Rebirth16 min read
The Black Lotus and the Long Whip
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The blade felt unreal as it slid between ribs—cold metal and colder intent—and for a second I thought I was watching someone else die.
"Lea," Alexander said, his voice as flat as the red robe he wore. "This is for her."
I tried to laugh. "For who? Gabriella?"
He didn't answer. He only lifted the dagger as if polishing it with my blood, and the smell of iron mixed with the perfume of the pond lotus that had led me into this room a hundred lives ago.
Around me, Colby stood white-faced, hands trembling. Grayson looked away, the kind of look that pretends to be pain but is really calculation. Baltasar watched like a judge reading a verdict he'd already written. They were all beautiful, all terrible.
"You're dying too theatrically," I croaked.
"No," Alexander said, softer this time. "You're an offering. She needs perfection."
"Perfection..." The word scraped like sand. "You call this perfection?"
Alexander's eyes—once the warm eyes of the child I raised—were empty as river stones. "She deserves it," he said.
My chest burned. The knife sank deeper. "You deserve nothing," I managed.
Alexander's hand was steady. "I deserve love," he whispered. "I deserve to be the only one."
The world narrowed to the red spill at my feet and his face over it. I had raised him from a starving ball of a thing, named him when no one else would. He had called me "sister" the first time he learned to stand. He had laughed when I taught him to count stars. He had been my only warmth.
"Alexander," I said, "you were my child once."
He made a small, infuriating smile. "You said I was your child. I am more than that now."
When they turned away with my heart—carefully, with ceremony, like stealing an heirloom—I tasted nothing but cold.
They expected me to die and not remember. They expected my years, my sacrifices, my name and everything that made me me to vanish with one fragrant, ceremonial knife.
They were wrong.
"Lea." Grayson stepped back, voice soft. "Lea, breathe. Please."
I tried. The body burned like a winter pond underfoot. My vision was a film of black. Their faces fragmented. I saw Baltasar, the one who had taught me the slow arts and the quick ones, staring like a priest. I saw Colby looking pleased. I saw Alexander looking victorious.
"Remember," someone said. "We gave her to Gabriella."
I smiled, because even to smile was a small defiance. "You didn't give me anything," I said. "You only took."
They left me where gods go to be buried—a shallow pool of reeds where the moon didn't show. They did not tarry. They had a ritual to complete, a perfection to unveil. Gabriella would be made complete. I would be a hollowed shell whose emotions would be poured into another so she could remember nothing and love nothing but the right face.
I heard them go. The wind took away their laughter. The marsh closed over my body like a lid.
Then the dark came, and something colder still—an absence, a taking of sight. My eyes, which had watched the deep marsh and the people I loved, went dry. Voices blurred. I remembered only the sound of Alexander's breath on my cheek as he knelt.
"Forgive me," he whispered. "Forgive me and forget."
I tasted his name and somehow held on.
*
I woke to chains and to a voice that already loved me too much.
"You're awake," said the boy I had named when he was no more than a scrap. He had my scent on him—salt and smoke—and he still called me "sister." "You're awake. Don't be afraid."
"Who are you calling sister?" I asked, though my throat was thick and my voice small.
"You'll forget." He smiled, and his smile landed on me like a pet. "I took what I must. I had to. For her. For us."
He fed me a bitter thing the first night—a pill that tasted of old river mud and the medicine that makes people forget. "I have to do this," he said. "To keep you safe."
"Safe from what?"
"From them," he said. "From her. From the world."
He was Alexander then—clever, determined in his way—both lover and jailer. He told me his version of the story and wrapped it in a thousand small cares. He washed my hair. He hummed when I shivered. He watched my fingers as if memorizing where they trembled so he could steady them in years to come.
"You're my sister," Alexander said more than once. "You're the one who saved me. You made me."
"You made a monster," I wanted to tell him. I wanted to rip that smile off and find the boy who had eaten seaweed with me, who had coughed and cried against my chest and called me by the name I had chosen for him.
I didn't have the strength. The pill dulled everything the way deep water swallows fire. My memories were like fish escaping a net, little by little.
"Will you stay?" Alexander asked once. "Will you stay with me if I promise to protect you?"
"Yes," I heard myself say.
He kissed my forehead then, and the sound of wings beating at the edges of a cage became the lullaby that made me sleep.
*
They told stories of a goddess named Gabriella who would become whole again, who would walk among the white-robed and the bright-eyed and carry a heart that pulsed with borrowed emotion. "She will be gentle," Colby said once. "She will be grateful. She will thank us."
