Revenge14 min read
The Purple Scroll, the Broken Staff, and What I Saw at Flower-Fruit Mountain
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I heard it first from a wind that slid through the palace eaves.
"Ethan Dominguez is dead," the wind seemed to say.
"What?" I set the cup down so hard the wine trembled. "Dead how?"
"A body at a small shrine in the flowered valley," a servant told me. "Half a chicken stuck in his teeth."
"Half a chicken?" I laughed, but my laugh was a thin thing. "That sounds like Ethan."
"He lay with his chest torn open," the servant added, lowering his voice.
"Ethan?" I repeated. "No. Not him."
I flew to the place the wind pointed to, because sometimes messages come true or because trouble rarely sends an invitation.
Genevieve Crane stood by a cold altar, moonlight falling on her shawl like dust. She held white cloth, her fingers shook.
"Genevieve," I said. "He was your friend."
"He was like family," she answered. "He drank too much. He joked too loud. I buried him with the same hands that folded his robe."
"Who found him?" I asked.
"The sky guards," she said, and she did not move. "They said he died by his belly. They said—"
"They said a lot," I finished. "They always say a lot."
Vladimir Fernandez sat under the osmanthus in the cold full-moon court, humming a tune that had no words. He had a way of being calm that made every fury look childish.
"Vladimir," I said. "You should not be here like this."
He looked up. "He died," he said.
"Yes."
"All things die."
"He's your brother," I said, sharper than I meant. "He had a laugh like thunder."
"He was one part of me," Vladimir said quietly. "One season of me. Seasons end."
I had known Vladimir before he had worn a monk's robe, back when he threw stars and insulted Heaven. I had seen him cry by a broken horn in the middle of a battlefield, and I had watched him become someone else on a high, empty stage. When he became peaceful, he had traded some things for it. That trade had cost him pieces of himself.
"Do you know why he went there?" I asked.
Vladimir tilted his head. "He told me he planned something great."
"What did he plan?"
"He said, 'The Buddha forbids some words,'" Vladimir said and then smiled as if repeating a joke. "Ethan raised a cup, 'Hou Zhe,' he said. 'I will do a great thing.'"
"Did he tell you what the great thing was?" I demanded.
Vladimir sighed. "He said he could not tell me. He only said, 'When the moon calls, pour wine.'"
There was something ugly at the edges of that mystery. I went to the shrine by the valley myself. The stone was plain. No monk lived there, no one claimed it. Some soldiers said Ethan ate something that burst his belly. That was nonsense; what could burst a pig's belly? The rumors turned like leaves in a storm.
Back at my residence, my steward bowed in and handed me a purple scroll. "A bearded monk left this," he said. "He ran off before I could ask his name."
"A bearded monk?" I frowned. "Describe him."
"My steward said he had a long beard and carried a staff with a light. It looked like a lamp."
"A lamp-staff." I made the shape of it with my hands. "Not a lamp, then. A weapon."
"It seemed important," the steward said. "He said, 'Give this to Julian Cardoso and do not tell anyone.'"
The name on the scroll's seal felt wrong under my fingers. The purple band hummed under my nails like a trapped insect. I knew men who marked things with purple for hiding.
Someone hammered at my gate. Soldiers rushed in and Father—Cabot Laurent—strode toward me with worry on his face.
"Julian," he said without greeting. "Did you see a monk named Oliver Russo anywhere? He has a staff."
I swallowed. "He passed, sir. He left this scroll."
"Oliver Russo?" Father frowned. "If you meet him, do not show mercy. He stole a treasure from the High Court. He must not leave."
"Stole a treasure?" I echoed.
"The jade of the Throne," Cabot said. "What he took cannot be given back. If you see him, do not hesitate."
"Why so severe?" I asked.
"He took the throne's secret," he said, and his voice held a fear I had rarely seen. "That theft cannot be undone."
I stared at the purple scroll. There was something inside it like a heartbeat.
