Sweet Romance18 min read
The Cracked Egg, the Stolen Mark, and the Price of a Face
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Chapter One — Fall and Rebirth
I woke to cold and pain, to the taste of iron and the slow, terrible understanding that my face had been torn away from me like a petal ripped by wind.
"I—" I tried to speak, but my throat was a wire of sand. My hands were tied. My back screamed where leather had met my skin. I was bound to a wooden cross in the back garden of Cloud City’s imperial estate. Shadows of watchers leaned over me; the moon was only a blade.
"Larissa," someone said my name like it was a verdict. "Answer me."
"Why?" My voice was bone-dry. The name belonged to the woman stepping through the gate. She moved like a carved thing: perfect, cold, and full of thin triumph.
"Journey," I breathed, seeing her—Journey Hart. She had been my friend. She had once claimed our childhood, slipped food into my hand when I had none. She had promised to guard me.
"You were saved by me," Journey Hart said. "You were raised by my household. Yet you chose a mark none of us were meant to have. You chose the Azure Dragon."
I tasted bile. "I thought—"
"You thought friendship would matter before destiny?" Journey laughed. She let the laugh tear through the night. "You think you can carry a Dragon’s mark and still stay dirt? You think you belong to the temple that breeds heirs?"
A man in a gray ghost mask, the mute Fiend who answered only with gestures, handed her a dagger. Fox Volkov's eyes were like glass.
"Why—" The question died in my chest as her hand forced my jaw up. Her nails dug into my cheek. The pain made me tiny and furious.
"You were only a walking blood jar," Journey said softly, as if she were describing a stain. "A rare bloodline. One could feed it to your sister and draw power. But you thought to run into the Demon Grove and make a pact with the Azure Dragon yourself? Fools die for that."
She laughed when she pulled the mark free. The light that left my breast felt like a sun ripped from the sky. Her face brightened as sigils slid beneath her skin.
"I am the Azure's chosen now," she crowed. "And you—" She spat. "You will be sold to the worst brothel. Let men make you feel what it's like to be broken."
They left me to the dark and the pain.
I died that night.
I remember the fall—how the city bent away in the memory of the other life I had lived. I remember a different death, a different world where I was an anomaly among machines—an ability they called witchcraft, an "anomaly" who had walked buildings and ripped sky. I remember fire and a rooftop one hundred and one storeys up.
Then I woke again—cold, in a body that wasn't mine, a body scarred and weak, but waking.
The memories clawed back at me like a tide. My name—Larissa Haas. I had been stolen as a child by Journey Hart. I had been raised as her servant. I had trusted her. I had given her my hand. And she had carved me into a battery.
I sat in a shallow pool beneath a cliff and breathed. The world felt unfamiliar, but the truth was sharper than knives.
"I am not done," I told the night. "I have a memory now. I remember what they took."
A man with a face like a frozen statue stood at the water's edge. His hair fell like black silk. He smelled of cool iron and old medicine. He glowered. A gold light gathered in his chest and then died.
"Alive?" he asked with more suspicion than surprise.
"Yes," I said. "Alive is the wrong word, but—"
He tilted his head as if listening to a song only he could hear. "You shouldn't be," he said. "You should be dust."
"I don't plan to be dust," I said. "I plan to take everything back."
He laughed in a small, dangerous way. "Then you are welcome to try. But if you touch my robes while you thank me, I will buckle your knees."
"Thank you," I said. "But I don't do favors without interest. This world owes me my life."
He coughed, blood warming his palm. "Leonardo Burns," he said, finally—an ugly little thing to give away so early, but I remembered the name: the strange man whose silence could break storms. "You helped me."
"Leonardo," I corrected, swallowing the old nickname that my mother—no, that the life I had stolen had given me.
"I don't eat favors," he said. "You don't come free."
I slipped away into night, into the memory of my other life braided with rage. My chest hurt where the mark had been removed. I had liabilities—an absent magic root; a ruined future if I let Journey live.
Chapter Two — The Mark and the Beast
Five years. Five years of learning under a different sky had changed me. My voice was earned on a new throat. My hands had learned poison and remedy, knot and trap. I had a sapling of power—a crimson vine I named "the Bramble" because the old world called it a witch's weed, but it fed me.
