Revenge14 min read
Choose Me in the Next Life
ButterPicks14 views
I remember the cold before I remembered my name.
"They said the hour was right," the herald shouted into the winter dark. "Bring the bride into the manor!"
I had been chained in the cold cell for more than a year. They dragged me out because today a husband would be crowned—only I was not the bride.
"They brought her out," someone called, and a dozen bright-robed cultivators flooded the courtyard like teeth.
A white-clad man shoved a sword against my throat and barked, "Take the witch away! The Lord and Lady demand to see her."
They had left the shackles on me so long my wrists had rusted inside them. When they finally unfurled the iron chains, my fingers trembled as if discovering motion for the first time.
"Do you not speak?" the white-clad officer sneered.
I spat a laugh that tasted of blood and old iron. Their laughter froze.
One of them cracked the length of a sword hilt across the back of my ribs. I did not cry out. I had learned long ago that pain is a thing to study, not to beg for mercy from.
From the high stage, the bride and groom stood in bright vermilion. They were the two faces I had loved most and trusted most. We had trained together, we had sworn vows together, and I had turned my back on my order for them. I bent my head for them once. My reward was chains, broken bones, stolen power—and the knowledge that the man who promised me everything had chosen another.
"Today is the marriage of Lord Bennett Ball and Laney Andre," the herald proclaimed. "We promised to present the witch—Yaonian—to the gathered houses."
The bride laughed a sugary laugh. "It's a good day, friends. Let us show leniency for old wounds."
The crowd cooed. They were hungry for spectacle. They would invent reasons to torture me until the sky split because shame glitters like gold in a room full of men who crave applause.
I had been their mark for countless tribunals, their scapegoat, their cautionary tale. They called me "witch" while they wrapped themselves in righteousness. They called me "monster" when I bled. They tasted power and found me a convenient mirror to break.
"So you will die decently?" I said aloud, loud enough to make the nearest officer flinch. "Or will you keep the fine theatrics for your children?"
"Silence her!" someone yelled.
They rained down a forest of blades; the sky was full of metal and the courtyard smelled like iron. I let their flying blades pierce me. I had been broken. Their weapons could only carve me; they could no longer extinguish me. My veins were pinched shut. My throat had a lock on it. They gave me pain to play with and called it justice.
"Kill me then, Bennett," I snarled when I could speak. Blood threaded my voice. "If you are a man, you'll finish what you started."
He looked at me as if at a broken toy and shrugged. Around him, polite laughter rose like steam. He and Laney—my teacher's daughter, my childhood friend, the woman who smiled while they took every part of me—stood on their dais. They had crafted a story for the world where I was the villain and Bennett was the savior.
"Let her suffer," Bennett said. "It will be a lesson."
"Not this day," a voice said from the dark.
The sky folded. The world went black as if someone had drawn a calligraphy ink line across the heavens. The clouds closed like a lid. Weapons dropped in midair. I felt breath on my curls; a cold hand slid beneath my chin and lifted my eyes to a face I had never seen yet felt my whole life had waited for.
He wore dark robes that drank light. He moved like a wind that is never named. When his gaze met mine my heart remembered something before my mouth had a word for it.
"You are broken," he murmured. "I should have kept you. I am sorry."
He held me as one holds a relic: both reverent and furious. Around us, the crowd rippled with unease.
"Who are you?" Bennett demanded. "Stand down. You will earn the wrath of the houses!"
The man looked at him without moving his voice. "Do not ask my name to those who do not know how to kneel with honor."
"Is he—" someone whispered.
"He's the name they feared," another voice answered. "That's the Ghost King."
He did not answer their fear. He only touched my hair—so gently my skin remembered heat—and then swept his hand and wrapped the manor in a red seal so thick that the world beyond tasted like copper.
He cradled me like a memory and spoke into my ear with a voice that broke something tender in me. "If you were given another life, would you choose me?"
I should have answered no. I had sworn never to give myself to another after the price of my first loyalty had been the salt of my ruin. But I couldn't speak. The red seal hummed. Pain washed over me like a tide. My eyelids folded like shutters. The last thing I heard before the world blackened was him promising to avenge me.
When I woke, I opened my eyes to my own hands again: I was back. Not old, not dying, but replaced into the hour before the chains had ever bitten. My memory was an iron map. I had names and dates and the echo of flesh under palm.
"I am not the same as before," I told the reflected face in a broken mirror. "This time I will live."
They had not yet had their victory. Bennett's wedding had yet to begin. Laney and Bennett were walking a stage built on my suffering. The whole world believed their story. The whole world said I had been condemned.
I chose to be subtle. I would not charge like a wounded wolf. I would plan, plant, and harvest the ruin they deserved.
