Rebirth15 min read
I Wore a Wedding Dress and Walked Out in Red
ButterPicks9 views
I woke up to rain and the taste of iron, and for a wild second I thought I was still falling.
"Who left her here?" a voice barked in the dark. "Move her. It's pouring."
"I said move her!" another man spat, and boots thudded on wet soil.
I lay on my back and blinked. The sky was a slit of gray; wind threw rain like a curtain. My head hurt like it had been hit with a thick book. When my eyelids finally obeyed, I saw a flash of red—my red wedding robe—and two men looming over me. They were laughing like bullies who had won a game.
"She won't die clean. Look at that face," one of them sneered.
"She’s a fine household girl, though," the other said with a snarl. "Must be juicy."
Someone's hand reached toward me.
"Touch me and you'll die." My voice was small, but the rain seemed to shiver when it left my mouth.
They stopped. For one breath they were unsure. Then one of them laughed and stepped closer.
"Stupid bride," he said.
Everything moved too fast. A blur of red. My chest filled with a cold, focused fury that did not belong to the body I took over. There was a crack, a horrible dry sound, and a head lolled sideways, sightless, skin pale as paper. The other man screamed. He tried to fight. He missed.
I don't remember the strike. I only remember a simple truth filling me: I wasn't supposed to be here. I shouldn't be this girl's body. I should be dead.
"I died in an airliner crash," I told the rain as I stood, shivering. "Eight thousand meters down with nowhere to go."
"You're alive," I said. The word tasted odd and new.
I remembered flashes—an old life full of neon and sirens, a dozen lives I had packed into a small, hard chest: a surgeon who navigated crowded ERs and nights slicing quiet truths into pieces; a woman who knew poisons and stitches and how to get out of a fight with your dignity intact. My hands knew things this body did not.
"This is the Ice household?" I muttered. The old identity rushed in like spilled water. "I am now—" I caught myself, heart tightening at the knowledge. "Evelyn Chase," I said to the rain, because I could not stand hearing my old name in this new mouth.
"You're the family head's girl. You are supposed to be marrying Prince Isaiah Clement tomorrow," a living memory told me.
"That man..." I spat. "He used me. He lied. He let his lover, Madeleine McCormick, set me up. They tried to kill me."
A tide of anger rose. "Then I'll make them pay," I promised the cold, and the promise came out steady, unbreakable.
A soaked man staggered into the path, collapsing at my feet like a puppet with a broken string. His face, when I saw it close, took my breath: pale skin, lashes like dark feathers, a sharp nose. He crawled and gripped my dress. His eyes unfocused; he was braided with pain.
"Help," he croaked. "Poison."
I had spent my other life reading symptoms like books. The man's fingers clenched my robe as if it were a lifeline. "If you don't let go, I'll break your arm," I warned.
He tightened his grip so hard it whitened. I knew the way pain froze people. I pressed my heel into his forearm and he hissed but did not let go.
"Stop this." I knelt and closed my fingers around his pulse. There was not only poison but a second presence—a faint, strange force that felt as alien as the aircraft metal that had ripped my last life apart.
"You're done for," I told the rain. "Not today."
I drew on an instinct that did not belong to this world. In another life I had made needles and solutions; here I made my own tool: hair and qi. I called it the Silk-Needle method. My hair tightened into lines that tasted like steel in the rain. With a breath, I pushed them through pressure points. The man's pain shrank to a dull ache. He loosened his grip and swallowed. I bowed out and walked away before he could thank me.
He watched me go. "Red dress," he whispered, and then saw me vanish into the trees.
The Ice estate gate stood under a sky beginning to pale. A small crowd clustered in a muddy courtyard. For a piece of a second I was a ghost in my wedding red—wet, dripping, defiant.
"Brother," someone said to a tall man in ornate robes, and she leaned into him as if he were home. "Maybe she just wandered off."
His face sharpened when he heard my name. "Madeleine?" he said softly. The crowd watched him like a king practiced for applause.
A thin smile crawled across my lips. "So this is what you call care," I murmured.
"Who are you?" Madeleine called in a syrupy voice, stepping forward.
"I am Evelyn Chase," I replied slowly. "And I am not what you think."
"She's our family disgrace," Isaiah Clement snapped. "She has disgraced the marriage. Take off her dress. Make her kneel and apologize."
"Do it," a chorus said.
I laughed once, dry as new paper. "Isaiah, your eyes and your brain seem to be in very different places. If you are blind, donate your eyes."
