Face-Slapping17 min read
My Little Temple, a Hidden Room, and a Purple Sword
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I opened my eyes to the same thin light that had chased me awake for three days.
"I need to find firewood before I die of hunger," I said to the empty temple and to myself. The temple smelled like stale incense and cold stone. My small body was tired, my palms had blisters, and my stomach made a sound like wind through a hollow reed.
I am Kaliyah Daniel. I should have been three and helpless, but someone — some impossible luck — had handed me a chance inside this old child's body. I learned fast.
"Don't be stupid," I told myself. "Pick the biggest leaves. Don't cry. Sell the mushrooms. Buy a knife."
I picked branches and gathered a bundle of big leaves that could hold mushrooms and wild greens. The mountain air tasted of wet earth. I walked down to the county town with my back bent and my heart a drum.
"Little girl," an older woman asked at the market when I spread my bundles. "What do you have?"
"Fresh mushrooms," I said, putting on my best voice. "Five copper for a leaf. They are clean and just picked."
The woman looked at my patched clothes, at my small clean hands, and at my honest face.
"How about four leaves for twenty?" she bargained.
I blinked. "It was five."
She smiled a weary smile. "Make it twenty, child. My daughter lives in the manor. She'll like a mushroom stew."
I wrapped up the mushrooms and the greens. I held the small coins like tiny suns in my palm. I bought a cheap back-basket and a small dagger — a blade a little larger than a manicure tool, but sharp. I bought a tin box when I could and a fold of bread that tasted like promise.
"Be careful," the blade-smith grunted when I paid him. "You are small. Keep out of trouble."
"I will," I lied and tucked the coin away.
At dusk I slept in the old temple, the place that had been my shelter for three short days. I would not be afraid. I had pockets in the air, a plan in my head, and a little blade.
I woke with a lightness of head and a drop of blood on my wooden bracelet. I had cut my finger while harvesting. I looked into the well behind the temple and found water that breathed white mist. When I drank it, my stomach curled like it was being combed. I thought I might faint.
I woke in front of a little courtyard that did not belong to the broken temple. It belonged to a three-roomed cottage. I called into the empty rooms, "Is anyone here?"
There was no answer.
I pushed at the bookcase in the study and found a small book with the title Space Manual. "Space?" I said, and before the word was over, the book slid like a moth and touched my forehead. Light slipped into me.
I read with my eyes closed as words sank into my mind. There was a measuring stone that could test spirit roots. There was a well whose water was spirit spring. There was a library I could slowly unlock and a book written by the previous owner. There was something called the Chaotic Root, and then I saw the word I had dreamed about since I was three: mixed root.
"Oh," I whispered. "No cap on growth."
I put my hand on the measuring stone. The light flashed white and I laughed loud and new. Mixed root. No barriers. I was dizzy with a small crazy joy I had not known was allowed.
I opened the well water and drank. The world tasted like rain. My ribs eased. My finger would heal. For the first time in the memory of this life, I felt starting strength.
"Alright," I told the empty room. "You and I — let's not starve."
I spent my days the way a cockroach finds crumbs: quick and cautious. I sold mushrooms at the market. I carried leaves and bundles and traded. I sold greens and bought a little cloth to mend my back-basket. The town buzzed and left enough scraps for me.
"Where did you learn to sell like this, child?" an old doctor in the herb shop asked me one afternoon when I brought him a good batch of cleaned, properly prepared herbs.
"My master taught me," I said.
"You have a steady hand and a clean mind," he smiled. "Forrest Stein. Call me Forrest. Bring your herbs to me from time to time."
"Forrest," I repeated. "Okay."
Forrest became the man who paid fair, who taught me about pulse and about how to dry ginseng skins so they kept. I would match his kindness later with my loyalty.
One day I found a house with boarded windows. I slipped a rock through a hole it had and heard the thud of a false floor. I had found a hidden room — three rooms of trunks filled with cloth and silver and silk. My little heart thumped.
"This is impossible," I said aloud, but I took the boxes. I put cloth into the space, and when I opened the last trunk, I found a faded map and a diary.
"Dirty rich," I grinned.
I filled the space with things I could spare. I washed in the well. I learned the slow, stubborn breathing of meditation. The book taught me a breathing method. Following it, my spirit lit like a small lantern. The tiny spark of something inside me — purple as a bruise and bright as a beetle — took in the world's small lights.
When I was brave and foolish, I sold some of the silk quietly and bought seeds.
"Planting," I told myself. "A small farm in a pocket of earth, that will keep me fed."
