Revenge17 min read
My Heart, My Eyes, My Lotus
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I woke to cold stone under my cheek and the taste of blood gone sour in my mouth. The world pressed against my ribs where a hole lived now. I knew the sound of steel; I knew the weight of betrayal. I knew, too late, who had put the blade there.
"Longxian,"—I don't use that name now—"your heart can be for Beatrice. Consider it your blessing." The voice was dry, kind on paper. It belonged to Penn Bartlett.
I watched a man in red stand over me. He was almost pretty: red like a sunset, eyes like chips of coal. His name was Cade Allen. His fingers were stained with my blood.
"You won't die," Cade said coldly. "You will live without the heart, and she will wake with what you gave."
I tried to lift a hand. The blade shifted deeper. Someone laughed, light and cruel: Benedict Garza. Another voice—calm, measured—gave instructions, and Phoenix Girard heard them all and nodded like a judge signing a verdict.
They called me lucky. "Your heart for Beatrice—what a perfect match," Penn said. They pronounced me a sacrifice, an offering, a convenience. They believed I would be grateful.
"You are a good sister," Cade murmured, and the word arrived like a final thing.
I am not kind by nature. I had lived in the deep swamps where things with teeth taught me to scrape a living out of mud and despair. I had learned my power with claw and hunger. But I was also capable of tenderness. I had once taken in a small abandoned thing, furred and breathing—he named himself long after. I named him for life: he was Longsheng then; he called me "sister". He grew into a god in two hundred years. He grew into Cade Allen.
I raised him with blunt hands. I taught him how to stabilize a fevered breath. I taught him how to hide grief under a joke. I taught him the shape of a lullaby. He slept sometimes with his head on my knee and called me "sister." He never lied about being warm.
He lied about everything else.
When the blade pushed to my sternum and the world blurred at the edges, I watched those faces I trusted. Phoenix Girard placed his hands as if in blessing. Penn Bartlett took my heart. Benedict Garza pretended to be sorry. Cade Allen drove the knife.
"Your sacrifice is noble," Phoenix said. "You will still live with no feelings. It is mercy."
Their mercy ripped my life into numbers: what they called soul they called a commodity. They believed a lotus could be made whole by trading parts.
When my chest was empty and the cold set in, Cade bent close. He touched my eyelid. His hand was cool as river stone.
"Sister," he said, "you must not look at me."
He took my sight, too.
I tasted darkness. I tasted rage like metal.
Later, someone told me I had been spared. "She is without heart," Penn huffed. "She will have no dangerous attachments. Longsheng's path will be smoother." They laughed as they walked away carrying what they wanted.
A small voice fumbled at my knee.
"Sister," it said. Longsheng called me "sister" and struggled with the weight of what he had done.
I swallowed one broken laugh of my own. I was still alive, because they decided I would be. But life is not breath alone. Life when you are used is a slow, thick thing.
"Longxian," Phoenix said to Penn as they left, "you did well. For Beatrice. She will be perfect."
"She will be perfect," Penn repeated. Benedict smiled like a man who had put a bet on the right horse.
They left me to darkness and to a boy-made-of-their-choices who would call me "sister" and then fold his face away when needed. I heard his steps fade, and the sound of the red robe blending into the wind.
I bled until the moon set.
Weeks passed. I might have crawled toward revenge then—
But they had plans for me besides death.
Cade came back every few hours. He stood at my chains—a soft iron that devoured any panic I tried—and he sang into the dark. He cleaned my hair without permission. He wiped the blood from my mouth in a way that was both tender and possessive.
"Will you stay?" he'd ask, and when I didn't answer outright, he would say, "Sister, if only you would remember me."
Once, he put a small clay bead to my lips, silent and sure. "It will help you forget, sister," they told me—about the pill that takes names away. "It will unfasten pain."
It was not their mercy, either. It was medicine that carried a blade. He crushed forgetting into me. He forced down a potion called the Mèngpó draught and the swamp flower's hush. The world folded soft and clean. The memories that burned their way back into me, later, came like embers reigniting in a rainstorm: bright and painful.
In the hours when my mind still spooled, Cade—the long boy I had raised—leaned close. He would whisper, "I will take care of you."
I believed him because it was easier, because the quiet swallowed the pain, and because his hand fit mine. When the potion loosened its grip later, I tasted the lie like rust.
When I awoke properly—eyes empty, chest hollow—and when the silence of the chains filled with other people's voices, I saw that my world had been rearranged. They had given me a life without pain, but also a life without truth.