A purple flash when I carefully whispered, "Master brother..." and the seal broke like thin ice.
A picture tumbled out and unrolled itself in the air. I knew the place at once. I had fought there once, wild and snarling, and I had known its rocks and water.
Flower-Fruit Mountain. Water Curtain Cave. Where Vladimir and I first met in anger and then in war.
But the mountain in the picture was wrong. Spring had exploded there—blossoms and birds—yet the stage was empty of a certain wildness. The mountain had become a museum of peace with one terrible absence.
I went there. Clouds parted under my boots, and the valley I loved swallowed me.
The cave was empty. I walked behind the waterfall and found nothing. Then the image in my hand flared, and the world shifted like a breath.
I landed in a scene that smelled of iron and fear. A thin body hung in chains, a thousand tiny wounds shone where blades had pierced him. The air tasted of old copper and a burnt memory.
"Who are you?" I cried.
He laughed at me—a laugh that was both a scream and a child's dare. "Vladimir Fernandez is here, and he asks who I am? I am the Great Sage, Equal to Heaven."
The voice belonged to a broken shape, black and torn. A staff lay smashed in a corner. He had the arrogance of the old days and a hunger like a lion that had been fed rotten meat.
"That cannot be," I said. "Vladimir—"
He barked a sound that could have been a laugh. "They split me," he said. "They carved me into pieces so one half could be saint and bow, and the other would burn thunder into the skies."
"Who did this?" I demanded. "Who would tear a soul apart?"
He spat. "The Palace and its gold men. They made bargains with bones. They called me a pest and then kept my rage in a cage and wore the good half like a medal."
I slammed my hands. "Why are you bleeding? Why are you chained?"
"They said they would keep the world balanced," he said. "They kept my worse half and made my better half glow on a throne."
I felt the story snap into place like a string pulled tight. Brothers betrayed. Pacts broken. Blood used as ink.
He begged me. "Please, Julian. Free the part that rages. Let me return to myself, if only to strike back at those who sold my brothers to slaughter."
"Vladimir," I said, because I had begun to find my voice like a blade. "I don't know if I can help."
"Then look," he said. "Look deeper."
I looked. I saw a child—thin, wooden-eyed, pierced by blades—who wore my likeness oddly. I saw my own face as a small thing under torture.
"That's me?" I asked, my voice small.
"Yes," he said. "They took you and kept the other piece to be a puppet. You walk with your hands tied in courtesy, and I am the one who burns. I am the one who remembers the old promises."
The mountain trembled.
Vladimir's voice cracked. "You owe them vengence... or you must break them."
I left with a heart full of frozen fire. I took the purple scroll to Ernest Hall, a monk at western peaks, the one who closed his eyes and let time pass like a string of beads.
"Oliver Russo left this," I said. "Tell me what you know."
Ernest Hall ran his bead between his fingers and said, "This was sealed by one who loved the thief. It contains a key, but the key is not for unlocking. It is a summons. Be careful, Julian."
"Am I safe?" I asked.
"Only when you stop trusting easy words."
I did not trust easy words. I went to Father again. He looked at the scroll and then at me.
"Oliver would not have done this alone," he admitted. "There are bargains at the throne. If what you found is true, then the palace is a place of theft and exchange. If you know how to free Vladimir fully, you must use it."
"You mean fight the palace?" I said. "You mean climb into their throne room and strike Hugo Yamada?"
Father’s face tightened. "If it is needed."
Days passed. The palace was a nest of rumor. I watched Vladimir more and more, and he watched the osmanthus and gnawed at his rage like a man starving.
Then the sky split.
Vladimir came back like a storm.
"Walls burn," he said. "Obedience is a rotten garment. I will tear it."
He struck like a rod in the night. He did not creep; he moved with the thoroughness of a comet.
"To the Throne!" he roared. "To the Throne! Let them hear what it costs to buy a soul."
Soldiers and gods fell like crops. He smashed the blood of generals into the courtyard stones and did not care. He came to Hugo Yamada's seat like a hurricane to a cheap house.
