Revenge16 min read
The Rabbit Lantern and the Yellow Robe
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I remember the heat of the blade.
"I did what I had to," Xavier said once, his voice flat as a ledger. "For her."
He held the knife like a prize. The metal was hot enough that the handle burned his palm. He pressed it into my chest. I felt nothing where he touched. Nothing but a cold, stunned silence where my heart should have hammered.
"You will not scream," he said. "I will do it cleanly."
"Xavier—" I tried. The name came out as a prayer, not an accusation.
He did not look at me when he pushed the edge in. He had been beautiful to me once. "Dream," he had called me, once, with a softer voice. "We will be together."
"I will be with you," I had promised then, hands small and foolish inside his. I had carved my days around the idea that his promise was a map, certain and true.
But promises are maps that tear.
1
"I remember the night I first found him," I told the river, though no one answered. "The lantern bobbed like a rabbit in the dark, and I tripped and landed on him."
"You fell on a prince," Adeline said, pointing with her little knuckle. "You almost embarrassed us both."
"I was saving him," I had said. "He had blood and herbs on his teeth. He was poor and hurt."
"He was a prince who took off his name like an old coat," I said, remembering. "He called himself only 'Yan' then. He smiled at me in a way that made me want to keep him."
"Then you should have kept him," Adeline said. Her voice always sounded both stern and small. "You should have made him yours."
"I tried," I said. "We promised the river and the lantern and the willow. 'We will be together,' he promised."
"He meant it," she whispered. "He meant it in a way that changed things."
2
"Meet my daughter," Father had said the night he returned from the south, bowing as if unveiling a gift. "Dream, this is Julieta."
"I touched the cake in my hand and it fell to the ground," I told myself over and over. "I had never seen her before. Father smiled as if a new jewel had come into his palm."
"Julieta is pale," he said. "Julieta was found. Be kind."
"Be kind," I said out loud then, because kindness was what my mother taught me.
She smiled at me. She smiled like light sliding off glass. Her name sounded like silk—Julieta Ayala. People liked the sound of it.
And he liked the sight of her.
"You must understand," I tried to tell myself. "I was jealous, yes. But I had never plotted harm. I was a poor girl who wanted to keep love."
"I will keep him," I promised, over and over.
"You will fail," the room said without words. "You will fail because love does not equal power."
3
"Why didn't you tell me you were a prince?" I asked him once in the garden when we were still foolish, when the world felt warm and safe.
"I feared the throne," he said. "I wanted something ordinary once."
"I wanted a life ordinary with you," I said.
"Then that life was stolen," Father said when he called me a fool later, when he struck me for "dishonor." "You expose yourself. You bring shame."
"Julieta helped," he said later, to coax me back into the light. "She helped me be whole."
"He called her his pearl," I said to Adeline, with a lower voice. "He bowed to her at her wedding like the river bowed to the sea."
"It was a mistake," I told myself wildly. "A night. A misunderstanding."
"You said it yourself," Adeline said. "You ran and made scenes. You tore at skirts and caused a scene at a wedding."
"I did it because I loved him," I said. "Do you not understand?"
4
When the emperor's man came to fetch me from the thatched house at the borders, I thought—quick and selfishly—he had finally come to take me away from the dark.
"His majesty remembers the mercy you once showed," the eunuch Cruz said with hands that smelled of old sweetmeats. "You must come to the palace."
"Mercy," I repeated. "Was it mercy to toss me into a cage later?"
He called himself Xavier Lindgren when he took me into the palace. He was the one who had once let his hair fall loose by the river so I could braid it. He smiled when he looked at Julieta now. "Dream," he said, "I cannot tell all the court what I have done. I can only keep you close."
"You kept me like a prize," I told him. "You kept me for a purpose."
"I kept you because you promised to be patient," he said. "Because you were my little, the one who laughed at my bad jokes."
"Then why did you let her marry the throne?" I asked.
"To survive," he said. "To keep us both. I needed allies. I needed her father's sway. I promised both."
"Your promises are like paper," I said. "They burn."
5
"They called me a poisoner," I told no one who needed to know but the wind. "They called what I was a woman who would harm another."
"Are you lying?" someone shouted once from the hallway. "Are you innocent?"
"I saved him once," I said. "I saved a man I loved and then I was traded like a coin."
"Wasn't it you who tried to push her?" Father had shouted at me the day I was shut away. "You tried to ruin the wedding."
"I was a child," I said. "I wanted what I thought was mine."