Weeks passed in the small hours of other people's lives. I practiced on broken breath and ghostly scriptures. I walked among the throngs with a wide straw hat. I learned to hide and to let them come to me like moths to a light.
"Who are you?" the servant at the gate asked, peering at my hat.
"An itinerant healer," I said. "I can bind fever and mend the broken."
"I hear the Master is ill," she said. "They are looking for someone. They offered gold."
I smiled and left three times more gold than they expected. "Tell them I come at dawn."
They needed a healer for Bennett. It was deliciously convenient.
On the wedding day I revealed myself. I stood among guests like someone who has come merely to eat, and when Bennett spoke vows about devotion I spoke across the murmurs.
"Wait," I said. I removed my hat.
"Isn't that—" a voice cut in. "Isn't that Yaonian?"
A hush fell like a clap. The guards checked my face in disbelief. Bennett lunged forward the instant he recognized me. He moved like a man who had rehearsed outrage as a posture.
"You dare!" he snapped, hands reaching for a letter in my belt.
"Keep your hands by your side," I told him. "You will embarrass yourself."
He tried to snatch the paper. I let him reach. He came within my reach and found only air, then felt a palm like iron slap into his chest that knocked the breath out of him and a thin red line of blood at his lip.
"How dare you—" Bennett spluttered, shaken as applause rained from the crowd who loved a scandal.
Laney stepped forward, both defenseless and blushing. "Stop this," she cried. "This is our day."
"Do you deny writing this?" I asked. I unfolded the letter and let Bennett see his own hand print—blood and all—pressed into the paper.
Bennett made a face and tried to laugh it off. "You are lying," he said, voice thin.
"Then explain how your blood got on our ceremony vow," I said.
He bristled. "I—"
"You made me a relic," I said to the assembled house. "You lifted me up as a spectacle. You cursed a life to entertain your vanity."
"Don't be melodramatic," Laney said. Her voice tried to be regal but trembled.
"You said my death would be a lesson," I said. "You said you would watch me suffer. You taught everyone to draw lessons from cruelty."
Bennett's face shifted: first color, then disbelief, then an ugly slick of fear. The room tipped. I had built a quiet stage where truth unraveled all their rehearsed lies.
A servant in the crowd licked her lips, then whispered, "Read it."
So I read aloud. I read words of their warmth and promises once written for me and now serving as proof they had betrayed me. I read the vows Bennett had drafted in private. I read the oaths Laney pretended were made only for each other. The crowd's perception of them slipped like a painting being peeled from a wall.
Laney turned white. "You are slandering us," she cried.
"Is it slander when your own blood proves me?" I asked.
Bennett tried to pull himself up with a final bluff. "She's a liar," he spat. "A witchly liar. Do not listen."
The crowd murmured. Some drew their phones—no, in our time they lifted small crystal slates—and a dozen recorded. Faces that once smiled now frowned. Ops that had craved the spectacle found that spectacle had changed its terms. The music in the hall had become the sound of verdicts.
"Get her!" a noble cried.
They surged. I let them come and wove them into memory. I did not kill. I did not have to. My purpose was punishment that tasted like public ruin.
I walked away then, toward the mountain where the Ghost King slept in a tomb and in the space where he had touched me. The pact was still fragile, but every step that took me away from my old prison tightened a knot in the world that would one day hang heavy around Bennett and Laney's necks.
Weeks later, while I tended Bennett's wounds in his bedchamber, while Laney flitted in and out with consolations and promises, I made my true bargain.
"How long will he live?" Laney asked, all ice and petals.
"Long enough to make amends," I said. "Not for him. For you."
Laney's eyes brightened the way a fox might brighten when it smells a goose. "Do it then."
"He will stand three months from now and preside at the New Year's blessing," I told her, clean and plain. "Then he will be a man who cannot cultivate anymore. He will be bound by flesh."
Bennett coughed and then spoke, his voice a brittle string. "Never. I will not be torn from cultivation."
"You cannot have both," I said. "You cannot decide to be both lord and lamb."
He clung to vanity like a drowning man grabs driftwood. "What do you want in exchange?"
"A jewel," I said. "The Broken-Soul Pearl. You have it in your vault. Let it come to me when the time is right."
Laney paled, then nodded because she cannot deny she loves safety and status more than truth.
"Do it," Bennett whispered. "Make me whole for one ceremony."
And so the arrangement held like warm glass. I fed him tonics and forbidden herbs that mended the signs but hollowed out the root. He stood tall on the day of the blessing and towered above the valley of folk under his watch. I watched him beam and bear down his shoulders like a man prepared to climb a throne again. The people prayed to the sky and to him. He bowed and accepted the chant.
At dusk, his smile was warm; at midnight his spine cracked.
