Revenge17 min read
I Thought I Was the Lead — Until the Little Sister Came
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I was certain I was the lead of this life. I was the one who took the vows, who climbed the ridge, who lit the lamp for the whole hall. Then my master came back from a short trip and held a hand that was not mine.
"This is Kristina," he said without a shadow of hesitation. "She will be your junior sister."
I looked at the small hand curled in his palm. I looked at Kristina's bright eyes, at her laugh that sounded like a bell. My throat closed.
"You will obey your senior," Ely Albrecht said to me as though naming a fact. His voice was soft as the snowflakes that always seemed to gather in our practice hall.
"She—" I started.
"Call me sister, please," Kristina chimed, leaning into Ely with the ease of someone who had never been told no.
"All right," I said, and the word felt like a stone in my mouth.
The first trace of the system came like the click of a distant hinge.
"System notice: Female Supporting Role Revival System activated. Target: win over aloof immortal Ely Albrecht. Progress: 10%. Reward: 10 points."
Kristina squealed so delightedly that the system's mechanical voice almost sounded pleased.
"Points? Points for what?" I asked the empty air.
"Maybe for making Master smile," Kristina teased, then she handed Ely a half-bitten white cake and hovered his lips with it. He had the look of a man who studied ancient scrolls better than pleasure.
"He does not like sweets," I said without thinking.
Kristina pouted. "But I brought it because—because it's the best."
Ely smiled, a tiny bend of his mouth, and took the cake. The room spun for a breath. That smile, quiet and private, was mine once. The world had shifted.
"You see," Kristina said later, as the disciples clustered like birds around her, "Master likes quiet tea, but I brought cake. He should be less stern if we laugh for him."
Ely's answer was a mild, "Don't be a fool," that had no real rebuke in it. I sank like a stone.
I tried to do what I had always done. I brewed the bitter tea he preferred and left it by his desk. I collected fresh snow for the ink to keep his scrolls white. I practiced until my hands bled and my sword arm learned the old angles by muscle and bone.
But the mountain noticed my changes. Whispers followed me down the stone steps.
"She thinks everyone's made of the same cloth," one of them said.
"She expects us to match her, and we cannot," said another, with a long breath of relief. They named me "severe" and "cold" until I learned to own those words.
Flynn Cannon, the boy I had raised by guiding spells and by lending a hand through early failures, protested for me at first.
"You are too harsh," Kristina accused me once, as if I were the true culprit. "Why do you punish Flynn so?"
"Because practice is the path," I said. "Because there are dangers outside these peaks. If you do not learn to stand, a single wind will take you."
"That's not fair," Flynn pleaded.
"You do not need my pity," I answered.
"System notice: Target: Flynn. Progress: 20%."
Flynn looked at me with something like betrayal in his eyes. "Senior sister," he said in a voice that used to be mine for comfort, "I—"
I cut him off, and I thought I meant it to be gentle. "Go to penance cliff."
Everyone watched my rigid command and the way the wind settled after it. In their eyes I was the woman who forbade warmth.
After that afternoon, Flynn's supplications turned into distance. Kristina's smile widened. The system's voice happily ticked percentages as if tallying coins.
"System notice: Target: Ely Albrecht. Progress: 20%."
Ely's shoulders eased around Kristina like a cloak. When she laughed he seemed to suspend his endless shushing of the world. He read poems to her that once he had read to me, and he placed a faded jade amulet in her palm with the air of a father.
The hall cleared for a routine contest and I thought the world could still be what I had crafted. Then Kristina bested me.
"You are supposed to be a genius at fifteen," Murmurs. "How did she—"
They chanted Kristina's name like a hymn as she stepped down from the dais, air full of the applause of novices who only wanted to be seen. White lightning that had once honored me now found a new path, and I tasted the coldness of dust.
I stood broken, ankles raw from the blows I had taken, watching the crowd tilt toward her. Then the voice said it again.
"System notice: Target: Ely Albrecht. Progress: 45%."