Madeleine's painted face paled; she had always made fortunes from small cruelties. "Evelyn—" she whispered, too late.
"Sit down," Isaiah ordered.
"Sit where?" I asked, and slowly reached for the seam of my robe. I tore it clean off. I was not going to beg. I would not perform humility for liars.
I gathered rain in my palm and used it like ink, and my hair like a brush. On the torn fabric I wrote, loud and clear: "Evelyn Chase refuses this marriage. I denounce you, Isaiah Clement. You have three crimes: you consort with my cousin, Madeleine McCormick; you plotted to ruin me; you have no honor."
The crowd gasped.
"She has a proof of virginity," someone said, pointing at the red mark on my wrist—a small tradition's seal the family kept. Murmurs spread.
Isaiah's anger flickered, then strengthened like a vise. "You want to ruin the marriage on our wedding day? You want me to be shamed in front of my people?" He raised his head, face cold.
"Why not?" I said. "If you have nothing to hide, you will defend your honor. If you have something, maybe you should keep it to yourself."
"You insolent wretch," he snarled. "You will be punished."
He stepped forward, and his aura flared white. I had no idea how much strength I carried in this borrowed body—no idea when, but I felt something like a spark still under my skin. He struck, axe-like, and the world narrowed into a single, roaring pressure that tried to bend me into the earth.
It was supposed to end there. For the first time in years I felt bone break, air leave my lungs like a sucked-out balloon. I watched my hands tremble. If this was the end, it would be clean and angry. The crowd began to call for blood.
Then something flowed into me. It felt like a warm, slow river. My mind steadied and with it a new light, a small worm of gold, awakened in the dark of my chest. Pain reinterpreted itself into power.
"She has a spirit," a voice said, low and frightened. "Her qi—it's rising."
My blood sang. I rose on a current and hit back. I remember a wooden stick—an old thing used once for ceremony—being my only weapon. I swung it and struck Isaiah on the lip. He bled.
The crowd did not expect that. They began to watch differently. They had stood ready to humiliate the "waste" for years; they quietly wondered if the waste might get up.
Madeleine's smile disappeared. "You dare!" she cried.
I tore a sheet of paper from my dress and wrote the charge of divorce in bold strokes. "I renounce this marriage. I withdraw from our agreement. Isaiah Clement is dishonorable. Let him explain."
A hush fell that felt like winter glass. Isaiah's face twitched. He thought: his wrath was honorable, his nobility intact. He did not expect to be undone by a woman who was "nothing."
"Bring a cage," he snarled at his steward, Wade Lam. "Put her and Madeleine and anyone who aids her in it and parade them."
Someone in the courtyard laughed. "A parade? Make them pay."
They did not know then how public everything would become.
We carried Madeleine and Isaiah out in a large wooden cage; they were forced inside like spoiled animals. Isaiah, once a prince in everyone’s eyes, tugged and roared. Madeleine cried in three-part soprano for the pity of strangers.
"Five thousand for someone to read the divorce letter!" I announced to the group of onlookers, my voice carrying the kind of mischief one reserves for a well-planned heist. "Loud-voiced folks, take a coin and repeat it!"
At once two men stepped forward. They shouted the list of my charges. The mob clustered and their faces changed from scorn to glee to something else: a thin, passionate joy. They had always liked a spectacle. Rich men and poor men leaned in. Children peered.
"Is that him?" a woman hissed. "That dried-up prince?"
"You see, he even smells of the cage," another man joked, and someone flicked a coin.
Isaiah raged. "Release me! Move the cage!"
Madeleine whimpered. "Evelyn, please..."
I walked the cage up and down the main street myself. "You call me waste?" I challenged him. "You call me ruined? You call me unclean? You cheated me, Isaiah Clement. You plotted with Madeleine McCormick to have me killed and to take my place!"
"Stop this circus!" Isaiah barked.
"Sir," I said softly, so only the closest could hear it. "Tell us why you lied. Explain why you let the three of you set a wedding bed into a trap."
He had no answer. He had thought he had a fortress of lies. The cage rattled. People took out little devices and wrote notes. Some snapped pictures. A group of market women clapped. A child shouted, "Good! Make them pay!"
Madeleine's face flickered between desperation and calculation. "Evelyn, dear..." she crooned. Behind her mascara-slash I saw only a raw hunger.
