Sweet Romance12 min read
A Matchmaker on Duty, a Forgotten Husband, and the Scissors I Keep
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I was summoned because heaven kept burning through its own people.
"Why me?" I asked the throne's echo, half-complaint, half-smile.
"You never set foot in any temple. You are unknown. Precisely why you will do." The voice sounded like thunder wrapped in velvet.
So they sent me — Kira Stephens — down to hold hands with whatever mess gods and immortals made of their love lives. My job title, in plain language, was "divorce specialist for immortals." In heavenly paperwork they called it "reconcile or sever the ties of fate." I jokingly told my colleagues I only accepted cases with clear ledgers: assets before affections.
"Members of the Council believe your temperament is suitable," Genevieve Burton told me when she stuffed a pouch of ceremonial seeds into my hand. "You cut, you seal, you do not indulge."
"Seem harsh?" I asked.
"It is law," she shrugged. "And you are terrible at being indulgent."
I was not a great fighter. I had never pretended to be. My talent was red tape, ritual, and whatever small, practical magics one learns running a bureau where broken vows translate into endless forms. Still, somewhere along the way they had put a pair of thin scissors into my hand: a bronze set that could cut destiny threads. The scissors hummed when I touched them. They smelled faintly of river mud and old paper.
My mistake — or my luck — was that the man who once stood across from me in a small, damp courtyard, who had once done the patient, domestic thing that makes marriages, was one of the immortals who came back and found his memory wiped.
"Ernesto?" I had said that first time when I bumped into him on a path.
He did not look at me like he owned my past. He looked at me like I was an unfamiliar page.
"Do I know you?" he asked gently. His voice was blade-calm. He smelled faintly of sword oil and storm.
"I—" I did what every mortal woman in countless tales had done, but with a bureaucratic twist: I marched into the office where statutes and contracts were kept. "You have a fate ledger here," I told Genevieve. "You are on the list."
She didn't laugh. "You will do the right thing."
"Right thing?" I said, cutting the little paper thread between us as a precaution. It snapped like a small, polite apology.
The first time we were forced to be partners, it was almost comical. We had not had a wedding. There had been a thrown-together rite in a windy field because a mortal habitually stole starling cloaks and called it a courtship. He cooked me a whole night of simple food after we were declared wed. "I can steam a lamb," he had said, then he listed ten dishes of which I had heard only half the names. He had dark lashes that lay against his cheeks like the shadow of a blade. He was absurdly earnest. He said things like, "If you are cold, take my cloak," and meant them in a way that would make anyone in my office's line of work suspicious.
"You do know how to use a pan?" I teased one night, when the moon was low and we had more rice than conversation.
"I can try," he said. "Will you teach me to carryations of laughter in a room when it is owed? Teach me to be reckless with sugar?" He leaned in and my knees, traitorously, remembered a dozen little humane inclinations.
We were decent at being ordinary. We were terrible at remembering one another.
"Do you remember being married to me in the last life?" I asked the first honest question after he'd forgiven, with a look that was more puzzled than angry, the fact that I'd once clipped his fate-line.
He shook his head. "I woke up and found the world had a scar where I expected convenience. I thought someone borrowed courage from me."
"That's one way to put it." I clipped another ledger, more for my courage than for his. "Fine. Then we are unencumbered. We can go our separate ways without scandal."
"Will you have dinner with me?" he asked later. He had the disarming way of asking things that made refusal sound ugly. So I did. The meals became small agreements of attention. He learned to cook the few things I liked. I learned his silence — which was not rudeness but readiness. When he did speak in those circles of kitchen steam and broth he said, "Eat," and when I bickered he answered with simplicity: "I will."
Genevieve and I officiated. We sat in the marriage hall and watched dozens of ridiculous, tragic, and sometimes truly moving ceremonies. It was part farce, part court, part weather report for love. We cut ribbons and recorded dowries and confiscated charms. "How can there be so many ways to be cruel?" Genevieve hummed as a pair of gods argued over a child's name. "You'd think at their age they'd be done being monsters."