I learned to cook with the iron pan I could not really afford. I learned to sharpen the thin blade into something clever. I learned the difference between a cheap lie and an honest trade. I met two other children sleeping under a rotted porch one day. They were thin and frightened.
"Who are you?" I asked them.
"Bethany," the girl said. "And Jose."
"Who took care of you before?"
"Our mother is gone." Bethany's voice was small and steady. "We had a rude man at the market."
"You stay with me," I said. "You help with chores. Learn to read. I will try to stitch up your lives."
They stayed. I taught Bethany to sew. I taught Jose to fetch water and to hold my measuring stone when I read. We kept the space secret.
"You will be my family," I told them one night, "but swear not to tell."
"We swear," they said together with a solemnity that made their small faces serious. "One life."
We had food and a plan. I taught Bethany how to count coins and Jose how to identify herbs.
"Teach me how to read that big herb book," Jose asked. "I want to know what saves people."
"I will teach you," I said, and meant it.
Months passed — not in the thick way of months, but in the way of small improvements: a stronger arm, a better soup, a wider smile. My mixed root took in the mist from the well. My breathing changed.
Then came the day of the big market festival, a three-day feast that soaked the streets with oil and laughter. I sold more herbs than I thought I would.
"More bread," I told Bethany as we walked among the tables.
At the central square the showman smashed rocks with his chest and a crowd clapped. I watched and kept one eye on the crowd.
"Keep your basket close," I told the two children.
"What about the kids?" Bethany whispered.
"Watch the crowd. Watch the palms. Watch the hands," I said. "Never let a hand hide."
We were not careful enough.
One man touched my shoulder, another reached for Jose. The world folded like a card house. A cloth pressed over my mouth. The taste was dust and sleeping spice.
"Don't make a sound," a voice hissed — low and greedy.
I pretended to sleep and let my mind drop like a small stone into the dark water of sleep. Even bound, I sent out a whisper of notice to the well and to the measuring stone. I felt them like tiny stars.
They put ten of us — children and one small white-haired page in purple — on a cart. We were taken away, the town vanishing behind the wood and the dust. I breathed and watched, every inch of my skin awake though my mouth was sewn shut. They smelled like cheap wine and old leather.
When they left the cart to the broken temple, it was not the one I had known many nights before. This one had other crackings. The captors left to cook and count their cash. They lashed children and tucked them into corners like raw meat.
I reached with my thoughts. My hands were tied.
"Don't," a boy beside me murmured.
I worked quietly until night. I used a piece of metal to cut thin cords. The food the captors put by the fire smelled of sleep. When the men fell to it, drunk and heavy, I moved soundless as a shadow and untied the children.
"Follow me," I whispered.
I had drilled them, in the market slip, in the small cave behind the well. I taught them breaths that did not empty the head, breaths that cut the light into threads and hid it. We crept out of the ruined temple and into the moon.
At the edge of the road, we met three boys wearing white and fine clothes. They had been taken earlier from a carriage, too young for the street.
"Who are you?" said one in a voice that flattened into suspicion. He had a face older than his years and a crown of impatience. He was Cassius Hayes.
"My name is Kaliyah," I said. "We are going home."
They looked at me, the world heavy on them. Then Cassius tilted his head, as if he guessed the truth.
"You are small to command a rescue," he said. "Why did you save us?"
"Because you are alive," I said. "Get out of the road and run."
The children scattered into moonlit alleys. I slipped back to the ruins and set a pot to boil, seasoned with a trick I had learned from Forrest: a taste that loosened the mind. I made it slow as honey.
When the captors returned and found a pot bubbling, they sat down and ate careless. The sleep came heavy and quick. I moved among them as if I were a witch. I bound them in ropes that would let them wake to find their legs gone and their pride smaller than their shoes.
Then we walked back into town.
"They will go to the magistrate," Jose whispered.
"I will not," I said. "Not yet."
I kept silent. I wanted something else: a public reckoning where hands that reached for children could no longer hide behind darkness.
I worked for weeks. I gathered testimony. I took the ledger I found in the captor's little chest: names, prices, tokens, a list of villages. I put together proofs — the captors' own marks, the stolen ribbons they kept from each victim, a ledger with the seal of a merchant who bought children once "for work." I burned into my memory the faces of the captors.
"Who will help you with this?" Bethany asked when I told her.
"Forrest," I said. "And I will find the magistrate."
Forrest agreed, with a quietness that was like a hand on my shoulder.
"This is dangerous," he said. "But you did right to save them. Let me bring them to the magistrate."
"No," I said, because I had another plan.
"Another plan?" he raised his eyebrows. "Whatever you choose, Kaliyah, I will stand with you. Do not make a child shoulder what an adult should bear."