"I don't care what name you go by," Journey Hart had said once. "If you cross me, every step will be burning."
In the forest of a thousand beasts, the sky tore with battle. A girl screamed as a beast's horn split air. The woman who rose in red—me—moved like a blade.
"Journey—" someone cried.
"Get back!" Journey shouted. Her voice had charm and iron. She had the Azure Dragon's sigil now, a small glowing star at her forehead. But she had used another cruelty. She had caged a little sister of a friend—Dream Castro's Lu Yan—and played with her like a toy until the life left her.
"The water-kirin," Journey snarled at the fallen woman. "Give it up and I will let you live."
"Give me the face of a liar," I said softly as I dropped from the trees.
"They said you died, that your bones washed out to sea," a white-robed man cried. He was brave, infuriating, Andres Sutton. "Who are you?"
"You are dead when the world says you are dead," I said. "But I have hands."
They called me a witch. They called me a thief. They told stories in the market about the ghost in red that had come to steal their heirs' beasts.
"Who are you?" Journey demanded, hating the sound of my voice as if it were a blade.
I had been careful; I had used understatement. I had let poison be medicine. I let Lu Yan breathe. I put a vial to her lips and watched her eyes flutter. "Eat," I said, and the remedy did its work. She coughed and drew the breath of a woman who had been borrowed by death and returned to the living.
"That is impossible!" Journey spat. "You poisoned her. You used sorcery."
"She is alive," Lu Yan said, crying out in the white-robed man's arms. "Journey tried to take my kirin. She wanted to feed its blood to herself."
"Liars!" Journey shouted at the crowd, and the crowd swelled like a wave against a cliff. "She is a monster."
"She is not a monster," the white-robed man declared. "She saved Lu Yan's life. Someone else gave the order to take the kirin."
Cloud of accusations. My charm came from the smallest places—the way I did not look away, the way my hands moved. The beast-people watched, and the younger ones trembled. The raised woman, Journey Hart, had learned to smile like a blade.
"You are a holy thing," a boy said into my ear, his eyes like saucers. Brooks Davenport, small and fierce, held a birdlike hatchling that lit when it sneezed.
"He's my son," I said with a breath between teeth. I had a child. The life I had before had left me childless. This new life had given me one, perfect and messy, with hunger and wondering eyes.
He called Leonardo—"uncle?"—and my chest slammed into itself. Leonardo had saved us both, once again.
But the world had teeth. Journey Hart would not accept that she had lost her prize. She would not accept that I had grown after dying. She would not accept that the Azure Dragon had not answered her call.
Chapter Three — The Slice and the Little Egg
We stole an egg out from under an Ice Phoenix and then lost it in the middle of a storm of claws. Brooks had found the egg the way children find treasure: with sticky fingers, alarm, and a too-wide grin.
"This is an egg," he said, cradling it like a newborn world. The shell bore ancient sigils that hummed when I came near. "I'm going to cook it for you."
"This is an Ice Phoenix egg," Leonardo said quietly, and his voice made a hollow in the air. "If you break that shell, you will kill a lineage."
"I wanted an omelet," Brooks answered with perfect sincerity.
We argued. The Ice Phoenix screamed its hunger for its missing child. The forest shifted. I wrapped vines about the egg and carried it like a secret. Leonardo carried me like a map whose lines he finally understood.
"You did not die," he told me later, while the first hatchling broke through and licked the blood from my palm. The little thing called him "Father" while it blinked like a godling.
"He named you by your eyes," I said as the hatchling crawled into my arms and curled. " He thinks you are the kind of warm thing that will stay."
"Little liar," Leonardo muttered, but he did not move.
We made a home from ruin. I rebuilt what could be rebuilt. I learned new medicines. I learned the hard, simple fact that if you want to be feared, you also must be kind sometimes. Brooks learned to set tiny traps for raccoons. The hatchling—the fire baby— slept on my chest like a sun.
Chapter Four — City Streets and a Poisoned Throne
Cloud City smelled of copper and incense and greed. It was where power made a garden and starvation fed on the roots.
"That woman again," Haisley Cleveland the princess cried in the auction house voice silky with entitlement. "Who lets peasants into the auction?"
