Revenge14 min read
I Was Made into a Bone Fan — Twelve Years, a Lamp, and a King
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I remember the first thing I saw after death: the inside curve of a lamp, a thin chill through my ribs, and a face I had once trusted smiling as if nothing had happened.
"You're awake," the voice said.
"Of course I'm awake," I answered. "Would I ever sleep through an opportunity?"
He laughed softly. "You look the same, Nova."
"I do not."
"I know," he said. "That's why you are interesting."
I am Nova Crouch. I was made into the bone with a slow, surgical cruelty — a fan cut from my limbs and rimed in some people's pride. I have been the lantern-keeper of the dead; my duty small, my view wide. New ghosts come to me bewildered, and I ease them, guide them, or watch them cower. I waited at the bridge for twelve years.
"Where is Lincoln?" I asked the lamp that first night.
"He's not coming," the lamp muttered in a language only the dead repeat. "You were made useful."
I laughed then, because twelve years of waiting can twist hope into a private humor. I kept my lamp on the table beside me. My lamp glowed a thin, bitter blue. Inside it a memory thrashed like a trapped fish: the woman made into the bone fan — the cause of the knot that tied my life and death — she had been put into my lamp for a while, and now she was finally freed into the world of my sight.
"Bone-Woman," I called her, affectionless, the old name sticking like a bone between teeth. "You weren't going to miss my tea."
Mercedes Ibrahim looked out at me from inside the lamp like a doll getting used to movement. She smiled with the same slow wickedness she had used to make me a thing.
"It's been some time, Nova," she said. "You look... neglectfully pretty still."
"Neglectfully pretty," I repeated, happy with the phrase. "Do you miss him, Mercedes?"
She tilted her head. "Miss him? He fed me. He loved me. He—"
"—left you where you are," I finished, and my hand tightened on the lamp handle.
The lamp shook. A small shadow flickered across the wall: the other man on the stairs. He had the quiet calm of someone who keeps his storms for later. Deacon Oliveira — my master, the one who had put me into the lamp and kept me safe enough to be still. He had watched me become a thing and never once smiled for it, except in private.
"You're too fond of the one who made you," Mercedes hissed.
Deacon's voice cut through like a blade. "You would be surprised what I can be fond of," he said. "You," he looked at me, "for example."
I raised an eyebrow. "Flatterer."
He did not answer; his eyes simply said what his mouth wouldn't: I did this for you.
Lincoln Curtis came when the news reached him. The news: Mercedes — the woman he had loved, the woman who had died with a story like a dagger — had turned up inside my lamp. Like every man who loved her, he moved faster than good sense. He arrived with blood in his lashes, ashamed and wrecked.
"Nova," he said, low. "Please."
"Please what?" I asked, leaning back on the cushions. "You want the fan back? You want her revived?"
Lincoln dropped to his knees, the way respectable men sometimes do when their pride is heavier than their patience. "I ask you," he said, voice gone thin. "Please. I beg you."
"You said once that a beggar should kneel," I told him. "You said they should know how to plead. Do it properly."
He looked smaller on the floor than he had as a boy picking peaches; it made me want to laugh and spit at him at once.
"I will," he said. "I will get on my knees. I will say anything."
"Then start talking," I said.
We made bargaining into a small, bitter game. Lincoln's offers were as shiny as brass coins: rites, blood, the promise he'd wrestle the laws of death back into place. He had found a recipe — terrible and exact — tucked in an old book. He'd risked the forbidden for one woman. The idea pleased and disgusted me in equal measure.
"You never tried for me," I said, teasing because the truth hurt like salted meat. "You never once chased a resurrection for my sake."
Lincoln's face did whatever faces do when guilt sits in them. "I didn't know," he swallowed. "I didn't know the fan was... you."
"You didn't know?" I repeated. "Oh, Lincoln."
"Nova," he choked. "I had her bones for years. I cleaned them."
"You cleaned her bones," I echoed. "You stored them. And yet you let me vanish into a lantern and said nothing."
