Rebirth16 min read
The Firefly Oath and the Jade that Wouldn't Lie
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I did not expect to wake up and find the world very nearly the same, and yet everything wrong in a way only I could feel.
"We thought you were gone," Stefan said the first time he saw me. He had the same gravel in his voice as always, like a road that had been walked on too often. "We thought you were done for, Ethan."
"I thought so too," I said. I let myself be called Ethan because names are brittle things and I liked the sound of this one when it slipped from Stefan's mouth. "I tried not to come back."
"Try harder," Ludwig replied from where he was stuffing something into his robes. "You weren't supposed to leave the ledger untended."
"You two sound like you'll miss my chaos," I said, and the way Stefan looked at me told me he had already missed it.
"Maybe," Stefan allowed, and for a heartbeat his laugh was the same foolhardy noise it had always been. "Maybe not. We have a new order to uphold."
"Who took her?" I asked before I knew I would. The question had a weight to it that surprised me.
"Who took who?" Ludwig's eyes narrowed. "You're back in one piece—well, almost. Where's your sword?"
"Not all of us care for swords," I said. I felt like laughing and crying at once. I wanted to tell them how ridiculous it had been to hear food and laughter drifting from a temple I used to hate, and how the world seemed to have flipped while I was a moth of light and memory.
"She," Stefan said, and he said it like a knife that had not yet been turned. "A girl. Mariah."
The name had a brightness to it that made me flinch.
"Mariah Alvarez?" I asked.
"Yes," Ludwig said. "She went after you."
"She went where?" I asked.
"To the place of the dead," Stefan said simply. "She walked the path alone."
I was not afraid of death in the way the living are. I had tasted it, smelled its iron, watched it gather like dusk. But I was afraid for Mariah. Not for the bright, noisy person I had met months—or a lifetime—ago, but for the truth that made her step into darkness before others had the courage. The jesters and servants can call us haughty and say the sun likes us better than they do; but when someone you care for goes into the dark by choice, it rattles your bones.
"Why?" I asked.
"Because," Stefan said with a voice full of old obligations, "she did you a kindness. She went to the underworld for you. She walked that peril because she believed you deserved a chance."
"She did what?" I shouted, and the sound surprised us all.
"She went to the underworld," Ludwig repeated. "She walked the rivers. She spoke to the ledger."
"Then why is she not—" My mouth closed on the thought. I had watched her fall into traps, I had watched her fight with the sort of breathless stubbornness that made the world tilt. If someone pulled her down, we would pull them out again. That was the promise of old lives. That was what mattered.
"She is safe for now," Stefan said. "But something else happened. People speak of forces at work. The live corpses grew sharper where you passed through. Someone has been feeding them. Someone has been setting snares."
"Someone?" I said. I should have known. "Who is the mind?"
"Daniel Cox," Ludwig said, and the syllables landed like a stone. "He speaks for the council. He said Mariah would bring shame to our order. He ordered something very public."
Daniel Cox. The name carried a careful polish, a smoothness like a coin waxed for circulation. He had charm, and the kind of sharpness that a cultivated blade hides beneath gilt.
"Why?" I asked. "Why Mariah?"
"Because," Stefan said slowly, "she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and because she believed things we were supposed to distrust. Because the ledger was meddled with—"
"And because convenience crowns itself king," Ludwig said.
I closed my eyes. All of my old life hummed with a memory I had tried to smother: the weight of command, the complacency of men who grow used to power. We called ourselves dignified once, but dignity turns to rot when it is used as a screen for small cruelties.
"Find her," I said. "Tell me where."
They looked at each other. The kind of look that passed between them said, quietly, that the path would be dangerous. Not for them; for me, perhaps.
"You are not the same man," Stefan said softly.
"I don't intend to be," I said. "Not anymore."
*
The first time I saw Mariah after the world shifted, she looked as if someone had packed sunshine into a small human body and set a bow upon it. She laughed like a bell someone had struck by accident.
"You!" she cried, and in her voice I heard the reckless joy of someone who believes in impossible things.
"You were not to go alone," I told her.
"I know," she said. "I was going to ask, but then—"
"Then what?"
"My heart said hurry. My heart said do it now."
I wanted to be irritated and stern and sharp. Instead I found myself warm. There are certain fools whose warmth is contagion. She had it in the way she kept saying things that made you feel better than you merited.