"Thank us," Baltasar echoed. "For their sake, for the order of things."
They spoke reverently as if the theft of a life were charity. I watched them through the fog of forgetfulness and began to know things again in small, stubborn flashes—Alexander's small hands reaching for my hair, the way Grayson tried to hide what he knew with jokes, the way Colby smiled too wide like a cracked mask.
I remembered one more thing: a black lotus hidden in the marsh where I'd once played. I remembered the taste of its pollen in the night and a promise that had been made to me by someone in white years before.
"Don't go near the lotus," Alexander warned me.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because it's dangerous."
"All the best things are."
He did not answer. He rarely answered me honestly.
But the lotus calls to those who are hollow. It calls with the voice of things lost and things never had. When my memory came back in shards—like knives in water—I went to the place Alexander told me never to touch.
The black lotus unfurled in the midnight pond like a mouth and smelled of thunder. I knelt and put my hand on water that was not water and closed my eyes.
"You're not the only one who remembers," a voice said.
"Who?" I asked.
A shadow rose from the pond. It was not a dark thing—I would remember faces later—but a presence, like the echo of a storm.
"All of us," the voice said. "All the things taken for plans. The things that were used, like tools and seeds. We keep small pieces of those who are stolen."
It gave me a memory—a crack of light of my own life before the stealing, a warmth from a hand that was not Alexander's. I saw Baltasar's hands once, kinder, teaching me to hold a blade like holding breath; I saw a pale pair of eyes that watched me like a patient moon. I remembered being a person long before I became an object for others.
The lotus offered me a choice. "Become dark," it whispered, "and take what is yours back by any means, or forget and stay safe."
I laughed. "And if the world calls me a monster?"
"Monsters win."
I took the lotus's bite like a promise. Pain flooded my body and then left in a river of cold. Memories returned like a tide. I remembered the knife. I remembered the ritual. I remembered the theft of my heart and eyes. I remembered giving that child a name.
I opened my eyes. The chains had fallen. Alexander stood in front of me, pale and terrified.
"You shouldn't have," he breathed.
"Neither should you," I answered.
He reached for me. "Sister," he said. "Lea, don't do this."
"I already have," I told him. I smelled marsh and iron and something else—my new decision like leather. "You and they stole from me. Now I will take."
He laughed, a brittle sound. "You mean you'll take revenge. You'll be like them."
"There's no like," I said. "There's only doing, and you did. Now I will finish."
I pushed him. He fell into the shallow water with a splash like a laugh cut short. He crawled out and looked at me with something like fear.
"I will protect you," he said hoarsely. "I will—"
"Protect me?" I whispered. "You can't even protect what you stole."
His face changed then. There was hatred, and a desperate love that wanted to be an ownership. He came toward me, hands out.
"You will not leave," he said. "No one will take you from me again."
I did not leave. I stepped forward.
"I will take," I said. "I will take everything back."
*
The first punishment was simple and public.
They gathered in the Hall of White Pillars—a place where the sitters were many and the river of perfume ran in troughs along the staging. People had been invited: the priesthood, patrons of the houses, servants who thought they would smile about a god's wedding. They thought they were coming for the unveiling of Gabriella, the heart complete and gifted; they thought they'd witness the mercy of mortals and the benevolence of gods.
"Gabriella will be whole," Colby told them. "She will be grateful."
"She shall bring blessing," Baltasar murmured to the crowd.
I walked into their ceremony with a black whip coiled in my hand and a silence like a tide behind me.
"Who is she?" asked a woman with the voice of a bell. "Where is Gabriella?"
"She will arrive," Colby said, puffing his chest. "In a moment, the perfection..."
I stepped onto their dais.
"Stop her!" someone cried.
Alexander rushed forward, but Grayson and some of the assembled humid-faced priests blocked him. He struggled for a second and then was pressed flat, like a seal.
"Who are you?" Baltasar demanded, his voice the kind that rules courts and harvests.
"Someone you took things from," I answered. "Someone you used as an instrument."
They laughed kindly at first, like the laughter that soothes a small wound. "Longing for drama," Colby said. "She's a mad little thing. Who is she?"
"Lea Berger," I said.
Silence thudded down. The name seemed to crack the columns. A hundred small hands went to the throat as if to choke on breath.
"You died," Baltasar said.
"Not dead," I said. "Hollowed and used. But not dead."