"Monsters evolve too," I said. "They rebrand as 'complicated.'"
The world below was messy. River demons insisted wives were brides to the current. A man called his wantonness "tradition" and marched into a township to claim a bride by force. Each time, I had to put on the unflinchingly neutral face of the registry, consult the scrolls, and decide if the knot had the right to remain tied. "No," I said more than once. "No. That's extortion, not courtship."
We had rules. We had procedures. And sometimes rules meant public theater, because only in public could the shame of the wicked carry weight.
The first real case that mattered for me — the one that taught me how to wield my scissors not with literary flourish but with administrative precision — involved a man named Fabian Marques.
Fabian was, on paper, a pillar of his clan: a general's nephew, tidy on the roster, reputable at the market. But he had a private ledger no court should ever touch. He had killed his wife — or at least, he had murdered his path to advancement by stabbing the one who trusted him. He had wrapped the act in the language of "ascetic risk" and "trial of the spirit." He had said aloud, "I needed to be unburdened," and expected pity.
"You might think I have no emotional stake," I told Genevieve when the file first landed on my desk. "But I do. I swore an oath to cut only what must be cut."
Genevieve tightened the ribbon on the folder. "Then cut, Kira."
Sancho Kovalev, the stern marshal assigned to preserve order, came with me to the tribunal room when the hearing convened. "Public," he said. "We make a spectacle. People must see the law."
We arranged it under the arch of the old hall, where those who had been chastened before had left a faint smell of incense and ash. "Why public?" I asked. "Isn't this cruelty?"
"Justice requires witnesses," Sancho said. "Shame isn't vengeance if it prevents future harm."
Fabian arrived in a silk robe that still smelled of perfumed ink. He moved like a man making sure the world believed he belonged in it. The crowd gathered — tradespeople, a captain from a neighboring god's retinue, a woman whose daughter had been spared a river god's claim last season. They pressed in. A clerk summoned, by name, the ledger of evidence. "You will be heard," I said into the scroll-holder, and then into the microphone of ritual: "State your intent."
Fabian smiled. "My wife was... a coincidence." He said it with the practiced detachment of someone who thinks words will make a wound neat.
"She was your wife."
"So the law will decide. I have deeds, witnesses. I am willing to admit regret."
He admitted nothing. He made confession into a compassion-seeking performance and the crowd, for a moment, felt uneasy.
I drew the scissors. The metal felt cool. I made the ritual sign. "Show us what you did," I commanded. "Show the truth."
Sancho kicked a brazier into life. I summoned the evidence: the blood-smeared shawl, the ledger entries that Fabian thought were discreet. I allowed only the pure-eye clerks to narrate. Then I called for Fabian to present his version.
He began with arrogance. "She was weak. I am not soft. The world is cruel; I chose to be less cruel to my descendants."
There it was. The audacity that made people gasp. "You say you are less cruel to your descendants. So you made the choice for them," I said. Everyone looked at Fabian. He had prepared speeches, but not the kind of silence a crowd gives before rejecting a man.
"Men of our line—" he started. "Women must be sacrifices—"
"Enough!" Sancho roared. The crowd finally hushed.
This is the moment an accused man exposes more than a wound: he exposes his own humanity, cleverly dressed, and then he tries to hide from it.
I ordered a public re-enactment. "Let the neighbors speak," I said. The first neighbor, a woman with callused palms, stepped forward. "He beat her for losing the child's bread," she said. "He kept her locked at times. Once I saw him drag her by her hair."
Fabian's face changed: from composure to annoyance to denial, to a sudden frantic laugh, and then to cold fury.
"No! That is a lie!" he screamed. He raised his voice in protest and then softened. "I loved my image, I loved my name—who would not? I did not intend for her to die!"
"You did," said Sancho.
Fabian's reactions became a spectacle: his expression wavered between entitlement and panic. He tried to appeal to pity. "Please, I am honorable," he begged a moment later. "I did this because I feared corruption, feared weakness. I sought to be a man free of distraction."
A child in the crowd clutched his mother. "Why would you take her?" he asked.
