Revenge10 min read
The Broken Ring and the Nine-Tailed Promise
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I watched the lightning fall and thought I would never stop feeling the cold.
"Stop," I ordered, but the word came out hollow. The storm paid me no heed.
"You killed her entire clan," someone whispered at my shoulder. "You gave her the thunder sentence?"
"Relax," I replied. "She is a nine-tailed fox. She can't die."
"But—" the voice stuttered. "She already cut eight of her tails to save you. She bled her heart's blood for you. She's been living on a heart-essence. And you—today you forced her to surrender that last bead..." The words came like knives.
I arrived to find Juliet Green suspended by iron chains. Her faceshadows were smeared with blood; her nine tails were ragged stumps, each one a raw ribbon of wounded flesh. She looked at me with eyes rimmed red.
"Why?" she said. "Why did you butcher my family? Why—"
"Enough," I snapped. The sky dimmed half at my annoyance as if the world listened to my mood.
"She's a demon—" someone started, but Juliet's voice bled through.
"Juliet, I saved you when you were bleeding," she whispered. "I gave you everything. I even used my heart's blood to keep you alive..." She coughed. The chains hummed with the thunder. "You promised you'd marry me."
"Enough of these lies!" I cut in. I felt the old arrogance creep back into my jaw. "Demons hurt humans. They lie. If you hurt Juliet, you will pay. I will have your clan answer for it."
The girl beside me—Paula Larsen—pressed her face to mine like a devoted sister. She wore innocence like a cloak.
"Your Highness, she is frightened," Paula said sweetly.
"She's a demon," I repeated, and before Juliet could gather her strength, I had her suspended higher. The topmost bolt of lightning struck; she screamed, mouth raw and hoarse.
"I am your Juliet," she gasped between shocks. "I used my blood to save you—"
Paula sobbed on cue and collapsed into my arms. I felt the steady beat of her deception. The world narrowed to Paula's thin, trembling fingers against my sleeve.
"Two choices," I said to Juliet when the storm paused like a held breath. "You either spit the demon-bead into her mouth to heal her—or I will pry it out myself."
Her eyes widened.
"This heart-essence keeps me alive," she rasped. "I bled for you—"
"Spare me," I said, and I forced the short blade into my palm. I thought foxes bled and rose again; I thought the bead could be taken without killing her. I was wrong. I took her to the wooden stake, and the rest is the part of us that should have ended then.
When the blade pierced her chest I felt nothing. I remember the sound she made—half animal, half child—and the strange, shrill hush after. Later, in the cool that followed, she spit a bead the color of a trapped sunset; she held it to the sky and, with a smile so faint I could not help remembering it forever, she crushed it.
Her form shimmered. She smiled and chose death.
I watched the small bead crack, and as it shattered the air betrayed itself. A hundred echoes of sorrow rolled through clouds; my most cherished ring—the ring she made for me—fractured into two in my hand. The ring we treasured since the day I almost died in the mortal coil. The world tilted.
"Impossible," I said. My hand went numb when I tried to mend it with power and failed.
"Your ring's broken?" Paula whispered, visibly shaken. Her eyes darted. She had always treated objects carelessly, but this one had been sacred. I felt a hollow open in me like a wound.
"She broke it," someone murmured.
"No," I said, but my throat closed. My memory of her tending to me in the dark—nailed into my chest like a thorn—rose up with ligature pain. I could not make the voices line up. The deck was stacked against truth and yet I had thought myself all-powerful.
Days blurred after. I sat in the high hall and stared at the half-ring. I began to feel a small, unwelcome tug—like guilt, but older. I took up the picturerolls that an old painter had kept. He had once painted a young man blind and the girl beside him with a fox like ribbon on her chest.
"This painting—is it of me?" I asked him.
He squinted. "You look much the same," he said. "You once walked the city with her."
I ran back through memory, and it cracked. I saw April rain, small hands that told me to eat with the corner of a spoon, that she had called herself "my Juliet." I had been preserved by a fox, a fox who cut tails and bled for me. I had married illusions and left a queen to pain. I realized then: I had been blind in a way deeper than sight could mend.
I stormed to find Juliet's prison.
"Bring me the fox," I barked.
They stared.
"She exploded her heart-essence," a guard said.
"I will see for myself," I insisted. I went anyway. The cell that had held her was empty but for a smear of jade light. The bead was gone. My half-ring in my hand burned like a coiled thing.