Cade was not just my child. He was the East Lord, the god of spring and flame, dressed sometimes in red when duty called. They honored him. They bowed to him. I had birthed a god and taught him to smile.
I also had a name that fit me: Ava Keller. I would keep it.
"Longsheng," I told him, once I could speak in the dark. "Who gave you the right to do this?"
He pressed his forehead to my hand. "Sister, you fainted. You were taken. I did this to keep you safe."
He said things like that until the drug took it from him.
Years later, old hurt becomes a hard stone to carry. It suits you like armor.
The first pieces of memory returned slowly—snatches of a white robe, a petal falling in a forbidden pool, the feel of a blade's weight and then the hot, fast yawp of betrayal. The second return came like a storm. One night I heard the echo of a laugh in Penn Bartlett's voice and the reflection struck something awake. I remembered the forbidden pond, the moon-white lotus that looked like me, and the one who would wake—Beatrice Byrd.
I remembered Phoenix Girard teaching me to steady my breath, how, once, my hand shook and he put the soft of his palm to my brow and said, "Call me teacher." I loved him. You do not choose the first warm hand that pulls you from a hole. The hand that pulls you out becomes part of you.
But the world took a different path. He had other duties. He had other names to protect.
When the memory unrolled, hate was only a pale skin; the deeper current was a slow, precise demand. I had been a body farmed for parts. There was a price I had not agreed to, and that price had been paid with my flesh.
"At least you are alive," I said, once, to the ceiling. "At least they left me alive. I am grateful for that, aren't I?"
No. I was not. Gratitude was for the small and ordinary. When you have been sculpted as an answer to someone else's need, gratitude is a lie you cannot keep.
Cade—East Lord—was not merely cruel. He thought himself kind. His cruelty looked like devotion. He thought of me as a thing to be guarded. He thought removing my eyes and my heart was mercy because it would make me less dangerous. He expected me to be powdered into dust and kept like a relic.
"Will you go with me?" Cade asked, one night, voice trembling as someone who feared being alone, who feared he had not done enough.
I had no sight then, but I saw the way his lips quivered, the false earnestness in his grip. I let him have a moment. Then I made a plan.
In the deep of the swamp where I grew, there are gifts no one remembers. There are roots and the bones of old magics that bargain for hunger. I spent months drawing strength from the places they thought weak. I wove my own black lotus from memory: the part of me that had been passed, hidden in the empty place of my chest. That lotus calmed pain and drank power and taught me to see without eyes.
It took time. It was a slow and careful undoing. I relearned how to feel. I set the small things aside—sleep, food, time—and fed instead on the small currents that ran under riverbeds and on whispered pacts.
When I finally moved of my own will, it was not as the blind creature they assumed me to be. I moved like a thing newly equipped.
Cade did not see it coming. He had been raised to command, to stride and to be obeyed. He had not been taught to expect that I kept any of my old plans.
We went back to the place they had left me. They had become careless. Power makes men careless.
"I thought you liked being quiet," he said, when I wrapped my fingers around his own—no chains now, only the illusion of affection he always craved.
"You took my name and my sight," I said. "I will take what's right."
He smiled as if already forgiven.
In the ice-deep pool of the Deep Marsh, I freed a thing I had bound there long ago: my old instrument, a black whip-scarred by the deaths it knew. It answers to me, and when I called it, the dragon-silk lashes rose like a thing that had been asleep. I had taught it to cut not only flesh but will. I had stored it for a day I would need a language they could not ignore.
"Cade," I said softly. "Call yourself Longsheng when you kneel."
He did not understand words then like he did orders.
The whip fell three times across his shoulders. Each strike was not merely pain; it was a trial. With each slap, I claimed one piece of what they had stolen.
"This first lash," I said as Benedict and Penn watched from the high steps, "is for being ungrateful to your origins."
"Longsheng," he coughed, blood at his lips, "I—"
"You were my child," I said. "You were given bread and warmth. You learned my lullabies. You learned my hands. And you returned the favor by becoming a knife. You are punished for that."
I learned to speak and the world listened. The gods had a soft point for spectacle, and I intended the show to be searing.
I called them before the Throne of Clouds. I called Phoenix Girard; I called Penn and Benedict; I called every small god and maid who liked to say they loved order. They came because they had interests to watch—because spectacle is always safe.
When I stood before them, I was healed enough to stand but hollow in places that made me calm. My voice was the only thing I trusted. I spoke like the pulse of stones.
"Beatrice will wake," I said. "She will have what you put in her. She will also remember who sowed the seed for your kindness. And I—" I turned to Phoenix first, because he was the highest, the quietest. "I will take back what is mine."