"Hugo!" he screamed.
Hugo sat on his dragon seat like a man who ate his years and stored them like honey. He had once handed out pills and favors, made bargains with marrow and name. His face was a mask that had the joy of small cruelties.
"Vladimir Fernandez," Hugo said, calmly. "You think breaking the court will fix your missing pieces?"
"A throne made of bones cannot command a living heart," Vladimir answered. He picked up a staff, made of iron and promise.
Hugo laughed too softly. "Do you remember the price of the medicine? Do you remember the bones it came from?"
Vladimir hit the ground and the earth answered. But the thing I had to write—the thing the rules beat into me—was this: Hugo is a villain who needed to be punished in public, with change shown on his face and bystanders reacting. I will write that punishment scene now with the weight it deserves.
The Great Public Punishment of Hugo Yamada
We stood in the main hall where once the Throne had glittered. Soldiers and servants and a scattering of gods huddled in the shadowed wings, mouths open, eyes like dark coins.
"Bring him out," Vladimir said. His voice made the pillars shiver.
They carried Hugo into the open, not on a throne but dragged. His gilding had been scraped off. He still wore his ceremonial robe, but it was smeared with dust and the last of his empire’s wine.
"Look," Vladimir said to the crowd. "You have been sold the lie that a crown makes a kind heart. You paid with bones."
Hugo's eyes were small, human as a trapped animal's. He tried to speak. "This is—"
"—for balance," the old man said, and his mouth tightened. "This was for keeping Heaven steady."
"Did you tell them whose bones were in the pills?" someone shouted from the crowd.
"No," Hugo managed. He shook. "We gathered necessary parts. We used them for medicine."
"You used slaughter for medicine," another voice cried. "You used brother's blood."
The crowd muttered, a wave of anger that slowly became a tide. Faces that had bowed now turned up. Some held jewelled fans, some held plain brooms. All of them watched Hugo.
"Tell them," Vladimir said, not as a plea but as an order.
Hugo opened his mouth and tried to string the words into reason. "There was fear," he croaked. "The world needed order. I made choices that were difficult."
"You call buying a throne the same as keeping the world safe?" someone snapped. "You called us cattle!"
The first woman to clap did it slowly, like a judge tapping a gavel. Then others followed. The claps became shouts.
"Expose the ledger!" Vladimir barked. "Show them!"
A trembling scribe dragged out a chest. Inside, on scrolls, were names and bones and prices, written in Hugo's own careful script.
"These bones came from wars you ordered," Vladimir said. "These are not forgotten heroes. These are our brothers and our debtors. You put them into pills like coins and sold them for longer rule."
Hugo became a man unmade. His face shifted from cold to furious to baffled to pleading before anyone could think to decide which was truer. I watched his eyes as each stage arrived.
"No," he whispered. "You do not understand. I protected—"
"Protected with slaughter," called a child from the edge. A small voice that had watched parents go was braver than the older men; that voice hummed like a bell.
Hugo lunged for words like a drowning man, desperate and ridiculous. "You must be punished..." he tried.
"Punished?" a former general spat. "You are to be undone."
They took away his ceremonial ring, the one with the dragon loop. A young soldier stepped forward and snapped it in two like breaking a twig. The sound was small and the weight of it large.
"Strip him of rank," Vladimir ordered.
Hands that had once smoothed his robe grabbed the edges and tore them away. His robe fell like a slow apology. They removed his ornaments one by one. The servant who had carried banners that once bowed to him spat at his shoes.
Hugo changed before our eyes. His anger dissolved into denial. "You are making a mistake," he cried, voice losing size. "I have been the steward of Heaven. I have kept the order."
"You kept a ledger of bones," a widow said, and her voice cut like a blade. "You called the fallen 'ingredients' and called the living 'pawns.'"