"I bought nothing," I said, leaning back on the balcony where light pooled like honey.
"She is the one who played us!" Haisley screamed, but she had already been humbled by a mistake: she had taken an offer to buy a Phoenix-repairing elixir and discovered her money was missing. I had not taken it. I had other tricks.
"Two hundred and fifty," Haisley said into the market, willing two hundred and fifty to exist.
"Two fifty-five," I said, quietly. I had a small token to show—my hand held a vial that glowed blue. The crowd watched me like a child shows a pebble that turns gold. Haisley cried "thief" and pointed her finger at Brooks like he had done this as a joke.
"Shut up," Leonardo said from the next box, his voice even and heavy as stone, and Brooks clung to my skirts. I let him. The Phoenix hatchling waddled behind him, fuming with the effort of being adorable.
"She has seven-level alchemy," Deanna Bray, the clerk, whispered. "She forged that drug herself. If she has six and seven-level pills to spare, would she need to steal a single vial?"
"It was a political thing!" Haisley wailed.
"Her mother," I said, knowing the wound I'd opened, "was a beauty the city used. Your family sold girls; you helped bury them."
The market choked on the words like a man who ate too much spice. The guards dropped their hands.
"Careful," Leonardo murmured. He disliked me as a thief and loved me as a woman who had stolen his patience.
"She is the same," Vaughn Lee—the soft-voiced man with a face that made daughters sigh—called out, and I knew my past had reached people who still kept wishful memories. "She looks like her—like someone gone too soon."
"It is not that," I said. "I am not the girl anyone remembers. I am the one who remembers everything."
The crowd parted when I declared Haisley guilty of slander. The princess would be humiliated in public if she dared press charges on me again. She had to kneel and apologize—three times, loud enough for the stalls to hear. Her cheeks peeled red. She spat a viper at me and I returned with a sweet hum of herb-laced water and a smile.
"Make the apology real," I said, because cruelty tastes better when it's fair. "Do it for the people you thought you owned."
She apologized, eyes small. Then the cost of her pride rose like smoke; the skin around one eye burst with sores. I had placed in her pocket a counteragent that only stopped when an apology was sincere. She wanted to be beautiful; she wanted to be above dirt. The apology firmed both.
"Three days," I told her, letting her wiggle before the basin like a child. "Do the work. Learn the smell of dishwater. Then I will let you be whole again."
She said "Yes" through clenched teeth, and the market laughed like a bell.
Chapter Five — The First Public Unmasking
I did not plan to take everything at once. I planned to be patient. I planned to have the Azure Dragon rot in Journey Hart's veins as she starved for the power she could not keep.
Journey had risen to a position where every gate opened for her. She had trophies: a mark at her forehead, a rank among the Temple’s daughters, men on their knees. She studied heirlooms like maps to use.
She thought she had me in a bag. Five years ago she had done the cruelest thing: she tore my magic out and carried it for her own advancement. She had taken my name as a slur amongst her circle. She used the man who had picked me from the gutter to be her instrument. She was arrogant enough to think the city would look the other way.
"Let us see what the city prefers: your face, or the truth," I told Leonardo when he handed me a small blue bottle stolen from the royal vaults. He muttered a proverb. He hated that I was so entirely wrath and so quietly fond.
We planned. Fox Volkov—Journey's mute—had been useful. He hated Journey, but he could not speak that hate in air that would feed his usefulness. It was easier to let him keep living as a phantom and let him bleed the kingdom’s secrets into my ear with gestures and little traps.
"Tonight," I told the men and women who had joined me—Chauncey Oliveira leaned against a post, brokering a smile that could unpick a woollen coat—"we go to the square."
"Why the square?" Brooks asked, clutching the Phoenix hatchling as if it were a stone so precious it might break.
"For audience," I said. "For faces."
We went at dusk. The market was full. Then I called for the trial. Someone had to bring proof. Someone had to name names.
"Journey Hart," I called then, holding up the remnant of the Dragon mark in a glass vial, a luminous tear that still pulsed under artifice. "You called me traitor and thief. You sold girls. You took what was not yours. Stand, and tell all."
Silence. The people looked at Journey like a queen might look at a beggar. She sputtered with a cold, angry laugh.