A murmur climbed the crowd like smoke. Many had suspected. More had protected their faces as if air could hide the truth.
"Longxian," Phoenix said, hands folded, the polite blade he used on people he liked. "You speak of things you don't understand."
"I understand better than you, Phoenix."
"You are gullible. You believe the world is fair."
"I believe it gives me what I take back."
Senior gods hardly expected to be addressed like that. But when the sword of spectacle pierces, gods put up their hands like children. I had built a small stage in the vastness, one where none of them could make the rules. I had the old swamp's magics to keep them honest. None of them could move without my permission. Even Phoenix's breath came measured, because he knew controls had shifted.
"You think to punish us?" Penn barked. "You are blind. You are heartless. You are monstrous."
"Heartless?" I laughed softly. "Yes. I was made heartless for a moment. I was carved. But the heart that beats in Beatrice is my own blood and will now be a witness."
I raised my hand. A light like a curtain drew back. There in the crowd, bright and stunned, was Beatrice Byrd—her hair fell like moon water, eyes like clear glass. She had awaken. She had been given what I had been forced to give. She stood as they made her—soft, bewildered, perfect to the design.
"Do you see what you did?" I asked the assembly. "You gave Beatrice a heart that carries my life. You gave her my eyes. Is she perfect?" I turned to the woman who wore the new pieces of me. "Beatrice. Do you remember the pond? Do you remember the white petals? Or do you only inherit pain like a dress?"
Beatrice's hand went to her chest. She opened her mouth; then she closed it, as if thinking whether she could betray the kindness she had been handed.
"It's not her fault," Phoenix murmured, but his voice thinned. A dozen servants rustled their skirts.
"It is her fault to be beautiful now," Penn said. "It is convenient."
"Convenient," Benedict echoed.
The crowd was suddenly a chorus of small noises. The gods had come to gawk, not to judge. They were glad to gossip later about who had done wrong.
"I will show you the wrong," I said. "First, Penn Bartlett."
I made Penn the example. He was loud in his small fights and cruel in the corners. He had called this exchange a blessing. He would be punished publicly—not because I wanted to kill him but because humiliation is a slow-acting toxin.
I made the sky part. Storms rolled. A hundred small gods watched to see a deity humiliated. I made illusion take Penn's words and mirror them back: every "blessing" he had said now echoed on the air for all to hear, louder and more obscene than his lips had ever dared. He turned red and then white. He tried to hiss some excuse, then to throw himself at my mercy. The assembled gods took their offerings of gossip out and fanned themselves, drinking in the spectacle.
"Stop!" he begged. "I—"
"No," I said. "You are the one who chose to take someone else's life for an idea. You will now have your reputation burned."
Angels—small winged creatures who lived on applaud—flew higher and dropped petals of shame that could not be washed off. The petals fused into a garland and the garland went about Penn's neck like a crown of stones. Wherever he walked thereafter for an age, people would know what he had done, and a god's reputation is the only comfort for their insecurities. He tried to laugh at first, and then tears set his face in a way even gods do not practice.
The crowd watched and chewed.
Then Benedict Garza had his turn. He was the one with the easy pity voice. I made him face to face a retelling of all the small cruelties he'd smiled through: the quiet little betrayals of lovers he had encouraged, the false comforts he had given as he led people to the trap. He was an actor forced to watch the play of his life in full, without his director. He tried to deny, but a thousand tiny mirrors showed what he had done. People clucked. Old maids took their fans out and spoke loudly about loyalty and honor. Benedict collapsed as if wax.
"Is this not public enough?" I asked. "Then watch Phoenix Girard."
Phoenix's punishment had to be the worst. He had been the kind one, the teacher, the man whose hands had once comforted me. He deserved something finer than ridicule. He deserved to lose the way he had looked at the world and find himself unmoored.
"Phoenix," I said when the hush grew heavy enough, "you taught me to call you master. You used a father's language to ask me for a daughter's heart. You wrote your logic on my skin."
He tried to speak. He could not find the words. I made the sky reflect his memory backs: every time he had touched me with "care", the memory unrolled and displayed not warmth but a ledger. I let the crowd see the ledger's line items: "lesson—remove sister's fear; item—her heart's removal; method—give to Beatrice." He could not move. He had no excuse. He had the face of a man confronted by the mosaic of his own shame.
The gods did not kill him. They could not. But I would punish him in a way he would remember—one that was worthy of his name but stripped of his comforts. In front of everyone, I took from him not his life but the most human thing he clung to: the right to be thought gentle. I took his patience, his soft judgments. I turned his gentle voice into a small, pained whisper. He would stand in every council and be heard as a man who knew how to soothe but who had chosen calculation. His time as a moral anchor was done.