"Five thousand each to read it aloud!" I offered again. The crowd surged. A man with a scar read the words like scripture; others repeated them, louder and louder: "Isaiah Clement consorted with Madeleine McCormick. He arranged for Evelyn to be taken and to be killed. He is unfit to command respect in the court."
The first crack in Isaiah's veneer came from the crowd. Noblemen who had nodded at him all year looked away. Merchants who had courted him to back their caravans pulled their hats down. A woman who had once been flirted with by him spat in the mud.
"You've ruined us," Isaiah hissed. "This is defamation."
"It looks like truth to me," someone said. "And truth is heavy."
The crowd's mood shifted into a cruel tide. People who had envied Isaiah for his silks now cheered. They wanted to see the mighty humbled. They wanted a story to carry home that night. Madeleine's pleas drowned in the clamor.
Isaiah's face crumpled in public. He tried to call for his steward, for family, but men with coins and men without pushed close and blew on their hands for warmth. Some took out small ink brushes to sign their own versions of the event. A boy crept forward and smeared ash on Isaiah's robe.
"Look," shouted one merchant. "A prince who is impotent of honor! Who would take him? Who would trust him? His line is not fit."
Isaiah's rage turned into an animal's panic. He laughed, then sobbed; he tried to hide his face, then struck the bars until his fists bled. People drew closer to see the spectacle. Some whispered the truth in eager, outraged hisses. Others recorded the scene in notes and moved like dealers.
I kept the divorce paper pressed to the cage as if it were the most precious thing in the world.
"Let me speak," Isaiah begged suddenly, the crowd quiet enough to hear him breathe. "If you spare me, I'll marry her—"
"Will you?" I said, and the air sharpened like a scalpel. "You would only marry to cover your own shame. But I am not your blanket to mend your faults. You are the one who will be remembered as a liar."
He went pale, then red, then whiter. He looked at Madeleine—his hand brushing hers—and his face contorted with the realization that the people he had relied on had already chosen their side.
People began to shove coins into the cage slats: bets, payment for the story that would travel. A scholar took out a small quill and wrote, "Let the prince be reduced." Others took pictures—no nuance, only headlines. A young woman wept and kissed the cage bar as if it were a relic.
Madeleine tried to speak, and her voice cracked. "Brother…"
"Do not call him brother!" I said, and the onlookers cheered the phrase like a proverb. She flared with a vanity that could not survive the street.
The cage became a theater, and the theater had judges: the crowd. Each person present made their verdict in a thousand tiny ways—laughter, a toss of a scarf, disgust—and those verdicts reinforced one another until Isaiah's public face was gone.
At the end, when the sun had finally broken through clouds, someone counted out two million in coins and set them on a crate. "We ransom the prince," someone said with satisfaction. "We buy his silence."
Wade Lam, the steward, came forward and paid. He clutched the coins like someone paying a debt with a shaking hand. He had to pay to restore a family's facade, but the city had already chosen new tales.
Isaiah and Madeleine were led out, not to the palace but to their private carriage, their faces brand-stamped. People spat and jeered. Children shouted insults. A group of women followed and sang mocking songs as they were driven away.
"You will remember this," I told the empty street when they were gone. "You will taste this shame."
They did. The rumor spread faster than a plague.
— — —
"You're not the same as before," my big uncle, Foster Myers, said when I returned home. He looked at me as if he had discovered a strange new bird sitting in his palm. "You have changed."
"People change," I said carefully. "And I plan to keep changing in ways they will not like."
"We must be careful," he warned. "That wealth you demanded—two million—will draw eyes. Lady Madeleine's people will not forget. Your three-uncle, Graham Monteiro, is bitter. He will not let this pass."
"Let him come," I replied.
A wager followed, a public duel that would mark our family throne. My cousin Eliot Rios, the spoiled boy who thought himself a man, challenged me at once. He wanted my position. He wanted my title.
"Win the contest," he sneered. "Lose and you give me the head of the house."
"I said I like wagers," I answered.
We agreed to fight. He called in a champion—a trained blade man strong with drugs and tricks. I agreed to fight him on the field my way.
"Do not go easy on him," Foster told me.
"I won't," I said.
When Eliot's champion drew his blade and charged, he found my stick a hurricane. He underestimated me when I moved like a woman who refused to be contained. A crowd gathered to watch a small, ridiculous bet escalate into a court spectacle.
Eliot Rios laughed and then collapsed. His leg snapped like a twig. He screamed in a way that made the gathered nobles stiffen. I had not wanted his doom—except he had wanted mine.
