Sweet Romance12 min read
My Master Brother Flew Off — So I Married His Thunder and a Wooden Doll
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I married Jordan Wolff and he flew away on our wedding night.
"I'll come back, Kristina! I swear I'll come back," he shouted as his breakthrough ripped a hole through the hall and the roof, and then the sky swallowed him. He left me on the bridal bed, staring up at the gash in the ceiling and at scattered star-piercings of cold light, feeling every second of his promise as a small stone in my chest.
"Do you mean it?" I asked the empty air, but the only answer was wind and dust.
Half a month later the rumors began. "She made him cry on their wedding night," people said. "He couldn't stand looking at her. He had to leave."
"Ridiculous," I said out loud to my mirror, turning my face left and right. The mirror showed a clear-cheeked woman with dark lashes and a lazy smile. Ugly? Who said that?
I had an idea. "I'll hold a match—a martial match—招亲," I told myself. "Find a partner who can actually stay." I posted the notice myself and was just walking away when the sky split with thunder.
"Kristina Cameron, you cannot marry anyone else!" A voice roared, not from clouds but from the bright, impossible air. I looked up. For a moment I thought it was Jordan's voice.
"You tell me not to marry and I'll... I won't!" I shouted. A bolt hit the notice board and turned it into ash. The crowd scattered. I stood with paste in my hand and the taste of shock in my mouth.
"Now everyone knows," my father, Booker Green, said when I got home. He rubbed his face and shook his head. "You won't marry now."
"It's not like he can just come down and stop me," I muttered.
"Don't forget he can call down lightning," he said.
"Right," I admitted, a little bitter. "What a thing to forget."
I stomped to the courtyard and shouted at the sky, "Jordan, I can't go up and you can't come down. Let's just leave it alone!"
Silence. The sky was silent for a breath and then the same voice, as clear as a bell, roared, "You think so? Not for you!"
I raised my middle finger to the air, because what else could I do? Jordan answered with a thunderous sigh I could feel in my teeth and then a wooden toy at my dressing table shouted at me.
"Kristina, you think I'm gone, but I'm not," the wooden puppet said, slamming its tiny fists against the lacquered table top. I blinked at the puppet. The puppet was Jordan's voice.
"You can't come down," I said to the thing. "I'm not going anywhere."
The puppet stamped and crossed its small wooden arms. "I will find a way," it said stubbornly. "And you will cultivate faster."
"No," I said. "No, you won't drag me into your hard work life."
"Let me out," it demanded when I closed the box.
"Not a chance."
That was how my new life began. Jordan had become a presence that could not leave me and could not really help me—he could speak, bicker, and if he wanted, thunder. He could also, as it turned out, insist that I train.
"You're not being fair," I told him one evening as he sat with his tiny carved hands folded and his wooden face pinched.
"Fair has nothing to do with love," he said, and the sentence struck me harder than any blade.
Driscoll Barrera—my second brother—did not like my strategy. He was the kind who had no patience for hesitation. When he finally stepped out from his long seclusion, the first thing he did was press a book into my hands and ask, "Where is your discipline?"
"Discipline?" I echoed.
"You're my responsibility now," Driscoll said. "I will not let you be left behind."
"Why would you even care?"
"Because Booker Green asked me," Driscoll said flatly. "And because I will not let you be weak."
He pushed me out of the door and into a new practice there on the cliffs, and he stayed. He became the sharp jaw at the edge of my days. He didn't smile often. He didn't allow excuses.
"I can't break through," I told him one afternoon, breathless after a practice swing.
"Then stop hiding," he told me.
"Stop calling me childish things in front of everyone," I retorted.
He touched my shoulder one time, a quick, brief motion. "Strength is not all sword and breath. It's also what you decide not to surrender."
I was hiding something anyway, a smaller secret than ambition but heavier: Jordan's shadow inside me. In dreams he turned threatening, and my mind braided fear into images—me killing people I loved, me stabbing Jordan; scenes that felt unreal until they were not. The vision terrified me more than anything in practice.
"You don't know me," I said once in a soft thrust against that terror. "You think I'm a coward because I can't catch up."
"Stop making yourself the only judge," Driscoll replied. "Practise."