A hush layered on the audience. The priests shifted, the servants looked guilty, the noble folk gaped. Someone in back whispered, "She has their face," and a murmur of recognition passed. This was the sister they had murmured about, the quiet thing who had once been a pupil.
I began to speak plainly, without flourish—because cruelty is a business and needs no dressing.
"Colby Petrov," I said, and felt the black whip in my hand like a tongue. "You told them I was a tool. You told them I was replaceable. You used me for a perfect plan. For three hundred years you wanted the seat the gods would grant. You schemed while I slept, you plotted while I sheltered the child you all wanted for leverage."
He smiled like a man who expects applause. "What of it?"
"You took nothing but gifts," I answered. "But you'll perform now."
I cracked the whip. It snapped through the pillared air.
"Colby," I said, "for your arrogance, you will lose your name."
I began the public undoing.
Colby's punishment was a stripping of identity. In front of the crowd I spoke of everything he had done, every seed he had planted, every person he had bought with a promise of future rights. I forced his patron to renounce grants. I had the records read aloud—contracts he had forged, letters of ironclad betrayal. Each paper I read cost him a favor; each favor called from the holders removed his land, his tithes, his privileges.
"Is this true?" I asked the patrons standing behind him.
They looked at one another, then at their ledgers, then at my face. One by one they took back their endorsements. They spat. They took torches to the document boxes on his table and burned his seals before the crowd.
"See how the great fall?" someone in the crowd murmured.
Colby went from dignified to bereft in minutes. Men who had been at his table left. Women who had accepted his gifts retreated. A child in the front, who had once been given an emerald charm by Colby, ripped it from his neck and flung it into the hall as if it had become obscene.
He staggered, shocked in a way only those who have never been refused can be. "You can't—" he began, and then his voice was swallowed by the roar of the crowd.
They had expected a spectacle, but this was a slow public disassembly. Colby tried to plead, to charm—old tools. They failed. For the first time he tasted the dissolution of his narrative.
The priests who had been his allies turned. "We cannot hold what is contaminated," one intoned. They took his priestly scarf and burned it. Mores and ceremonies that had buoyed him dissolved like sugar in rain. Colby was dragged by those he had once hired, hands bound, and set on a stage where his titles were read out loud and then burned. People took to photographing his fall—ink and paint were used to caricature him. Children spat. Women who had accepted his favors slapped him. A man who had been his scribe yelled his ledger numbers like curses. The humiliation was public, slow, and inescapable.
Colby moved from haughty to pleading to denial to rage to a silence so hollow his words stopped meaning anything. He fell to his knees, palms pressed to the floor, and everyone who had been in his debt walked away. The crowd tasted the sweet sport of watching a tithe-master lose his coins. "You took from others," I told him, "now watch them take from you."
This was the first punishment.
The second was for the one who had taught me and betrayed me—Baltasar Hughes. For him I arranged a more intimate ruin. He was to stand in the center of the hall, near the moon pool, with the eight-strand red thread—the symbol he used to bind destinies—floated over the water. The priests loved that thread; they had made sacrifices on it for centuries. I made it the symbol of his unworthiness.
"Baltasar," I said, "you were my teacher. You taught me names and how to bind breath. You taught me the slow arts. Yet for the sake of a myth you bent us. You decided a girl's life could be traded for the convenience of a narrative. You thought you were saving the world by dividing one life into many."
His face softened at first, the guilty smile of a man who used kindness to hide ambition.
"You will not be excommunicated like this fool," I told him. "You will be judged by the thing you loved most—ceremony."
I had arranged for the priests to reenact the ritual he had used to justify the theft: the lines he had drawn on my chest, the words he had uttered while the blade was held. They repeated everything he had said, and then I twisted the mirror.
"Baltasar Hughes," I said, "you renounced a pupil for purity. Now the hall will witness your act in reverse."
The priests who had once nodded at his words were made to echo them against him, to call for the offering he had demanded and then to declare the offering worthless. They took the eight-strand red thread and plaited it into a crown, then hung it about his shoulders. The crowd watched as the sacred symbols were inverted. The priest who had blessed his furrows spat at his feet and untied his badge. Children pelted him with withered lotus petals gathered from the pond where I had bled.
"Do you feel it?" I asked.
He tried to speak, to defend himself, to call upon his authority. It cracked and failed. I reached into my sash and drew out his prize: the small carved token he had always used to remind himself of being right. I snapped it in half. The sound was tiny but it echoed. People clapped. A few began to sing a mocking hymn to their own sincerity.
