Revenge14 min read
The Jade Bottle, the Little Fish, and How I Became Someone Else
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"I remember the first time I thought I was the story's heroine."
"You did?" Cabot laughed, his voice like pebbles in a stream. "You always did."
"I meant it then." I folded my hands around the cup of cold tea. "I meant it when I thought every step I took was for the path."
"You still do," he said softly. "You just learned to walk your own path."
"I was the only disciple." I looked up. "Giuseppe chose me. He taught me the roots of the art, how to plant a seed of power and tend it until it grew into a tree."
"I remember you with the sparring sword," Felix said from the doorway. "You were ridiculous."
"Annoying, you mean." I let a small grin slip. "But useful. You were useful, you know."
Felix's face crumpled for a second. "I owe you everything, Julieta."
"You weren't wrong." I didn't mean to be cold, but cold had become simpler than trust.
Then Giuseppe brought her into our world.
"Master," I said, when she followed him into the hall like a bright bird and held his hand as if it were a rope and she would forever cling.
"He is back," I told the hall.
"She will be your junior, Julieta," Giuseppe said gently.
"This is Chloe Ivanov," he added as if naming a small thing. "Her name is Chloe."
"Chloe," she chimed, bright and wet-eyed like a child with new candy. "Big sister! I will call you big sister forever!"
The system voice came then, just like nonsense wind in my head: "System prompt: female-support-role inversion detected. Host objective: charm the cold elder Giuseppe. Progress: ten percent. Reward: 10 points."
"Points," Chloe giggled, and I could feel everyone in the hall tilt toward her light.
"Try to put points into your power," she said aloud into the room while I poured the master's tea. "Put it in strength. Be strong like sister."
"Don't be foolish." Giuseppe smiled at her in a way I did not expect him to smile at anyone anymore.
"He never smiles for me," I whispered, but Luca—no, Felix—interrupted.
"Master, your disciple has brewed tea." Felix, always eager, bowed.
"You've brewed hard tea," Chloe leaned over, pressing a sweet, half-bitten rice cake into the master's palm. "Eat, your face will smile then."
"Steady," Giuseppe murmured, and took the piece with a bored gentleness that stung me. He ate it like he answered a child's question.
I told myself not to care. I had taught them everything I had—ritual stances, the way to hold breath against wind, how to accept the pain that made the bones stronger. I had been fifteen and already beyond them. I had been born for the path.
But I had never been taught how to be a person among people.
"You are too strict," they said later in the sparring yard. "You make us feel small." Felix's voice was small, genuine.
"She is just... different," a voice called. Hugh Valdez, with his usual lazy smile. "Why be bound to the grind every day? We might as well live a little."
"She doesn't get it," Broderick said. "We want some fun."
Chloe laughed and tilted her head. "Big sister is serious, so we will be better. But sometimes we should play."
"You think because she trains we should be punished?" I asked. "What is the value of training if you do not protect the people who cannot?"
"Because it is endless!" they cried, cheerful and selfish as hedgehogs. "Life should not be only weight and path."
"You will learn when life slaps you," I told them. "Not all things get better with laughter."
"Why punish only Felix?" Chloe said, feather-light. "Why make only Felix go to the rock of penance?"
The system chimed in another time: "Progress: twenty percent."
I looked at Felix. He had been my pupil. I had once taken thunder for him during novice trials. He blinked, and his eyes were full of pleading. "Senior sister," he whispered.
"Then don't come," I said. "If you won't go, then do not come to me."
I left the sparring yard and the whispering. I left the yard but the world kept turning toward her.
"She is so pretty," one disciple said.
"She is funny," another answered.
"My sword is hers to play with," someone added like a prayer.
I walked to the practice cave and found the tea cooled, but my heart warmed at nothing. For they were not mine anymore.
"Julieta." Nicolas came and stood before me. "Are you not going to the mountain? They say there's a spirit pearl in the ravine."
"I prefer the path," I said. "Paths are what I was born for."
Nicolas shook his head. "There are other things, too. Love. Joy."
"I have no joy in losing people to the dark."
He was my betrothed long before I left. He had once told me life with me would be "a blessing." He had given me a pouch of sweets for our betrothal and talked like a boy who had not learned that promises bend.
Now he was cool as winter. When the news of Chloe's sudden advancement came, his face flickered with a hunger I did not understand.
"Do you care," I asked him one day, bringing him the wine I brewed.
"What for?" he said. "Your path is set."
"I thought you would be different."
"People are different when it is convenient," Nicolas said simply as if the world were made of stones.
Later, on the bright day of competition, Chloe moved as if lit from within. She pushed wind like silk and broke my guard. The crowd roared her name like a hymn and lifted her. A white-clad figure descended in thunderlight at the last strike and clutched her. She looked at me with eyes wet and said, "Master, he helped me."