I did, because being told I couldn't was a faster ignition than any promise.
We were four then: Booker Green, our master; Jordan Wolff, who had light and thunder and a wooden toy voice; Driscoll Barrera, my cold tutor; and Freya Mikhaylov, our third elder sister, wild with laughter and hard as a blade.
Freya was trouble in plain clothes. She drank and she bet and she joked about marriage like it was a bargain to be stolen. She told me, once, "If I meet someone who is true, I'll take him. If he betrays me, I'll kill him."
"That's dramatic," I said.
"It's practical," she answered with a grin that was dangerous in its calm.
One day a rumor passed through the mountain like a shadow: the man Freya loved was a fox spirit. She was not ashamed; she found him lovely. The mountain's rules frowned on such things. A fox pretending to be a man is a thing to kill—not for heartbreak, but for danger.
"Do you think Freya's plan will work?" I asked Hattie Bonner, the little imp who hung around like a child and knew too much.
"She is Freya," Hattie shrugged. "She never does things small."
In the end the fox did what foxes sometimes do: he fled and changed and left. Freya looked for him and then left the mountain herself to find what she wanted. The dates of a wedding were almost set—until the fox vanished.
"She will go after him," Jordan said, and his voice was small and angry.
"She might not come back," Driscoll said quietly. "Or she might."
Freya left. For a hundred years she left. Years later, when we met again, she was crueler and kinder at once. She had become the mountain's master in heart and blade.
After Freya left, my life bent toward one thing: to get out of being the girl who couldn't catch up. I closed my eyes and trained until my fingers shook and my legs burned. Sometimes I hallucinated—once I dreamed I stabbed the golden girl that Freya once called friend, and in the dream everyone watched and judged. I woke with my hands curled like claws.
"You're sick," Driscoll said bluntly.
"Maybe," I admitted. "Or maybe I'm afraid."
"Afraid of losing him," he said.
"I can't stop loving him," I whispered.
"You don't have to keep letting love be an excuse," he replied. "Make it your power."
I didn't believe that at first. I believed a stubborn little lie: that I would only be a weight on him, that his bright path was not mine to walk.
The day I decided to close my door and go into real seclusion was the day I met the dream where I killed Jordan and then split into something I did not know. The vision's violence gave me a map: the heart-demon that chased me wore Jordan's face.
That was both unfair and true.
"Then prove yourself," Driscoll said the morning I bowed to the cliff and began the long process of breaking through my barrier. "If you can't become the woman who stands beside him, then become the woman who stands above what made you small."
I trained until my muscles learned to forget their fear. Driscoll pushed me like he was sculpting a blade out of soft iron. Jordan's wooden puppet argued and pouted from the shelf, sometimes mocking, sometimes cheering, but never more than a voice.
"Do you want me to burn this place down?" the puppet asked me once late at night.
"Stop being melodramatic," I said. "You made the mess, you deal with it."
The day I finally felt the first true loosening of that stone in my chest, Jordan came to me. Not the puppet, but the presence of him—he had not truly left; he came down with a mission, an errand to do among mortals. For a moment I thought the old chest pain would return, but instead he sat by me, real and warm.
"I was missing you," he said, and his voice sounded like rain after drought.
"I was training," I said.
"You were training so I wouldn't suffer?" His eyes were surprised. "You didn't have to be so brave."
"I didn't want you to have to wait for me," I admitted, because it was the first honest thing I had said without fear.
He smiled like the Jordan I had loved. "You didn't have to be brave alone," he said.
"I wasn't alone," I said, looking at Driscoll and at the shadow of my master who always left cookies by the door. "I had help."
We traveled. Jordan and I walked the lands below the mountain looking for a "destined person" the world said could change the currents of fate. We saw seas like melting mirrors and peaks like knives. We laughed and we fought and I learned that being loved by a man who could reach the stars did not mean he was a ruler over all of me. He was stubborn. I was stubborn. That made us good company.
Time renamed itself. We were gone for two hundred years and came home to find that the mountain had kept fewer things than I expected. My father had died. I stood at the water edge where he used to fish and found only the stone of memory. He had said, before he slipped away into silence, "If you are hurt, Kristina, come back here. We'll always be waiting."