"See," I whispered. "You wanted to protect ceremony over a person. People will remember that now."
Baltasar's face melted from priest to man in a breath. He looked at me like someone betrayed by a child. Tears came, but they did not wash away the burn. The public watched, some in horror, some in delight. He had been undone not by force but by exposure, by the quiet, precise removal of his supports. The pillars of his reputation who had been glad to stand by him now looked away.
He staggered under the weight of ritual turned inward. It was an elegant cruelty: humiliation without blood, unmaking without physical harm. He fell to his knees and stayed there for a long time. The assembly dispersed slowly while he was left with his own thoughts.
Then there was Alexander.
Alexander's punishment had to be different. He had not simply conspired for gain or for ceremony; he had loved me in his way and cut out the thing that made me tender. He had been both betrayer and beloved. I wanted to break what he valued and leave him with the full view of what he had done.
We took him to the Great Steps—where gods make pronouncements and men sometimes confess sins they have not truly felt. The crowd gathered: priests, servants, the few who had retained honor, those who liked seeing the rise and fall of a name.
We brought out his trophies—his robes, his dragon-stitched carriage harness, his seat of honor. I had them set on a plinth. Then I brought out the things that mattered to him most: the stories he had used to hold his power—his forged lineage scrolls, his lists of favors, the small carved names he had once kept in a chest.
Alexander knelt, because he had always knelt in private, in the places where he thought he would find mercy. He looked at the plinth, then up at the faces.
"Tell them," I said.
"Tell them what?" he whispered. He had no strength now in his hands, only the shape of wanting.
"Tell them why you took my heart."
He opened his mouth and a sound came out like a bird in pain. He told them everything. He told them how he had been plucked from a crib and presented as useful; how he had watched my devotion and wanted to possess it; how he had learned that to be worshiped, one must own what others worshiped. He told them about the pill, and about the moment he had chosen to become more than a child.
"Do you regret it?" someone in the crowd asked.
"Yes," he said. "No." His voice shredded. He strode through a labyrinth of feelings and settled on the one that let him keep standing: denial. "No. I did what had to be done."
"Then watch," I told him. "Watch what your 'having' has cost."
I took from my satchel the long whip that had been my secret for a hundred nights—the old black whip that had been sealed in the ice pond before I ever became a tool. I had not used it often. It is a cruel thing, but it cuts not with duration but with truth.
I lashed the whip sideways. The leather sang. Alexander flinched, not because it cut but because it told him the story of his choice in sound. I did not strike to wound; I struck to make sound.
I spoke then, slowly, the litany of what he had stolen: sight, heart, memory, name. The crowd listened. His posture shifted from arrogance to confusion, then to pain. The whip's snap echoed every time I named another theft.
"Look," I said at last. "Look at the world you have made."
I had hidden a mirror in the plinth. Alexander finally saw himself: not as a god or a child, not as owner but as robber. He watched his own face in the glass and saw the emptiness he had shaped. People gasped. Some wept. One old woman in the crowd, who had lost her lover to a war Alexander's dragon-ride had ended, spat at his boots.
It is a different thing for a man who has been worshiped to be witnessed in the contempt of the people he thought would lift him. Alexander's face crumpled through the stages of reaction—first the hard veneer of denial, then the flare of fury, then the cold slide into pleading. He knelt and begged.
"Please," he said. "Forgive me. Make me whole. Take me back. I—"
I looked at him. I felt the old tenderness that had been his first cradle. I felt the two hundred years he had been my "long life," the boy who had called me "sister" when he first learned words. I also felt the murder he had committed. I felt the knife, the ritual, the way my name had been dismissed by him and his masters.
"You stole my heart," I said. "Not metaphorically. You carved it out and gifted it away. You took my sight. You took my memory. And then you tried to make a woman from those pieces who would love you properly."
Alexander's face broke then—like glass hit by hail. He slit the air with a cry that sounded like a child and a god both. He fell to his knees and put his face to the floor.
"I am nothing," he said. "I am nothing without her."
"You are nothing with what you are," I told him. "You can plead; you can suffer; you can confess. But nothing can give you what you wanted without taking again. You cannot own me."
People watched as his beggary turned to fury and then to despair, and finally, to the hollow shame of exposure. He rose on trembling knees, silent, and the crowd dispersed. No single punishment was enough; the thing I inflicted on Alexander had to be the slowick collapse of the man who thought love could be bought.