"Progress: forty-five percent."
Giuseppe looked at me then with a softness I had not seen since I was small. "You are steady," he said. "You hold the line."
"Did you see?" I asked.
"Sometimes a master must protect the child within," he replied.
I did not shout then. I bowed and removed the jade token that marked me as leader and slid it to Chloe.
"You won," I told her. "This place is yours."
I left the mountain that day.
"I thought—" I told Cabot as we tied our packs. "I thought the world would be simpler."
He grinned with those honest, fish-like eyes. "You only thought you would be the heroine."
"I was meant to protect people," I said. "To teach them. But my protection became a yoke."
"And you walked away."
"Yes."
He fidgeted, childish in his worry. "Don't go too far, small moon."
"Don't call me that," I said with a smile that wanted to be sharp but failed.
He laughed. "You were called Moon by the pool, Julieta. You used to come when the flowers opened at night."
When we reached the abandoned temple of my birth—my family name erased, temple roof caved, vines eating columns—I sank into the pool. Water was memory. It was where a fish had once been my friend.
"Hello," a voice said.
"You grew new wings," I told the little fish who became flesh and would later become Cabot in human form.
"Call me Cabot Luna." He stood like a boy out of a child's book. "You left me the pool to watch small lights."
"You can speak," I said.
"I can," he said. "I can do a lot of things I shouldn't. I will go with you."
He was small, bright, and he sat with luggage that none of us could recognize. He adventured like a child who had stolen lanterns from the market. He spent our meager coins like a diplomat who had no fear of poverty.
We walked and saved villages. We fought a butterfly demon and were praised by villagers whose silver hands shook with gratitude. Cabot would shout, "Go, Julieta! Beat it!" from behind my shoulder, then hide when a bigger demon roared.
We lived in a cheap inn one night. I had saved thirty-five spirit stones. Cabot found a way to spend them in two heartbeats on food and a bath, and then looked at me with hurt.
"You are poor," he laughed. "It's not my fault."
"You are a greedy fish," I said, and he made a face like a child who had been caught eating stolen fruit.
The night the town lit lanterns for the festival, I peered down at the square. Strange things were afoot. Cabot tugged me from the roof. "We are not alone."
We climbed down and found a narrow cave that to my healer's sense smelled of magic and iron. Inside, a pearl burned golden and hung above a pit of cold flame. The cave strained with motion and we saw Chloe ahead of us, small, smiling—too small, too contrived.
"Juniper," she said as I stepped forward. "I can reach it for the master."
The air shuddered.
"System prompt: target attachment to Giuseppe Clement increases."
We fought the guardian. It was fire shaped. We were pushed to our edges. Cabot dove through a fireball and swallowed the pearl like some foolish star. He reeled. The guardian paused, surprised. Chloe reached with a smile and the cave shook.
She lured us into calamity.
"Thank you," Chloe murmured, when a collapse sent her falling away. She glared at me, her face made a small cruel thing.
"Forgive me, Master," she said to Giuseppe when she returned later with a burned cheek. She said it as if she had been the one to suffer.
"Progress: sixty percent."
I saved her, and the crowd called my name and hers and the wind tasted of ash. I took the jade bottle from my belt, that strange little bottle that had held my fish friend more than once, and put Cabot inside it.
Later, Cabot burned with fever. His skin steamed, his voice thin. He whispered my name over and over as if a talisman. I poured my blood, my power, into him and could not stop.
"We need a deeper cure," I told the healers we had found in dark places. "We need magic from the ravine."
We walked to remote healers. They tested and prodded. "A poison in him," they said. "A jewel inside that is not meant to be taken."
"Then return the jewel," I snapped.
"It cannot be removed," they said.
So I carried him deeper into dangerous places, until my name became a rumor that bought enemies: "There goes the traitor who left the mountain."
Finally, messengers came with a green-ink scroll: a warrant. "Take her. She killed an apprentice. Take her. The evidence is here." The scroll bore the mountain's seal—it bore Giuseppe's hand.
"There must be a mistake," I said. "Giuseppe wouldn't—"
"Maybe he would," Felix said, and his eyes folded in a way the wind folds a leaf.
We were hunted. We fled through snow and ravine. Cabot tried to be brave and failed and hid behind my skirts like a child. We saved strangers who had been left for dead and they called me their savior. I had not meant to be a villain. I had been a teacher once.
The warrant said I murdered Chloe; a stone image replayed in light the moment I did not dive to save her from the trap—my hesitation framed as malice.
"I didn't kill her." My voice shook.