I understood then that I had been replaced in the script of the hall. That I, the girl who had sacrificed every private joy for a public duty, had been set aside for a new heroine with a system that rewarded charm.
"Take the amulet," Kristina said to Ely later, in the quiet pale of the hall. "Let me learn better tea. I'll bring the mountain laughter."
Ely placed the amulet back into his robe as if a thing were a trifle. "You are young," he said to Kristina in the way a man speaks to someone he swore to protect. "Learning is your step."
I tried to speak, to tell him the weight of those small trivialities that once kept our nights together from the cold, but the words stuck. I could not climb into his face and say, I was the one who loved your loneliness into a shape I could live with.
Instead I learned to leave.
"Leave?" Flynn mouthed, as if the whole idea were a sin, a betrayal. "Where will you go?"
"To the world below," I said. "I want to see what my training can protect."
Ely's eyes softened, as they had a thousand times when he had corrected my grip. "Go then. If you go, return when you must."
The path beneath the high edge is a harsh place. Villages ragged like lost cloth, markets where the poor traded what they had for what could break a day. I found no glory here; only need. There were people who would not rise from the ground without someone to lift them, and I began to lift whoever asked.
A small blue fish greeted me at the old pool at my first night's shelter, a creature that wrapped its fin around my palm as if to claim me. When it transformed into a boy with a smile like a catch of the sea, both foolish and brave, I found a new kind of warmth.
"Who are you?" I asked him. The boy shivered, a splash of water making his hair fall in small wet ropes.
"Call me Cash," he said. "I'm a fish who learned to speak and then to walk."
He followed me like a shadow that liked being held. He called me "Little Moon" because on long nights at the pool I had said the moon looked like the hollow of a spoon. His name was ridiculous, his courage the sweetest kind.
"You can't be seen in the wrong market," I warned the flea-eyed innkeeper once, when Cash decided to throw his coins out like a blessing. "People will take what looks like weakness."
"I'm not weak," Cash said back, sulking, then raced down the street after a stray dog.
I began to train with a different purpose. Where once I had sharpened myself like an arrow to pierce heaven, I now learned how to be a blade that saved a child, a shield that kept a householder's last grain safe.
"You've been changed," a tanner in a small village told me once.
"People change," I said.
"But are you angry?"
"I was angry," I admitted. "But I will not let anger be the thing I teach."
We saved a village from a butterfly demon once. The townsfolk knelt and cried, but my hands still smelled of smoke. Cash sat on my shoulder and cheered because I had been strong. He leapt at the spoils and spent every coin like a man with no tomorrow. There was something absurd about him, but his small cheering made me breathe.
Months passed—no, I will not say that. I will show you the moments.
"You're the only one I know who thinks a fish can talk," I told him as we walked.
"Because I'm the only one you keep," he said, earnest and ridiculous.
"You will cost me all my coin," I warned.
"I will be worth it," he said.
His voice had a way of making ordinary things feel like a promise. It was a small thing, but in the shivering dark of an inn that meant the most.
I never left his side. We moved from town to town until the name "Mila Bowman" carried a new story. I helped accrue or befriend those neglected by the major halls—boys and girls with the spark but no teacher. I gave them beds, food, and a measure of courage. The world can be kinder when someone steps in.
But the past hung like frost.
A bounty went up. The great halls spread a portrait of me in blue, an accusation inked with the claim that I had caused harm to a junior sister. I read the words on a slate in a border market while a laughing child pointed at my face and said, "That's the woman who killed our saint."
"Why would they do this?" Cash asked, looking at the hard strokes of the painting that made me look hard and cruel.
"Because they can," I said.
"Because someone wants you gone," he said more harshly than he needed.
I kept to the roads. I kept my head down. But it was a long knot of fear that did not untie. One day, in a town outside a secret ravine, a group of women from another hall saw Cash and me and laughed.
"You're with her? The traitor?" one spat.
I drew my sword. It doesn't look as good on the cobbles, the way you have to straighten your spine and twist your fingers. They called for their elders, but we left before the argument could grow.
