Rebirth12 min read
When I Rose Again: The Sword That Remembered Me
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When I rose to godhood, the whole sky thought I had stolen a crown.
"You stole her rank," they whispered. "She took Princess Bethany's place."
They were wrong, and they were loud.
"I didn't steal anything," I said once, folding my hands. "I only took what never belonged to any of you."
"You dare—" Bethany hitched her skirts and made a show of trembling. "You dare speak like that to a princess?"
"Princess," I repeated, and the word tasted like ash in my mouth. "You love the word. You live behind it."
"Rain Seven," Crosby snapped from the side of the hall. "How can you stand there and insult the princess? She—"
"Quiet," Tomas said, and his voice silenced the room. He wore the armor of a war god and the face of law. "You are no longer my disciple. Leave."
"You'll lose everything if you go." Cash said it like it was a warning, a trembling thing.
"I am leaving," I answered. "I don't want your pity."
They expected a crying child, a begging wretch. They expected me to beg. I left the hall and took my things. My hands were steady. My feet were steady. My heart had a secret of its own. I had a whole other life stacked inside my ribs like old maps.
They called me Rain Seven when I was small, a slow pupil with a broken spirit. They said I could never learn. They said my god-sense was ruined. They said that I could not pass the years.
They were wrong.
"Is it true? Her god-sense is mended?" Bethany asked later, whispering, sweet and dangerous.
"It is. She ascended," a brother answered, and there was mockery in his voice like he was tasting a joke.
"Three thousand years to reach an upper god," another said. "Three thousand years and she only reached... this."
They laughed. They were a chorus of small condemnations. They were certain of everything.
"Little sister," Tomas called as I walked away. His voice said father more than master. "Rain Seven, reconsider."
"Master," I answered to the empty hallway where I put the old pass-token back into its place. "I have."
I left the sect anyway. I went to see the sword.
When news spread that the Three-One Sword had awakened, crowds gathered like a tide. Gods, demi-gods, the proud children of the heavens came so the sword might choose among their hands. The sword is older than most songs. It sings of wrongs and remembers the one who once carried it.
"It will choose a worthy hand," Bethany cooed, leaning against Tomas as if his strength were hers.
"Of course," he said, with a man's calm who holds the right to break the world's rules. "Only the worthy."
I walked into the ring of watchers among them. They nudged, hissed, tried to shove me aside.
"She can't be serious," Cash laughed. "She can't be—"
"Quiet," I said, and the sword heard me.
"Three-One, come to me," I murmured, and everyone saw the sword's light tilt.
The blade leapt free of the mountain's stone and flew through the air like a bird who remembered its home.
"It chose her!" a voice gasped.
"It cannot," Bethany snapped, her lips flattening. "This is a trick. A trick!"
"Did you ever think," I said, when the sword was in my hand, "that this sword remembers the hand that fit it before? That it remembers the one who carried it before you were born?"
"You're insolent!" she spat.
"I am not. I only remember."
The sword sang once, a long aching note, and the air curved like a second smile.
"You are a thief," Bethany told me to my face. "A low thing who steals what belongs to true blood."
"True blood," I echoed, and I closed my fingers around the sword's center until it hummed like a bird. "Tell me then: whose blood? Yours? The Emperor's? Tomas's? Have any of you a right to what was never yours?"
The crowd murmured. Tomas's face had not changed. His jaw was a stone.
"Preposterous," he said. "She would slander us."
"Prove it," I said. "Or be judged."
A challenge. A public ring. Bethany signed with a slash of her palm and blooded the pact between us. We fought under the eyes of all. I kept the sword sealed inside me, by my choice, and let her think she had the advantage.
"You're going to let her have the sword?" Cash asked, incredulous.
"I don't wish to hurt any of you," I said. "But I will not be mocked."
Bethany was swift and cruel. She used a borrowed golden bell and called down a cage of fire. She thought artifacts would save her. The bell shattered in a shower of sparks when it met the sword's true will. Her face burned.
"How can this be?" she gasped.
"You told me once," I said, "that you were the master's favorite. That he would shield you. That the world owed you every mercy."