"You have no claim," she spat. "What proof do you have to stand there and call me a thief?"
"I have the ladies who dug bones out of your garden," I said. "I have the parents of the girls you fed to your rites. I have your oracle, the one your silver bought, who tells truths only when drunk, and I have this." I tipped the vial. In the sunlight, it sang like a throat.
"You are insane," Journey cried, voice gone thin as a wire. "You cannot—"
"And yet everyone here knows your face," I said. "Everyone here remembers the girls stolen, the ones promised to you, the ones you gave away when the price was low. You made the City into a ledger: their names are entries. Tonight, we close the book on you."
People in the crowd cheered. That cheer felt like thunder.
"She is only jealous," a young man called. "She wanted the Dragon. Journey is a good girl!"
"Shut up," someone spat, and jerked the youth by the collar. The weight of the word "blood" slipped into the air. People looked at Journey differently now: like men who had been shown a blade and told it's theirs.
"Bring the mural," I said to Fox. He made a slow, precise gesture, and a screen rose from the hands of the cathedral boys. We showed the proofs: maps, ledger pages, bones unearthed with names carved in the wood around them, the intimate records of deals that stank of sweat and vomit.
Journey's expression changed like a mask melting. First she smiled—thin and perfect. Then her smile shortened. Then there was the small, defensive edge, the refusing distortion, then a toppling panic.
"You lie," she said at first. "You frame me," she cried later. "You slander me." She pointed at random faces as if her finger could find a man who would testify.
"Is it true?" a mother in front asked, louder than I would have dared. "Is this the girl who sold my Mira?"
Murmurs. The screen rattled. The old coins on the temple altar trembled.
Journey tried her final tactic: to call the elder priests and make claims of black sorcery. She reached for the altar. The priests recoiled. One woman in the back—a girl whose sister I had helped—stepped forward, and said, "She did this. She sold them."
The crowd turned.
Then we started the sentence of shame.
I had prepared for this moment. I had prepared words.
"You took from the city what you did not create," I said. "You turned daughters into offerings. And because you were clever and cruel, you were safe. Not anymore."
Journey's face went a lovely, pale green as the crowd's voices rose. Then she tried to run.
"Stop her!" someone screamed, and five men lunged. Journey struggled. She was strong with dragon-marked hunger, but fear makes a creature clumsy.
I had a list of everything she had done. I read it aloud.
"You sold girls," I said. "You fed their blood into your rites, and took their years to smooth your own path."
"You humiliated people," I said. "You pushed boys into razor pits. You bribed priests and wrote lies."
"Do you deny it?" I asked.
Journey screamed that she did not. She denied. She swore on her mark and on the dragon, and on the morning star. She denied. But as she denied, another scroll unfurled across the screen: the ledger with her signature, names listed with prices.
The onlookers' faces changed. Hands reached for the swords mounted at their hips. Mothers began to cry. Fathers lifted their knees like men ready to break something they loved and found broken.
"Mercy!" Journey begged, when the first stones hit her shins. "I had no choice! I had no choice!"
"Your choice," I said. "Your face at the gate."
Her voice collapsed into something small. "Please," she whispered later. "Please—I was hungry. I wanted the mark. I thought I could be more than dirt, and to be more I had to harvest."
"Harvest?" someone shouted. "You harvest children like weeds?"
"She is a monster," a woman cried. "She took my little Sera!"
Journey once knew how to hide the body of her greed inside a laugh. I watched as she climbed through the stages I had promised to herself when she sold me: triumph, denial, fear, bargaining, and then—collapse.
I did not kill her. I could have. But I had other pleasures reserved. She would be dismantled publicly: her honors stripped, her followers forced to clean the drains she had used for her cries, her reputation pried tooth by tooth.
They dragged her through the Market of Names. We had set up witnesses and clerks to dictate her transgressions. The public list had the ragged clarity of a ledger written in blood.
First, the priests were called. They unstitched her ceremonial robes and took the small Dragon sigil from her brow. It cracked as if made of sugar. A priest pronounced her "unholy," and the bell rang.
Then they brought victims. A dozen women gathered with faces pallid as winter. They told stories that turned the crowd's stomach.