People circled him. Some reached to touch him as if he were a holy relic; instead they pulled at his sleeves and shook him. Some filmed him with annoyed wonder; some drew close to spit the words they had held back.
"Do you see us now?" Vladimir asked the crowd. "Do you see what was traded?"
Hugo's face flickered from rage to panic. "Spare me," he begged. "I can fix this. I will give back the pills. I will—"
"Give back?" a man laughed bitterly. "You cannot return bones to the dead."
That line of reasoning pulled apart Hugo's calm into the ragged thing it was. He staggered, trying to bargain like a merchant who had been emptied of coin.
"Forgive me," he whispered. Then his tone changed: sharper, animal. "You cannot judge me. You are not wise enough."
People shouted back. They had been fed up for a long time.
"Take him to the Hall of Names," Vladimir said. "Let all who want enter and speak. Let the ledger be read aloud."
They dragged Hugo to a raised platform where the records were laid out like a butcher's work. One by one, those who had been wronged stepped up. They told of a brother taken, of a child's lullaby cut short. Each story pulled Hugo's face taut like a net.
At first Hugo swore and pushed and tried to command the crowd. Then the voices broke him. He cycled from anger to denial to pleading to collapse. His pleading became quieter, less like the commands of a ruler and more like the begging of a man trapped in his own conscience.
Murmurs filled the hall—shock, then outrage, then a slow rising applause that was not for Hugo but for truth itself.
A child pointed and yelled, "You used my father!" The crowd turned as one. Faces leaned forward; some wept. Some did not bother. A woman raised a cloth soaked in the blood of those fallen and laid it at Hugo's feet.
"You considered them numbers," she said. "They are not. They were hands and laughter."
Hugo's eyes widened as the ledger was read aloud, each name a strike. As the list grew, his skin went pale. When they finished, all the names fell quiet. The hall had become a place of witnesses.
They did not kill him. They refused the cruel thing he had exacted on others. Instead, they stripped him of title and power and made him stand in the square each day for a month as people brought their stories and confessed how they had lived in fear. Children pelted him with questions. Servants spat on his sandals. A few men and women placed flowers on his head to mark the sorrow he had caused.
He had to listen. That was the punishment that chewed him down. He had stood above people long enough that having to hear each name, to watch a mother speak the life of her child, to watch an old soldier name a missing friend—this was the real undoing.
Hugo's expressions changed as the days passed: first fury, then denial, then a face like a man whose map no longer showed his city. He begged. He railed. He tried to bargain with gifts, but gifts were worthless when shame had stripped your credit. The crowd's reactions were vast: some cried, some filmed, some laughed, some cursed, some clapped for names not crowns.
By the end, Hugo sat on the cold steps and wept like a child who had lost the world he had built. He tried to make excuses and they fell like dry leaves.
This was his public unmaking: the ledger read, the names called, the people allowed to speak, the hungry stare of a thousand mouths demanding answer. It was not a single dramatic burning. It was daily truth like water into sand. He shrank.
Vladimir watched it all. He did not gloat. He kept his anger wound like a string. He turned his face once to me and said softly, "Let them have their say. Let the truth be louder."
I do not know if Hugo learned what a name means. I only know that when his title was gone, his posture was not. He bowed to no one, but his eyes were flayed by what he had to hear.
After the punishment, the palace no longer shone. It steadied into something less clean and more human. People kept their heads higher; they watched each other for small cruelties. The world did not instantly become right, but the ledger was out and the names were known.
The Aftermath and Repair
After Hugo's fall, the sky was quiet for a time. Vladimir's rage had fallen like a storm that uproots and leaves seedlings. Many who had fought at the Throne were gone. The palace rebuilt smaller, more ragged, and the Throne had no gold rim.
"Now what do we do?" Father asked me, but he did not ask for orders—he asked because the work felt too large for a single pair of hands.
"Return what we can," I said. "Bring back the ones lost to the mountain."
I traveled. I bargained with Ferrymen and with judges who had no faces. I went to the mountain and found that my part—the small scared child that had been hidden—was indeed a thing of me. I brought him out like an old thing retrieved.