I returned to the mountain when the day was near. The memory of him dying was a hollowed place. Our father, Booker Green, had been the one to send us into the world and tell us to grow. He had been stern, but he had loved with all the clumsy warmth of the ordinary. When his light went out we were left with the hard, cold problem of living on.
"I can't do this," Driscoll said once while sitting in the dirt near the grave he made for our master. He had broken the last rule: he had insisted on solitude but failed to be where it counted.
"You don't have to do this alone," I said, trying to be the steady voice. "We are a family."
He scoffed a laugh that tasted like iron. "We are children wandering over a map our father left. Someone has to stand at the edge and make sure we don't fall."
I looked at Jordan then. He stepped closer and squeezed my hand. "Then let's keep walking together," he said.
At some point I opened the small wooden box that Freya had given me years before. The night I did, everything in its small space breathed together: inside were charms, a stone carved with runes, a paper, and an old bell.
"This is the last step," Freya had told me much earlier. "It isn't a thing you can wear. It's a proof."
"Proof of what?" I had asked then.
"That you tried," she said.
I placed the items on my palm and felt a light yawn inside them. The air seemed to hold its breath. Then the universe rearranged itself just enough to let me step through.
I left the mountain and came back a different person. People said I had done the impossible: I had made my heart stop being a weight and taught it to be an anchor. People who had once laughed at the girl who could not ascend now spoke with respect. They watched me walk and saw in my stride something of the mountain's own resolve.
When Freya returned she wore an armor not of steel but of certainty. She had killed the fox who had betrayed her in a city far away and then walked home with the body and with the story. The mountain welcomed her fierce way like an old friend.
But she did not let the fox die quietly. No—Freya demanded that he be brought back to the market square in the capital of a nearby province and that everyone who had watched him charm them from their homes see what he had been.
It was a cruel, public thing, and yet perfectly Freya. Emmanuel Gentile had been good at being sweet and soft and sly. He had sold lies like honey. When the truth came down, it struck him like lightning.
They carried him through the city in a cage of gilded bone. "Look at the face who owned your kisses," Freya told the onlookers in a voice that trembled and then hardened. "Look at the lies he taught you. He pretended tenderness and left only theft."
"Do not kill him!" someone shouted, a woman who had been swayed by him.
"Let justice decide," a judge called from the raised dais.
Freya did not want a judge. She wanted the market to see what had happened to their trust.
He was dragged before the crowd. He tried to speak. "I loved her," he whimpered.
"Love?" Freya spat. "Your love was a costume. You took what you wanted and left us to bleed."
"People will say I was cruel," Freya went on, and the crowd leaned forward like birds at a feeder. "I will tell you how this goes."
She made them bring the letters, the tokens, the gifts he had given. She showed the places where he had met girls in silence and left them a week later with no word. She let the mothers and the daughters speak. The crowd became a thing fierce and loud.
"Do you remember this?" she asked the merchants, holding up a ring. "He sold this for a coin and promises."
He tried again to make a face that begged forgiveness. He tried to nod like he had acted for love.
"Watch him," Freya commanded. "Watch how his hands shake not with regret but with counting how much he can still pocket."
People who had called him charming now spat on the ground. A woman who had been his lover before, now gray-haired and steady, spat once and said, "He promised to be my husband. He took my trust. He took my savings. He took my name." Her voice was the quietest blow—worse than the loudest scream.
The merchants cataloged his crimes.
He went through a cycle I had seen in nightmares: first bravado, then denial, then shrinking into excuses, then pleading, then facing the teeth of those who had been wronged.
"Please," he said at one stage, looking to the faces that had once blushed at his compliments. "I can do better. I will pay back."
"Pay back?" an old man shouted. "Where is the price for stolen years?"
The crowd answered like a wave. "Pay back!" they shouted. "Pay back!"
They made him stand under a platform and they stripped him of his false finery. They read out the names of the women he'd charmed. They produced the ledgers and the false promises in his own handwriting. A widow recognized the handwriting and said, "This book took more than money. It took a life."
I watched it all from the side, my hand tight in Jordan's. He squeezed back. "Are you alright?" he asked.