The sword's light wrapped me. I felt the old life—ruthless, clever, full of laughter for the wrong reasons—pour back into me like hot wine.
"You think you're better?" she screamed. "You think—"
Before she finished, she had a blade through her hand, and then through her cheek. Her tattled threats cut the air.
"Stop!" Tomas cried. He moved like a god who loved what he taught more than the truth.
He saved her. He cursed me with a hand and a look that could strip skin; he hit the altar and forced the fight to stop.
"They are weak," I said, and I let the sword out to hover. "All of you are weak with your lies."
Then the world changed.
I let the sword show what it knew.
"Show them," I told it. "Show them what they did."
The blade's light spilled memories like spilled milk across the sky. The crowd saw color and old hills and a woman laughing in a house that had not been theirs. They saw the old god who loved bad jokes and better wine. They saw a child on a bed, and then they saw Tomas—young, hungry, wanting the power no man should take.
"Stop this," Tomas begged the sky.
"Do not make me soft," I said. "If you would like your past to be remembered, let it be remembered by all."
Images struck like lightning now: the old god, weakened by her last trial, a god who had trusted too much; the man—Tomas—who learned the night's routes and the way to press a heart when it slept. Tomas's face changed from defense to guilt to a hollow, like a well that had been drained.
"You're a liar," Eric shouted from the raised platform where the Emperor sat, pomp like a carved mask. "You would shame the throne."
"I speak truth," I said. "You sat upon a silver throne and filled your chest with things you had not earned."
"How dare you!" Eric—Eric Herve—rose, and he was red with both rage and fear. "You will kneel and apologize."
"Apologize? For what? For living?"
They panicked. The crowd shifted like a sea. Murmurs became something else—maybe fear, maybe the hypothesis of an answer.
"Show us proof," Eric demanded. "Produce evidence."
The sword's light answered. It poured the memory of a stolen bone, of a theft no crown could hide. Tomas's chest opened. The crowd smelled old blood in the air.
"They took her bones," Julio Elliott's voice cut in from the dark. He had come with a presence like storm-cloud, his cloak a blade of shadow. He is a name of the night that does not like being reminded of old favors.
"They replaced his bones with hers," I said. "They took the marrow and split it into grafts. They stitched themselves with what they stole. They pretended to be something they were not."
"No!" Tomas said, and his god-face cracked. "You are a liar! We saved you! We—"
"You 'saved' by tearing her apart," I said, and the sword's light hissed like flame. "You took what was mine and called it yours. You swallowed bones and called them inheritance."
"Stop this theater," Eric said. "She is mad."
"Is she mad?" I asked. My hand moved. The sword's song hardened into a command.
A silence fell—thick and unbearable. Then the crowd moved. "Is this true?" someone demanded. "Did they kill a god?"
"All you ever told us was that the Moon Summoner fell in her trial," Leon Curtis said. He was old, white-bearded, the man who asks questions when everyone else falls silent. "But never the how."
"Why didn't you tell the truth?" I asked Tomas. "Why did you take her and stitch her bones into yourself?"
"Because we needed strength," he said. "Because—because if the throne shifted, the heavens would end."
"And you thought you had the right," I said. "To trade a life for a crown."
Tomas's eyes were a slow slide from bravado to a child's terror. He tried to smile, tried to make his voice a river. "I did what I had to. We did what we had to. Do not judge us by the standards of the living."
"You judged us," Bethany sobbed, and then smiled like a thing whose last thread had been cut. "You judged me as a princess because it gave you breath. You made my life into a ladder."
"Enough," Eric said. He rose now like a king who has been stung. "You will be punished for slander. For treason. For—"
"For stealing a god's bones," I finished. "Yes."
He lunged. Some guards stepped forward. The crowd surged.
"You will not escape," I said.
I did not kill them in a corner. They had made their crime public by stealing a god; they had made the sky a witness. So I will punish them before the sky and before everyone who had cheered their climb.
"Bring them forward," I said.
They were dragged to the center—the Emperor on a cushion of arrogance, Tomas held by hands that had trembled, Bethany dragged like a fallen queen.
