Rebirth12 min read
I Woke Up Twice: The Moon, the Sword, and a Thousand-Year Debt
ButterPicks16 views
I woke up choking on a dream and a century of ash.
"You're trembling," said the dark room, which was really just a memory in my lungs. "Breathe, Ines."
"No," I said. "Not that name."
I sat up so fast the room swam. For a long, dizzy second, I thought the hundred years were real, every bruise and fevered memory. Then the candle on my small table steadied, and the silence around me took on the shape of a life I had not yet lived.
"Who is at the gate?" someone outside called.
I wiped my face with a sleeve and walked to the door. My voice was thin. "Who is it?"
"It's Luca," said the voice. "Luca Suzuki."
I almost laughed at the sound. In the dream, his palm had been the pivot that cast me into long darkness. Seeing his face at my threshold now made my stomach curl.
"What do you want?" I asked, closing the door a hand's breadth.
"I came to say something straight," Luca said. "Are you hurt? Are you safe?"
"Is that a question?" I snapped and tried to slam the door. He caught it with a soft, unfamiliar pressure.
"Wait," he said. "Please. Let me—"
"Get out," I said. "What do you want?"
"You can tell me," Luca said. "Has anyone hurt you? I—"
"Don't. Don't make me repeat yourself," I said. My throat narrowed with a hatred that tasted like iron. "Why are you here?"
His voice chilled into a stillness. "I'm here to return what belonged to you. To end what shouldn't be."
"I don't understand."
"I want to break our betrothal."
For a heartbeat everything I had feared and everything I'd dreamed of slammed into my chest.
"Why now?" I asked. "Why would you do that in front of my door?"
"I have reasons," he said. "There is someone I love. I must follow her."
"Then go," I said. I handed him the small token we'd traded as children. "Take it. I accept."
His hand closed around it, slow and confused. He looked at me—really looked—as if seeing a different woman than last time.
"Thank you," I said. "Now leave."
He hesitated, then bowed once and left.
I let the door fall shut. I let the breath that had been held in my chest for a month go out in a long, ragged huff.
"That was the future," I told the dark. "Or a warning."
A tiny tear wet my cheek and left a salt trail on my face. I slid to the chair and pressed my palms to my mouth.
"You're not going to be that woman again," I said to myself. "Not if I can help it."
The day began with a ceremony: my formal declaration. I was the daughter of two elders of the sect, given a place at the front of the hall. People muttered and folded their hands. I heard the whispers: favor, inheritance, advantage. All of it felt like a net.
"Forbes Shaw," the Master said as if the name itself might settle fate. "What do you think of this girl? Her parents died protecting our disciples. Will you accept her?"
Forbes stood, his gaze like winter glass. He had been called a thousand things: empty, severe, unmoved. He looked at me and did not smile.
"Will you be my master?" I asked.
The room went strange and quiet. I bent my head and spoke the words I had practiced till they no longer hurt.
"Forbes Shaw, I, Ines Dalton, ask to be your disciple."
That should have been enough. It wasn't. The Master did not answer. A small black dragon—crazy thing—stared at me from by the altar and then imitated Forbes in a thin voice.
"Permit."
The hall exploded with noise.
"What did you say?" a senior elder barked.
"Forbes!" the Sect Leader said.
Forbes said nothing for a long time. Then he opened his mouth, the same way a storm opens across the sky.
"Fine," he said at last. "Take her."
The silence that followed was a mercy. I had my answer. I had him.
My first week with Forbes was a series of shocks: his indifference that felt like protection, his small, unintelligible gestures—some evenings he'd leave a bowl at my door; once he set a single perfect sword on the table and said, "Name it."
"Name it?" I repeated, because it asked for a thing of heart.
"Yes," he said. "Call it what you will."
"I will call it 'Moonward,'" I said without thinking. "Invite the moon."
He did not smile, but the corner of his mouth softened once, like a hinge oiling.
"Moonward," he repeated. "Very well."
Days became rhythm: run until my legs burned, sword until my muscles protested, eat, sleep, awaken. He taught me to move my center, to find the pivot in a tree branch or a stone. He had a gift for turning brawn into grace. He spent hours correcting postures, but he also sent me down the mountain to fight—first small things, then a wolf, then a bear that could have ended me.
"You'll learn to be useful, or you'll learn to die," he said once, watching me tape my wounds.
I learned both.
