Rebirth18 min read
I Woke to Ice Water and a Demon Who Called Me Sister
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I woke to cold water poured over my head.
A bucket of frozen water slammed down and the ice pain tasted like metal. My hands were bound with enchanted cords, my skin a map of whip marks, my once-white robe soaked in blood until the cloth no longer had a color to claim.
I coughed, blood thick in my throat. "That pool is sacred," I croaked. "You're wasting it on me."
"You know your place, Giulia?" a young celestial lord snapped, his eyes rimmed red. He raised his voice like a bell. "How dare you burn a saint's body? Do you think we should spare you because of some story?"
"Cut her open," another officer said with disgust. "If what they say is true—if she set the Star Immortal on fire—her bones belong to the judgment platform. Prune the roots, throw her down the altar."
I opened my eyes and laughed. The sound came out like a dry thing, but it was laugh enough to make them recoil.
The Star Immortal had died in the heavens ages ago. She had no soul left—only a body preserved through rites. I had set that body alight. They thought they had found a motive. I had heard them all before.
"Then do it," I said. "Prune me. Kill me if that helps your conscience. Or waste more words, if you like your breath."
The lord—Gustavo Casey, his name like a curse in my mouth—struck my face. "You falsified being humble, didn't you? I knew that smile was a mask."
"Stop the theater," one of the officiants snapped. "We mustn't act without word from the Throne."
That name—Throne—made the crowd fall quiet. Edward Bonner, High Luminary, had the habit of appearing as an absolute coldness until something moved him. He stepped forward like winter, as if his skin cut air.
He didn't touch me. He simply looked. The platform itself shuddered and the laws of their halls hummed like a distant bell. "The Code forbids unilateral punishment," he said.
Gustavo reddened. "She burned the Star's body, my Lord! That crime demands pain."
Edward's hand slowly unbound my cords.
I spat a mouthful of bitter blood back where it belonged and smiled with my lips torn. "You will shelter a monster?" I asked softly. "Will you hide me because you once helped me across a street? Will you remember me once I'm ashes?"
Gustavo's hand shook. "You expect me—"
"Do you remember," I said low, "how you opened my spirit two hundred years ago and placed a fragment of the Star inside me? How you wiped my memory? Who told you you had the right?"
Edward's expression did not change. He said simply, "Come with me."
I laughed, a broken sound. "Master, if I fall and die, will you remember me?"
He paused. The platform went colder.
"What did you do?" he asked. It was the smallest of sounds. I heard pity and an ancient weight. "You burned the body because you thought otherwise you'd be a vessel."
I told him then what I had not said for two centuries. I told him the hush of the night when a blade opened my chest, the ritual hand that pushed a stray thread of a dead immortal's soul into my inner house so that the Star might—one day—finish growing. I told him they had used me as oven and hearth.
Edward's face remained a blank plane. "Return with me," he said.
I smiled and let my laughter become a blade. "If I die, will you remember me? The fire took the Star's shell. If it takes me, will you remember the hand that let her live inside me?"
They called it mutant mercy. They called me traitor. Gustavo called me a wicked woman and raised an enforcement strike. The pain screamed. I tasted iron and the aftertaste of fear.
I had staged everything—my burning of the preserved body, the fall from the Expiation Altar—because the altar in its pit had a tide of demonic qi now, a surge of raw matter that might save or break me. If the Star's fragment sprouted inside me and awakened fully then, she would claim my body; I would disappear. If I broke my cultivation first and leaped into the altar when the demonic tide rose, perhaps I could survive and carve out a different route: destroy the fragment, avoid being a furnace. Either choice fit the ledger of my rage.
When I fell, the world blurred into wire and sky. I hit the ground below the altar and the air was wrong—blood-sky and rust—like the old, empty legends of the Demon Realm. I pinched my arm. I couldn't move my left leg. It was no longer mine.
Then a hand like snow closed around my throat from behind.
"Who are you?" a low voice asked, rough as a lullaby.
He had a face carved cruelly beautiful—long nose, thin lips, eyes a deep, impossible red. A small garnet mark feathered the fold of his left eyelid, like a comma of flame. He looked every bit like something born of nightmare.