"I planted a flower on you," I said. The words came out before I could smooth them. "A tracking flower. If you lied to me—"
"You're dramatic," she said. "You're the most dramatic thing I've met."
"You don't know me," I said. My tone was half accusation, half plea. "You think you do, and you don't. You think you can hold a lantern to every shadow. Some shadows bite."
"I will bite back," Mariah said in that way that left me wanting to cradle her head and tell the entire truth at once. "You are not alone, Ethan."
Sometimes, the simplest words can be the sharpest weapon or the warmest blanket. I did not know which they were at that moment. I only knew that I had sworn to come back if she strayed.
"Promise me one thing," I said, because promises are peculiar talismans and I am fond of talismans.
"What's that?" she asked, brows up like she was inviting me to make the world a little safer.
"Come back to the place where the moon sits on the well," I said. "No more underworld strolls without witnesses."
She rolled her eyes, but there was the small, ridiculous smile that meant she would heed me in her chaotic way. "Fine," she said. "But you'll come with me next time."
"I might not," I told her, and the truth slid out like a shard. "You know what I am."
"You're dramatic," she said again, and there was a softness in it.
For a long time after, we walked in a way that is neither war nor peace but something like truce. The others moved with us—Stefan and Ludwig—each with their own burdens. The world had rearranged itself around me, and the parts that hurt most were those that showed how much I had lost the right to be trusted. That right gets earned, not taken.
"Tell me what you saw in the underworld," Stefan asked one night when the three of us sat in the temple courtyard. Little lights hovered across the grass like reminders.
"It was a ledger," Mariah said. "A book. Names like old leaves."
"And did you see my name?" I asked before I could stop myself.
She didn't laugh. "No," she said. "But I saw a garden that looked like you might have planted it."
"A garden?" I repeated. There was a particular dullness in my chest then, a hunger that felt like a year-old frost.
"It had fireflies," she said. "A thousand of them. They knew your face."
My heart kept misbehaving in ways it had long vacated. I felt like a child again, letting secret hope light the corners of my chest.
"You should not visit those places," Ludwig said. "Not alone, and not with unsanctioned desires."
"I wasn't alone," Mariah said. "I had a candle and foolishness and people I thought were friends."
"People who betrayed you," Stefan said.
We all fell silent after that. Betrayal has a thousand faces. Mine had been polished, masked in the garments of a leader who had been called to dignities I half-suspected were traps. People had fallen in. They had gone to the gods for favor and left friends behind.
"Tell me more about the live corpses," I said at last, because whatever else ached, curiosity is a feature of the mind that refuses to die.
"They were made sharper where your shadow fell," Ludwig said. "They grew like weeds in soil you had walked."
"Someone is feeding them with old spells," Stefan said. "And someone taught them to listen to us."
That set my jaw. I had always believed that the world listens to certain harmonies. Someone had added a disharmony.
"Then we put the disharmony in a bowl of truth," Mariah said, half to herself, and her hands made a small circle as though pinching a secret.
"You would use the word truth," I said, and she tackled it with that same wide-eyed conviction.
"Truth can be found if you look the ledger in the face," she insisted. "Or in the jade—"
"Tianshan jade," I supplied automatically. I felt the name like a warm weight in my palm.
She smiled, the gesture like light. "Yes. Give the jade space to hold what it knows."
"You trust a stone?" Ludwig muttered.
"I trust the facts stones keep," she said, and there was a clarity in her, as if she had found a place of rest inside her own noisy logic.
We set off then, not into a blaze of glory but into the slow, careful work of tracking. I kept my senses close to my body, like a man guarding his last coin. There were false alarms, fights with live corpses that had more stubbornness than design, and the quiet nobility of people who simply refused to give up on someone else.
"Are you afraid?" Mariah asked me once, after a skirmish when the moon was a thin white coin over the trees.
"Not lately," I said. "Fear was an old companion. Now I only feel tired sometimes."
"That's allowed," she said simply. "Tired means you tried."
It is astonishing what small sentences can do, how they can knit coal-black places back into something like hope.
We found signs—traces of tethered ropes woven with cursed thread, and the smell of old wine used to bribe the living. All of it arranged around a single idea: make spectacle, force repentance, and the council can claim order restored.
"Who profits?" I asked.
Daniel Cox smiled when he answered. "Order profits," he said. His smile was like a coin in the noonday sun. "Order is a tidy thing, Mr. Colon."
"You did this to her?" I said.