"Do you ever laugh?" I asked him in private one night, because the way he looked at the moon made me think of unspoken things.
"Sometimes," he answered. "Not often."
"You will for me," I said. "You promised to protect me."
He touched my hair as if to weigh it, and it was the smallest closeness I'd known.
"Be good," he said. "Don't die."
I broke my first sword on a beast of rash strength. Moonward bent and finally came home ashless but scarred. Forbes swept the pieces into his palm and then because he was human, he punished me by making me train harder. I thanked him anyway, because each grief he gave me was stitched with his eyes.
One afternoon, while buying a handful of small things in the market, I met a man who couldn't help himself.
"Excuse me," he said with the polite arrogance of a shopkeeper. "Are you a disciple of Forbes Shaw?"
I looked at him. He offered a bow. "I am Anadolu," he said—no, that wasn't one of our names. He changed it. He said he was none of mine. He offered me shelter from rain and an herbal map. I kept the map.
"You're not from here?" he said.
"I am just passing," I lied. "I have things to buy."
He offered a red-eyed trinket and smiled in a way that let me see the teeth of the world. I walked away with the trinket and a new awareness: wherever I walked, something watched. Just because I had taken one step away from that dream didn't mean the world had forgotten.
Three days later I found my path tangled with one of the town's small, cold schemes: women were disappearing. The magistrate was polite and useless.
"Who is in charge?" I asked.
"Nobody," he said. "It is a rumor."
"You will send troops?" I asked.
He awkwardly kissed his ring. "We don't want alarm."
"Then who will mourn?" I asked. "Who will light the fires?"
That becomes a task you cannot ignore. So I took the map, I took Forbes' single nod—"Do not make yourself known"—and I went.
"You're going alone?" said a man in the market.
"I can hold my sword," I said. "I am not alone."
I walked the streets at night like someone wearing a net. A few days in, a red cord of cold traced my wrist like a compass. It led me to a rabbit lantern and a woman who had been smiling like someone who had been paid to keep a face soft in the world.
She moved like she belonged to the shadows. When she passed a certain lamp, her eyes went hollow.
"Who are you?" I whispered.
She answered in a voice that seemed to come from beneath the city. "Ariss," she said—no name I knew. But when she looked at me, she called a certain name that made my heart drop.
"Alley, alley," she said. The voice pressed into me, and I felt cold fingers in my stomach. My body moved for a second as if on someone else's lines.
A young man threw a small alchemist's furnace at the air; the ghost dissolved into a leaf of the long-dead tree. A disciple from another sect stood there, breathing rapidly, clutching something. He introduced himself as Rafael Saleh. He had followed the leaf and had been looking for answers.
"Follow that ghost," Rafael urged. "Don't delay."
We did. We went to a yard with a single well and a weak tree. The tree—long and gnarl and lichen—had but a few leaves. I stepped closer. The leaves smelled like old medicine. The tree had roots that coiled through a corpse. It fed on a man who had once been called a prince and loved a woman with a rabbit lantern named Ariss.
"He waits," Rafael said. "He calls her."
"How did this start?" I asked.
"A thing was stolen, a thing of life," Rafael said. "A jewel. A seed. They called it a living tree. It was made for the wrong hands, and now it feeds on people."
We freed that spirit in a way that did justice to its long, aching patience. Rafael coaxed the pieces with a soft chant; I pulled Moonward and cut the cords that bound the tree's root to the corpse. The leaves gathered in a small jar, and when we combined them, the face of a prince hovered there, a man who had been waiting a thousand years for one who had promised to "come back."
"He waited for a woman named Ariss," Rafael said, and I felt the thousand years in my throat. "She never returned."
We took that soul to the edge of the world and left it in a place that would hold memory without pain. I felt a strange tenderness for people who had been reduced to prayer, to slow waiting. When I returned to Forbes, I found him watching the chess board like a wounded king.
"Well?" he asked.
"We put him to rest," I said. "But the world keeps losing pieces."
He looked at my hands as if to see whether they still trembled. "Good," he said. "You did not die."
That should be the end of one tale. For me it was the start of a thornier road.
When I returned to sect life, whispers followed me like a second shadow. I found myself thrust into matches, into rituals that were meant to temper ego. I fought on an arena stage and beat beasts that laughed at my youth. I won coin and prizes and a single white hairpin of moon-sheen stone; I bought it for Forbes with money I had won and felt a silly pride at my small treasury for his fingers.