"This," I told the crowd, "is the man who took my bones and called them his. This is the princess who shamed my name to hide his hands. This is the throne that sat upon a stolen bed."
Eric's face was purple. "You dare—"
"You took from her a right to finish her trial," I said. "You took her name. You ate her bones. You put them inside you, thinking no one would remember. But memory is stubborn."
I lifted my hand and the sword's light wrapped their bodies in strips like ribbons. The crowd watched. They did not shout. They watched because they had been wrong, and wrongness makes people quiet.
First, Bethany.
She had been jealous and petty and cruel to me for years. She had tightened her smile like a noose. It would have been too easy to kill her and end it, but their sins deserved something else. They deserved spectacle because they loved spectacle.
"Bethany," I said softly, and she looked at me as if seeing a ghost. "You loved humiliating small things. You thought you could make a world by pressing people down."
"I never—" she whispered, but her voice was gone.
I made the air around her thin. "I will take from you what you loved."
Her crown—her borrowed dignity—fell. Her high voice turned into a small human noise.
"Public humiliation," I said. "But not just humiliation. You will lose what you built your life upon: the pride that let you throw people away."
I stripped her of rank in front of the assembly. I wove a spell that made every mocking thing she had ever said to any person in the hall replay and echo until they were so loud she could not hear her own name without hearing the voices of everyone she'd hurt.
"Do you hear them? Your words, broken like glass."
Her face crumpled. The crowd at first surged with a curious gasp. Then some nodded. One by one, the replies came from lips that had once obeyed her: the broken children, the cousins, the apprentices she had pushed. They told the world of each small cruelty, of every insult she had said in private.
"It is done," I said. "You are stripped. You will wander with your name chewing your tongue, and you will find none who answer you with the title you once preferred."
She sobbed. "No," she said. "No—"
The sound that followed was not simple pleading. It was a sound of someone losing the scaffolding of their life.
The crowd watched as she slumped into a heap of herself.
It was a punishment of exposure and shame—the social death she had once delighted in handing out to others. It was public, it had witnesses, and it delivered a slow collapse—worse than a blade.
Second, Tomas.
He had been my master. He had given lessons and been a father to many. He had also been the surgeon who thought to harvest a god for himself. His punishment would be different.
"Tomas Madsen," I said.
He straightened like a man hearing his name given again and again by a bell.
"You will carry your actions with the weight that made you take them. To steal a god's bones is to steal the threshold of endurance. You will feel what it is to carry without the right."
I walked close and placed my palm on his chest. The crowd's breath felt like a tide.
I cut the thread of his claim to godhood. Not with a single kill, but with removal.
He had worn my marrow like a cloak. I drew it out.
"Remember how you felt when he died?" I asked him softly, showing him the memory of his hand taken in joy and then stained with blood. "Remember the warm copper smell you could not stop tasting?"
Tomas screamed. It was the sound of a man who found his own body unfamiliar.
I did not take his life. I took what he had stolen: the grafted bone, the borrowed strength that had made him stand above others. I peeled it from the inside of his chest with the precision of a surgeon who knows the body too well.
He fell to his knees as if age had seized him. His shoulders slumped. He was not killed. He was made human.
"I will not let you die slow," I told him. "But I will make you remember the debt you took. You will live with brokenness in you, a knowledge in every breath, every step, that you took someone to become more than yourself."
Tomas's face changed. He was not the roaring god now. He was small and raw.
"I am—" he tried to say.
"You are punished," I said. "And you will spend the rest of your years making repairs you do not know how to make."
People watched this. They whispered about the justice—so unlike any they had seen.
Third, Eric Herve.
The Emperor appeared fit to strike, but his face melted under the weight of what he had done.
"You sat on a throne built of teeth," I told him. "You kept a crown on a head that was not yours in the first place. You traded a living being's right to ascend for the comfort of a throne."
"You will lose your throne," I said.
I bound him with the sword's glow and let everyone present feel the truth he had hidden—how he had taken letters, how he had calmed a council with favors, how he had lied to an empire's face while he chewed on a murder's secret.