Lincoln's hands curled. "I couldn't... I was a man of the world. I thought saving one life, even hers, would be enough. I thought—"
"—that someone else could be compensated," I supplied.
His voice broke. "I failed you. I know."
"Good," I said. "Confession is the first step to bargaining."
The bargain was raw and ugly. I made a list. I liked lists. I asked for small cruelties because cruelty is payment; it warms me like a small fire. If he wanted her back, he would have to kneel to me, live in a world where his hands were not entirely clean, and pay a price not even the living took willingly. He agreed. He was quick to agree, children and the naive often are quick when their hearts are at stake.
Deacon watched all of this with that flat, unmoveable gaze.
"You will help him," I said to Deacon one night, placing the heavy bone fan between us on the floor. "You will give him the way."
Deacon's smile was a whisper. "I never gave bone that could not be used. But tell me: what will you do when you have mercy?"
"I deserve all of it," I said. "I deserve to hold the lever."
Months — or perhaps only days, ghost-time is elastic — passed in a strange rotation of small triumphs and public humiliations. Every time Lincoln returned, he was made smaller by the price he paid elsewhere. I liked to test him. "You wanted to bring her back," I told him once. "Did you think you'd be able to keep your hands clean and still bargain with death?"
Lincoln had no answer that would satisfy me. "I would cut my tongue out for her," he said in a voice that should have made me soften; instead I only smiled.
"It won't be your tongue," I told him. "It will be your pride."
Then the mountain erupted.
Edmund Boyd — the head elder of the Mountain Order — had dug, schemed, and kept bones where they would do the most good for piety. They had my bones in the ground. They made a fan from me — not to honor but to hide power. They had been careful for years. But they had one weakness: they were proud of being righteous. I was not.
When I arrived with Deacon and Lincoln at the mountain, we did not arrive in secrecy. Deacon walked beside me. Lincoln came beside him with a bruised righteousness. The mountain disciples lined the courtyard in neat rows, their faces held the blank expressions of people taught to believe an easy truth.
"Release the woman," I called out.
Edmund himself, the man with a jaw like a chisel and a conscience like an old bruise, stepped forward. "You will not come here and break our acts," he said.
"Then watch us break them," Deacon said. "You were part of the plan."
The courtyard filled with a quiet that has weight. Mercedes was brought out on a stretcher of sorts — she had been sitting fragile, eyes sunken, and when she saw the gathering she began to laugh. Her laugh cut like glass.
"Do you see them?" she said, voice bright. "All these people, and yet not one saved me."
"Mercy is not a thing you accept with a smile," I said, stepping forward.
Edmund raised his hands. "We will judge what must be judged."
So the punishment began — not a private act, but a public spectacle as necessary for us as for the mountain's law.
"You have to show your shame," I said to Mercedes. "In the place where you stole someone else's life and sold it to a fan."
She smiled in reply. "You think you can shame me?"
They made a circle. Disciples leaned forward on their wooden benches like a chorus waiting for a tragedy. I set the bone fan on a low stone in the center. It shone pale, like a shard of moonlight. Mercedes was forced to stand. Her wrists were not bound; that would be too merciful. She had to own her mistakes with her legs.
"Tell them why you did it," I ordered.
"I did it for love," Mercedes said, and her voice soured.
"For love?" the crowd murmured.
"For power, for protection, and to keep him," she corrected, smiling like a child unmasked. "Is it a crime to love?"
"To take another's bones is a crime," Edmund said. "All witness this."
"Who gave you the fan?" I asked, sharply.
She blinked like a girl trying to remember a name she had been told to forget. "A friend," she lied at first, then snapped, "No — it was given."
"By whom?" I pressed. "Tell them now."
Lincoln stepped forward suddenly, trembling. "I knew," he said. "I... I had a part. I begged them for a way."
The courtyard stirred. A ripple of surprise moved like wind through grain. To see the golden boy of the mountain confess was like seeing the sun step down.
Mercedes laughed, a short sharp sound. "So this is a trial," she mocked. "Lie, and they'll take the lie as truth."