The path home is always an inward road. I turned back to the tall peaks because there were questions I could not answer from below. I wanted a face-to-face. I wanted the truth laid like a flat stone.
We returned weary. The grand gates were the same carved faces, calm and stern. Except that Ely Albrecht's study was the place of warmth, and Kristina kept a softness I had once had.
When I walked into the hall, she was there in his arms.
Mouth gone dry, I stepped forward. Ely gave a breath and saw me with gray surprise. "Mila."
"Why?" I asked him with everything in the word. "Why did you have me punished? Why did you believe the painting?"
"Because—" he faltered for the first time. The quiet dignity slipped from him like a cloak. "The evidence."
"What evidence?" I demanded.
"Your likeness was caught at the cave," a voice said. Flynn’s, small and wavering.
Flynn had believed the drawing; had let the world twist the hand that once clasped his wrist. I saw the hollow in his face like a thrown shadow.
"Flynn," I said, "tell them what you saw. Tell them where the truth is."
He looked at me, then at Kristina, then down. "The stones—"
A hush came like snow. A woman's voice higher in the hall called for judgment and the elders began to set the old rites in motion. Evidence, a trial, a lash. I knew the rhythm before it started.
They bound me. They set me upon the dais as if the world were built to show me. Ely's face hardened into something brotherly and proper. "Mila," he said, "present yourself."
"So this is how you repay me," I thought. The hands that taught me to place a foot in the right angle had placed a noose around me with their law.
The strokes of the whip began.
"Do you confess?" an elder asked.
"No," I bit out.
The first lash cut and scattered the world into rings of light. Pain was not the worst; humiliation drenched deeper. A thousand eyes kept watch on the tightness of my jaw. I tasted blood on my tongue. Flynn cried somewhere in the crowd. Kristina watched, face pale, but her eyes shone with a distant, practiced pity.
"System notice: Target: Public sentiment to Kristina. Progress: 80%."
I would not bow. I would not kneel to what they said. A hundred strikes later, my back was a map of past winters. The last lash came like a verdict. They threw down the rod and called the sentence.
"By the rites of our order, you are banished. You are anathema; your right to instruct is voided."
Ely's hand trembled as he touched my head like someone touching a relic. "Go," he said, as though I might float away like a dried petal.
I left with Cash and a heart so full of an absence that the air looked hollow. I crushed the jade token Ely had given me against a stone and watched it split like a small world opening.
We fled. For a year we wandered beneath the sun and into the dark.
Then the rumor that burned the quickest reached me: Kristina had been seen outside the mountain with a voice in her head that told her where to find other people's luck. That she smiled at the wrong moments. That she had made a trade with a system that took more than it gave.
It was a child's story at first, then a map, then a trail. People spoke of her as a creature who sucked the light out of others to make her glow. The old voice of the system, the hollow narrator, was the same voice I had heard when she arrived.
"System notice: Female Supporting Role Revival System log closed. User: Kristina Crowley. Outcome: failed. Repercussions: unknown."
What I wanted was simple and jagged. I wanted to stand before the hall and say, "She lied. She put words like knives in our mouths and we swallowed them." I wanted to turn the light back to where it belonged.
So I built a force out of the nameless, the overlooked, the girls who once thought the mountains were always high and the men always cold. We were a ragged army of apprentices and wronged apprentices, and we marched to the gates of the mountain like a new dawn.
When I arrived, Ely came out to meet us, his robes thin with grief. "Mila—"
"You called me traitor in your halls, Ely," I told him. "You let them lash me until my bones wanted to leave. Do you remember?"
"Evidence."
"Then you will remember you do not rule the truth. Stand down."
He looked like a man seeing his temple crack. There were tens of us, and dozens of others who had come from towns Ely would never touch. The crowd parting for us murmured. The elders assembled like a slow thunder.
We wanted justice, not blood. We wanted the truth to be out.
"Open the hall," I said.
Doors opened, and people crowded in like a tide. Kristina sat sheltered by the front row, her face half hidden under a veil of white silk. Ely sat behind her, hands folded like a statue.