"She promised our child wealth," said one mother. "She promised a better life, and instead she sold them for the price of spice."
"What say you?" I asked after each testimony.
"I say—" they would start, and the crowd would lean in.
On the square, someone had the idea to remove Journey's voice. They bound chaff into her mouth as a symbol of her betrayal of words. They stripped her of her title, cutting away the little plaque she had used as a badge. They forced her to wear the wooden label of 'TRAITOR' around her neck. The market turned her into an object of stoppable curiosity. Children who had been spared because she had once smiled at them followed with sticks, prodding her like a hedgehog.
Journey's reaction was a spiraling horror. At first she was livid, striking anyone who came near. Then she pleaded with strangers. Then she screamed at her priests. Then she tried bargaining like a drowning man who suddenly remembers a raft he had kept in his cloak.
"Please!" she cried at me once, her hands raw from the ropes and rope-burn. "Do you understand nothing of the world? You cannot do this to me! I am Journey Hart! I—"
The crowd watched as she changed façade like a dying animal. Faces in the crowd recorded everything on small glass tablets and sent them like arrows across the city. The crowd took pictures. The priest asked incredulous questions. She begged to be left to die privately. The answer was a roar: "No. This was done in public. This was done to the public."
Then came the humiliation that I had promised myself for the memories she had locked away. She was to stand before the main archway and hear each name she had sold. We had twenty names. Twenty names shouted until the market sounded like a drowning barnacle.
Journey's face collapsed. She tried to speak each name to deflect, to claim mistakes, then to freeze at a syllable. Her body cracked with each memory. People spat at her shoes. Priests stripped all her honors.
Finally—because the law needed a final sign—we let a council of elders decide her penance. Her sentence was public: she would work the very docks her deals had supplied, cleaning, hauling, making amends in sweat and pain while the ledger of those she had wronged hung above her like a cross.
When we left, she was small, a peasant with a broken mouth and a name that no one dared to whisper in polite company.
She had been powerful. She would be nothing.
Her last look at me was not of hatred. It was the look of a woman who realized how deeply she had been loved and how she had thrown that away for a scrap of power. It had a quality that made my chest go cold, and I almost felt pity.
Then I remembered what she had done to me. I walked away.
Chapter Six — The Price of the Face
Revenge gave its own iron peace. The markets hummed differently. Women bought bread with sharp eyes. Children looked at their elders with new queries.
But power leaves cracks you must fill, and while Journey sat in the dockyards picking glass shards, others tightened their hands. Old men of faith who prospered on crimes cleaned their teeth and muttered promises to the city lord.
"Benjamin Burgess," Leonardo told me one night when we sat by a lamp. "He thinks he can hold things together for himself. He has a ledger even larger than Journey's."
"Then let's burn his ledger," I said.
"Or perhaps we make him bury it," Leonardo answered, and his smile was the kind of map a sailor keeps from storms.
We went after Benjamin like a clever leak. We found bones in his garden, hidden in a patch of lilies he used to show guests. We found the little girl with the mole under her left eye in the reflection of his teacup. We unfurled evidence like flags.
When Benjamin realized he had been exposed, he screamed like a small, frightened animal. We took him into the square, just like Journey. We read his filings. We read his names. We showed his ledger to the public.
He tried to bargain.
"Do not send my sons," he said with the hiss of a man who had had a kingdom and was asked to give a village. "If you kill me, who will feed the market?"
"Your income," I replied. "You fed it on bones. Your income will feed the real people now."
He whimpered. The crowd forced him onto his knees and scraped the soil off his face. Children threw stones—only small ones, nothing fatal—and the elders made sure the law's teeth did not take the man home.
"Make him apologize," I said. "Make him name every body so they can have graves. Make him dig."
He did. He dug like someone trying to scratch a tunnel into forgiveness.
People asked whether I felt lighter after each revelation. The answer was always the same: not lighter, but clearer. The air felt less clogged.
But clarity means more enemies. Faces with the tongues of knives still lurked in the shadow. Cloud City loves a comfortable silence and hates the breaking of jars.
Chapter Seven — A Promise, a Bite, and a Face
Leonardo stayed near. He fed the child when I was away. He held me once under the roof of a stolen warehouse and bit me when I lied to him.