"Public judgement," I pronounced. "You will be stripped of title, not by knife but by memory. Every favor you extorted will be proclaimed. Every family you bankrupted will be named in the market. You will not be dragged out and killed. You will be left a man whose name has empty air where respect used to be."
The crowd screamed, a distant sound of leaves in a thunderstorm.
Men and women stepped forward to tell of debts, of fines, of sons sold into distant households to pay for illusions of loyalty. Old women spat his name into the dust. Merchants counted up what the empire had stolen.
Eric's voice became a thin thing. "You cannot—"
He was forced to kneel, to beg in public, to count aloud the ways the crown had been bought. The humiliation of a throne explained openly is a collapse worse than a blade, because the army stayed and the men who had once flattered the crown did not laugh—they turned away.
He was left on the stones without title, but alive to see how the world reshaped its face away from him.
The punishments were different. Bethany was stripped of rank by echoing voices that would always remind her; Tomas was left to carry the full knowledge and weight of what he had done; Eric was rendered impotent by exposure and the loss of the net of power that protected him.
There was sound—cries, the clump of feet, the hush that comes after a theater collapses.
"Now," I said finally, feeling the old power thrumming in my chest like the old wine, "tell me who remembers what a god is."
A hush, then a soft: "We do."
"You will see me come with a sword," Leon said, but his voice was smaller now.
"I am the Moon Summoner," I told them. "I am the one you took pieces of and thought it would not matter. Do not think you can make history with other people's bodies and call it your own."
Tomas looked at me with a shame that had no words.
"I will fix what can be fixed," I told him. "And I will let what cannot be fixed teach. Remember that."
"Take her," Julio Elliot said, finally, and his shadow stepped back. He bowed to me like a man who had finally seen his own reflection thrice. "Your justice is—"
It was enough for him.
After the punishments, the world did not stitch itself at once. There were small wars of rumor. Some merchants regained their courage. Some griefs could not be undone.
"Will you stay?" Cash asked, with the small hope of a child.
"I will not stay to be worshipped," I said. "But I will not vanish."
"Will you punish more?" Bethany muttered from the ground. Her voice had the tiny, animal sound left when a bird's wing is broken.
"No more than necessary," I answered.
Julio Elliott stayed by my side. He had once been a child I watched grow; I had once been his nurse and his bad-law friend in another life. Now he stood like a man who had traded darkness for a greater sense of humor.
"You will come with me to the border," he said. "The magics of this place are broken. I will help you restore what you chose not to keep."
"I never chose to keep what was not mine," I said. "I only chose to remember."
"Then remember," he said, but he smiled. It was small. "We will make a proper throne, with fewer lies."
I left the hall then. They had seen me as a petty student or a legend. They had seen me humiliated and then made whole. They would speak of it for a long time.
Out beyond the ring of watchers, the bird—the great old thing who used to prance in my old life—circled and landed on my shoulder. It made a sound that was like a laugh and like a choked sob.
"Old thing," I whispered.
It pecked my hair, affection and mischief and a low promise. Julio Elliott's shadow leaned in.
"No crowns today," he said. "No thrones. Only work and mending."
I looked at the Three-One Sword in my hands. It hummed like an old friend, quiet and steady.
"Promise?" the bird croaked.
"I promise," I said.
Then I looked up at the sky. Lightning braided through a purple cloud. The sword's song wrapped around me and the sound was like a memory walking.
"I will not forget," I told the sky. "I will not be taken apart again."
The bird cocked its head and blinked, like someone who had just woken up from a long nap and could not tell whether morning had arrived yet.
My name was Juliet Giordano now, and also the Moon Summoner, and also Rain Seven. Names are bandages; memories are what hold the wound together.
We would go to the border and stitch the world with truth. The sky would be heavier for a while. People would learn to be quiet in the presence of the truth. I would forgive or not, as the hour required. But one thing would not change: the sword remembered, and so did I.
And when the sword hummed in the night, every time it sang, the broken parts I gathered would come closer to being whole.
The End
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