"Childishness," the palace later called it. "A temper." They scribbled it into the ledgers. They put me behind small glass windows and called it restraint. They whispered "malady" when I coughed blood. They tried to kill me with neglect. I got so small they said I was no one.
6
"You're taken back to the palace, Dream," Adeline said in a voice that shook with its own fear. "They said the emperor... he is fussy. He is angry."
"He is angry because I am alive and he can no longer smooth the truth over," I said. "He wants someone to pay to keep Julieta alive."
"Who would be cruel enough to—"
"Xavier," I said.
He took me to the south because Julieta was ill. Then came the knives in the night, the staged attacks, the swords. I remember them stepping through like actors.
"Stay with me," Xavier had said when bandits struck. "I cannot lose her. I cannot bear to lose what is already so fragile."
"She is your heart," I thought. "I was only a hand that held the lamp."
They sent men with poisoned blades. They sent a thousand small things in the dark to test me. The foreign prince Kai—who smelled different and had green eyes like a strange jewel—came and watched me and let certain looks linger in a way my heart could not read without trembling.
"Who is he?" I asked Adeline later.
"He is a stranger," she said. "A dangerous one."
7
"It was my plan to keep you alive," Xavier said, quietly, the night men leaned in. "I told them to keep you. I told them to feed you herbs. I told them to let you cough but not die."
"Why?" I whispered when my throat could manage breath.
"Because only you and Julieta share certain blood. The healers claim so—an old woman's superstition. If two have the same line, perhaps a life can pass. It is nonsense masquerading as hope."
"You used me," I said.
"No," he said. "I used your safety to shelter my throne."
He said it with the casual cruelty of someone who had gotten used to lying like a breath.
8
"You're going to have a child," the healer said one day, and the world tipped. "The child will be small. We must be careful."
"A child," I said. It felt like a small bright lantern in a dark room. "He is mine."
"Your life is a ledger," Xavier said. "Your child is a coin. It can be spent."
"Don't," I cried. "My child—"
But the world was not kind. The child was born small and bare and thin and quiet. They took him and tested his blood with a cold bowl.
"The blood is not right," the chief physician said. "It will not match the heir. The child is stillborn."
"Xavier," I gasped.
"Dream," he said, and behind the word I heard the sound of a coin clinking. "I am sorry you had to prove it."
9
"They threw my son away," I whispered. "They drowned him like a thing in a bowl. They would not let him cry. They would not let him live."
"They said it was mercy," Adeline said. She had always looked like she was about to cry. "They said he would suffer a short life."
"I wanted to burn the court," I told her once. "I wanted to take a torch and turn the red robes into ash."
"You cannot," she said. "You have a baby in your heart."
"I had one," I corrected. "But we buried him without a name."
10
"They killed Spring Peach," I said on the night the house smelled like burning. "They killed Adeline."
"No," she choked. "I live—"
She had been my rock and her breath left me like a lamp blown. They cut at her throat with a hand that did not hesitate. They crushed her between orders and men.
"Where is he?" I demanded, and for a long time there was only the sound of my own blood.
Xavier did not look at me when he announced the sentence. "For your crimes," he said, one hand on the hilt of a blade that gleamed white, "you will be given the pill and the cut. You will be made clean."
"Clean?" I laughed. "You cannot make death clean."
He ordered a small knife heated and red-hot. He wanted meat for Julieta, he said. He wanted to press a palm of living into a failing lung. He wanted to trade. He wanted the shape of my body to be the medicine.
"Do it," I said. "Do it and end it. Let this world stop cutting me."
11
They took the knife. The heat seared like the sun. I felt the world narrow to an edge of sound. I heard boots and the odd clinking of a spoon. I felt his hand, Xavier's, press with the certainty of a man closing a door.
"You were always stubborn," he said. "You were always my stubborn Dream."
"I forgive you," I said because the sound came out of my mouth, because perhaps forgiveness was the only thing in my chest with room enough to turn into air.
He planted the blade. He sawed like a man learning a new trade. He showed no mercy. He said mercy once, but it was a joke. I felt the cold run down my spine and then the world folded like a cheap screen.
12
I should have died.
But sometimes a map is wrong, and you find a hidden road.
I woke up in a place full of dark soup and a woman handing me a bowl. Her hands were rough as a plow. "Drink," she said.
"I have nowhere else to go," I told her.
"Then drink and remember."
I remember the bridge, the black broth, the woman called the ferryman's sister. The system voice murmured in my head like a poor clock.