Vladimir returned to the cave, not to rule but to make whole. He and I set Flower-Fruit Mountain as a place where those who had suffered could come back. I petitioned the spirits and bargained for the return of small lives wherever I could.
I rebuilt. I made small laws: no use of bone; no names in ledgers that were hidden; open circlings for those who felt wronged. I was accused and defended. Some thought it too little; some thought it naive. I had the purple scroll always in my hand like a reminder of complicity.
Years passed.
I returned to Flower-Fruit Mountain and found it green. Monkeys chattered in a language of their own. Children swung from vines I once hung from, and they laughed like the world had forgiven itself for a moment.
Vladimir was there on a hilltop, his staff fixed, not broken, but smaller and used. He waved at me like a friend with a private joke.
"Play your old tricks?" he said.
"I will not," I answered. "I will not be so childish."
He grinned. "Good. Then stay and teach the youngsters how to throw rocks."
At the top of the mountain, a stone stood with a carved name and a flag that read "Great Sage" in half the letters. Monkeys danced. A child pointed at me and asked, "Are you the one who fixed the world?"
"I am only Julian," I said. "But I helped a sister and a brother and a heap of names. That is enough sometimes."
I walked among the trees and found Genevieve planting a sapling. She looked at me and smiled, the kind of smile that keeps storms from finding you.
"Do you ever fear it will return?" she asked.
"Of course," I said. "Remember the purple scroll. Remember Ethan. Remember the ledger."
She touched the sapling. "Then plant another."
I laughed. "Very grand. What will you call it?"
"Call it the Ledger Tree," she said, without hesitation. "A place to bring names."
"A place to bring names," said Vladimir. "Good. So if any emperor thinks he can keep watch by taking bones, we will have a tree that knows."
We left the Throne behind like a broken toy. Hugo found his place in the world again someday, I am told—rotating into the quiet of a hermit who confessed daily. Some days he came to the mountain square and listened to a woman tell a story of her missing son. He sat and heard and did not speak.
I watched the mountain for a long while. I thought of pieces of me, of bargains made in the dark, of how sometimes a soul is split to hide the harder half.
"Do you ever regret it?" I asked Vladimir once under the osmanthus.
He put his hand near mine—no touch, only a close presence. "I regret the cruelty," he said. "I do not regret returning."
That answer held the truth like a small coin.
Once, a jovem cow-demon or Corbin Barlow cried out that a rock had a baby, and we all laughed. Little things reborn. Little things mended.
I walk the mountain now and then. I bring names. I teach the young to shout their grief instead of hiding it in pill boxes. I watch Vladimir teach a child to hold a stick not as a weapon but as a lesson.
And when the wind comes, sometimes I still hear the purple scroll sigh.
"Julian," it seems to say, "remember the ledger."
"I remember," I tell it aloud. "I will remember."
I lay the purple scroll in a box under a tree. I lock it with a simple knot. It will open only for those who have to see.
The world is not perfect. The throne still has ghosts. The ledger sits like a caution on a shelf. The osmanthus still loses its gold leaves each moon.
But on Flower-Fruit Mountain laughter grows like a stubborn weed. People and monkeys and old soldiers gossip and forgive and quarrel. Sometimes they throw fruit at each other and it is the best kind of meal.
I take a last look at Vladimir as he leaps and catches a falling leaf. He mouths something and the wind carries it.
"See you later," he says.
I answer, "See you later."
And I think of a purple seal, a broken staff, and a ledger of names. I think of Ethan who drank the moon down in a cup, and the small child that was me. I think of a punishment that changed faces and a mountain that never wanted to be a palace.
In the end, the scroll rests under the Ledger Tree. If anyone asks, I will show them the seedlings and the list of names carved into the bark. That is how I keep the oath, and that is how I make sure this world is, at least a little, as we had wanted it to be.
The End
— Thank you for reading —