"I have a space," I said, because adults say brave things like that even if they needed time to learn them. "I can bring witnesses."
On the day of the harvest feast I stood in the square. A banner for the county banner hung at the magistrate's hall. People came for gambling bread and songs. The captors had been bold because they had a buyer who paid handsomely.
I stepped forward with Bethany and Jose and called to the crowd.
"Listen!" I cried, and a hundred heads turned like small seas.
"Who is that child?" someone asked. "She has a voice."
"She is the one who came from the square," an old woman said. "She looked like a sparrow the day she sold mushrooms. Now she looks like a hawk."
I had asked the three recaptured boys — Cassius Hayes, Leonardo Alvarez, and Robert Baird — to be there, disguised in simple clothes. They had agreed with quiet bravery.
"We were sold," Cassius said clearly. "They took us to a stone temple. They had a book. They traded children like sacks of grain."
The captors, hearing their names called, were still and full of the slow arrogance of men who counted their profit. Maddox O'Brien, the leader, wore a smirk like a rusted blade.
"You think a child can shame me in my market?" he grinned at first. His voice tasted of boldness. "I have money, and men, and a road to ride."
"For now," I said, and Forrest stood behind me with four others who had seen the captors on the road. "But not for long."
"Do you have proof?" someone in the crowd shouted.
I set out the ledger upon a board. "Here," I said. "Their own tally. See the marks? Children taken from villages. The tokens they wear as brands. A rope of notes."
"Forrest can verify the handwriting. He is a man who weighs truth like scales," Cassius added.
"Forrest?" the crowd turned like sunflowers.
"Forrest?" the old pharmacist stepped forward and read the names. "These are names I have seen traded like trade goods in the market. Money changes hands in markets, but not the price of children."
The crowd shifted. Murmurs rose like a storm.
Maddox's face, smug a breath before, started to change into confusion.
"This is impossible," he said. "These are lies. You lay a trap. You're stealing from honest traders."
"Who in the crowd has had a child taken?" I shouted. Half a dozen hands rose, trembling and small.
They told their stories — a child's scarf, a neighbor who did not come home, a small boy who used to spin stories of a blue-sailed cart. The evidence stacked up like bricks.
Someone in the crowd — a clerk from the magistrate's hall — had seen ledger entries and came forward with ink-stained papers and signatures.
Maddox's smile stiffened. His voice stepped down a rung.
"This must be a mistake," he stammered. "I trade animals. I... I do not trade children. Someone else — a rival — put my marks there."
The crowd's voice rose. "Liar!" an old woman spat. "You have the skins in your tent. You are muddy with their fear!" A hat was thrown. Someone pointed.
Maddox's face went from scorn to sharp surprise. He touched his chest as if he felt a cold sink into him.
"No," he said, and then, softer, "No, you cannot. I have men. I have names who will swear otherwise."
"Do it," I said. "Bring them here. Let them say so. The market will not cheapen the voices of those who were taken."
He sent his men. Two limping fellows came forward — the local buyers who had paid him to deliver children to far caravans. They had been paid and they had turned their heads for gold.
The buyers looked at the faces of the children, and the ledger, and then at the magistrate's driver. They faltered, then sweat. The crowd smelled their sweat like betrayal.
A hush fell.
Maddox's face lost its color as his denials began to fail.
"That's not what I meant, not all—" He sputtered. "Someone tricked me—"
He looked at the magistrate's hall, and then at the great crowd, his chest heaving like an animal about to be caged. The first man in his group, a grizzled trader named Baryn, made a move as if to take back a word. He tried to speak, then shut his mouth. Someone in the front row took out a stick and jabbed toward Maddox's feet.
A child — one of the rescued — walked forward. The child held out a scrap of ribbon. "He took my ribbon," the child said. "He said he would trade it for a coin."
Maddox laughed first, but it was the laugh of a man cutting the last rope. The laugh thinned.
A woman pressed forward with a child-shaped carving. "That's my boy's carving," she cried, and the sound broke the cloth of the afternoon. The crowd pressed like a pack of sea birds.
"Silence!" someone shouted, but no one listened.
Maddox's eyes swam from anger to recognition to a dull, disbelieving panic. He was a man who had built his life on a ledger and a comfortable cruelty. Now his people turned like a flock discovering the weather.
He tried to slither away. "I will pay back," he said, and found no coins big enough. "I will—"
"Pay back?" someone in the crowd roared. "You think money can buy the mouths of children?"
The moods of the crowd shifted as quickly as weather. A fisherman stepped forward and spat into the dust. "Kneel," called a woman whose child had been taken years before. She had a face carved in lost nights. "Kneel and beg."