"You're going to tell the truth," I said. "Tell them who handed you the fan."
She looked at Deacon then. Her expression flinched, like a bird realizing the trap. "He gave it to me," she said with a small voice. "Deacon did. He wanted to—"
The name fell. Deacon's jaw tightened into a line. The disciples inhaled as if the air itself had gone thin.
"Deacon?" Edmund shouted. "Explain yourself!"
Deacon stepped forward slowly, like a tide answering a bell. "I gave it to her to save a life," he said. "Because she was necessary."
"Necessary?" Edmund bellowed. "You betrayed our law."
"She took it," Mercedes shrieked, the smile cracking. "No, you made me take it. You told me I could hide it. You promised—"
Her voice faltered. Shock first, then denial — and then the first crack of human fear. The crowd leaned in, hungry. I let them see her unravel. This is what I had longed for — the moment the bright mask slips and the face behind it becomes small.
"You're not the only one who can break a promise," I said to Deacon quietly; my voice cut like wire. He met my gaze without flinching. There was no shame on his face, only a terrible tenderness, like a man who had pressed his palm into a wound and chosen to stay.
Mercedes's act of control collapsed. "You promised me return!" she screamed now, voice high and ragged. "You promised he'd come for me!"
"Promises made in darkness are bargains with devils," Edmund replied. "This court finds you guilty of theft of life. We will enact a public unmaking."
They had many ways on the mountain; I had been part of their trophies. But vengeance is an art. I wanted her punished where the pride of the mountain would feel justified — where every disciple would watch the one they had been told to revere be found wanting. I wanted the crowd to see what parasitic love does when given power.
"Now," Edmund said. "Strip her rank. Let the lantern show what she took."
Men moved. They took her necklace, her bells. The disciples watched, the older ones with a hardness like old iron, the younger ones with eyes full of confusing questions. Whispers went around. "Bone-Woman took from the dead?" "He protected her?" "How did Deacon—?" They murmured, breath soft, like leaves.
Mercedes's face went through a checklist of reactions: first arrogance, then dismissal; then suspicion; then anger; then confusion; then the slow, dreadful bloom of terror. Her chest heaved. "You're wrong," she hissed. "You can't —"
"I can," I said, voice low and unyielding. "We found the body. We found the fan. We found your ledger."
"You'll burn me," she lied.
"We will strip your pride first," said Edmund. He nodded to one of his men. A small, ceremonial knife was brought out, carved with the mountain's marks. The blade was old but true.
"No!" Mercedes spat. "You can't cut me. You can't—"
She tried to twist away, to regain the place where a smile would save her, but the disciples were quick with their hands. They held her shoulders, held her wrists. The blade traced a shallow line over the palm of her hand — a symbolic cut, to take rank. She hissed, then sobbed with the fierce noise of one who realizes the world has closed.
"Tell them who you traded the bones with," I said, and the crowd hushed. The sound of the wind seemed louder than all dissent.
She broke down and then, as if pulling a string, rose into a new stage — bargaining. "I did it for Lincoln!" she wailed. "I did it to be his! I did it to make him stay!"
There came gasps as if someone had stabbed a fish in a bowl. The disciples shuffled, heads turned, fingers pointed. "Lincoln?" murmured a woman near the front. "He, the one they praise?"
Lincoln's face had frozen between guilt and despair. He could barely hold his stance. "Stop," he begged, but his voice was small.
Mercedes's face went through more shifts now: triumph for a heartbeat; then shame as the crowd began to retract the warmth they had for Lincoln; then bargaining again. She began to explain — and with each sentence the crowd's mood changed, some hissing, some weeping, some folding their arms in cold judgment.
"Is this true?" Edmund said.
"It is," Deacon said calmly. "I supplied the fan, and I did it to keep a balance. I misjudged where loyalty and law collide."
"Then take your punishment," Edmund said. "Leave the mountain. Live as a commoner. Be bound to no rank."
The crowd cried out, some in triumph, some in incredulous sorrow. A boy near the back shouted, "Deserve it!" Others bandied whispers like knives.