He tried to speak to me later, in whispers. He threw himself at my feet and sobbed. He told me of his childhood, of how he had been given to me, of how he had been used and lied to. He begged me in all the languages he could remember to let him be "Longsheng" again. For a moment I felt that old ache—the ache that had once been a small boy warming his hands between my own.
I looked down at him.
"Die," I said.
He did not die. He knelt and then crawled away, a ruin among ruins. The gods and priests took him in—not out of mercy but to keep him visible and small. He would live, to be watched.
The punishments were varied. Colby had his lands and honor stripped and his patrons turned. Baltasar was stripped of his ritual symbols and thrust into the very ceremonies he had corrupted. Alexander was left to live with the shame of his own story told aloud. Each punishment was public and crafted to make the sinner feel his own action in bone and memory.
They reacted differently.
Colby started with smug denial, then bitterness, then a wild, shameful pleading, and finally a stony silence. People spat when he passed. Children tripped him and laughed. A patron he had betrayed kicked his foot once in the market and made the whole street applaud.
Baltasar went from shocked to pleading to hollow. I saw him older by years in a night. There was acceptance on him like a winter cloak, but his eyes never found rest.
Alexander's trajectory was the cruelest to watch: he went from triumph to denial to rage to hysteria, then to brokenness. When he tried to stand and be a god, the world refused; when he tried to be a child, the child had gone. He tried to bargain. He begged me to let him be near. I said nothing. He cried. The crowd watched him beg for warmth he could not earn, and that was his sentence.
In the years that followed, people retold the scene as cautionary tale. The hall became famous for the day when a woman who had been used reclaimed herself. Songs were sung.
I do not tell this with pride. I tell it because the public punishments changed things. They were not a mere spectacle of pain. They were the revelation of rot in the system and a reclamation of the story that had been taken from me.
*
After the punishments came recalibrations. The world does not roll back neatly. There were debts to settle—practical things. The priests argued. The markets adjusted. A new line of pilgrims began to come to the marsh where I had once been hollowed. They came for the black lotus. They came to be witness. They left with coins and songs.
And me?
I took what I wanted. I reclaimed a heart that had been made of pieces that were not mine and knit it into something that belonged properly to me. I used the eyes I had taken to see in the way a thief sees after becoming honest. I carried the long whip across my shoulders like a sword of truth.
Alexander lingered, sometimes at the edge of sleep, asking to be called what he had once been. "Longsheng," he murmured once to the marsh, and then, in a voice both small and furious, "Call me by the name you gave me."
I called him nothing.
Gabriella—Gabriella Anderson—was given back her life in a way, and she wept and then learned anger and then forgiveness; she took her own steps. People who had once provided her with a clean life wept too when they realized what they'd been complicit in: a life built on theft is never stable.
I did not become gentle again. I became precise.
I returned to the deep marsh and took from it what it would allow: a remnant lotus for memory; the long whip for justice; the eight-strand red thread as a reminder of bonds that can be both binding and betraying. I told the world what it had done.
And somewhere in the reeds, when I stood at the edge of the ice pond where the black lotus breathed its storm-scent and the sky rolled like a drum, I remembered a child with golden hair who had called me "sister." I remembered his first laugh and the way he cried when a magpie stole his toy. I remembered that he had once been my own.
"You know," I said to the marsh one night, voice cold and steady, "forgive and forget are not the same. We forgave nothing."
The marsh seemed to answer with a plash where a fish broke the surface, and then a small, bright thing flitted near my hand.
A butterfly, white as a slip of cloth. It landed on my finger like a promise. I let it rest. I had taken a lot. The air held a taste like iron, like rain on hot stones.
The long whip was heavy on my hip. The black lotus behind me trembled and folded back into the dark water. The eight-strand red thread hung coiled in my hand. I had chosen to keep some threads and break some others.
"You wanted me to forget," I whispered to no one in particular. "But I remember enough."
I stepped away from the marsh, away from the stage of punishments and back into the narrow paths where only a few dared to come. The world would go on telling tales of the day the girl took back her heart. They would say I had become a monster. They were not wrong.
But as long as the black lotus opened and the whip hung at my side, I would answer to myself.
And if anyone asked me what I had learned, I would say: one does not give away a heart to prove another's worth. One tears down the lit temples of lies, and in the rubble grows what must.
The sky was low and the pond was silent save for one last sound: the soft, steady tick as an old clock wound itself and began, once more, to count.
The End
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