"You didn't try to save her," Nicolas hissed later, in the hall where a small army of the mountain's disciples had come to the stone dais. "Why did you pull back?"
"I pulled back for another life, Nicolas. I pulled back for someone else."
"No one saw that other someone," he spat. "No one believes you."
"Do not lie," Chloe said at the hearing, her voice small and placid. "I was saved by Master. Big sister left me to die."
"Punish her," someone cried.
"Take the whip," Giuseppe said. "We can spare no traitor."
"You would turn on me?" I asked. My voice was a stone skidding down a dark road. "You pledged me as your heir."
"You were too close to the line," he said. "Too far from our path."
"I would not kill!"
"Enough," he said. "We will abide by the rules."
The lash came first. I tasted iron and the sky blurred. I thought, if I die, no one will remember anything but the headlines.
"Stop!" someone screamed.
"Cabot." My chest felt like it would break. Cabot came running, small and earnest, as if he could hold the world.
He jumped onto the dais and, like a child stealing a lantern back from a god, he leapt between me and the lash. The whip cut the air and a thin ribbon of light fizzed past him. He fell.
"No!" I screamed.
"Search him," Giuseppe ordered. "If he lies in the pit of illusions, then let him."
They drew close. They took Cabot to the center. He was pale and breathing like a wounded star. Then he closed his eyes and spoke, "Search my heart. The truth is inside my pearl."
"Search him," Cabot said again, to no one in particular. "Search me."
Giuseppe raised a hand. "By mountain law, we can do the soul-search."
"Do it," Cabot whispered.
They drew a circle and called the old, terrible spell—the search that throws a person's mind into the world they lived in that day. I had been told of it as something to be avoided. They had said it would peel the skin from the truth.
"No," I begged. "He cannot—"
"Do it," Giuseppe said.
Cabot closed his eyes. "Julieta," he whispered.
"Live," I told him. "Live so I can prove what I didn't say."
He nodded, and they brought the spiral spell down.
The world tore like paper.
I heard the rustle of the cave again. I saw the pearl. I saw the fire. I saw the guardian. I saw Chloe smile with a mouth made of knife-edges.
In the image Cabot made, he rushed the guardian first. Chloe turned and raised her blade, and it struck at him. He crumpled from his wound. I climbed down after him and put my arms around him and felt him slip.
People gasped. "She's lying," some muttered.
"No," Cabot murmured with his last breath, "the little moon did not let her die."
They traced the memory back to a face in the crowd. "It is true," said Gerard, a weathered monk, his eyes big.
"She saved the fish," Cabot said, and then he went still.
I fell forward and wept over Cabot's body. He breathed nothing. He had given himself to make truth breathe again.
For a long while after, I could not stop crying.
They searched and searched. Chloe's story unspooled and tangled. The spell's echo showed her stepping back, twisting the scene to ensure it looked like a betrayal. She had been clever; she had learned the art of being loved and used it to call pity like a bell. She had been wearing a system like a second skin.
They opened the court for judgment.
"Chloe Ivanov," Giuseppe said slowly. "You have been found using unnatural aids and binding spirits for influence. You have manipulated the mountain against your elder. You have broken the ten precepts of our order."
"No," she said, and her voice was suddenly thin and raw. "No, I only wanted to belong."
"You will be punished," the elders said.
Her face changed a thousand times in the moment between sentences: a child's smile, a small crown of triumph, then a shadow of fear, then anger twisting into denial.
"Stop it!" she cried. "You don't understand! You don't know what the system gave me—"
"We know," Giuseppe replied. "You sold other lives for advantage."
"Not—" she began. "Not like that. It's—"
"You used me," I said. My voice was little. "You used our people's trust."
Chloe clapped her hands slowly, like a performer who realizes his act has ended. "You are cruel," she said then. "You didn't help me when I was alone."
"You are cruel for taking what isn't yours," I answered. "You took love the way you took pearls—by fishing in shallow holes."
She laughed, a high, bitter sound. "They all loved me. They all wanted me."
"They wanted someone soft," Felix whispered. "They wanted the light show."
And so they decided punishment: not a quick exile, not a private lesson. It would be done where everyone could see—where her theft of lives, her use of pity as armor, could be taken away in a performance as public as the favor she had won. The crowd assembled in the great courtyard. Parents, disciples, villagers—each face curious, each eye a small accusation.
The punishment had two parts. One was to make her stand in the center of the dais and speak each name she had used, out loud, the names of those she had preyed upon—monsters, spirits, those she had sacrificed for points. She had to recite them as if confessing prayer. Each name had to be told, and at each name a token would be placed upon her—ashes, seeds, rope—to mark the weight she carried.