"You bought this for me?" Forbes asked when I gave it to him. He wore it once, clumsy and proud.
"Keep it close," I said. "For luck."
He put it into a chest and shut it like a secret.
There were those who hated me for the favor the Master showed me. There was Kanako Carr—delicate as paper but sharp as bone—who had wanted Forbes' attention. There was also Luca, who had broken our betrothal. Kanako smiled and cried in a way that made the hall soft around her, and people mistook tears for truth.
"Forgive me," she said to me under a hundred eyes. "I didn't know. I—"
"You don't need to," I said aloud, louder than I meant. "Your act is understood."
The crowd leaned. Their whispered breaths sharpened into knives for the ones who spun stories against me. Luca stepped forward, wounded and resolute, and lifted Kanako into the center as if she were still a fragile vase he must protect.
"Stop," Forbes said, not breaking his calm. "Enough."
He pronounced punishments then—measured and public. Kanako would go on a long walk to think and be unseen at the meditation cliff; Luca would be sent to the edge-world to deal with men of conscience.
The crowd cheered, but that did not satisfy something in my chest.
I wanted something clearer. I wanted them to see the past as it had been played with my life.
So I waited.
The harvest ceremony came. The whole sect gathered. Forbes sat at the head like a cold bright helm. The hall smelled of incense and sun-baked rice. I stepped forward with a voice that didn't tremble.
"Everyone," I said. "Listen."
Forbes flicked his eyes, the smallest signal, and I felt his permission like a rope around my heart.
"I knew," I said. "I knew, from the dream, that things would happen. I knew that certain hands would push me down into danger. I will tell the truth now."
The hall held its breath. Kanako's cheeks were wet. Luca's jaw ticked.
"You remember the way I was treated only months ago," I said. "You remember the rumor that made me a villain. You remember the time some of you thought I was weak."
The crowd stirred.
"It was a plan," I said. "Kanako used a lie to make you believe I was cruel. Luca followed because he chose the easy warmth that blurs the line between truth and comfort."
My words struck the hall like winds. People whispered, then louder, as I unfurled the evidence: a small bundle of intercepted letters, a servant's testimony, a hidden recording I had taken when Kanako had practiced her tears near the kitchen two nights earlier.
"These prove collusion," I said.
"Impossible," Kanako cried. "Luca—Lucas—" She used his full name like a plea. "Tell them—"
"I know what you did," Luca said then, and his voice broke. "I followed a voice, and I loved the voice. I was wrong."
"Then say it," I demanded.
"I did," he said. "I ask forgiveness. I beg it."
It wasn't enough. It never was.
"Forbes," I said. "Let them see what it means to betray a life."
Forbes turned his head. He studied Luca as if weighing the man against a stone. Then he unrolled a small blue scroll and spoke the punishment he would deliver.
"Kanako Carr," he said, his voice like steel in winter. "You will be made to atone before all the disciples."
"Atone how?" Kanako whispered.
"You will stand in the courtyard for three days," Forbes said. "You will tell, in the open, the whole plan. For every lie you admitted, you will perform a task given by the elders. Today you shall begin."
"And Luca," he said. "You will stand in the market square and denounce your own action. You will return every token of promise you took from her. You will accept the cane as comfort for the pain you caused. You will say in public: 'I abused trust.'"
They both fell apart at the edges when the hall did not drown them in soft pity. They were strangers to this exile.
The punishment scene that followed was long and precise. I will not hide its length.
The courtyard filled. The air was tight with expectation. Mostly they were curious; some were waiting for spectacle. At first Kanako's lips trembled and her voice broke into small, pretty sounds as she told the story she had rehearsed in private. Then Forbes' elders presented the servant who had witnessed the plot. She told, in blunt sentences, how Kanako had stroked a linen and asked a gullible maid to place a false note where my hand would find it. She told how Kanako had whispered to Luca that the note meant I was "cold and plotting," how she'd painted me as dangerous in the hue of tears.
"Why?" someone asked, cutting into the courtyard's stillness.
"For favor," Kanako said at last. "Because I wanted to be chosen."
The courtyard smelled of paper and dust. Her voice kept breaking like thin ice.
Luca stepped forward, his shoulders hunched. The market's crowd pressed to see. The elders gave him a cane and a small cloth to scrub the dust from his shoes. He had to read the statements that testified to his half-heartedness: his failure to stand by me when I needed him most, the palm turned away that had allowed danger to take me.