"Give up the post!" they cried on the sidelines.
"I will not," I said between breaths. "I will take whatever I want."
I fought until my bones felt like glass, and then something beyond grit took me further. Pain has been my teacher twice. When I stand near death, something snaps and the world bends. My qi—my strange little borrowed spark—blazed until I stood taller, stronger. The crowd's whispers warmed into a legend.
My uncle tried to open the family treasure once Graham Monteiro approached and threatened to plunder. He threatened the house, but he found the doors locked by more than iron.
"I am not finished," I told the three-uncle when he wheeled in threats. "You wanted blood? Come get it."
He did. He came with men. He came with poison and a sick, cruel smile. He thought to take everything in a single night.
"You forget what it is to stand in a storm," I told him coldly.
And I struck.
— — —
"Who are you, really?" a new voice asked later that evening—soft, like velvet over steel.
He stepped out of the dark like someone who had been carved by midnight itself. His black robe moved like shadow; his gaze felt like a question that turned the skin taut. He called himself Miguel Cherry, and he had the air of a man who was used to being obeyed.
"You saved me in the rain," I said, bewildered.
"You saved me too," he replied. "Do not mistake me for gratitude."
He put a drop of blood to my forehead—a sign of a pact—and said, "If you ever need me, call my name."
I laughed at the theater of it. "You come like a god and leave like a rumor."
He did something that defied sense: he left a little token in my hand. It was a strip of red ribbon that tasted of ash and promises. When he touched my skin, I felt the faintest of maps drawn inside me. He vanished like a shadow folding. I kept the ribbon.
I found something else too—a paper with a crude image of a black cauldron. When I rubbed it, the paper dissolved into a fine dust that wrapped around my wrist like gold. My room shimmered, and I woke in a small, green place that smelled of earth and rain.
It was a world inside a thing—a living tool. A little boy-about thing with eyes like dark pools called himself Clay Marchetti—no, the voice belonged to the cauldron’s mind, and he called himself "Keeper".
"This place will be yours," the Keeper declared with a child's pettiness. "You must learn to use it."
It was a realm of herbs and towers, and in the center stood a black, blank cauldron that hummed like a restrained thunder. My heart beat fast. I had found a treasure: a private domain for practice, full of distilled qi and stores. The Keeper was rude and demanding but inside he protected a library of power: herbs, recipes, and a tower where I might grow stronger.
I sat and drank in qi the way a thirsty traveler drinks water. It took me a single long night to advance—first to a better foot of purpose, then to another—and the next day I returned to a house that watched me like a hawk.
"You're skilled," Wade Lam said when I later paraded my newest concoctions. "Where did you learn?"
"Everywhere," I said.
I became a problem solver to the poor, healer to those who could not pay with coin, and a magnet to those who wanted to exploit or to serve me. Samir Conway—the sharp-eyed youth I freed from the slave market—followed me like a loyal shadow. Eloise Eklund, a young maid with a quiet blade hidden under her words, fell into step with me. Together the three of us worked the small miracles of the city: a wound closed here, the rumor was swung there, a poison cured and a debt rewoven.
At the auction house, I sold the tiny miracles I could produce. "Ten percent of the coin," said a man named Emil Barrett, who read the divorce paper for a laugh and kept a tally of which way the wind blew.
"Bring your finest," I told the auctioneer, Brianna Peng. "I will show you what you are missing."
When the jars opened, smell poured out like a surprise. Even the old and hard-bitten gasped. "Ten stamps," they murmured. The master of coin watched like a man who had discovered a new star.
"Who are you?" he asked again.
"I'll be called 'Easy Ice' in town," I smiled, and my voice was a foreign thing to my own ears. "A new name for a dangerous thing."
I began to gather people: young men like Samir, quiet servants like Eloise who had hungry looks for a better life. A loud girl called Paola Chavez—dangerous and forward—tried to take a boy from Samir and found herself cut down more than once.
"Not today," I said and the street learned to listen.
— — —
There was a time when I asked Miguel for gold. He left more than gold. He left a secret: the cauldron's Keeper had a path up through its nine tiers that would let me learn weaponry, artisanship, alchemy—almost every skill I had dreamed of. It was a ladder built into the fabric of the world. Each trial earned points. Each point purchased mastery.
"I want the book in the tower," I told the Keeper. "The one they call 'Wings of Marking.'"