My steps slowed. I found Paula in my hall, pretending to stagger, pretending to weep. Her foolish rehearsed trembling made bile rise in me.
"Who is she?" I asked Paula softly.
"She is Juliet," Paula said in a voice like sugar. "She saved you, my lord. I only—" Her lips trembled.
I watched her for a long time and then—like a man who comes back to life only to realize his bones are brittle—I felt rage with the force of an engine.
"Where is the bead?" I demanded.
She pointed a shaking finger to the east and lied like a practiced thing. She thought she had sewn all the seams shut. How we were fooled.
Weeks taught me little but one certain thing: pieces of truth clung to imagination like burrs. I collected them, and while I collected the world seemed colder. I could not stop thinking of how she had once called herself Juliet to me in the halfway world of survival.
I began to gather memories in the archive of my study—little soap-bubble recollections that rose from the water's surface. In them she was small, saving me from a storm, coaxing me to sleep. I loved those bubbles; I pressed them to my face. With a force my pride would not have allowed in public, I melted them together with every scrap of my remaining heart and, in some private, foolish ritual, tried to create her anew.
The bead we had kept of her soul was half of what she had owed to me. I had half of it in my hands; I had a piece of her left in the coldness of my chest. I mixed my blood with the tiny remainder and poured the whole into a night of ceremony. I whispered promises I had not kept and lit a string of candles for the stupid hope that memory could serve as rebirth.
In the end, I made a thing that resembled her in the low light. She opened eyes made out of my own longing. I called and called her name and gave her life back with a fragile contraption of borrowed will. For a short, luminous hour, I had her.
But the world had other plans. Paula and her conspirators had not waited. They had set the rest of the snares.
"Your Highness," Jenna Falk said one morning, breathless, "they have taken the bead."
"Who?" I demanded.
"Paula," she said.
I felt the floor tilt.
We found her in the market, cackling in a vendor's shadow, holding the bead in both hands like it was a prize. She had managed to turn people's curiosity into armour. She smiled the smile of a woman who believed the world owed her.
"Paula," I said. "Hand it over."
She looked like any powerless woman on her knees. Then she flicked her eyes up with the flat look of a trapped viper.
"I'm keeping it," she said. "You shouldn't have loved a demon."
That was the day I learned how dangerous small lies could be.
We took her and bound her to the center of the great court. Word went out. The square filled like the sky after a summer storm: faces turning, whispers burning. People came because they wanted justice, because they wanted spectacle, because the heart of a ruler had been wounded and pleasure in vengeance is an old appetite.
"Paula Larsen," I said, stepping onto the raised dais. "You stole what protected Juliet. You faked caring. You shattered lives. For this you will be judged."
Her face was pale, the masquerade of sorrow gone. She tried to laugh it off.
"You think you can punish me?" she said, with a practiced flutter of outrage. "I am merely a grateful servant. You see only what you want to see."
"Speak truth," I said.
"You have no proof," she smirked. It was the first honest thing she'd done.
The crowd leaned forward. Breath mingled in the air like a held storm. I called for details and told them the story of the bead, of the broken ring, of the bleeding fox. For every fact, I had evidence stored: guards' reports, the painter's sketch, the half-ring itself. Each proof was a nail.
"She forged my grief," I told them. "She kissed my hand and used my gullibility. She stole a soul."
Paula's expression changed. The mask cracked. Her fingers trembled—first with practiced grief, then anger, then the flush of panic. She tried to deny, then to bargain.
"It was only—" she pleaded to the crowd. "He promised me—"
"He promised you nothing," someone in the crowd cried.
"Burn the traitor," someone else hissed.
The tide turned.
I had spent months building the case, and tonight my voice would be the hammer. I had not sought blood, but the law of the mountain and the cries of the people demanded a spectacle. For our kind, public shame is a weapon sharper than blades.
"Paula Larsen," I said, and I made the decree. "You shall be stripped of your titles and publicly atoned for your crimes. You shall stand in the square for three days. On the second day, we will tear the token of deceit from your possession, and on the third, you will confess your lies before those you have wounded."
Paula's face flickered. "You cannot—"
"Watch me," I said.
They hauled her out into the sunshine on the appointed morning. The square filled to overflowing. Faces from villages and city stalls leaned in. The children were hushed. The elders shook their heads. I remember my ring felt as heavy as a stone as I held it in my palm.
"Let the confession begin," I said.
She turned to me then, small, and in her eyes I could see the life she had been denied—something like regret, like hunger—but warped into cunning. She opened her mouth.