"Task complete," it said, blunt and disinterested. "You were the envy slot. You were made to teach a lesson."
"Who are you?" I asked no one.
"A system," it said. "You are the piece to be removed."
13
"I understand now," I said later, to no one who would swear to me. "Julieta had a mission. She came here with a map. She had been shuffled into a world that loved her by design. She was the heroine in a story that required another's erasure."
"Do you hate her?" Adeline asked.
"I hated Julian as I hate a memory of frost," I said. "But she is not what the world paid me to think. She was locked into a script as much as I was. She was given the steps and told to wear the crown."
"Did she know?" Adeline whispered. "Did Julieta know she would be a poison?"
"I do not know," I said. "I only know that men pick pieces and call it fate."
14
After everything, they left me a corpse with a small scrap of life: a single breath that could be counted. They left me with a wound and a technique. They wanted me dead and instead they left me where the light was thin.
I returned to the palace like a ghost. I walked where I had laughed and found only echoes.
Then the reckoning came.
They thought that when I died they would silence the question. They thought the court could be closed like a book. They thought that a quiet tomb would fix their ledger.
They were wrong.
15 — Public Punishment (the 500+ word scene)
The first day the doors opened was bright with wind. Flags snapped like tongues. The square was filled: merchants, eunuchs, nurses, and soldiers packed shoulder to shoulder. People pointed. Lamps shimmered like eyes.
"They called for a public trial," someone cried. "Finally, they will unmask the traitors."
The platform had been set in the central court. A long bench, a scarlet carpet, and a fold of white silk to hide a bucket that would be used for symbols. The crowd hushed when the carriage announced the arrival of a new power.
Kai Burks stood at the head. He had come from across the sea with a court that smelled of salt and iron. He was no longer only a stranger with green eyes. He wore a crown that weighed like the weather. He moved like a man who had worked out his anger with a sword.
"Bring them forward," Kai ordered. Two men stumbled onto the platform—one dressed in velvet like a wolf, one wrapped in threadbare robes pretending to be sanctity. Xavier Lindgren and Julieta Ayala.
They had been summoned. They had been allowed in chains, because the new rules said nothing of former rank when the whole kingdom wished to look closer.
The crowd leaned forward. "Look!" someone shouted. "The man who took Dream's life in his hands!"
Xavier's face was a study. At first, it was like stone: blank, official. He blinked as if hoping to find the old comfort of a throne beneath his feet. He had tried to paper over the dead. He had been the emperor. Now he was a man in ropes who could feel the wind for the first time without a curtain.
Julieta stepped lithely forward, wearing the high silk of a queen who had been told everything was hers by another's script. Her smile did not falter.
"You did not expect this," Kai said, loud enough that even the market women could hear. "You thought power would keep you wrapped from truth."
Xavier straightened. "Kai Burks," he said with the cold simple pride of a man who had staged many scenes. "You are an invader. You have no ground to stand on."
"I have this ground," Kai said and tapped the flag at his chest. "It is where the dead woman lies. She once saved a prince from the river like a lantern snagged in the current. She was called Dream. She was called Dream Wolff. She was used."
A ripple went through the crowd. Someone hissed. Someone cursed. Someone laughed like a dog.
"I was told to keep my throne," Xavier said. "I did what any ruler would have done."
"Any ruler would have done?" Kai's voice sharpened. "Any ruler would have lied? Any ruler would have sold the life of a child to buy a crown?"
Xavier's expression finally broke. At first there was the brittle blink of shock, like someone realizing their footwear is gone. He tried to pull his chin up, to reclaim a stance he had practiced for decades.
"It was survival," he said. "It was order. The court could not fracture. She—" He looked at Julieta and then away, because when he looked the lie cracked on him. "I loved order more than an outburst of kindness. I will not apologize for saving my people."
"You saved only yourself," Kai said. "And you used a woman as bait."
Xavier's face changed then, the transition moving quickly as though curtains had dropped. He went from defensive to furious, from furious to a small, pale man. "You dare—" he began.
"You dare use compassion as a currency?" Kai answered. He walked to the very edge of the platform until the crowd pressed in like a tide. "Tell me, Julieta Ayala," Kai said, and Julieta had never looked so calm as she did when everyone turned to her, "did you know the cost of your favor? Did you know the blood that supplied your favor? Did you know Dream's child?"
Julieta's smile thinned. Her eyes flicked like knives. The first reaction was denial.
"I knew nothing," she said. "I loved—ahead of all, I loved my husband. I took nothing I did not earn."