"Kristina Crowley," I said. "I want to see your system."
She laughed; it was a small bell still. "You think I would show you? The mountain judges do not like surprises."
"Then we will give them the surprise."
I told Cash to bring the jade bottle, the small amulet that had saved him once and held the faint river-glow of his heart. He came forward, small and trembling, eyes wet.
"Let her speak," I said. "If she claims she acted for love of the hall, let us test that."
The elders only half-understood, but curiosity is an old hunger. The trial began. They conjured the stones that held memory, the archaic arts of reflection the mountain used to bind a man's soul.
"System notice: Recording. Subject: Kristina Crowley."
Kristina's eyes widened. For the first time she looked unmoored. "What are you doing?" she whispered to Ely.
"This is the way of truth," Ely said.
We set the stones in the center. The elders chanted, low as riverbeds. The memory-stone pulled at the threads of time.
I took her hand. "Say nothing," I told her. "Not a single lie."
She laughed a brittle laugh, and for a moment something like fear crossed her face. Then, in the middle of the chant, I saw it—she was startled by a flash of her own face reflected as a villain. The stone showed the scene we had all feared: the cave, the flare of flame, the noble figure of one who had leaped to save a small blue fish. Kristina's blade thrust at the person in the cave—she had given the shove that made the event happen.
"No," she cried, her message cracking. "No—it's not—"
She tried to push the memory away, but the stone did not care. It showed everything: the slanted excuse, the system cheer in her ears, the way she had smiled as the hall turned to praise. The crowd quieted, breath held like a net.
Then Kristina's expression made a terrible arc—first a blink of denied shock, then a hard curl of rage, then the sudden mask of innocence. "It was an accident," she said in a voice that tried to be small and broken. "Master had me fetch the pearl. I slipped and it—"
The elders looked at Ely for confirmation. He swallowed. He looked like a man whose hands suddenly slipped from a rope. "Evidence," he said. "But we will—"
"Listen," I said. "Watch this."
I had brought witnesses: villagers who had seen her boast about how the system made her glow; a traveling apothecary who had sold her the charm nodes; a boy from a town who told us that Kristina had asked about the right moment to turn attention away from someone else.
They came forward. They told their stories. They described the system voice that had often encouraged Kristina to gain the favor of Ely. The hall's oldest scroll-keeper stepped forward and touched the memory-stone. He adjusted the setting and what rolled from the polished grey was not only the cave. It was a string of messages hidden like whispering ghosts, a record of a pact.
"What is this?" Kristina cried, and in her panic she started to plead, to smear the earth with her words. "You don't understand. It told me—"
"System notice: Kristina Crowley—user log complete. Extraction: karmic drain." The hall's whispers rose into a roar.
"Stop her," someone cried, and in the press of bodies a woman pushed forward with an old mallet, the tool of public shame in many cultures. She raised it like judgment.
I took a step back, and the true punishment began.
This is the scene I promised I would write honestly because a public punishment must be more than a sentence. It must be a fall seen by all and felt ridged across the world.
They moved Kristina onto the stone dais in the center. The elders called for the rites as they had called those centuries. The punishment would not be a single strike; it would be a layered unmaking of the power the system had allowed her to enjoy.
"Kristina Crowley," an elder said, "you conspired with an outside talisman. You traded lives for acclaim. You used false charms to siphon the goodwill of the hall."
"No," Kristina choked.
"First," the elder intoned, "we will unmask you."
They drew back her silk and painted the hall with her true face. Her burned cheek—no, the burned part on one side—revealed that she had taken measures to gain sympathy. A murmur ran like wind. People who had spoken about how tragic her injury was looked at their own hands.
"Is this part of the deceit?" someone asked.
She yelped and denied, but her eyes were not sure. The elders ordered a water-priest to cleanse her wound. As the steam rose, the crowd watched.
"Second," the elder said, "we call her speakings before all."