Mercedes's change was now to panic. "You can't make me common! I am blood of the Order! I—" Her voice increasingly thin, she tried to step forward, but hands held her.
"Do you beg?" I asked, without any mercy left in me. The question was a blade wrapped in silk; she did not understand it until it was too late.
Her reaction went from anger to denial to tears. She did not want to beg before us; there was no script for that in her life. She reached for a last shred of dignity and attempted to assert: "I did what I had to," she said, voice cracking.
"You did it for love," I told her. "And you killed for the feeling. You traded bones for a place in a man's life."
There was a pause. Mercedes's shoulders shook. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I never meant to hurt Nova," she said so faintly that the wind might have taken it.
That whisper was a trap. The disciples heard the tiny confession and erupted. Women shouted the old words of justice; the men pressed closer. This was a public stripping of all illusions. Mercedes had expected knifing and exile. She had not expected the pure, unadorned contempt.
Hands grabbed and tore at her ribbons. She gasped. Her expression moved from anger to shock, from shock to fevered pleading, then to the brittle acceptance of someone watching a cliff eat them.
"Take her to the river of forgetting," Edmund said.
They led her away. The crowd watched, the clack of sandals like a metronome marking time. She had gone from pride to pleading, from bravado to the pit of abject weakness, all under the gaze of the mountain she had tried to use.
Her final cry — a sharp, jagged sound — tore the cold air. Children stopped playing. Elders lowered their eyes. The courtyard emptied of talk, filled instead with the echo of a woman who had believed herself untouchable being made small.
I kept my lamp close. The lamp hummed like a heart. The bone fan lay on the stone. Lincoln stood and walked away. Deacon did not look like he had won. He looked like someone who had spent his life preparing to lose at anything that mattered.
After, when the crowd dispersed, some of the apprentices came and whispered to me. "Is she really gone?" one asked.
"She will be," I said. "The mountain made an example. That is all they know how to do."
"Did you want this?" the boy asked.
"I wanted the truth," I said.
The punishment had lasted longer than a day. Mercedes had gone from smug to shattered, from denial to bargaining, and then publicly diminished until she had nothing left but a thin, pathetic howl. The watchers had changed, too. Where there had been admiration and envy, there was now a slow, spreading pity and the kind of victorious scorn that makes people feel safe. It was a public lesson and a private wound rolled into one.
A week later — no, days later, counting time with the heart — we found out that Edmund's men had not only shamed Mercedes but stripped the mountain's vaults. The fan had been taken away, the bones removed. They had done justice as they knew it. Yet none of that patched what had been broken: Lincoln had burned bridges, Mercedes had been unmade, and Deacon had bared a secret that made him smaller and larger at once.
"Why did you help me?" I asked Deacon that night, when the courtyard was washed with faint lantern light.
He set a hand on my shoulder, heavy as a promise. "Because I cannot bear your disappearing," he said. "Because after twelve years I could not let you be erased."
"At what cost?" I asked.
"At any cost," he said simply.
His answer was not comforting. It was a soldier's vow edged with menace. I looked at him and remembered the boy who had once walked down from the mountain and handed me a stolen peach. I remembered the quiet patience in his eyes.
"I thought he was a good man," I said of Lincoln once, when the nights were thick and the lamp barely glowed. "I thought he would do the right thing."
"You thought wrong," Deacon said. "Good men look good because the world dresses them in light. That light is hair-fine. He could not learn to burn for you."
I kept my lamp burning for a long time. Deacon never left my side. Lincoln visited when he could, but there was always a small animal fear under his eyes now, a shame that had to be tended like raw meat. Mercedes — I heard rumor she clawed at the river until the current carved her thin, an echo of the woman who had thought being adored absolved all means. She had been punished in the sight of a crowd who wanted to feel safe again, and the mountain felt again that it had acted righteously.
"Do you forgive him?" Deacon asked me once, late, when the night had settled like a lid over our small room.
"I don't do forgiveness quick," I said. "Forgiveness is cheap. It is a laundress's trick."
