Rebirth13 min read
I woke up in a beggar girl's body and refused to stay small
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I woke to cold that ate my bones.
"Where am I?" I mouthed, but the words were small and scared. The world smelled of mildew and old straw. My hand—no, not my hand—felt tiny. I tried to pull it under the blanket. My fingers were stiff and thin like a child's.
"Hey, you alive?" a voice whispered through the gap in the temple door.
I heard the shuffle of old feet. I tried to answer, but my voice came out like someone double my age coughing. Panic rolled through me like a tide.
"Keep your distance," the woman said. "Don't want the sickness spreading."
She left the door cracked and a smell of frying oil drifted in. I turned my head and saw my own face in the thin light. There was a child sleeping, cheeks hollow, hair in clumps. A scrap of dirty cotton coat lay over her like a tired flag.
My head flooded with memories that were not mine and then were mine, thick and immediate. A life of discipline, of late nights studying technique, of a cave and a ring and a fall. My name—I had been one person who fought in forests and read books—but now another name came from mouths I did not know.
"Jemma," they used to call her. "Jemma Martini."
I tasted metal. I remembered cliffs, a failed ladder, a ring that opened a space. I remembered how my hands had learned to move swords. My heart slammed like a trapped bird. I reached for that memory—my other life, whole and sharp—and knew it had not gone. It was folded into me like cloth.
So the improbable had happened. I had opened my eyes to a different body. The little body did not match those old big hands and older skills I had kept in memory. I pressed my palms to my face and laughed, a small, wet sound that startled me.
"I can't be dead," I said aloud, and the sentence felt like a promise.
A stranger's cough came from the doorway. "Alive, are you?" she asked. "That's a blessing."
"Who—" I began.
She came in. She smelled of warm bread. "Good girl. Eat this." She set a hard bun into my lap. My fingers closed without thought.
"What's that name?" I whispered to myself. "Jemma Martini."
I sat up and listened to the city outside—icy wind, carts, muffled voices. I crawled out and wrapped the coat tighter. The bun was a poor consolation, but it warmed my stomach.
"Don't trust the crowd," the woman muttered as she closed the door. "Keep to the temple when it's worse."
I did not sleep. I sat and thought and tasted the coinless life of the child who had lived here. I realized with a bitter, sweet laugh that I was lucky. I had space—the ring had not left me. My mouth formed the old name I had gone by in the other life and the new name together, and I whispered them both like a vow.
"Isabelle Walker," I said to myself in the dark, because that name was the last one that belonged to me in memory. "And Jemma Martini lives in this body now. We are sharing breath."
After the first day's fog of shock, I found how lucky the accident could be. The ring—the place I used to open—was still under my skin like a promise. When I pressed, the world dissolved and I was back in a small bamboo house and a garden that always felt too tidy. The space had more than I remembered: tools, books, seeds, animals. Inside, every shelf had a purpose, and in a corner there was a simple jade box.
"You're stubborn," a bright voice said from the doorway.
I turned and saw a young voice in a smaller, rough body. She stared at the jade box like a child at a bright coin. Her name, as I learned quickly, was Brooke Myers—the woman in the market who had once given Jemma the quilt long ago, I was told by pieces of neighborhood memory. She had an easy habit of taking in those who needed help.
"Who are you?" Brooke asked.
"Just someone passing through," I answered, because the truth felt too wide.
I stayed hidden in the small temple and let the winter come at the city. My bones understood cold and hunger, but my mind ticked like a clock. I read hastily, over and over, until the words came back to me: techniques, a seed plant called dragon-nectar berry, a method of tempering the body so the energy could go where it needed. The old life had been a life of agreements, of paying dues with sweat. Everything in me wanted more: not just to survive as Jemma, but to live like Isabelle again—on my terms.
I planted a tiny seed of the idea in the temple ground: grow strength, steal time, make a life.
"Why don't you go home?" a voice asked months later when I stepped into sunlight that tasted of cold and iron.
"Home is what I make it," I said. The city around me, called Yunyang, blinked away. I had the space to rest, to sleep and come back and spend a hundred days as if they were one. I used it like a thief uses silence—carefully, gratefully.
I learned to cook. I learned to hide when I needed to. When I walked the alleyways, I wore Jemma's dress and the coat Brooke had given. People patted my hair and called me Red Flower—the old name had stuck to the child like a petal. I learned who were kind and who pretended to be. I learned that a girl's life in Yunyang was small if you let it be.