I wheezed. The grip squeezed and I thought my breath would shatter. The hand relaxed and threw me to the ground. He bent, aromatic breath cold on my cheek. "You think to be my meal and not be found?" he asked.
"I thought you might remember," I whispered. My tongue tasted of ash.
A small man in black—one of his attendants—hissed, "My Lord, the woman came with the dying. She is likely a stray. She fell with the tide. We should rid her now and rest the Lord."
The attendant's black smoke climbed into the air—an attack. Instinct made me raise my hand. My fingers moved on their own, summoning a shape—an impossible barrier of scarlet fog that shivered in the wind.
The attack struck my red barrier and splintered. I bit my tongue hard enough to draw blood. The attack collapsed. I looked down at my hand and the inside of my palm. I had no cultivation. My bones had been pried. My soul was not mine. Yet the demon's scarlet qi—the rare, lethal maroon we called Dorian's Thread—answered to me, folding into a shield the smoke could not cut. The attendant's jaw dropped.
"You can wield the Thread," he spat. "Only the Demon Lord can touch that shade."
Every hair on my arms rose. The Demon Lord himself—Dorian Nunez—tilted his head like he found the world amusing. He stared and I felt something old and hungry ripple behind his eyes.
"Brother?" I heard the word fall from my lips like an accusation and an offering both.
He did not answer. He only watched me as someone overlooks a tempting puzzle. I caught myself smiling.
"Brother," I said. "You do not remember me?"
Silence. The attendant sneered and tried again. The chaos of the great net—the assembly of demons—tightened. They brought out a great array to bind, called the Four-Phases Death Grid. I saw the runes and the red stone at its northern heart. They were careless. They had not expected a deviant who could read the old patterns.
I crawled, broken, toward the red stone under the northern ground patch while Dorian played with their killers like a cat. He was careful and lethal, taking only what he needed. He killed hundreds as if they were insects and never let a drop of their lives stain him. He was precise to the point of taste.
I took the stone by feel and remembered the architecture of death: a single crack of that stone would unravel the Grid. I broke it into many pieces and spread the blood fumes, watching the moths and the small parasites come to feed. When the beasts swarmed near the stone—delicate souls seeking the blood—their wings flickered and I burned them with the Dorian-threaded magic, until the last corpse was black, until the Grid flared and unmade itself.
Dorian's eyes caught mine then. He came close enough to touch, and half a breath between us felt like winter.
"Come," he said. His voice was lazy silk, and danger with it. "Come nearer."
I closed the distance, sliding my ruined leg. He took my hair like a child stealing a ribbon and ran his thumb along my cheek with a motion rehearsed across lifetimes. "You should not have played with fire," he murmured. "But this is almost amusing."
"Brother," I said again, "I sought you. I sought the one who killed the Star and set its pieces inside me. I am the oven they put her in."
"You are clever," he said. "You burned a saint's body so we'd bring you to the Judgment Altar. You leapt. You gambled with your life."
"I did," I said. "And I won a gamble, perhaps."
He watched me like he inspected a coin. His attendant—the one I had crippled—had tried to lie and had his hand pinned by a thrown blade that ended his breath. I tasted the scene like old copper.
Dorian laughed in a sound like a church bell being sunk. "You have the Star's thread inside you. So you sought to starve it or to burn it out. Or to let it grow and claim you." He touched my shoulder; his touch shimmered like a coin dipped in moonlight. "I am not your rescuer. I may be your doom. Or I may be your amuse-bone."
"Which will you be?" I asked.
"Both," he said.
This world is not kind to those who try to choose their own death. But it is richer to those who can use the chaos to buy advantages.
Within days, I was moved into Dorian's court under the pretense of being his sister. He had been re-born without memory, and my voice, my name, and my false claim were the strings he took curiosity to bite. He indulged in the toothsome sport of testing me. The court—old lords, called the Twelve—fawned and crouched. They were eager to appease.
"Who is she?" whispered Wyatt Denton, an elder with spots of fear at the edge of his voice.
She was not their daughter, but she wore the look they wanted—innocent, compliant, a small thing to be paraded. I played my part. I was small and hungry and hungry to be seen.