"Watch them," I said. "Let them see."
The public punishment lasted like a slow, terrible rain. He had to listen while each person explained how they had been robbed of hope. He had to see the effect of his small kindnesses when scaled across a score of lives. He had to watch the faces of women who once giggled at him now hold him in contempt.
At the end he was not dragged away to die. He was made to make restitution where he could and sent with a warning. But the humiliation was deep and complete. He had been a man who delighted in the power of a lie; now he had to look at the reality of every bridge he burned. Freya watched the last of him go, then spat one last time on the dust and pulled her cloak close.
When the crowd dispersed, some clapped. Some cried. Some took what had been a scandal and made it a lesson. "Don't be this man," they said. "Hold your kindness as if it's something that can be broken if you treat it like a toy."
Freya lit a cigarette and tossed it to a gutter. She then turned and walked back toward the mountain, a little lighter.
That was not the only time wrongs were made right on my watch, but it was the one that left a loud ring in people's ears. It taught the market not to trust honey more than the honesty of their own lips. And Freya, for all her wildness, came back with a steadiness I had not seen before.
Back at the mountain, life had its smaller reprieves. We drank once on the roof until midnight and then another night and another. One night the four of us—the old crew—drank more than the rules allowed. Booker Green scolded us for a week. We laughed and confessed the stupidest things.
"Remember when you and I fought off those bandits?" I said one night, drunk enough to be honest and proud. Jordan laughed.
"You mean when you knocked three of them out and then used a fishbone as a needle?" Driscoll said.
"Don't make fun," I said. "They deserved it."
Freya slapped a hand on the table. "To old enemies and new friends," she declared and thumped her cup. We toasted until dawn.
We had small miracles too. One day a cultivation exercise went wrong and I shrank into a child's body for a day. Jordan freaked out in a way he had never in his life. He dressed me in tiny clothes, pinched my cheeks, and insisted I call him father—then promptly apologized half a dozen times for being ridiculous.
"Call me father," he insisted with a grin so smug it was dangerous.
"No," I said in a tiny voice. "You can't just force roles."
"Then call me Jordan," he said, and the world fell into perfect disorder.
I grew back. The people around me made me like a ship that had weathered storms: a little battered, but somehow seaworthy. Driscoll held to his stern training and bitter jokes; Freya drank and laughed and threatened every man who looked at me too long; Jordan learned how not to let thunder speak when his heart should.
When the time came for me to step through and finally claim the last thing I'd been chasing—an ascension step, a bell that called my name—the mountain was there to watch. I was not the same girl who had once screamed at the sky. I had hard lessons, friends who spilled their truths in my lap, a father who had done his best, a sister who returned and killed the man who had betrayed her, and a second brother who kept an anchor on me when the waves wanted to topple.
On the night I stood at the edge of a breakthrough, Jordan put his hand over mine and the wooden puppet on the dressing table gave a small, satisfied grunt. "Finally," it said.
"Stop making noise," I told it.
He smiled. "No," he said. "This is yours."
I took the step. The bell in my hand rang not like thunder but like something smaller and truer. It had a voice and it said my name. The mountain exhaled.
Later, in the quiet that follows a storm, Freya sat on the porch and laughed. "You didn't become him," she told me. "You became you."
"I would not have believed it without you," I told her.
"Good," she said. "Then don't make me come back and kill someone else."
We laughed. We drank. We sat under the stars where he had once broken the roof and promised to return.
And he did—not because he was forced, but because he decided he wanted to watch me grow. We had a hundred small honest moments: he gave me his cloak when I was cold; he tutored me in languages and old songs; he kissed the top of my head and said, "You were never less to me." Sometimes he still thundered. Sometimes I still shook. But we had both learned that love either builds a ladder or it becomes a prison. We chose a ladder.
Years later I would tell the story to small faces sitting under the eaves: about a girl and a wooden puppet and a brother who left and promised to come back. They would listen with wide eyes and ask me how I kept going.
"I kept breathing," I would say. "I kept fighting. I kept letting people be both my teachers and my mirrors."
In the end, I did not become the woman who needed someone to hold the sky. I became the woman who could stand with the sky, and who could let that sky have thunder without being broken by it.
The End
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