But the first time I chased were three men bent on cruelty, action came from memory faster than fear. They had cornered a girl in the woods, used language like a net.
"Help! Someone, please!" she cried.
I had to move. Training over years works on muscle and mind. The old reflexes were iron in my chest. I ran.
"Let her go!" I shouted.
They turned. One in a bright silk shirt laughed and reached forward. "Oh? A child thinks she'll save others?"
"Try me."
The fight was brief and sharp. I could have ended it hard, but I wanted them afraid, not dead. A foot to a knee, an elbow planted into ribs, a palm under a chin. They fell like sacks. One begged already.
"Please—please! We won't do it again!"
I stomped my foot over the leader's chest. The wood smelled of blood and winter leaves.
"Leave her," I said softly. "If I see you near any girl again, I will find you and make you regret there was light in your world."
We took the frightened girl back to her cave. She clung to me like a child. Her name was Keilani Gauthier. She had lost parents early. In the low way that saves the sad, she asked to learn.
"Teach me," she said.
I looked at her and at myself. The world had given me a second chance at skill. I could take a pupil. We had been alone for a long time.
"Yes," I answered. "But there are rules."
I named them like an oath. She bowed until her forehead burned the hard floor with the force of her desire. Then she ate and started to train.
We lived in that rhythm for three years. We rose with light, ran through snow, slaughtered game until the meat was a feast to the old bones. We used the space for healing and strength. I learned the strange pleasure of watching a pupil improve. Keilani learned like a stone absorbs sun.
"Isabelle," Keilani said once, breathless after a run, "what will you do when we are strong?"
"Travel," I answered. "We will go where the world is rougher. We will test ourselves."
"Will you ever teach me to fly?" she asked, eyes huge.
I laughed. "Flying takes more than skill. It takes a place to claim. One day."
The luck that had stranded me in a child's body touched us again in the form of a rumor: two people of great practice had fought in the mountains to the south. Fire and water, people said. A scene that made men drop their spoons and watch the sky with mouths open.
"Do you think they are legends?" Keilani asked as we ate by a fire.
"It's chance," I said. "Legends are just that until someone proves them real."
We tracked the rumor like hounds. The forest was dense and brave. We moved quietly. I taught Keilani to listen to the world and to how the world gave away secrets in small sounds.
When we found them, they were not what I expected. They were not immortal lights above earth but two people whose discipline had carved out strange edges in the air. A woman moved like a wind that smelled of lilies. A man moved like a river. Their fight sent shockwaves through clumps of grass three yards away. They did not even notice us hiding behind a stone until the battle slowed and the woman looked right at where we hid.
She smiled with eyes that had seen a mountain die.
"You are not from here," she said when the fight ended.
"No," I said, careful. "We are travelers."
She stepped down, dust in her hair like a crown. "I am Kimiko Watts of Cloud-Song Sect. I try not to recruit. I found talent among men whose bellies are full and spirits willing to burn. You—they both—you and the one behind you—there is a strength in your bones."
Keilani made a small sound that could have been a laugh.
"May I ask?" Kimiko said. "Do either of you bind yourself to anyone? Do you have debts?"
I guessed she meant ceremony; she meant status. I had had masters before who asked the same questions with sharper eyes.
"No," I said. "We owe only our lives."
Kimiko looked at Keilani. "I can take you. The Cloud-Song Sect will teach you to hold power with discipline and to control the terrible parts."
She looked then at me like one who sees a coin with too many edges.
"You," Kimiko said slowly, "you have something else. A rare pattern. Come with me. I will offer you training."
Keilani flinched. She clasped my sleeve, fingers cold.
"If you go, will you take me?" she asked.
I looked at my pupil. When you teach someone, you row them to shore and then sometimes follow them to new seas. I could not break her small grip.
"I will not abandon you," I said.
Kimiko frowned as if I had bargained with fire, but then she nodded. "Very well. Neither will I take her by name. She may stay under your care until I measure what she can become."
That was the first public promise that set our path: to join a sect and take what power it would give, but to keep Keilani with me as an apprentice.
Cloud-Song Sect was not like the small houses I had known. It was a mountain of stone and terraces that smelled of incense and boiling herbs. Monks in grey marched like a river.
"Outsiders," the gatekeeper warned when we landed, "you will sweep floors and carry water for a while. Do not think rank chooses you."