"Are you mine for asking?" he said once, cruel and soft.
"No," I answered. "Not yet."
He laughed as if the idea of possession were a ridiculous thing to bring a knife to. "You stole a child from my sleep once. That alone is a crime."
"You stole nothing," I said. "You were asleep. You were not made of hands."
He cupped my face in his palm and tasted my fear as if it were a new spice. "You owe me a meal—and perhaps you owe me more."
We argued and we touched and we made plans and I taught Brooks to make an omelette that tasted like victory because we used herbs that looked like laughter. He declared them the best in the world.
"Say sorry to the market," Brooks suggested one day, very solemn for his age.
"To the market?" I asked.
"Yes. Markets are people. People have feelings."
And when the Phoenix hatchling curled in my lap and called Leonardo "Father," the world tilted in a harmless direction. Leonardo’s eyes did something I rarely let myself see: they slid soft and small.
He had a strange way of protecting things. He would stand like a terrace wall and not ask for reward. He would cough when glad. I found that to be the most disarming thing in the world.
Chapter Eight — The Circle Closes
People kept asking about my past like a wound they wanted to touch. "Why not leave, Larissa? Why not go somewhere far?"
"Because," I answered once, and the word was a stone. "Because these are the streets that saw me die. I would rather stand on them and show what happens to those who buy children with silver."
I never stopped learning. I never stopped tending to Brooks and the hatchling. Phoenixes and children taste of the same heat: hungry, whole, and impossible to tame.
Journey tried to return like a ghost with money. She did not last.
Benjamin died in prison—his body hollowed out, too careful to stop his own rot. Haisley, the princess, spent a season under the eaves as a scrubber and came out with her face still whole but her heart thinned. People said forgiveness had touched her like salt.
And Leonardo? He never asked for much. He asked for truth. He asked me to let him stand where I needed him to stand. He asked me once, quietly and plainly, "Will you be mine?"
"I am mine already," I answered.
That night the city smelled of salt and pine. Brooks sang and the Phoenix slept in my lap. Leonardo kept his watch on the doorstep like a man who had set a personal oath in stone.
Chapter Nine — Final Reckonings
Some men tried to raise their heads after the purges. Quinn Collins—who had been arrogant enough to try to claim Brooks's Phoenix—found himself bound in the market, his face smeared with refuse. He begged for clemency while the crowd recited the names of those he had humiliated.
"Please," he hissed. "I am sorry."
"Your apology is the same for all those who sold," I said, as his lips chattered in cold wax. "You sold because you were proud. You will pay because you were cruel."
He began to thrash as if he were pinned by hunger. The crowd through coins at him. Boys spat in his face. He had not realized what it meant to be small until someone made him small.
And Journey? At the docks, she sweated and washed the fish that she had once ordered to be slaughtered. She worked until her hands were callused strips of leather. She tilted her head toward me one day and said, "If I had been kind—"
"Then perhaps you would have been safe," I said. "But you were not kind."
The last time I saw her, she was bent and smaller than she had ever been. She looked at Brooks, and I saw a scrap of shame cross her face.
"Say nothing," I told her. "You have had your punishment."
She began to cry then, because she had been punished but not forgiven, and there is a difference.
Chapter Ten — A Different Ending
It is not the end of everything. The hunt for those who hide debts never stops. The city is full of cracks. Every so often a new ledger is produced. People always find ways to forget.
"Will you ever stop?" Leonardo asked me once, sitting beside me on the roof where the market became a river of light.
"I will stop," I said. "When every ledger has been confessed, when every family has been mended, when Brooks can look at the world and not ask why his mother had to be made of worry."
He smiled, and then kissed me, and then kissed the child, and then left me standing with the dawn.
We did not have a perfect victory. We had small things: a Phoenix that had decided its family was with us, a child who thought omelettes could heal any wound, and a city that learned—slowly—to listen.
In the days that followed, when people asked for a story they could tell their grandchildren about the witch with the red face and the phoenix egg, I told them the truth: "Once there was a woman who broke into a temple to take what belonged to her."
Brooks laughed and called me "mother" in a voice that sounded like wind in leaves.
And that was enough.
The End
— Thank you for reading —