They rolled forward a long scroll of the daily messages and read them aloud: the system's artificial voice, the whisper to go here, to make others look away, the subtle push to let her be in the center.
Kristina's voice began to morph—pleading, incredulous, then angry. She pleaded for mercy, then blamed the system like a woman blaming a convenient storm. Her audience was the mountain—disciples, elders, townsfolk, traders—people she had courted with her smile now leaned forward like hounds.
"Denial," she said. "It was a vision. A trick."
A girl in the crowd—a little apprentice who had once been pushed aside—rose and spat, "You pretended to be the wounded one while you took our days."
The crowd clapped to that line like thunder.
"Third," the elder went on, "we hold her accountable to those she used."
They called up the dozens—people who had lifted her because she seemed fragile. An old scholar came forward and said, "I gave her the old volume because she seemed without means." A stable-hand declared that he had signed a false account after a rumor that Kristina would be favored.
Kristina's head rolled with her words like a bell. "No one—"
"Fourth and last," the elder said, "the public unmaking."
They removed her privileges first—the little personal tokens that made her comfortable in the hall. They took the jade pendant Ely had placed on her bud, then the small cups. The crowd jeered at each loss. It was meant to shave away her dignity.
"Please," she begged, "I did this for attention. I am sorry."
Then, rather than a brutal spectacle of blows, the punishment was crafted like an exposure.
They sealed her from the inner rooms, cut her support from the masters who had once watched with indulgence, summoned the halls from near and far to witness. They recited the records and they made her wear the symbol of a betrayer: a collar of old willow wood, hammered with the names of those she had used.
Kristina's expression changed in detail I will not forget. It passed through five stages fast and terrible: first, a spark of triumphant certainty—"I can turn this." Then the flash of panic when the record emerged. Then a tight, bitter denial, like a bird with broken wing. Then a moment of madness where she shouted that everyone else was the liar. Finally, collapse.
Her changes were the engine of the hall's reaction. There were cries of "Shame!" and "Justice!" and some small, rare voices saying, "How could she?" But others—many—wiped their faces and took pride in the restoring of order.
She tried at one moment to give a speech in her defense. "You don't know what it was like to be alone at the start," she sobbed. "You don't know the voice urged me to act!"
"No one knows what it is like to be weak," the elder answered. "But we know what it means to harm others."
She begged, and she promised small things—donations, attendance at public causes—but the elders were stern. They pronounced a sentence not only of banishment but of penance: Kristina would be inscribed in the Hall's Book of Shame, would labor every day to repair what she had taken, and would be bound by vow to serve those in need for a ten-year term.
More stinging to her was the social collapse. People who had laughed in her presence now turned their backs. Apprentices who had bowed to her in public walked away sideways. When they taped the papers of the mountains with the record, Kudren traders and wandering monks took note.
Her scream of realization at that final removal—the exact moment she heard the crowd turn—was the most terrible sound. She had lost her following, her small comforts, the adoration that the system had purchased for her. She degraded from favored child to pariah within a single hour. Her eyes moved through shock to blankness, and then there was pleading. She reached to those who once laughed with her and called their names. They did not answer.
Around her, the witnesses did not merely look—they reacted. Some murmured, "We were fooled." Others hissed, "She deserved it." A young girl spat quickly into Kristina's direction and a man in the back took out his ink-stone and drew a small slip showing Kristina's face crossed out.
Journalists—men who made a living telling the news of disputes between halls—wrote down every detail and drew thin sketches. They were soon to tell the story in the capital: love and betrayal, the small girl's ambition, the machine-like voice that had steered her.
Kristina broke. She tried to bite and scratch, to wheedle the elders, to throw herself at Ely's feet and beg for pardon. Ely hesitated as if the old strings of affection had not yet burned. Then he turned his face away.
"Do not show me your face," he told her coldly. "You chose your path."
She crumpled. There was a final slump, not dramatic but absolute, as if the last of her belief in puppetry—of being a heroine—slid into a puddle of the things she had lied about. She wanted the mountain to fix her, but the mountain only had rules.