"Did what? Ask for an investigation?" Daniel's expression was a perfect mask of insult at being accused. "We simply acted to preserve tradition. We had reports of meddling. Mariah's bedside manner is...unconventional."
"Unconventional," I echoed. "You call smearing a woman, taking her, and setting live corpses at one of our own 'unconventional'?"
"Drama suits you," Daniel said. "And theatrics are sometimes required. Consider it a test of your loyalty."
"To what?" I demanded.
He smiled, and the smile was like a blade polished to show no handprint. "To peace, Ethan. To the safety of the many."
"There are other ways to keep peace," Mariah said too loudly.
"Quiet, child," someone behind Daniel told her, and the contempt in that voice was a kind of oath. They had planned something public. They had planned to humiliate, and that made me focus like a hunter finding the scent.
I sat with my anger and shaped it into intent. If they wanted spectacle, I would give them spectacle—but on my terms.
"Bring the ledger to the courtyard next dawn," I told Stefan and Ludwig. "Bring every witness. Bring the young scribes and the old mothers who twist gossip into thread. Bring the fireflies if you can."
"You're setting a stage," Stefan said.
"I know," I said. "I will make them perform their own truth."
They laughed at me. It was a soft noise, like wind through an abandoned orchard. But when dawn came, we had gathered a crowd enough to eclipse the sun. People turned out because spectacle had the taste of gossip, and gatherings had always been my specialty.
"Why are you smiling like that?" Mariah asked, clutching my sleeve. Her eyes were wide as the world itself.
"I'm remembering an old habit: leaders like to be seen," I said. "We will see them."
Daniel Cox took the floor in his high, practiced voice. "Ladies and gentlemen of the order. We have gathered because disorder breeds like mold when left to its devices."
"You kidnapped a woman," Mariah said, like a dog barking at a hawk. "You set living corpses on innocent villagers to make a claim. That's not order—"
"Order sometimes requires hard looks," Daniel said. "Sometimes the ledger must be corrected."
"And sometimes people are cruel," I said, and I let my voice widen and become something public. "Sometimes the ledger lies because someone has torn pages and slipped in new ink."
A ripple of sound moved through the crowd like wind through dry grass.
"You speak of lies," Daniel said. "Do you have proof?"
"Proof?" I laughed. "You required spectacle. You delivered it. See how easy it is to script a truth?"
"On what grounds do you accuse me?" Daniel asked. He had the kind of control that made you suspect his hands had always stirred the pot.
"On the grounds," I said slowly, "that you thought you could hold a woman up like an offering and claim sanctity."
The crowd stirred. There were whispers and small cries. A few people looked pleased at the scandal; others shifted as though sitting on a bed of thorns.
"Denial is your art," Daniel said. "You think your charm covers your perfidy."
"Charm takes many forms," I said. "Tell me then: who gave you the ropes with the cursed knots? Who paid the necromancer to teach the corpses to sharpen themselves where my shadow fell?"
Daniel's face flickered. For a moment he looked human and fallible and small.
"We follow—" he began.
"You followed an order that fed on fear," I finished for him.
It was then that Stefan stepped forward with the ledger. He had never been a man to take center stage, but he held the book like a thing with weight. "The ledger," he said, and the sound of the words made people look like ships turning toward the lighthouse.
Ludwig, who had a pen of his own, began reading aloud. He read names, and he read the threads of transactions. He read of a string of bribes and arrangements that led from Daniel's study to the necromancer in the marsh, and he read the exact pattern of ropes that matched the cursed knots.
"You cannot make that proof," Daniel snapped.
"It is proof because the jade remembers." Mariah stepped into the light, unexpectedly certain. "It remembers the hands that pressed it. It remembers who touched the ledger and what they added."
"Mariah," a voice hissed behind her. "You are not to—"
"I have seen the jade," she said. "I carried it to the well and set it on the steps. It warmed under a hand like a confession. It thrummed when Daniel's thread touched the page."
Daniel's face abandoned the civilized planes it had drawn. He looked naked in anger. "She lies," he said. "She is a child with illusions."
"The jade," Stefan said again, and he held out a small green stone. "Is that your handwriting?" He turned it so the light made the surface tremble just so.
A man in the crowd who had been watching took a step forward. "That knot," he said, and the words were like a landing bolt. "That is the pattern from the council. Only one person in the order had the right to weave such a knot."
"I did," Daniel admitted. "But—"
"Admission," Ludwig said evenly. "Now where is the necromancer?"