Kimiko smiled. "Let them start at the beginning. If they climb, their climb will be theirs."
We bowed. We became the new students who scrubbed dishes and carried wood. I did not mind the work. It grounded me more than any fit of training had done when I was alone. Keilani made friends laughing at a broom.
"You're different than the others," a priest said once as we sat cross-legged and practiced breath. "The way you take in lessons... unusual."
"Different in what way?" I asked.
"They say you could be a blade, or a key," he said with a strange grin. "A key opens doors some are too small to see."
The day came that taught me why he had called me key. A complaint arrived to the sect from Yunyang: a gang that had grown bold in the town had been pressuring girls and snatching what they wanted. The town sent a petition. People wanted justice and an answer.
Kimiko turned to me. "You once drove those men off in the forest," she said quietly, like someone dividing a rock. "Now we will do something different. We will make them answer in public."
I felt a memory of that first fight light in my chest. It had been a useful strike, but now we could use power. Keilani squeezed my hand.
"How will we do this?" Keilani asked.
"Tell me everything you remember," Kimiko said.
I gave the details I had: the leader's face, his swagger, the way he said pleasure like a cocked knife. She listened, eyes steady as a blade.
Then she smiled a thin thing.
"We will show the town what cruelty costs."
We set a day. I walked with Kimiko to the city where the gang's leader—Gordon Cervantes—held himself as if he had carved claim over a street. He wore fine cloth and it suited him like a mask. When we arranged for a public market square meeting, the leader laughed out loud at the idea of an old woman and two children confronting him.
"Who are you to me?" Gordon asked in the market, the sun making his coins in his pockets dazzle.
"People," Kimiko said simply. "We are the people who will not be afraid anymore."
I had never been good at speeches. I preferred making the world obey by action. But Kimiko had plans; she had read and found the quiet places where shame hurt more than steel.
"This man," she said, and the market quieted. "Is accused of taking advantage of young women in this town. He denies it. We shall see."
Gordon rolled his shoulders and demanded laughter. "There are no proofs."
Kimiko raised a pale hand. "Proof always answers in the small and the large."
From the crowd, came murmurs—old women, shopkeepers who had been wary, young men who had been hurt. From my pocket I had the one thing that made cruelty plausible: a small scrap of fabric, a boot print that matched Gordon's horse, and the words of the men he had used to conceal truth.
"These belong to the houses you threatened," I said. "And these are the merchants who saw you, men who will speak."
Kimiko had arranged others to stand forward—women whose cheeks had been burned with shame, men who had been given coin to silence themselves. The leader's smug face drained color as tales assembled like a storm.
"No!" he shouted. "You lie! I did—"
"You used us like cattle." A woman advanced. She had looked like a scrap all her life. Now she was steady. "You took what you wanted with promises like coins."
"That's nonsense," Gordon barked, then his voice faltered. "I never—"
He turned to his men for support, but the men were silent. Someone in the back muttered, "We're not boys to be bought."
The crowd's anger was a wind. Kimiko spoke calmly.
"Gordon Cervantes, you will answer for what you have done. You will do it in public, and you will show true remorse."
"Remorse?" he barked, and the self-sure grin peeled. "I won't—"
A voice cut through. "If you refuse," Kimiko said, "then the true ledger of the town will be written for you. The market will know."
Gordon's voice broke to a whisper. I watched his face in that moment—the slow fall from swagger to fear. He tried again to laugh. The shopkeepers were not laughing with him now. Children pointing. Old men shaking heads. Women turned their backs to him. A merchant pulled down a small jar from a stall and put it on Gordon's chest like a coin of accusation.
"You're finished," a man said. He had the bearing of a smith. "You thought the family would not weigh in. They will weigh in."
Gordon's eyes darted. "This is slander!" he cried. "Slander!"
Women began to shout the names of the secret places he had used. He tried to deny, and his denials formed thin sails blown out. He jerked back, then forward, voice breaking, then coming out small and croaked.
"Please," he said once, then louder, then like a man falling, "Please! I didn't—no, I didn't—"
"No," said Kimiko quietly. "You knew."
Then the crowd acted like one thinking thing. They pulled him to the center. His men looked at their master and did not move. They saw the market and every eye. Someone took a long inked scroll from Kimiko's hand—documents of sale and bribe that she had compiled hours before, names pressed, witnesses sworn. The stallkeepers began to list what they had lost, and the numbers rolled like thunder.