"It wasn't me," she said. "It was the fox. She prayed to die. The bead—she gave it away."
The first murmurs rose. Someone spat. A marketwoman shrieked.
"She killed herself," Paula said. "She wanted to be free. I only took what was left."
"Then why the lies to me?" I asked. "Why build a nest of false devotion?"
Paula's hands flew to her mouth. She laughed, a thin, high sound that made the crowd lean in with a taste for ruin.
"I wanted power," she admitted. "I wanted to be seen. Juliet's death was an accident, yes, but all of life is a string of accidents. I dressed them up and made men like you fall. Is that a crime?"
Gasps rose like small waves.
"Is that a crime?" I echoed. "Yes."
I had sworn never to be moved by such cruelty. I wanted her to feel what Juliet had felt when she smiled before she shattered the bead. I wanted her to watch the broken ring and know that the world had turned because of her small, selfish hands.
"Paula Larsen," I said, "you will be publicly shamed. Your titles will be torn from you. You will stand on the dais and we will tell every lie you have told aloud. You will be beaten of lies by the truth of those you betrayed. And you, personally, will watch the rebuilding of every village your treachery touched until the law says you are finished with toil."
She went white. "No," she breathed. "You can't—"
The crowd reacted like a thing alive. Some called for blood. Others wanted spectacle. A woman near the front produced a cloth and held it up to record—a crude, preserved note for those who could later tell the tale. Children crowded to the edges and pressed small fingers through the ropes. A guard stepped forward and with practiced cruelty she was stripped of the comforts of her station—her cloak, her false jewels.
"Look," I said softly. "You wanted me to see you as pure. Now everyone will watch you unclothe your pretense."
She tried to scream. Her voice was small. She began with the same denials: "I didn't—" Then the eyes in the crowd found her, and the stories arrived. A servant who had been beaten spoke up. A craftsman whose work she had ruined told of promises broken. For every lie she had told me in my hall, a hundred small people had bigger wounds.
I watched her go through stages—defiant, frantic, pleading, denial, collapse. My officers read out confessions that she had made in her letters. She made a last, desperate attempt.
"Spare me," she begged. "I will do anything. I will tell you where the rest of the beads are. I will—"
"Confess it all now," I said, and I gave her no mercy. I would not let her die as a noble. I would unmask the small, mewling truths.
She revealed names, places, dates. Each revelation was a salt on someone else's wound. The crowd's mood shifted from morbid curiosity to a darker glee. I saw faces soften when a lie was exposed, and I saw cheeks harden with new judgment when old betrayals were confirmed.
On the third day I ordered the final punishment. She was to stand on the raised stone in the marketplace. The town criers drew their parchments and read every shame, every falsehood, every betrayal. Then they performed a ritual of restitution: her jewels were broken and distributed to the families she had harmed. The craftsmen she had slighted were given the tools to rebuild what was lost. Children who'd been orphaned by her schemes were provided for with coin and shelter by the temple.
Paula watched. At first she tried to do the performance of outrage, but it withered. She sobbed. She looked at the broken ring—my half-ring—held up for all to see, and something in her face crashed.
When the punishments were done and the last of the parchments burned, I spoke.
"Let this stand as a record that cruelty done in small kindnesses will be met with a public accounting. Let this also be a lesson to me," I said. "I will not mistake false comfort for truth again."
The crowd disbanded slowly. Some applauded my sense of justice. Others merely breathed in relief that the drama was over. The woman who had once pretended to be my comforter was led away—humiliated, marked, and useful to the town again in the only way the law allowed: through labor, through exposure, through daily work that would erode the illusions she'd built.
I returned to my private rooms and found the half-ring on the table as if waiting. I touched it. For a long time I did not feel anything but loss.
Months became years then, and the mountain's seasons washed over me. I tended the small rift of memory I had sewn together. Once, in a quiet dawn, a little creature with nine ribbons of white fur slunk into my study and hopped onto the desk. It smelled of thyme and rain.
"You're back," I whispered.
The tiny fox lifted its head and, impossibly, looked at me with Juliet's eyes.
"I thought—I thought I would never see you again," I said.
She reached up and pawed the half-ring on the desk. The ring had no power left. It was only a ring. But when she curled into my palm I found something like peace.
"Did I punish enough?" I asked the empty air. "Was justice done?"
The small fox blinked and nudged the ring. It did not answer. It lived, and that was my answer.
The End
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