Daniel's denial was brittle, then broken. The mistake of a confident man is to think his lies are better than the world; the real error is to underestimate the patience of those who reconstruct truth.
"Follow me," I said, because I no longer wanted to be the man who ordered deaths into silence. I wanted to be the man who made liars sweat.
We led a small, ringing party into the marsh. The necromancer, a grim figure with a voice like twigs, gave up his companions when the ledger and the stone were shown to him. Perhaps the sight of the jade silenced him. Perhaps he remembered a dinner paid with a silver coin bearing Daniel's crest. There is always a cost, and in our world a cost is either recognized or it multiplies.
When we returned, the courtyard was packed. The crowd had grown like a tide. They wanted ruin or spectacle. The leaders wanted the comfort of seeing a single scapegoat. They got something worse: a full accounting.
Daniel's plan had been simple. He had imagined the order would close ranks around him, that his polished words would bind a lie into law. He had not counted on the stubbornness of those who refused to be stage props.
"Daniel Cox," Stefan said. His voice carried like a bell. "You stand accused of creating false evidence, of ordering the kidnapping of Mariah Alvarez, and of using necromancy for private gain."
"You cannot—" Daniel began.
"I can," I said. I wanted to watch him fall. I wanted to be the man who made the liar crumble so others might learn that cruelty has consequences that must be publicly owned.
Daniel's face went through the stages I have known well: first confusion, then anger, then a small, pitiful attempt at denial.
"I did what I had to do," he said. "For the order."
"For yourselves," Mariah corrected him. "You fed bullets to corpses and called it protection."
"She is a child," Daniel spat. "Do you know what chaos she would have caused?"
"Chaos is often a sign of growth," I said. "Or of rot. Which was it, Daniel? Growth for whom? Rot for whom?"
People surged. Some took out small tablets and scrawled; scribes leaned in and wrote like men claiming diaries. Mothers clutched children like armor. The air had the smell of change: it smelled like dust being scooped away to reveal a stone.
"You will be stripped of your office," Stefan declared.
"You cannot," Daniel said, his voice thin.
"We will strip you," Ludwig said. "And we will make a record that cannot be erased."
Daniel lurched then, and for a moment I thought he might attack. He looked so small I thought of a trapped animal. He chose instead a different kind of pleading.
"You don't understand!" he cried. "You think I'm the only one who does what's necessary. There are others—higher. You will bring the whole order down."
"Then bring the whole order into the light," Stefan said. "We can test it. We will not be ruled by terror."
At that, the crowd pushed. It was ugly and marvelous. People wanted a story they could hold, either to throw at others or to wrap around them for comfort. The important thing for me was Daniel's face as his veneer flaked. He moved from a polished mask to a human being, and the sight had a power that no sermon could mimic.
He begged. He tried to bargain. He accused us of simple jealousy. There was a moment when I almost felt pity for him, because the abyss of his vanity had swallowed him whole.
"Please," he said. He dropped to his knees, the posture of a man who had been denied the comfort of rank and now sought out charity. "Please—"
"You will stand in the square tomorrow," Stefan said. "Every accusation will be read. Every witness will speak. You will answer before the people."
It was an old punishment, but honest things often are. Public accounting is a slow, grinding blade. It strips away the pretense of dignity.
Daniel tried to find a last refuge in his rhetoric, but rhetoric does not save one from a ledger that remembers. The next morning the square was full. Faces looked like carved things in the light. Children pressed forward, because children smell truth like fruit.
"Daniel Cox, stand," Stefan said. "Listen to each claim and answer."
For the next hour and more, people spoke. Nothing of it was quick. Mothers told of missing payments Daniel had promised to bring back but never delivered. A necromancer spoke with a rasp and named the sum. A scribe produced a torn page with the same hand that had written Daniel's ledger entry. A man who had been near Mariah the night she was taken told how Daniel's men had praised the plan. Each story built the architecture of truth.
Daniel's reactions were the picture I needed to see. He began with denial. He then moved to slanders. He attempted to gaslight the crowd, asking them to consider whether they could trust a woman who had been in the underworld. The crowd hummed with whispers.
Then came anger. He raised his voice and attempted to blame me. "He returned and now he wants blood!" he cried. "He is a demon of old—"
"You look at me and call me demon," I said. "You were the one who made a spectacle of a woman. You are the one who used corpses."
Panic followed. Daniel's tone broke into something small.