"Earn?" Kai spat. "Is a life an earning? Is a child's heart a ledger? You used what you were given— the system gave you support, and you used it to push another into the river."
At the word 'system' there were murmurs. Some thought of magic and fate. Some thought of deals with foreign courts. The crowd's mood bent, like metal against a hand.
"Xavier," Kai said, now directly, "you ordered the knife. You hid bandits in the dark. You had my lands watch the courtyards. You took a child's life because you could not face another kind of weakness."
The court shifted then. Xavier's shoulders trembled. First came arrogance, the false armor. Then a flash of panic. He looked to Julieta to find backing; Julieta's face was like a mask over motionless sea. People recorded with phones—no, with little gadgets—some pressed tiny boxes to make marks that would travel the world. The murmurs turned into a roar.
"Confess," Kai said simply. "Confess in front of those you betrayed."
Xavier's lips were dry. He opened his mouth and closed it. The first sound was an old habit of power—a defense. "I ordered things," he said weakly. "I made the court whole."
"You made a corpse," Kai said, and there was now a cruel, public joy in the voice. "You cut the throat of someone who saved you. You cut out her heart with your own hands and told the court you were honoring a ritual."
Xavier's face lost color like an old flag. "No. No. I only—"
He was interrupted as Julieta stepped back. Her earlier smooth composure was cracking. Flashbulbs snapped. A crowd member shouted, "Look at her face! She cannot say she did not know."
She clutched for the script she had been given.
"I did not know the details," she said. Her voice was several things now: a child saying 'I did not do it,' a queen refusing to lower her crown. "I was told lies."
The crowd hissed. Someone spat. Another voice called, "Justice!"
Kai raised his hand. "You shall answer under the sky you made them die under. You shall be brought to the river where Dream once found her prince. There you will look at the water and see what you are."
The sentence was not a legal flourish only. It was a public stripping. They dragged a basin into the center. They called witnesses—maids that had hidden pots, guards that had seen men pass, healers who had counted pills. Each person told a piece. Each piece was a small wound.
Xavier's changes: first the arrogance, then a flash of anger, then a desperate plea, then raw, hollow panic. Julieta's changes: from poison-sweet calm to a flicker of fury, then to pale denial, then to a tiny, brittle breakdown where the lines she had practiced failed.
"You killed her son," a woman cried from the crowd. "You killed her lover's child!"
Xavier tried to press his chin up. "No—" he began. "It was for the realm."
"Then tell them," Kai said, and the crowd demanded truth like a hungering animal.
"Tell them," Julieta echoed then, but the words died in her throat. For once, the perfect script had no line.
The hum of the crowd turned hungry. People who had once bowed to silk and braid now pointed. "Shame!" they shouted. "Shame on you!"
Then Kai called for what the old courts might call a purging. He called for rites of confession. He had them stand in the sun with bowls. He had the healers recount the pills. He had a man lay open the ledger where the payments were traced from Xavier to certain households and to two foreign hands.
As each proof was shown, Xavier's face moved through the stages of grief at lightning speed. "Shock," people whispered, "then anger," then "bargain," then "denial," then finally "collapse."
At the final point, when the ledger burned and the names of the men who had taken my child's life were read, Xavier fell to his knees. He clawed at the platform like a drowning thing. He cried out, "I only wanted to keep a peace!"
"You kept nothing," Kai said. "You kept a lie."
Julieta, charm stripped away, went paler still. Her mouth opened and nothing came. For the first time in her life in the palace, she could not play the part. The crowd softened for a heartbeat—then turned into a chorus for punishment. "You will wear the shame you wrote," someone shouted.
"What shall be done?" a voice asked. "How will you make it public so that the children of the city remember?"
Kai named what he would do. "You will be paraded to the river. You will stand where Dream once held a rabbit lantern. There you will confess publicly for all to hear. He will read what instruments you used. She will answer to the faces you used as games. The men who sold pills and the ones who drowned the child will be brought to the square."
The scene stretched on. Julieta's face convulsed now. She looked like a woman separated from all the veils of her life. She tried to speak, tried to shift guilt, tried to push it to the men. "He told me—"
"It is not enough," said Kai. "You have to say it out loud where the people can hear and mark it. You must watch those you used as paper dolls and tell them you used them."
The crowd wanted spectacle but also wanted to learn. They wanted to know their rulers would not waste a life to prop up their luxury. The lawyers of the city took notes. The children in front held hands and stared with wide eyes.