"She is his sister," said Kiko Ballard, the right-hand, bowing ritualistically. "She came with the return. If she be his sister, we obey."
If there is a talent that served me, it was my patience in playing small.
I listened to their plots while I tightened the fabric of my lies. I learned who conspired with the enemy staunch and who was rope. The elders whispered as if a single word could topple the palace. The very idea that men of state might have sewn their loyalties with the Sky Court made my stitches itch. I had been the scapegoat once. I had no loyalty to those who had made me a furnace.
So when the threads of conspiracy began to coil into a neat noose—men who had once plotted in dark rooms with the Sky Court to take Dorian's life, men who thought blood bargains could buy them standing—I planned the undoing.
"You need evidence," I told Dorian quietly one night. "Not only that—they must be punished out where everyone sees them dissolve."
He looked at me, his eyes like two small storms. "And you will enjoy the spectacle?"
"I will enjoy the justice," I said.
He tapped his fingers against the air and the idea burned slow in his face. He gave a nod the way beasts give a nod before sinking in. "Then pick the stage."
Our first target was the man who had called for my death on the altar—Gustavo Casey. He was arrogant and loud. He punished the weak to hide his own thinness. I had many small leads: a hidden amulet on his throat, a ledger bound in star-leather that told of a payment to a Sky agent, a confessional song he hummed when drunk that matched an ancient code.
I led Dorian to the Hall of Returning, a great place where the elders gathered as if to keep their gold honest by the windows. The lords sat in their carved iron seats. When the doors opened, I walked in and the world held like a breath.
"Speak," Gustavo demanded, the hall a place of absolute heat from his ego.
"Do you remember," I asked, "when you pried open someone's life in the dark and sold the scrap to them who would bind a demon? Or do you prefer I recite the ledger that has your name on its last page?"
He flushed. "You are insolent."
"Not insolent," I said. "Informed."
The elders murmured. "What is this, little thing? Parlor tricks?"
"Not tricks." Dorian's voice lounged in the doorway like a knife inside velvet. He stepped forward, and the mass of his presence made the carved roof creak. "Gustavo Casey," he said, "you demanded she be pruned upon the altar. You called her a furnace. You call the bargain fair. Come—tell us now, since we are all here, whom did you promise us to secure this elevation?"
The hall went silent like the pause before a verdict.
Gustavo's face became a mask of fury. "Traitor," he spat. "You slander a noble's name."
"Then answer." Dorian went near him with a movement like a closing summer storm. "Did you send the code-lad to the Sky Court? Speak. Tell us in the light."
Gustavo's eyes jumped like a cornered animal. He tried to send a message, but he had been careless. Dorian took the melody from his throat and turned it inward—an old demon trick—and the hall shrank as the man's voice became undone.
"I only—" Gustavo tried. "I thought—"
"Everyone here," Dorian said softly, and every eye in the hall fixed to listen, "you have asked me to be patient. You asked me to be indulgent. You have fed his machinations for centuries."
He let the words hang and then snapped them like a blade.
He reached out and, with a motion that looked like blessing, drew the light from Gustavo's chest. The elder's heart—his marrow—gleamed a moment like a coin. Then Dorian crushed it like one. The old man's mouth opened to a scream of paper and no sound came out. The elders watched blood bloom from his robes as if a rose was opening.
"Stop him!" someone shouted.
But Dorian did not stop. He lifted Gustavo up by the collar and kissed his temple in mock tenderness. "I thought you would be clever," Dorian said. "And you have been clever—at hiding the weakest of traitors in fine parchment."
Dorian walked him slowly to the great balcony where the city's procession stood. People filled the square: servants, courtiers, those who bought favors, those who had lost children to the old bargains. The crowd pressed, faces red with curiosity.
"Here," Dorian said, and he flung Gustavo forward so the man would fall upon his knees and call out, "Here stands the man who called for Giulia's death and wrote letters to the Sky Court."
Gustavo tried to pull a mask to his face. No one offered. The crowd's murmur rose like a storm.