Fabian began to shake, then sink. The crowd's volume rose like an ocean. The witnesses we called — the baker, the midwife, the woman he had once threatened — each repeated what he had done. The public had turned from curiosity into a jury of feeling.
"Fabian Marques," I called. "You have been accused, evidence presented, witnesses heard. You are given a chance to speak truly."
He flailed. "I didn't mean..." he began, then changed tack. He cursed the day his house had taught him to be proud, cursed the old texts, cursed the compassion that made him weak. He begged for exile. He said anything that might wobble public feeling. For a long time he tried to mask guilt with ideology.
But this law is theater because theater forces a person to be seen, and being seen had a consequence here: the crowd knew the man and the woman both. They knew who had baked bread for the child's first step and who had removed the splinter from the neighbor's toe. The crowd chose not simply punishment for punishment's sake, but a punishment that would unmake Fabian's central lies.
So we pronounced it: a public unmaking. He would lose rank, storehouse, and lineage privileges; he would be paraded, yes, but not merely shamed. He would be bound to perform, before the very market women who had bought his bread, six months of charity work while his name was publicly recited as an example. Then, on the final day, we would bring him to the square, cut the luck-thread from above his head with these scissors, and burn the token that allowed him to hold official favor.
Fabian's response went through a sequence like a weak man stuck in strong weather. At first, he attempted bravado. "You cannot take my name!" he said. "I will call upon my uncle!" Then, seeing there was no uncle willing to lift him from public disgust, he flailed to denial. "You misheard. She was sick. The midwife was lying."
Later in the ceremony, he pleaded: "I protect my children. I will not let you take the only thing I have left." The crowd, having seen his hypocrisy, hushed. The child's mother spat, "You took the only thing she had."
Then he sensed the ritual closing. The snip of my scissors sounded like a verdict; it is a small noise, but it sounds heavy. The lead clerk burned the name-tokens. Fabian, who had been overbearing a moment before, crumpled.
"Forgive me," he sobbed. "I will be better."
No one forgave him in a voice. The cheers were not for vengeance but relief. They had watched a man fall from the safety of self-delusion into the nakedness of anguish.
He was made to stand and confess in front of those he had wounded: "I did this. I thought my need was more important than her life. I was wrong." He tried to raise himself up in the last moments with bargaining, then collapsed into wordless pleading. The crowd touched his name with disgust. Some spat. Some took his robe to feed those he had wronged.
Sancho watched, his jaw set. Genevieve scribbled in the book of rulings. I felt the scissors weigh heavy in my hand. The public punishment had lasted well over an hour in speech and silence and then another two full days of community reparations. Fabian transformed from smugness to shock, then to anger, then to pleading, and finally to hollow acceptance. He was spared execution — the law takes life only in narrow cases — but his life lost its public honor. He was publicly refused the right to officiate, to lead, or to lay claim to fealty. He would live among those he had injured and work until his fingers bled into the ledger of making good.
When the final ceremony ended — the burnings hissed and the little tokens made a small sound, like rain on a roof — the onlookers dispersed in murmurs. Many recorded the event. A woman in the front said to her companion, "This will be told to our daughters so they learn caution." A child sobbed softly. Several neighbors hugged one another. A tradesman applauded. The merchant's clerk took a copy of the judgment to pin on the hall.
Fabian, for his part, leaned back against the column and did not stray. He had been placed in the kind of public accountability that, in our bureaucracy, works because it ties shame to labor. People will remember his name. People will watch his hands until they wear.
And that, more than anything, taught me the power of procedure. The scissors are not a savage weapon; they are a last-resort ledger instrument. They speak in a language only those who live by contracts truly understand. When I cut a thread, I'm not only separating two people. I am shuffling fate, telling a world that some choices are intolerable. The punishment was theater, but the theater was merciful by measure: the worst that man had to face was every neighbor's watchfulness and the knowledge that his name would be used as a caution.
By the third night after the ruling, I found myself again sharing a simple bowl of soup with Ernesto.
"You handled that well," he said between spoonfuls.
"It had to be seen," I answered. "Otherwise, what stops the next man?"
