
The people cheered. The monsters screamed and vanished. The air was cleaned. The lining of the heavens shuddered and rearranged itself.
When the light settled, I stepped down from the ridge and found I had a temple again, but not the cold, isolated marble of old. This temple was a place where mortals and monsters alike came to study how the world holds. A single lantern burned at the gate, hung by those who had been saved.
Youssef stood on the edge of the hall and watched me as I placed the bow on its stand. "You did it," he said, as if he had not known.
"I did what I was always meant to," I answered. "And I took back what I built."
He smiled and reached to tuck the crooked blossom at my hair more firmly. "Then stay," he said simply.
"Stay where?" I asked.
"At my side," he said. "At the temple our people made for you in a place the world forgot might have light. Let them pray if they want to. Let them not pray falsely."
So I did. The temple glowed. Children came to tug at my robes and ask whether I was a goddess. A boy took my hand and said, "Are you Abigail?"
"Yes," I said.
He smiled. "You must be a very good person."
"Not good," I told him. "Able. We are allowed to be able."
When the years passed, there were stories. I was called angel on some nights and demon on others. The world did what it always does: it made me into a tale, then tried to sew the tale to its chest. But I kept my bow on the stand and I kept the little blossom Youssef had given me pinned above my brow.
At night, when the moon slid slow and the temple lanterns looked like nests of stars, Youssef would hum me a song that sounded like old maps. He would call me "my goddess" in a voice that felt proud and dangerous. In the morning he would call me "my little sister" in a voice like a child. I would laugh and tell him he had stolen two names.
This temple was named in my honor and in a way it was new: those who came did not demand worship alone. They brought offerings of hard things—food, tools, a child's piece of courage. They let us teach them how to stitch the world so it would not fall apart.
Once, years later, a traveler came carrying a long ledger. He had been one of Case's witnesses, then, who had turned away, then back. He knelt at the gate and offered his ledger.
"I kept it," he said. "Everything you asked to be read."
I opened it and found the admission of a thousand small failures. The ledger smelled of smoke and rain.
"I will read it later," I told him. "For now, rest. Your work begins with a day."
He bowed so low it seemed like a blessing. He layeth down in our guest hall. When he slept, he sighed like a boy.
The world kept changing. Sometimes it was kind. Sometimes it was not. But when it turned dangerous, when something big and hungry crawled out, the bow sang and the arrow flew, and there was a man behind me who would throw himself into the dark and find me waiting there with hands that would not let go.
Years later, when someone tried to sell a statue with a face that was not mine and say it was mine because it wore my smile, the crowds laughed. They had learned to ask the right question: "Do you do the work?"
I smiled and thought of the place where the bow hung and of the blossom tucked in my hair and of the day the sun came back to the realm I had once sealed with blood and noise and a hundred-year ache. I thought of a small skeleton who had once wanted to see a sliver of light, and of the man who had kept that little thing until it grew to be a king at my side.
"How did you keep faith?" someone asked me once, a child with an earnest face.
"I didn't," I said. "I kept my vows. Faith is a thing people do. I chose to do."
He nodded as if this made perfect sense. "Is that hard?"
"It's everything," I said. "But it's the simplest thing."
My temple stands on a hill where the sky can be watched as a promise. I live there. I am Abigail Crane, with a mole at my brow and a bow on my wall. I keep a light for those who stumble and a reprimand for those who trade names for warmth. And when someone asks me if I ever forgave the woman who wore my face, I say only:
"She gave me a hundred years of lesson. In the end she made the last thing right."
She walked into the tide and sealed what she could not manage, and when the earth opened we both rushed to put a final arrow in the dark. The world forgives itself in pieces. I would rather teach people how it is done than let it happen again.
And when the children pray at my stair, they sometimes call me goddess and sometimes say "demon" with a grin. Youssef stands behind me with his crooked smile. We tend the world together.
I put my hand on the mortal-mulberry bow every morning. The string hums like a memory. In the very center of it hangs a tiny charm, the same the boy had folded in his fist on the day of my return.
"Bend it," Youssef says.
"I always do," I answer.
The End
— Thank you for reading —