Gordon's face went from red to the grey of cold iron. "You can't—this is my life! I have family—"
"Your family will not claim you," said an old woman. "You gave them nothing but shame."
Then he moved through the five stages I had only seen once before: first triumph, then confusion, then denial, then collapse, then desperate begging.
"I didn't do it," he said, voice thin as paper. "I swear on my life, I swear to the gods."
A thousand voices answered like waves. "No, we saw. We remember."
He fell to his knees in the dust. For a time, silence fell like a lid. The market's breath held.
"Please," he begged. Tears slicked his face. "Please, forgive me. I will give you coin, I will give anything—"
Coins were meaningless now. They fell from his hands onto the dust, and people stamped them into the ground with their boots. Spitting on his coins, a mother took her child's hand and lifted a bone-white finger at him.
"No," she said. "Make them see. Make them stop."
The crowd did not strike him. They had no need. Shame did the work faster and cleaner. Shopkeepers began to take down their signs. Young men called out the names of places he had used as traps. The words unstitched him. He scrambled like an insect, his suit wrinkling, his pride shaved away.
At length, they hauled him upright and bound him with rope. They led him to the prefect's office, but not before everyone in the market had stepped forward and spat at him, pointed, laughed, and took down his name. Children cried at his face. Women wrapped the ropes like talismans. He begged. His voice lost direction.
When the rope tightened, I felt the moment like a belt around a luckless thing. The man who had preyed on others—who had thought himself untouchable—was humiliated and led away under the weight of his own choices.
It lasted more than an hour in public. The cries, the pointing, the old woman who had kept a ledger of her own loss were all there. He had changed before our eyes: pride to smallness, denial to pleading. The whole market had watched, leaning against stalls, children peeking, mothers whispering for their daughters not to go near the man who had thought the world their possession.
When the prefect finally took him, his voice had shifted. "Please," he said—a sound like someone asking the rain to stop.
The scene passed like a person stepping off a stage into cold air. People returned to their business, but the story remained. For days they spoke of the way the strong had been brought low. For weeks, mothers watched the streets with new caution. For a year, the name Gordon Cervantes carried with it the weight of a man who had fallen in public.
Afterward, after the crowd had gone, Kimiko turned to me and said simply, "Justice is sometimes the careful assembling of truth and a town brave enough to say it."
Keilani, who had watched with wide eyes, said, "That hurt him."
"Good," I said.
But this kind of public correction is a lesson. Power without mercy can become cruelty. Mercy without truth is emptiness. I had felt both. I chose a path that taught by consequence.
We left Yunyang with a new lean toward the road. Keilani and I rose early and trained, our days packed with the useless and the necessary. Kimiko taught me to read the lines of someone's breath. She taught me how politics could become a weapon. She taught our hearts to be tempered.
Years blurred like stones under a river. Keilani became a walking storm with a laugh like glass. I grew a steadiness that was less brittle than it had once been. We hunted, we fought, we opened doors and took what the world gave us in hard coin. I told Keilani stories at night of the life I had had: the ring, the space, the books. She listened with a hunger.
"You said you had a ring," she said one night as rain patted on the roof. "Can you show me the space?"
I took her hand and walked into the room that no one else could see. "It is our secret," I said, and smiled.
A year later, Cloud-Song had given me a small rank and a title that carried more duty than glory. It was not the end. It was a door.
We traveled together after that. We took maps and learned the names of kingdoms: Dry-Ascend, East-Thunder, Fire-Song. We argued about where to go next. We argued about people and the strangeness of the world. We learned the hard truth: in a life like ours, attachments cut deeper than steel.
"One day," Keilani said as we walked along a ridge and watched snow tear like silk off the peaks, "you will be older and slower."
"No," I said. "I will be bolder. I'm not finished yet."
Keilani laughed and shouldered her satchel. "Then I'll be the old one, and you'll be the daredevil."
"I will always surprise you," I said. Her grin was the answer I wanted.
We kept training. We kept saving people. We kept getting better. We fell into fights that splashed our names across villages. We took simple things like pride in our small triumphs and the larger ones that walked the world.
If there is one thing I learned, it is this: a second life is not a mercy by itself. It is raw chance. You either burn with it or you let it go cold. I chose to burn.
And if any man ever thinks he can own light, I will stand in a market and make him kneel until the whole town looks. That is justice. That is sharp and clean. That is the life we carved from the stone of two small lives.
The End
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