"And Cade Allen," I said last, because he was the one people came to see. He had once been a boy who called me sister. Now he was a god of flame who had thought his crime forgivable.
When they built the dais for public trials, they named it for the stars. I stood at the center and lifted my hand. The crowd leaned in.
"You killed with a smile," I said to him. "You thought your cruelty would be sanctified as protection. You thought I would be honored to be your trophy. From the start you wanted me to be small, quiet, grateful."
He flinched like a child at a tree strap. The sky turned a color he had never faced: a cold, bridal fog. I let his voice be heard at last. I had one last mercy for him: to be seen.
"Why?" I asked simply. "Why did you do it?"
He could not answer with all his titles in his throat. The guilt had made him clumsy. He had never learned how to be guilty in public.
"You told me you'd be mine," he said then. It came out as a plea and as a confession and nothing great.
"You told yourself," I said. "And you believed the story so well you believed you deserved forgiveness."
The crowd wanted blood. They wanted to rally and call him out. But I wanted something cleaner. I wanted to show how broken his wanting had made everyone. I wanted him to feel, publicly, what I had felt quietly.
So I removed his sight in front of them all. I took from him what he had stolen from me.
When the light went from his eyes, you could hear the world hold its breath. Cade trembled. He fell to his knees. He called my name, flung himself at my feet. "Sister," he said, the word hollow and small. "I am sorry."
There were two hundred voices, and each one spoke. The onlookers did not clap. They recorded. They told their friends. They marked the moment because gods are also collectors of stories.
Penn's humiliation lasted a season. Benedict's undoing lasted longer. Phoenix's loss would be a constant ache in counsel. Cade would be sightless and remember every face he could not see, and that would be his punishment.
"It is not enough," he whispered once in the dark before I took his eyes, and I closed my palm over his face and felt how fragile gods are when you deny them their comforts.
They called it justice. Some called it vengeance. I called it completion.
---
After that public performance the land smelled different. People who had thought themselves safe were not. Small gods who had once traded favors shied away. The stories that came after said I took heart and gave it life again. They said Beatrice was waking because I had stolen what was mine and made sure she could hold it.
Beatrice came to me with tears and a softness I had taught her from memory. "Sister," she said. "I remember bits. I remember the pond."
"Do you know who took your sleep?" I asked.
She nodded and sobbed, like one who had been given a book and found the missing pages.
"It was for me?" she asked, voice small.
"For part of you," I answered. "For what you were made to be."
She pressed to my shoulder and said, "I will not hurt you."
I held her like a woman who had been given back what she had lost, and then I let go.
There were more acts. There were acts a public show could not hold.
Penn's friends left him. His house emptied. Penn was forced to sit under a public bower and listen while his enemies read aloud his past three hundred small betrayals. The crowd made it theatrical; someone recorded it and sent the words to places even gods feared to tread. His downfall was not violent but complete: no offerings, no invitations, no children were placed near him. For them, for it was worse than death.
Benedict went to the tavern and found no one waiting for his stories. People who remembered his pity began to call him "the man who smiled at others' death." He tried to argue the point, begged for friends, and the more he squawked the more the world produced accounts of his past jokes that had sent lovers into ruin.
Phoenix's punishment was subtle. He was asked to mediate no longer. Councils that once looked to his speech now avoided it as if a razor hid below his tongue. He was alive, but he had lost the one currency he used to buy regard: the belief in his gentleness.
Cade's punishment worked slower. Without sight his world narrowed to sound and a memory of my hands. My prick of showing mercy was the last sting: I made him keep the title he wanted. He could still speak and command. He could still ride in his dragon carriage. But every command cost him a small scream in the dark. Every time he raised a hand to take another life, that scream came back.
He was not murdered. I had not wanted to be a murderer. I wanted his choices to be visible to everyone and for them to mutter about him behind his back as he had done to me.
Public flaying is for beasts. The human mind responds to humiliation. So I used it.
After the public scene, the gods had to rearrange themselves. The councils shared a muttered vow: never again should a goddess be allowed to grow too dangerous. They made new rules. They called me dangerous. They called me mad. They hoped to make me smaller by naming me monstrous.
Beatrice and I left the councils. We returned to the swamp where my roots were older and where no light would judge us for being white or dark. People whispered fulsome things and cruel things. I burned the worst of them with stories.