"You must earn it," the Keeper snorted like a child, but when he looked at me he hesitated. "You are...not simple. Grind and you shall rise."
So we ground. I burned my mind, burned my spirit. I failed, the cauldron exploded—literally—when I misjudged brew times and burned something precious into smoke.
"You're a fool," the Keeper said and then handed me a new method like a grudging teacher. "Try this."
I did. The cauldron spat smoke again and again until finally, the phoenix of creation rose: clean, bright pills with ten clear bands like rings on a perfect tree. The Keeper whistled like a small god. "You will bring storms."
I did not stop. I worked until my veins hummed with the taste of fire. I made remedies capable of mending harvests of blood and breath. I made a pill to revive the fallen. I made a potion to clear poison. Each item glimmered like jewels and each time I nearly collapsed from the exertion.
One night I awakened to the banging on my door. My aunt had come with fury. The household had been stirred by my actions; those I had struck had allies. Chenjia—Graham's great wife, a woman who wore power like a blade—stormed the gate with a band of men.
"You killed my house!" she screamed. "You broke our boys!"
She advanced with a sword of braided terror and then stopped when Wade Lam swept into the room and handed her a small folded note. "We paid you to leave," he said toward the gate. "You have your money."
She snorted and turned to depart. But she had misjudged everything. I had set a trap in the gate: a scent and an influence that made men stumble like rats. Chenjia's sword missed. Eloise struck and kept the blade from meeting my heart. Samir drew a line and formed a shield.
"Stand down," I told the room. "We are beyond your stage now."
Then everything came crashing. Chenjia moved in fury and the house shook like an earthquake. She struck at me with a full force of a woman who had everything to lose, and I let her put everything into the blow.
When pain came, I invited it.
"Now," I whispered. The world trembled. I felt the small worm in my chest roar and swallow the attack. I broke free with a roar and hit back. I used the black cauldron's gifts, the Keeper's teachings, and the small faithful clenching of our three—Samir, Eloise, and me.
A voice cut across the din. "Enough."
He arrived like a winter dusk: Miguel Cherry again. He took me up in his arms as if rescuing a bird. He fed me a pill made of something like sunlight and iron and then turned his pale face to the attackers.
"Who injured her?" he asked.
Graham Monteiro's eyes widened. Chenjia had the look of someone who expected a penalty, but not one like this. Miguel's presence was a kind of avalanche. He crushed them with a pressure that left bones shaking where they knelt.
"Will you have them killed?" someone asked.
"No," I said. "But I will let them live as a lesson."
I had the choice to end anyone who had hurt me. It is an intoxicating thing. I did not kill, but I arranged punishments that were public, appropriate, and brutal.
Graham's lungs were choked by a bruise that halted his breath and then I carved away his strength. I crushed his centerpiece—his hope for the house—so that he would not breed further plots. Chenjia's pride was taken and placed as an ornament for my table.
A city hears the sound of justice and learns: those who betray are not untouchable.
— — —
I walked, then, into a new life: as Evelyn Chase, the woman who wore red and kept the world honest. I still dream of flights and emergency rooms, of quick hands and steadied breathing. I still have the city's map tattooed into the bones of my mind. But this place, with its black cauldron and little Keeper and the velvet shadow man, taught me other things: how to take the hurts and ring them back as teeth.
"You're cruel," Foster said once, worrying about the trousers he had not meant to iron in front of me.
"I'm not cruel," I answered. "I'm precise."
Samir smiled. "I'm glad you are on our side."
"Me too," Eloise said, soft and steady.
There are times I have to remind myself: I did not ask for this life. It collided with my last like steel on bone. But the world has its debts, and some debts must be paid in full. I learned to be a surgeon of fate: cut the lies, stitch the truth, and pour light inside the wounds.
People still call me names sometimes: "waste," "madwoman," "the witch in red." Sometimes they bow. Sometimes they pelt me with fruit. Sometimes a man of low rank throws a stone and the crowd laughs. Each time I stand there in my borrowed skin and see what I have become: not the Ice family’s broken doll, but a thing made of many things—past knowledge, present fire, and a small, stubborn star in my chest.
And if Isaiah Clement ever looks at me again, I will make sure the memory of the cage follows him every step. If Madeleine McCormick ever smiles, it will be because she has learned the price of her choices.
"Who are you?" the crowd will ask.
"I am Evelyn Chase," I will say. "And I keep receipts."
The End
— Thank you for reading —