Maddox's jaw loosened. His bravado collapsed into the look of a man seeing the floor tilt. He stumbled, then fell to his knees in the dust with his ledger under his hand.
"Please," he begged. His voice changed from command to pleading. "Please, let me live. I—"
"Beg," the woman said. She held up the ribbon and the child's carving. "Beg in front of them."
Maddox flailed, his hands clawing at the dirt. "Please," he begged again. "I will give you my place, my money—"
The crowd circled. A dozen hands reached toward him and dragged him to his knees. The magistrate's men came forward, to do their duty for a change. Some of the men who had bought children were called out to testify. Others tried to hide. They were forced to return the tokens, to point to villages, to name buyers with trembling voices.
Maddox's face drained. He tried denial, then explanation, then excuses that sounded like cobbled walls: "It was necessary," "they were apprentices," "they were orphans." The crowd hunched, listening, then a ripple of contempt rolled through them like an insult.
"Shame," someone muttered.
The change inside him was brutal and sudden: from swaggering villain to shocked man to fevered denier, to someone whose knees had gone too weak to hold him upright. His eyes went glassy. He shouted, then wept. He called names. He cursed. When even his own men turned away, he pulled at the dust and begged.
"Please! I didn't know! I didn't—" He tried to raise himself then toppled. Children talked, some with voices that were echoing theirs, small and reeling.
"Don't touch him," cried a voice. "Let the law take him."
"But let us see," another voice insisted. "Let him face the ones he sold."
So they did. He was made to stand in the square while the entire market watched. He was made to confess each name, each village, each token. He was ordered to untie the children who still kept calls and scratches on them. He was lashed with words until he could not stand. The crowd wept and clapped and cursed in equal waves. A scribe recorded the confession for the magistrate's books. Old men shook their heads. Mothers covered their faces.
When he fell again, broken by the weight of his own deeds, he clung to the magistrate's steps and whispered, "Please... please... forgive me."
"There is no forgiving," said one woman softly, "but there is justice. You will stand for it."
He tried to find anger to be proud of, but all that was left in his eyes was the frightened infant of a man who had traded his humanity for coin.
The magistrate's soldiers led him away, while the crowd followed, as though the city needed to stare for its own courage to be true. He was taken with his ledger nailed to a plank for everyone to see. People strewed flowers at the feet of the rescued children. They took down the marks and burned them in the square. Mothers hugged the children who had been found that day until the children were too tired to cry.
I watched it all from the edge.
"You did this," Forrest said quietly at my side.
"I did what I could," I answered. "But I could not have done it without you, without the boys, without the townsfolk."
Cassius — the one who had once asked me why — bowed to me like a small man and then like a prince. "You are brave," he said.
"No," I said, because bravery is sometimes just a choice to move. "I am stubborn."
The townspeople cheered in a way that hurt and mended at the same time. Some clapped, some wept. Some stamped their feet. A child leaped onto a barrel and yelled, "No one will buy our children anymore!"
The captors’ leader was taken to the magistrate and bound. There was a trial. The ledger was read. The magistrate pronounced judgment long and slow. The sentence would be to public work, to long hours, to handing over everything; but his punishment, in the square, had already been written by those who had lost their nights.
Maddox's ruined expression as he was led away was a map of defeat. The crowd had watched his fall. He had gone from being a small god with money to a pair of trembling hands in the dust. He had begged as human lungs can beg. The children watched him like a story that would not repeat.
That night I walked back to my space. Bethany and Jose prepared a small pot and we ate quietly. I had the ledger folded and placed in the space—an ugly thing to keep by the jar of seeds. I put my small purple bracelet on my wrist and fell asleep with my head full of ledger pages like falling leaves.
"Tomorrow we plant," I said to Jose, and to the sleeping space. "And though the world will still have sneers, maybe the market will keep a kinder tally."
We kept moving. We grew. I learned to distill herbs, to make pills of medicine that would strengthen a weak heart and sooth the wound of a night. Forrest taught me how to set a skull cap and how to move a spoon in a child's mouth when they were losing the fight for breath.
In the years that followed in that small lifetime, I grew from a child with three days of life into someone who had a field of small crops in a hidden garden, a few small animals in the space, and a sword.
"I called it Purple Treasure," I said one evening as I sat in the study.
"You named a sword?" Bethany laughed.
"It chose me," I corrected. "I found it in an old box, a small sword with a purple groove, and when I touched it, it hummed. The book said it was a bonded blade."
"Is it rude to name a sword?" Jose asked.
"It is not rude if the sword will save you," I said, and pressed the little blade to my palm. It was like a little heartbeat.