"Speak," said an elder.
"I was a coward," Luca whispered. "I was a coward. I loved comfort. I hurt someone who deserved better."
His voice was a stone slipping into water. People did not know what to do with it. A few spat, some murmured. For a creature who had once expected to be prince in easy things, the taste of public shame was new and very hot.
They were stripped of small honors, their names read aloud as echoes: "You will not hold public office. You will perform service to those you wronged. You will be watched."
"No," Kanako sobbed. "Please."
"Do it," Forbes said. "You chose this life when you chose to harm. Take responsibility."
They did. They knelt in the dust and delivered public acceptance. The crowd watched, some complicit, some weary, some delighted. Spectators photographed and whispered. A few children clapped; a few adults turned their faces.
"You look as if you had been carved from ice," Kanako cried to Forbes at the end. "How can you be so cruel?"
"For mercy to be real," Forbes said, "people must see the price."
They left the courtyard in different shapes. Kanako's steps were small. Luca's back was uneven. When they passed the gate, the city spat at them. The one who had hurt me most—the one who had struck me in a nightmare—received the worst fortune: the loss of status that ate at his pride like a slow flame. Kanako's punishment, measured and public, forced her to watch a life that might have been slip away.
The crowd applauded as if it had been a play, and in some ways I felt exactly that: that my revenge had become a lesson. That part of the work was done.
But I was not satisfied with mere scandal, because the world is greedy for pain, and the small punishments would not repair the century I had seen in my first waking.
I wanted a promise. A sort of insurance.
After the courtyard cleared, I walked to the edge of the hall and took out the white hairpin I had bought for Forbes. I knelt with it in my hand and offered it to him.
"Keep this," I said. "Not because you need it, but because I don't want any part of my history to live unreturned."
Forbes accepted it like someone receiving a thing that balanced the scales. "I will guard it," he said. "And you."
That night on the roof, under the moon I had named my sword for, I told him things I had never told anyone: about the dream that had been a prophecy, about a hundred years of suffering, about a demon-lord and a well, about Moonward and the bread I had learned to make for him.
"You will not be taken," he promised, with a weight that set the world in clearer lines. "I do not—" he stopped, then looked at me as if he were making a vow he had promised himself.
"I wasn't asking for promises," I said. "I was asking for the chance to live."
"For that I will carve and hold a shield," he said.
We slept then like two conspirators.
My next months were full. I grew in ways that surprised even me. I learned to ride the edge of fear and keep the moon's reflection in my palm. I fought on market squares and in dim alleys. I saved a girl named Red from a ruinous life in the bazaar. I gave her a sack of stones that would buy her and her mother a warm winter. I learned tenderness in the form of small, steady gifts.
And when a rumor drifted up again—about a creature in Tenfold Mountain, about a sect that caught and detained travelers—I thought of a father in a story telling of justice. I prepared. Forbes said nothing, and that quiet was a hand on my shoulder I had to respect.
The road to Tenfold Mountain is a harsh thing, but I am made of stubbornness and iron. I walked it because someone had to. I walked it because for once I wanted endings, not a loop of dreams and dread.
When I reached the gates of Tenfold, the banners of the guarding sect fluttered like teeth.
"Who goes?" a watchman called.
"My name is Ines Dalton," I said. "I come for a test, for the wrongs done, and for the truth of one man's life."
They laughed and tried to bar me. I used the sword that Forbes forged with me in name and in hand. I used my voice to break the silence that hides many wrongs. I moved like a woman who had been promised a second life—and I would not squander it.
By the time the sun dropped, the mountain had been cleared of an injustice, some prisoners freed, and I had another list of debts: small things to those I had found, the promise to Red, the name of my sword on my hip.
Forbes later said the tale was artfully balanced: equal parts work and mercy. He said it with his mouth closed enough to be trusted.
"Are you still afraid?" he asked one night.
"Always," I said. "But less."
He nodded. "Good."
I sleep now, sometimes with the echo of the first dream sitting at the foot of my bed like a guest who won't leave. But when I wake, I remind myself: I survived once by being clever and stubborn. I will survive again.
And when I pass the white hairpin, now worn at the throat of my sword, I laugh quietly. The dream remains a skeleton in a closet; the life I have is warm. If things must be paid back, they will be paid. I will be the one to pay them.
The End
— Thank you for reading —