He placed his hand near mine on the table. "You are made for the tedious and the true."
I smiled. "Is that a compliment?"
"It is," he said. "Even if you say 'tedious.'"
We kept a pattern — work, small meals, odd rescues. We saved a girl from a river sacrifice, stitched a village back to order after a wood-root demon crawled through a cellar, and once, when my scissors nicked a thread someone had mistaken for destiny, I coughed blood onto the parchment and had to hide it.
"Don't be reckless," Genevieve scolded later.
"I'm not reckless," I lied. The scissors were in my pocket like an old, absurd comfort. They hummed sometimes like an instrument that knows a tune only I half-remember.
Time is weird when you work in a bureau that touches every heart. People came with neat files, with barely concealed desperation. Some left laughing in gross relief. Some left later by the edge of pity. And Erin — Ernesto — was always there: quiet, practical, sometimes hilariously direct about food, always steady in the background.
Then there was the day the skies shut with silence.
"Everything's wrong," Ernesto said when he found me at my table. He had come from the north gate with news that the celestial net had missed. "The lines to the Council are dead. We cannot reach the throne."
I felt the tiny panic that always precedes a storm in a civil office: when the contact to higher authority fails, the job becomes heavy.
"It is like a lid on the world," Genevieve muttered when she came in. "We cannot send or receive. Clerks say the sky vibrates differently."
That night, under a sky smudged with worry, a lumbering thing from the old stories—an up-rooted, weeping tree-spirit—took a village's children as tokens. We were forced to act as ordinary people; there was no Guardian Marshal with a last-minute army. I sent the girls home and used the only thing I had: a ledger, a carved pentacle from my bureau, and a prayer to a goddess who had once mended the world.
We fought like clerks with blades, as mortals sometimes do: improvising. Ernesto cut, not with the scissors, but with a blade he'd trained with in another office of life. Genevieve summoned paperwork so strong and binding that the tree's roots tripped on them like a thief on a rope. With a final, improbable motion, I took the five-colored stone Genevieve had been carrying for uncertain reasons and plunged it into the ground where the tree's root's heart had been. The stone flared like a promise. The roots slackened. The world breathed.
Later, in private, Ernesto's hand found mine. "You tasted the edge tonight," he said. "You always do."
"I was trying to make sure everyone was documented," I said. "You went with your sword."
He shrugged. "We work in different registers."
We kept saving people. We kept making small rooms of peace. We found girls stitched to house walls by pacts, removed charms from the throat of a warlord, and once, in a seaside town with a crooked tree and a lesser river god, I dropped my scissors for reasons of need: to separate one tragic knot of cause and effect.
"You always keep those scissors," Ernesto observed one night.
"They are my signature," I said. "I cut threads I shouldn't have to. It maintains order."
"People will remember," he said softly.
"People remember the wrong things," I said. "They remember actions, not context."
He smiled. "Then we'll make them remember the right context."
Our intimacy was small: dinners and quiet talks, the way someone might keep a lantern close on a long road. He never forced me into an epiphany, and I never demanded his memory. When he confessed — one twilight, with a grin that had the ache of someone who'd lost and reclaimed a map — "I think I'm remembering a small set of patterns," I asked him to explain and he spoke of a night of overdone food and a cold season the two had survived together. The memory was domestic, tender, and perfectly ordinary. It was enough.
Sometimes, the world still needed grand gestures. Once I had to stand in the main hall and, in full view, pull the ledger strip that tied an immortal general to his turbulent passions. The spectators clapped at the justice; the baker with the crooked thumb cried quietly in the corner because she felt the scales level. And afterward, Ernesto stayed with me, folded me into his steady warmth.
The scissors remain on my desk. I file the copies. The five-colored stone is tucked into the soft pocket of my robe. If the world goes quiet again, I will take them both. I will go where duty goes, cut where fate must be severed, stand where the crowd needs to witness that consequence exists.
Sometimes love is a petition filed in triplicate. Sometimes love is a bowl of lamb at midnight. Sometimes, for me, it is both.
The End
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