"You pledged my name for coin," Dorian's voice carried. "You said you would swap a Demon Lord's blood for comfort. What comfort do you have now?"
Gustavo's face contorted. He tried to deny. "I was afraid," he croaked. "It was orders."
"Now you will see orders," Dorian said.
He lifted his hand and put a single finger on Gustavo's forehead. The old man's expression went through theater: smugness, shock, denial, terror, pleading—until, finally, he collapsed in strangled sobs that could not be breathed.
The crowd turned. They circled like sharks that smelled iron. A woman yelled, "He killed my son!" A man spat. A scribe flipped his ledger as if to find excuses. Someone who had once sought Gustavo's favor now spat and said, "You fed us lies! You would sell us for coin!"
Gustavo's pleas broke like thin glass. He asked for forgiveness. He named names. He begged Dorian to stop. He asked to die quickly. Dorian listened.
He did not grant the mercy of a quick end.
Instead, the punishment unraveled like a public sickness for everyone to see. Dorian forced Gustavo to read aloud every letter he sent to the Sky Court. The man's voice—quavering—told how he had promised land, blood, and guardians in exchange for a seat. Each name he spoke dissolved into the air like ash, and each ash found a throat in the crowd to choke on.
Then Dorian plucked from his sleeve an old metal coin and placed it on Gustavo's tongue. It hissed and turned warm and then hot. It became a furnace of memory. One by one, the crowd heard the names Gustavo had traded them to—the night he had opened a dark door in the court, the names of conspirators, the merchants, the priests. The people heard it all. The man could not shut his mouth. He could not stop the roll of names. The more he named, the more twisted his face became, until his eyes popped and he gagged on the truth.
"You call this justice," he croaked, hands clasping at the air like a man drowning in his own pledges.
"Justice is for the living," Dorian said softly. "And for those who prefer coin to blood. You will not die in secret, Gustavo. You will die with your bargains shouted from street to street. Your name will be a currency I will barter in market squares: 'Remember the man who sold his—'"
Gustavo's knees gave. He fell. The crowd watched him like an animal being skinned. They took his seals and slung them as banners. Some spat. Some took a token and said, "We finally pay what we were promised."
When it was done, Gustavo's body was left on a stone. He was not merely killed—he was reduced to an object lesson: his face, once proud, reddened and blank, a warning to those who would do the same. The crowd left with his name in their mouths like a new slang. The elders hid inside their robes.
That scene—public, grotesque, ritualized—was not the end. It was one of many. Each traitor met a different hour. One was forced to stand on a table and as the city watched, his nearest friends pushed him toward the center and spat on him. Another had his tongue pulled and had to recite the names of his children so that every parent who had lost a child could curse him. The youngest conspirator was taken and forced to sing the old lullaby that his mother had sung while pocketing the coins he sold his conscience for, until his throat bled and his throat's song had recorded for years the words of his betrayal, replayed in taverns and on stage.
I watched each unraveling with a divided feeling: it was clean and necessary, because it cleared the table. Those who had thought they could bargain in shadow were stripped and the world saw them. Those who had held a knife to me now had their own knives turned.
"Why such cruelty?" whispered some who still wondered.
"Because they taught cruelty," I said to Dorian once, while the stars emptied in the sky like spilled grain. "They told me I was a furnace and then wheeled me into the ovens. My cruelty is their mirror."
Dorian responded the way a man who slept inside storms does. "I am not a mirror," he said. "I am the hand that opens the mirror and shows them the face they deserve."
My role in the theater remained: the smile, the small childish ask, the pleading sister. I kept my acts, and the world kept spitting its secrets into the gutter.
But the victory had a rumor at its back. That rumor was a sword—an old thing called No-Error, or in the old tongue, Unwrought Reckoning—a blade whose sister had once cleaved the heavens. The Unwrought had been last seen in the Ghost Province, chained under the watch of the Ghost Lord. It was said to steal memory and grant memory in turn for a price. If I could find that blade, perhaps I could cut the Star out of me and not die. Perhaps I could be the one to decide who belonged to whom.
"Take a few elders," I said to Dorian as we walked, the sun thin as a coin. "Take men who have skeletons knotted in their sleeves."