He smiled like a man who loved laundresses. "Do you ever want to be more than a lamp, Nova?"
"I want to be a person who remembers," I said. "If you can promise that — truly promise — I will consider it."
He leaned down, and this time when he kissed me it was the kind of pressure that rearranges thought. "I promise," he said. "Not for bargain or retribution. For myself."
We retired to the quiet of false dawns, because there were still tasks: the bone fan had to be hidden, the lamp needed to be kept, the mountain had to be watched. Edmund's rule had not been broken so much as rearranged. Lincoln went back to where men who had lost things go — to small, private purges.
We returned to the life of the dead and the living in a strange cohabitation. Deacon drew pictures sometimes: landscapes of the mountain he once walked as a boy. They were always incomplete faces until one day he left the first brushstroke that belonged to me. He pinned up that sheet and finished the face.
"What is this for?" I asked.
"For the memory," he said. "So if you choose to return to the world, you won't be alone."
Months later — months in a world where the living count seasons and the dead count grudges — Lincoln came to me one last time. He had a small box; inside lay a blackened scrap of cloth and a hand-letter. "I tried to atone," he said. "I failed."
"You tried, and that means something," I said. "But not everything."
He looked at me with a heavy mercy. "Could you ever..." he faltered. "Could you ever be free of it?"
I thought of the bone fan, of Mercedes's public ruin, of the mountain's court and its small, self-satisfied justice. I thought of Deacon's quiet, terrible tenderness.
"No," I said finally. "Not all things are freed. But things can be rebalanced."
He knelt and kissed my hand. "Then I will bear my balance," he said.
He left. The courtyard sank back to its rhythms. The wind sounded like old drums. The lamp on my table hummed like captured sea.
Time is a strange currency. Deacon and I learned to bargain with it. We did not promise not to hurt. We promised not to allow erasure.
At night, we go to the bridge and watch the living float lanterns. Once I insisted on throwing a lantern of my own into the river. Deacon watched as it wavered and finally got swallowed by the water.
"What's the wish?" he asked.
"That someday," I said, "someone who used me for the wrong reasons will stand embarrassed in a crowd and know what it feels like to be small."
He smiled in a way that matched the old boy in my memory. "Then you will have your revenge."
"Revenge is not sweet," I said.
"Maybe not," he allowed, "but it is decisive."
We kept the bone fan in a chest that was locked and placed in the ground under a willow near the wash of the river — not because I wanted to preserve it, but because I wanted to control its danger. Every now and then I would hold the lamp up to it, watch the shadow of the bone fan cross the wall. It looked like a little sickle.
"One day," I told Deacon, "someone will ask for it."
"Will you give it?" he asked.
"I will not let it be used by the foolish," I said. "And the foolish tend to be the proud, the same who make laws as a coat to hide their hunger."
Deacon nodded. He put his arm around me and drew me close. "We will choose then," he said. "Together."
At dawn the courtyard smells of ash and boiled tea. The mountain has its wounds stitched and the world keeps demanding new ones. Mercedes's voice is a memory the wind sometimes pretends to carry. Lincoln lives like a man who has learned to trim his edges. Edmund still believes in laws and thinks himself righteous. Mark Burke, the nameless boy now older, passed the way of a witness.
Sometimes I stand at the bridge and the lamp flickers like a second heartbeat. Deacon's hand finds mine. "Do you regret waiting?" he asked once.
"No," I said. "I would not change what made me know you."
He glanced at the old willow where the fan rests. The river hums as always. I closed my eyes and felt the bone of the past in my palm.
When the world presses, I remember the courtyard and the cries. I remember the crowd's hush at Mercedes's collapse, the way the mountain feigned victory, the way Deacon promised and burned.
"One day," I told him quietly, "if anyone still wants to ask, I will open the chest. But not for mercy."
Deacon's fingers tightened. "Not for mercy," he echoed.
We keep the fan and the lamp. We keep our small, exact juries. We keep each other.
And that is enough, for now.
The End
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