Years are funny in spaces that are not the world. Inside, our little farm grew to small fields. I found a fox who was trapped in the space like a toy gone wrong. It turned out to be a nine-tailed fox — a beast with a proud voice and too much dignity to be a dog. Silvered fur, two tails at first and then nine when it was free. It called itself by a single conceited name: "Silverwhite."
"Don't be an idiot," I told Silverwhite the first afternoon. He answered with a snort of blue light.
We learned together. Bethany learned to sew clothes fit for dignitaries. Jose learned small formations and how to read a star map I had copied into the diary. Cassius and Leonardo and Robert — the three boys — turned into men who would call or send letters sometimes as if their lives and our brief crossing had been a clear thread.
I learned the deeper things: how to compress spirit into a pinhead and hide it. How to make a barrier, a voice, a message. How to take a bad man's ledger and make it a public shame. How to craft a pill that would stop bleeding. How to ride a sword like a horse. How to bind demons with wood and in the end to make a fox that would call a jump "playful."
People came. I treated pregnant women who were told their births were impossible. I soothed the fever of children who had been swapped for coin. I stitched a man's knee until he could walk. I placed the purple sword into my hand one day when an assassin spoke in the dark like an animal. It was not my first life, but I took it as if it were.
We traveled when I could. We walked on a road with a wagon that would appear when I said a name into the space. I put a small banner on the cart: "Kaliyah's Herbs." People looked at the banner and at the little girl who was not so small anymore and decided to rest their own heavy feet for a while.
"Where are we going next?" Bethany asked as we rolled out of one town and into another.
"Where the stars point," I said, and for once I meant it not as a joke.
We passed a river that wound around a city like a sleeping snake. We rode the purple blade out of the space sometimes, just to keep it bright.
"One more thing," I said on a late night when everyone slept and the fox's tails made a map around the candlelight. I took the measuring stone and placed it against the purple sword's groove. The stone glowed softly.
"This is our sign," I whispered. "Whenever the purple hums, remember the ledger, the children, the bowl of water from the well, and the little two-coin dagger that bought a life. Remember that a small voice can call a thousand people."
"And if we leave," Jose asked in the dusk, "what do we leave behind?"
"You leave behind what you can make — a field planted with medicine, a list of names that will not be forgotten, and a sword that will sing," I said, and the purple sword hummed like an answering bird.
The road had many forks and so did my life. Once in a market we were offered titles we could not use; once we stood in front of a magistrate who bowed his head so low I feared it would touch the dirt.
"Why did you teach me to read?" Bethany asked as we set a small bowl of stew on the table.
"So you will not be tricked by words," I answered.
"So you are a teacher too?" Jose asked.
"I am many things," I said. "I am stubborn, I am greedy for life, and I will not let small faces be sold."
I kept a secret pocket in my bracelet. In that pocket I kept a small blue pearl that had fallen from the belly of a sea beast — a bauble of a kind men chased in legends. When it touched my skin, it felt cold and then like a small sun. Silverwhite would purr and roll on top of it like a cat on a rock.
We sat one night with a map spread and the purple sword lying across it like a straight line.
"Promise me something," Leonardo said quietly.
I smiled at him because the thing about promises is sometimes they are just promises. "No," I said, and that made them laugh.
We kept traveling. We saved the woman who would have lost a child on a night of red rain. We crossed mountain passes and grew roots in two markets. We bound foxes and cured small children of devils that were only hunger.
And in the end, when I had to move on, I did not say the usual things about "always" or "together forever." I folded the ledger into the space with the silver and the seeds. I placed the purple sword into my storage bracelet and felt the hum settle like a warm pulse against my wrist.
"I will lock you here for the day I need you," I told the sword. "When the ledger insists on waking, you'll sound."
The purple sword vibrated, a small song like a child's laugh, and the measuring stone blinked white.
When I closed my eyes to sleep that night, I pressed my hand to the bracelet and whispered, "If any of you blame me for leaving, remember the taste of the well water the night we found the ledger. Remember the woman who draped a ribbon over a child's head and called him back. Remember the market's hands that took coins and then learned to give."
My hand closed around the band of the bracelet. The purple sword was quiet now, folded inside, a promise and a memory. The space was full of small lights. The fox's tails circled like moons.
I breathed once and then again. The sound was the same as always — a small, stubborn life that kept going. I slept like a child who had not been bought or sold.
And at the very edge of sleep, I heard a soft voice not from any living mouth but from the stone that measured root and from the sword inside the bracelet. It said, simply,
"Remember the well."
I smiled and let the sound be the guard of the night.
The End
— Thank you for reading —