The next week, in the courtyard where people once toasted their gods, Bennett fell in front of a thousand witnesses.
"You ruined us!" he raved. "You witches! This is not fair!"
Laney screamed. "You promised—" she wailed, public and raw.
I watched the scene as their faces turned into something I had hoarded—defeat, and the furious collapse of self-dignity. Bennett staggered toward me, his palms splayed like a beggar on a winter night.
"Please—" His voice changed as his pride bled away. "Please, I didn't know. I'll give you anything."
Around us a storm of phones and plates and whispered commentary rose like a living thing.
"Get out of here!" someone shouted.
He fell to his knees, the silks folded with the sound of paper falling. He tasted at the earth, then raised his hands, the way men pray, but with shame instead of devotion.
"Beg," I said. "Let them see your need."
He begged, scratched the marble with bloodied nails, crawled toward me like a man trying to catch a ghost with his teeth.
Laney's eyes turned glassy. "I can fix this," she whispered, but her scream before the words fell flat was the sound of a woman with everything slipping through her fingers.
They had been so proud. They had made a religion of decorum. They made a show of virtue so they could cut lives into pieces without naming the cuts. Now the game turned and the court called their bluff.
The crowd was divided. Some clapped. Some recorded. Some wept. A young scribe kept shouting how the truth must be known, how no throne can be built from cruelty. A woman snapped a crystal slate picture. A man laughed too long.
Bennett's face changed faster than weather: first hot, then pale, then the slow bubble of denial as he tried to unravel the truth, then the hardening of self-defense—"This is manipulated!"—then the wet crashing of collapse: "No—please—" Then he scraped his hands over his face as if to hide a mask that had melted.
Laney paced like a trapped animal, then climbed onto the dais and tried to speak, to redeem the spectacle with white words. "I never—" she began. "I did not—"
Her voice failed. The crowd's attention slipped. The moment had been captured and turned into a juror for them.
They begged. They denied. They shrank. A dozen witnesses closed in: servants who had once bowed to them, nobles who had laughed at their schemes, the groom's own houseguards who now eyed him with distrust.
By nightfall they were broken in front of everyone. They had been wrested of the comforts that made cruelty look like wisdom: power, status, and the smooth face of society's nod. What remained was a public ruin that would echo for decades.
"You brought it on yourselves," I said quietly, but loud enough for the gossipers. "You taught them that our pain could be theater. Now let the theater be honest."
That punishment was not the end. It was a beginning in which I collected the pieces of a different plan. I would gather nine trinkets—artifacts of old power—and with them break the seals that had pinned Ivan Bruno, the Ghost King, into a sleep that had bent men like Bennett into opportunists.
He had been bound by choice and by bargain. Once he had bound himself, he had left the world to Bennett's lies. Once he re-emerged, he had asked me in a whisper that broke my ribs with tenderness: "Next life, choose me."
I had promised myself I would choose myself first. I owed that to the girl who had been beaten into silence. I owed it to the man who had given me a hand when the world wanted to take everything.
We moved like a tide.
In the months after the ceremony, while I cured Bennett's flare-ups and watched Laney's eyes hollow into an appetite for the preservation of what remained of herself, I traced my path to the artifacts that would let me free Ivan Bruno wholly. I stole a relic from the villa of a lord who had trafficked in slaves, broke an amulet from a merchant's vault, and unlatched an heirloom chain from the sash of a magistrate who had benefited from my ruin.
"I will not harm the innocent," I told Alec Chandler, the young man I had freed from the wrong that had been done to him, when he asked if we should burn down every house that had once pointed at me.
"You won't," he said. "You will take their wealth and leave them thinking themselves lucky. That's your intelligence."
"I will not be them," I answered.
We kept the Ghost King as a secret between us. Ivan Bruno stayed in my bracelet—a black string with beads he had lent to me—an odd relic that thrummed when he was near. When my mind frayed, his cool voice threaded up from the beads like relief in the dark.
"Do you need me to come?" the beads would say without words.
"No," I'd reply with my lips sealed. "Not yet."
We planned, and we struck at corrupt houses like needles. The next stage was to break a seal laid into the bones of a proud house: the Ouyang family, whose patriarch had murdered my teacher and made me a canary for the rest of their hunting.
I did not kill all the Ouyangs. I wrapped a paper of reckoning that listed crimes and their names and pushed it under the elder's pillow. I left him like a curse in the morning of his life. He wrote his own confession and his house made amends in a way that peeled their face off for the rest of their days.
"Why spare them?" Alec asked.
"Because boiling a city is not how a garden grows," I said. "Because I wanted to take only what I needed, and leave a fear that would not make the world crueler, only smarter."