"Who are you, that you command me to move the stones?" Dorian asked, amused.
"Someone who will not be a fire for them," I said. "Someone who got the short end before the burn."
He nodded and set the old wheels in motion. He was cruel, he was patient, he liked the theater of the hunt. I liked it because the hunt revealed the people in charge like wet paper. The longer we walked, the more men we found who had hidden letters, who had negotiated with Sky, who had signed oaths. Every open wound he revealed was a ledger of a life.
It took time. We arranged for an expedition into the Ghost Province. The elders we picked protested—they were men with much to lose. They cried out when chosen, and some begged for mercy and received none. We moved like a slow season that would not stop.
We rode with the Ghost Lord's moon and he did not welcome us. But we came for a single purpose: Unwrought was not only a blade; it was an old cure. The Ghost Lord's court hated us for the noise we made. They hated us louder when the Ghost Lord learned that the blade would decide memory like a hand decides bread. He offered games and riddles and cursed tokens.
It was on the edge of the Ghost Court that the second great public punishment took place. This time, the man was not a little lord but an elder named Wyatt Denton—the one who had quietly shifted oaths to Sky and had signed away border garrisons for a promise of titles. He had been careful. None so. he had been careful.
But he had not been careful enough.
Dorian summoned the court and told them plainly of every contract Wyatt had signed—contracts that meant children starved, soldiers abandoned. Wyatt's lips trembled as names of men he had betrayed fell from his own mouth.
"Do you have any last words?" Dorian asked.
"I give—" Wyatt began, but he could not finish.
Instead, Dorian did something public but not expected. He did not simply take Wyatt's life. He invited the entire assembly to the square and asked them, one by one, to write the names of those Wyatt had sold them to. The scribes wrote, the people read, and an enormous bell tolled.
Then Dorian had the elder placed on a scaffold and, with the crowd watching, reminded each man of what Wyatt's bargains had meant. The children who had no bread were dragged forward to look at him. The fallen soldiers were named out. The whole ritual was a public funeral for the many lives his single betrayals had cost. Wyatt's expression, once carved in arrogance, melted through desperation, pleading, and finally, a hollow nausea as the man understood the geography of his crimes.
He had no coin left. He had no friends who would stand between him and the crowd. When the bell's toll broke him, it did so not with a blade but by the slow corrosion of wrath, recognition, and public contempt. He knelt. He begged. He cried words that sounded like leaves. The crowd's reaction was a heavy thing: they spat and threw mud, they recorded it with image stones, they repeated his bargains as warnings, as curses wished out loud.
Wyatt's ruin took longer than a blade, and the thing was worse in its way: he was stripped of memory, of legacy, and made to watch the lives he had ruined parade in front of him. He had nothing left. He begged Dorian to have mercy. The mercy that arrived was not a blade; instead they made him stand and tell the story of each life he traded, and for each tale he told the crowd responded with a name to be remembered. It was justice that kept him alive, so he could regret.
That public unmaking—Gustavo, Wyatt, a dozen more—became a tapestry of exposure. The elders that remained learned to keep two hearts beating in their breast: one for office, one for fear. They learned to hide the things they were not willing to give to the light.
I had not expected pity, nor asked for it. I had planned for leverage.
On the eve of the Ghost Court's final raising, when the blade was put into the public place and the elder-skeletons were at their worst, I sat by the slit of window that showed the Demon Lord's star-marked sky and waited.
Dorian came and sat beside me and plucked my wrist like he might pluck a thread from a spool. He was watching the city as if we were birds over a field.
"You used them well," he said.
"I used them like tools," I answered. "Like knives. Like matches."
"Then what will you do now?" His thumb brushed the scar at my throat where the Star had been sewn. "Will you use Unwrought on yourself?"
"I will use it on us," I said. "On the fragment that lives there. Not because I am afraid. Because I choose. And I have more to gain by choosing than by being ground into ash."
His gaze sharpened, slow as a knife being brought close to light. "To cut a soul is no easy hand. Why should I trust the hand that set the oven alight?"
"You have watched me this week," I said. "Do you trust yourself?"