"Did you not feel guilt?" Beatrice asked one night when we sat by fire and drank something warmed. "When he—when Cade took your eyes, did you—"
"I felt," I said. "I felt. But I also felt hunger to be whole again. There are things we need to mend for ourselves, and the gods assumed we would be grateful for the pieces they gave. Gratitude is a chain. I prefer my own scars."
She put her head on my shoulder. "Sister, will you stay?"
"I will go where I want," I answered. "Not where I am led."
But the world changes when a god cuts loose. It makes enemies.
Penn's humiliation made him bitter. Benedict's loneliness made him crueler. Phoenix's loss made him quiet and dangerous in a new way. Cade's sightlessness made him more daring because he could no longer be watched and shamed in the same way. The gods are people who learn desperately to hide their shame, and shame is a seed of destruction.
I let them be. I had my own tasks. There were things left uncollected: the old prophecies; the strange whisper of a fate that had set my life as a counterbalance; the idea that someone somewhere had decided my path years ago.
Listen: you cannot unmake the bone inside someone's mouth. You can only break what they have left and let them rebuild. When I walked later to the places where the light was thin, I found small creatures, small people who had been made into odd bargains. I taught them how to breathe without pleading.
"You are cruel," Beatrice said once, when we watched a god with his head bowed and heard him beg forgiveness in private.
"I am fair," I said. "That is worse."
The years moved. The stories that followed painted me sometimes as monster, sometimes as savior. I stopped caring. I kept my hands clean of gold. I kept my hands full of tasks.
At the end of those long years, when the marsh had a new kind of quiet, a small noise rose like a breathing crack in the world. A god—old and kindly Grady Correia—arrived from places no one expected. He said things like "balance" and "for the good of the many." He came too late.
I held his wrist and did what I had to. Some deaths are private. He had been cruel in a way that worked like a mold. He had decided that my living was a threat to his idea of peace. He had the arrogance of someone with a theory.
He tried to bargain. He spit phrases about "masses saved". He offered the one-liners of men who have tried to excuse their crimes with the idea of "greater good."
"You think killing me will save them?" I asked, as my long whip came down.
He could not answer. His breath left.
There was one tiny godling left, a greenish baby formed from his care. I spared it and took what it could bear: a shard of promise carried in a small shell. It became a seed. The world will always have seed when something dies.
There is a cruelty in reprisal, but also a truth. I do not pretend my hands did not hurt. They did. But I had been hollowed and sewn into someone else's design for too long.
There are new mornings now. Beatrice walks by my side. Cade wanders sightless among the clans, and sometimes he kneels by a child who has hurt and stumbles, and I hear him whisper the lullaby I taught him. Perhaps that is mercy.
We are far from the halls of Phoenix Girard. We are farther still from the stone dais where gods watch other gods. But the sky remembers. The sky will not forget.
When I close my eyes now—when I sleep without the old blackness—I see two things: the pond where two lotuses once lay, white and black, and a red thread between fingers that my teacher once gave to Beatrice and I. It is a thin thing. Phoenix once called this "the tie of intent." I now know it was something else: a taut red string, binding choices to consequence.
"Do you regret it?" Beatrice asked me once, under the marsh stars.
"I was given nothing to regret," I answered. "They gave me possibility and took it back. I reclaimed it. I do not regret taking back my own life. Only that it took me so long."
She smiled and placed a hand in mine. It was warm, not the kind of warmth forged from favors, but a plain, human warmth.
Our last night by the ice pool, I handed Beatrice a small stone. It was the piece of heart I let her keep, a chunk hardened into something like a trinket.
"Keep it," I said. "It is yours now. I will keep the rest."
She looked at me as if she might cry. "Sister," she said, clinging to the old name.
"I will always keep my name," I said. "Ava Keller. Longxian was what I used to be. Names are soft. They do not hold your bones."
She laughed, and the sound slipped like light over the water.
"You were always better at breaking what bound you," she said.
"I am not done yet," I answered.
We walked away together. The swamp behind us carried ghosts like wind. The gods would not stop telling their stories. They would call me monster and poet in the same breath. They would pretend they had never taken pieces of me because the truth is too ugly to wear.
At the edge of the world, before the sky fully opened, I paused and looked back at the path we had walked. The red string Phoenix had given lay, frayed, at my feet. I bent and picked it up. It fit in my palm like a promise I would not make.
"I keep it," I said aloud to the wind, to Beatrice, and to the memory of those who had been both teacher and thief.
"Keep it," she said. "Keep it, Ava."
I twisted the red thread into a small knot and put it into my pocket. Then I stepped forward into the cold dawn, and for the first time since my heart had been taken, I felt the ragged whole of myself pulse with the slow, stubborn beat of a thing that had chosen its life back.
The End
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