"Is this the man," a mother asked, "who ordered soldiers to bring live corpses to our fields?"
"It is," Stefan said.
He became frantic. "You are being led," he cried. "You have been fed lies!"
"Then why not answer them?" Ludwig said. "Why not produce your evidence?"
There was a slow, almost unbearable sound as the people turned on him. Not a physical turn—a moral one. They listened to the testimonies, heard the ledger, watched the jade. The air moved like someone untwining a rope.
Daniel's composure dissolved. First he tried to cry, then to curse, then to attack Stefan with words. He even attempted to run. A handful of people surrounded him. His fingers clawed the dirt. He begged us to show mercy. He pleaded that he had done it for order.
Mercy is a curious thing. I felt none for the man who had used fear as a paving stone.
"You made her a spectacle," I said. The sentence seemed to steal his breath. "You thought the world would close around your narrative. You chose a woman for a sacrifice because you thought you could teach the rest of us how to be obedient."
His face went white. He started to babble names, some higher, some lower, but the ledger was already in our hands. A scribe had the pages of payments. A necromancer had the dates. The rope had a unique knot. Someone in the crowd—an old woman who had been in the village the night the corpses were moved—pointed him out with trembling certainty.
"Do you accept the charges?" Stefan asked at last.
Daniel's voice came out as a broken thing. "No."
"Do you accept the punishment of the order for such crimes?" Stefan repeated.
For a while he said nothing. The crowd watched as if watching a sun eclipse. Then his shoulders slumped and the world took him over like an ocean.
"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, I accept."
That was the beginning of his humiliation. For a week, Daniel was made to stand in the great square and listen to every apology extracted like a tooth. We did not drag him into the mire of torture. We did something older and, in my opinion, crueler: we forced him to hear the consequences of what he had done.
People told their stories. People spat in his general direction. Children threw small stones at his shoes. An old man, the very one whose child had died because a corpse had been left in a field, walked up and laid a scroll of names—those who had been harmed—at Daniel's feet and said slowly, "You made us names in your ledger. Take them back now."
Daniel cried then in a manner I had never seen from a man so polished. Not a commanding cry; a small human heave. The sound broke something in the people watching. There were murmurs—some pity, some satisfaction, some bitter applause.
What I had wanted was not simply his fall but the lesson to be visible: cruelty that is dressed as order is still cruelty. The ledger may pretend to forget, but witnesses never entirely do.
When the week finished, Daniel was stripped of his symbols of office. His robe was cut into plain cloth and used to bind a poor man's wheel. He was made to walk the boundaries of the fields he had endangered and to repair them with the hands that had once caused ruin. The ledger recorded his humiliation; the jade shone on its shelf like a small, unblinking eye.
I watched his face as all of this happened. It changed from haughty amusement to the slow uncoiling of panic, then to bitter pleading, and finally to something like a small, quiet comprehension. He had believed himself untouchable; to be touched in that way was new and bitter.
The crowd's reactions were as varied as faces in a market. Some spat and turned away. Some watched with a certain grim satisfaction. Old friends of Daniel looked away like they had seen a ghost. A handful filmed him in the crude way of apprentices with ink tablets, taking down his shame to read again like a scripture.
When it was over, Daniel left the square. He walked smaller. I felt an odd weight in my chest. Revenge is a blunt tool. Justice is a different craftwork—a slow, religious thing. The public reckoning had not brought Mariah back from the underworld. It had not unwound all the other trickery. But perhaps it kept one man from thinking himself above cost.
"Is this what you wanted?" Mariah asked me later that night, when we sat by the well and the jade hummed faintly between us.
"I wanted the truth to be loud enough that the ledger could not pretend otherwise," I said. "I wanted one man to remember that his actions have names."
"Did it satisfy you?" she asked.
"No." My answer was quick and honest.
"You look less like a demon when you remember to be human," she said.
"Perhaps," I allowed. "Or perhaps I've simply learned to keep one eye open."
We listened to the jade for a long while. It thrummed like a thing remembering. Fireflies drifted against the dark like small vows. The well's stone was cool under our hands.
"There is more," Stefan said eventually. "You will have to decide what to do about the rest of your past."
"I will decide," I said. "But for now—"
"For now," Mariah said, pinching my sleeve, "there are flowers. And you promised to come with me to pick them."
"Yes," I said. "I promised."
And for once I intended to keep a promise that did not cost me everything.
The End
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