He studied me for a long time. His garnet flecked with that tiny mark. The thing about Dorian is that what he wants we could not buy from a king. He wanted a game and I was a new toy.
He smiled. "Then lead, sister."
We did not come as the Sky Court guessed—pious men with banners. We came as a slow, patient thing: a demon's hunger, a woman's cunning, and a blade that wanted to be found.
In the end, I did reach a blade; we did meet a Ghost Lord who loved riddles; and the Unwrought held in its iron spine the power to cut a thing out and leave the rest intact. To make a soul bled from a body and keep the body breathing is an old trick, one older than kingdoms. The cost is memory, the cost is a reckoning.
I lay myself upon the table and let the ritual begin. I will not pretend the process was not violent: it was a bulldozer in silence. I let them cut a wind around me and watched the Star spin inside, a small pale thing. Then the blade came down.
I will not describe the slice because it is a private cruelty. After it, something inside me stepped out and hovered, naked and blamed. I watched as the thing that had eaten my quiet years—my broken, pained years—was dragged away like a winding sheet and examined. I had expected horror. I felt relief.
They handed that thread to Dorian. He weighed it like a coin. He put it in his palm, rubbed it with an indecent curiosity, and held it to the light like a man seeing his first snow.
"You burned a saint," Dorian murmured. "So that you could keep the memory of your ruin. You did not ask too little."
I opened my eyes. Edward was there, and some of the elders. The Ghost Lord bowed, and a sound like a thousand coins falling made the room damp.
The moment after the blade did what the blade does, the punishments resumed. Men like Wyatt and Gustavo were shown in memory as men who would trade a child for a title. The world took note. The Sky Court trembled. It would be a long while before they forgot the names we read aloud.
But there was another thing.
When the Star's thread left me and sat in Dorian's hand, he did not simply vanish. He held it to his mouth and kissed it. "You are mine," he said. "Not yours anymore."
There is no easy end to being used. There is no easy end to bargaining with a demon.
He looked at me and put a thumb to his left eyelid where a small garnet sat. It glowed like a fresh wound.
"Now," he said, voice dark and small and dangerous, "we will walk among the ruins and claim the bones. You will be at my side, and you will help me find those who cut me down in the old time."
I smiled then and I meant my smile to be the cutting edge. "When we show them," I said softly, "they will know their deeds have a price."
He laughed, fond and cruel, and his laugh was an oath.
We left the Ghost Court and the city behind. The elders who remained trembled like paper. The world moved its weight. The Sky Court's ambassadors came with long faces.
I would not forget the taste of shame.
I would not forgive those I had been taught to obey.
"One day they will call you savage," an elder said when I walked past him on the street. "They will call you some name."
"If they do," I said, "I will remember their faces with a grin."
There are many roads yet to travel. The Unwrought had given me a slice of autonomy and the ability to choose the terms of my own demise. But the world is not tidy. There were friends who had lied, men who had sworn false oaths to save their skin, and a Demon Lord who loved the game.
We will go to the Ghost Province again. We will carve the names into the public squares. We will make examples, quiet and thunderous and varied, so that no man can say his crimes will pass.
And I will watch Dorian's garnet eye for the way it brightens when I read a name that was once mine.
At night, when the stars are low and the city sleeps, I touch the small scar at my throat and think of the blood-red bead that saved me from the altar's edge and the wheel I had to break to get free. No one had ever asked me whether I wanted mercy. I took it.
"Will you remember me if I die?" I had asked Edward when he first freed me. He had not answered—he had only said, "Return."
I do not know if he remembers. I do not know if he saw the moment the Star's thread came out of me like a pale animal. But I do know this: I have become a thing that will not die in silence.
And when the punishments are done, when names are read, when the crowd has its fill and the bell tolls, I will keep a fragment of the world in my palm—a blood-red bead that will never again be swallowed by someone else's flame.
I put it close to my chest and feel Dorian's shadow fan across me like a promised night.
"Come closer," he murmurs when the wind is right.
I oblige, because there are games we both like to play. We both like the sound of a name being broken under the sky.
And tonight, the town hears a new name—the one I will give them—and it tastes like iron and candy.
The End
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