After the public unmaking, there were smaller humiliations that spread after a while—doors that closed quietly, petitions that were refused, lovers who returned to their old flames with new shyness. That kind of punishment is worse than being flogged because it leaves no open wound for sympathy—only a steady loss that cannot be medicated.
And so Kristina paid.
I watched her reaction and did not feel triumph. I felt the coldness of one who had seen a beloved image fall from a pillar. For my part, grief and a long, slow pity sat like a stone inside me. There is a cruelty in being proven right when the cost is flesh.
"System notice: Kristina Crowley—penance initiated. Public acknowledgment: engaged."
That was the end. She was taken away to labor under the elders' eye, and the mountain was quieter for a while.
The aftermath was not only that Kristina suffered. There were ripples. Ely began to leave his study and teach more publicly, to stitch the rents his blindness had torn. Flynn came to me more often with bad jokes and an awkward attempt at apology. "Senior sister," he said, eyeing a loaf of bread in my hands once. "I—"
"I know," I told him. "I know you were confused."
He dropped his head and swallowed hard. "I am sorry."
"I take you back as my apprentice," I said. "You must learn the hard truths, but I will not drive you away."
He looked up at me like a man who had been given back his first breath. "Thank you."
Cash and I left the mountain not long after. We made a sanctuary, built like a patchwork of hearts, and people came. We found those who had been small and given them a place. My name changed from the one scrawled on an accusation to a rumor of iron and shelter. Folks whispered "Mila Bowman, the woman who made a haven." The mountain disputes over who was first faded into the background hum of a world trying to be kept.
Ely came once. He left the jade token at our door, his hand trembling. "You were always right," he said. "The hall failed you."
I looked at him and did not answer. There are things one cannot return to once the frame is broken.
Years later, the mountain came to need help. A great dark force rose and presented a test older than any of us. We answered. The battle was long. Ely gave himself to the sealing, and the mountain felt both empty and somehow cleansed. He came to me on the field before he followed the ritual into dark and told me, "Your way has always been true. Forgive me."
"I never wanted to be forgiven," I said. "I wanted justice."
He smiled softly as he passed. "We are both stubborn," he said. "Be the kind of justice that heals."
After the battle, the world changed. People still remembered Kristina in stories, a warning about the poison of shallow gain. She was never again favored, and she paid in the way I have already told you: the many small lost things, the daily labor of atonement, the public knowledge that her charm had been bought.
I kept Cash close. He turned, in the years, to the dragon he had the seed of being inside him. He learned to be large and still childlike. He opened shops and a small academy with my help and called it the Moon Haven. We taught ordinary people how to stand.
Sometimes I am asked if I was the heroine. I laugh. Heroine is a title men like to pin like a needle. I am a woman who learned to stand, who learned to forge a home, who learned that justice is not a single act. I learned that when the world points its fingers, you must bend to pick up those who are hurt.
"Are you still cold?" Ely asked me once when he sent a parcel with a few old scrolls.
"Some days," I admitted.
"Then make a fire for those who are colder," he said.
And we did. We made a place where the exiled found bread and where the small fish could dream of becoming dragons.
I kept a small jade bottle on a shelf in the main hall—Cash's little fountain-giver, the thing that had saved him. Beside it hung a broken jade token I had once smashed in anger. I placed a folded scrap in the frame by the door: "Truth does not need theater."
At the end of winter that year my apprentice Flynn brought me a loaf and a small, clumsy flower.
"I found it on the path back," he said. "Thought you'd like it."
"I like it," I said, and I meant it.
We all liked small things again. We liked the clumsy, true, ordinary acts. That was the real miracle.
And sometimes, on quiet nights, Cash would hum and call me by the old childhood name he had given me in the pool—"Little Moon." He would pull me close as if he were a child again and would say, hushed and sure, "I promised I'd always protect you."
I would press my forehead to his and answer, "You did."
It was not a grand finality, nor a perfect revenge. It was small and stubborn and exactly the sort of thing that binds a life to the world.
The End
— Thank you for reading —