When they paraded them to the river, Xavier's collapse was total. He tried at first a last-minute plea, but the crowd booed him down. They had once called him a stabilizer; now they called him a murderer. He cried and wept and begged. At each step, the faces he passed changed from reverence to scorn.
Julieta kept her head higher, but her lips moved, and at last she could not hold the act. In front of the river she wept, then the script flaked like paint. She choked out the names she had been given, the orders she had allowed, the times she had been in the archive to sign papers she had not read. "I was promised," she said, "I was made to be the light. I was told to push away darkness."
"Darkness you created," Kai said. "You will live with that in front of those you used."
The crowd stayed long after the parade to watch the men taken away. They watched men who had taken pills, watched lists be burned, watched names chanted as a litany. The punishment did not end in physical blows. It ended in exposure: the scripts of their lives were read aloud, their bribes broadcast across the city. Their faces were shown in the market so children would learn that power corrupts when unchecked.
And after the confessions, when they were led away, Xavier's collapse into horror and Julieta's face shifting from cool queen to someone very small and shivering were the two things no one in the crowd would forget. They would tell it like a town story: the day the city saw how a throne could be bought at the price of a woman's life.
It was justice in the open. It was cruel and clean, and the crowd clutched at it like a blanket.
16
After that day, some things changed. Men who had slept soundly in expensive robes stopped sleeping so long. People who had bowed too readily now asked questions.
I watched it happen from the edges of memory, from a small room in a distant land where Kai had sent me a token: a sapphire the color of river water and a scrap of a rabbit lantern.
"I could not bring the son back," Kai had said when he put the sapphire in my palm. "But I could break them in the light."
I held it until the edge of the world turned soft.
17
"I forgave them once in my head," I told the peach tree in the palace garden, which had been mine and had been stunted and yellow. "I forgave them so that I could breathe."
"No," the System said one night, dry as a ledger. "Forgiveness is optional."
"I forgave because I could not hold hate until it split me," I told it. "I forgave to unbind myself."
"You were the marker," the System said. "You knew the rules. Your role was to be removed. You were the envy node."
"I am Dream," I said out loud. "I always was."
"Dream," the voice said. "You have been… used. System log: mission complete."
18
They buried me under the peach tree where the blossoms were pale and spotted. Xavier knelt at the edge of the crowd with his hands empty. He tried to fix his face to a thing that would feel like grief, but it kept folding into something else. The servants moved like moths around a lamp. The court put on a funeral, and I let them because bodies need ceremony.
He had kissed my forehead in the coffin once. "Forgive me," he had whispered, and the lips on my skin were cold as winter apples.
"I will not carry your promise," I said to the air. "If we meet again, let river water separate us."
Then I closed my eyes and the voice, like the ferryman's sister, hummed, "You are unlocked."
19
In the after, or beyond, something like peace arrived. People will tell the story differently. Some will say I was petty and died for it. Some will say I was beautiful and wronged. Some will say Julieta was innocent. Some will say Kai was a savior. None will have all of it.
But one thing I will keep forever: the rabbit lantern I held that night when I fell over a stranger into the river. The scent of peach blossoms that never quite opened right in my courtyard. The talisman Adeline knelt and gave me, worn and small, that I clutched like a child's toy.
"Dream," Xavier once begged me under the willow, "let us be ordinary people."
We never were. He could not stay small enough.
20
"I am tired," I said once, to Adeline's silent face before she left. "I want rest."
"Then rest," she said. "You have earned your rest."
I closed my eyes knowing the world continued to spin and that the System's voice had an odd, neutral courtesy. "You are free," it said, finally. "You no longer carry the envy slot."
"I am Dream Wolff," I whispered as the garden's peach tree shook loose a single petal that drifted down to touch my hand. "If anyone asks, say I caught it."
The palace said a thousand things afterwards, and power re-aligned like a clock that had been rewound. People changed their stories to fit a safer narrative.
But the rabbit lamp and the pale peach tree staked the memory in a corner of the city folk could not easily forget. Every year someone left a small lantern by the river. Every year someone walked to the peach tree and set a token.
If anyone wrote my name as a cautionary tale, let them write instead that a woman loved badly and was loved back badly, and that in the middle of it all she stood like a tiny lamp that burned foolishly bright.
When I die—if death had meaning once—my last line was not a plea. It was the whisper at the ferryman's edge: "Take me when the moon is bright. Let the rabbit lantern float away."
I let go.
The End
— Thank you for reading —