We collected three artifacts more: the wound-binding rope, an unfailing bell, an obsidian pearl that a courtesan had once used to bind lovers. Those steps took months. Bennett and Laney stitched their faces back together for the public but their eyes were empty; they could not swallow the seed of doubt I had planted.
The final act was a confrontation that would be public, humiliating, and complete.
I invited them to a festival. They thought themselves protected by the same hypocrisy that had built them up. At the height of the crowd's laughter, I called them to the stage.
"Today," I announced, "we will hold a tribunal for those who traded mercy for spectacle."
"Who are you to call a tribunal?" Bennett barked, fury leaking still from his chest.
"Someone you betrayed," I said. "Someone you humiliated."
Laney stepped forward with a smile that would not fit her eyes. "We have nothing to hide."
"You have everything to hide," I answered.
Then I called for the bindings. The court, hungry for theater, obligingly gave me a stage, a thousand bodies, and because the world loves irony, I had been given the instruments to make them kneel where once I had knelt.
I unrolled lists of names and proofs—letters stained with Bennett's blood, witnesses, annals of things they had said in private. The crowd listened. They took notes. They watched. And then I had them call out the crimes in public: not merely to shame but to write down the truth.
"They framed me as a witch," I said. "They called me a monster because it was easier than asking what they had done to spurn them."
Bennett's collapse was slow and ceremonial: denial, rage, pleading, and finally a knuckle-pressing surrender. Laney's implosion was the more theatrical—she tried to reconstruct herself from the shards of praise and failed.
"Beg," I told him when he crawled. He did.
"Record this," I said to a scribe beside me. "Let the world keep this memory."
Their faces had changed into pleas that made the crowd shift. There were cameras—no, crystal slates—recording everything. A hundred strangers took pictures of Bennett as he squirmed. People clapped. Some spat. Some videoed to sell later.
He knelt and begged. "Please," he cried. "Forgive me."
"Who to forgive?" someone asked.
"To forgive the man for his own selfishness?" I asked. "For his betrayal? No. He will stand in shame for as long as any man remembers this day."
That punishment, public and total, burned like a lantern hung in their rooms, never to be extinguished. I made sure.
Once that was done, we moved on to the tombs. One by one, the artifacts were placed. Ivan Bruno's name—real and old as the bones of the mountains—was spoken aloud as we sealed the last ring.
"You asked once," he said when I had returned to him from the last theft, the word a chill in my wrist's beads. "If you could choose me again."
"I asked myself first," I whispered. "I will not be forced into charity."
He slid into a form that almost felt like hands. "Then choose me."
I placed my palm over the beads. "I choose you because once you chose me, and you kept a hand under my hair while men beat me. I choose you because what you are is the only thing that held me from drowning into what they wanted me to be."
He laughed, the sound a storm. "You are mine, then."
"Not like that," I said. "We are a bargain. We have a history in which you saved me and I paid you with a debt. I will not be owned."
The sealing ritual broke like lightning and then settled like cold rain. The Ghost King woke. He moved like a cat stepping out of a shadow. He was whole and yes, furious. He gave us his promise to protect and he gave me his blade to put under my pillow.
I stood on the mountain and looked down at the valley where Bennett and Laney sat trying to rebuild. Their ruin was a slow, careful thing. They had been made to witness their own undoing.
"Will you stay?" he asked at dawn.
"I will stay as long as it serves my balance," I said.
He took my hand then—not with chains but with a firm warmth that promised not to possess me, only to stand by me.
"Next life," he murmured, "choose me."
"I might," I answered, and this time my voice had no crack in it. "But next life is not today. Today I am myself."
The years that followed were quiet things. I kept being the healer in the public square, the woman with hands that could sew up a wound, the woman who had once been a spectacle and now was a remedy. I kept living my life as if the past were a map and the future an island I had already circled.
Bennett and Laney's punishment kept blooming.
"How long will this last?" a friend asked once, watching baking sunlight fall on the courtyard where a portrait of Bennett hung in a place of honors no longer afforded him.
"As long as there are names for what they did," I said. "As long as kindness remembers cruelty and marks it."
When I looked in the mirror now, I saw more than survival. I saw plans that had become gardens. I saw a bracelet that hummed when Ivan breathed through it. I saw a scar behind my ear that I traced when storms came.
"Do you regret anything?" Alec asked, once, as we sat under lantern light while the city slept.
"I regret that I gave them any of me to buy," I said. "I regret that my loyalty was once cheap."
"But you are not her any longer," Alec said. "You are someone who takes what she deserves."
I touched the beads, then found his fingers and linked them into a small joke of warmth. "I said once I'd choose myself first," I said. "The next life will keep the rest."
And if some nights you heard the ghost of a voice like wind over the mountain, whispering, "Choose me," know that the answer would always be mine to give.
The End
— Thank you for reading —