The second part was worse. They would build a mirror-lattice around her—glass panes suspended so that everyone could see every angle of her face—and in the mirrors they would lay the memories that she had used: a line of small glass vignettes, each a scene she had staged with the system's help. Each scene would show how she bent the hearts of others, how she stole their pity like coins. Those memories would be named and spelled and paraded. She would not be allowed to hide behind clever words. She would have to watch the things she had made other people feel, to feel them bounce back into her.
"Chloe Ivanov," Giuseppe announced, "you will stand in the circle and speak the names you took and show the faces you used. For every lie you planted, you will reap a year's penance. You will be stripped of rank, forced to labor for the mountain, and the memory lattice will remain in place for a decade so others may learn from your method."
Chloe's face went blank. Then she trembled. "You can't—this is cruelty!" she screamed, voice breaking.
"Is it?" Felix asked. "Or is it justice?"
The courtyard murmured. They built the lattice. The first name she uttered was sobbing. "I took," she said. "I took..." She stumbled over the memory of how she had smiled as if wounded, deliberately scoring sympathy. The crowd pressed forward, faces like bright knives. Her mouth dried. She pressed her hands against the mirror and saw a thousand faces of those she had used staring back.
"She wasn't always cruel," a child said, near the dais. "She was lonely."
"Lonely doesn't excuse theft," an elder said. "Lonely doesn't excuse making a life into a prize."
Chloe's composure began to fall apart. She went from false smiles to rages to imploring, an arc of emotions that turned the crowd's pity into contempt.
"You're monsters," she cried at one point, and spat the words at the ring. "You all used me! You used me to be kind and then you judged me!"
"No," I said quietly, "you used us. We used kindness as a thing to take or to give. But we taught you to take."
She sank to her knees and tried to plead. "If you make me repent, I will give anything," she said. "I will give all I have."
"People stood in front of you," I said. "Cabot died for the truth. You don't get to bargain with that."
The crowd began to chant the names of the betrayed for them—Cabot's name among them. She had to reckon with the small faces and the broken things she had touched.
Chloe's reaction changed visibly: from arrogance to shock to denial to a brittle sense of pleading. She begged and then she tried to blame others. People recorded her and some spat and some turned faces away. Some, the ones who had followed her the loudest, now had the hardest time.
After hours of confession and the mirror-lattice, Giuseppe pronounced the final sentence: she would be stripped of all rank, exiled from the mountain, and bound to ten years of labor in the outer wards, where she would teach those same warmth-and-kindness skills without the system, learning by labor what she had stolen. The mirror-lattice would stay as a permanent teaching artifact. The public would be allowed to speak truth into it for one month each year.
"Chloe," Giuseppe said, "you will pay back what you took."
"I didn't mean—" she sobbed.
"You did," the crowd said, like one voice.
She left the mountain then, led by two elders. Her face was ruined in more ways than one; the burn-scar on her cheek had been staved cosmeticly, a visible mark that would not let the world forget easily. The humiliation was not to break her bones but to break the fantasy she wore. She was forced to stand under the brim of the sun as they added rope and ash and seeds to her palms and ask forgiveness to faces of people she had gaslit. People spat or stayed away, and some cried.
When the rope came off and they walked her out into the world that had once adored her, she turned once, breathing like a caged animal, and looked at me.
"Big sister," she said, small and terrible. "You took what I wanted."
"No," I answered. "You took it."
She left with the elders and the chains of memory around her. The crowd slowly dispersed. Some wept; some cheered. Many had a new sense of what power could be and what it cost.
I kept the jade bottle in my hand all the while. It felt like Cabot's warmth.
We buried Cabot by the pool. We planted white flowers. I swallowed the ache, and when the first bud opened, I felt as if it had been a promise.
Years passed. I built the Moonlight Temple where ordinary people could learn. I taught those with no beginnings and little names. I opened doors where there had been walls. Cabot's pearl healed in me and made me fast. I became what I had wanted to be: not merely the mountain's heir, but someone who gave the people tools to stand.
Felix came once, his face pinched with regrets. "Julieta," he said, "I was foolish."
"You were young," I told him. "You learned."
Nicolas came less and less. Giuseppe's name lived in the world as both light and shadow; he had paid a price that could never fully be repaid.
As for Chloe Ivanov, rumors said she had been dragged into darker places and later served the mountain with her hands raw from labor. She was changed by the lattice's years. Some nights I thought of turning my face to the wind and calling her name across the valley. I never did.
"Do you forgive them?" Cabot's small voice would ask when he was alive inside the room, when he was breathing in the silence of my own heart.
"I forgive in the slow way," I told him. "I forgive because living is harder than vengeance."
When visitors came to Moonlight Temple, they asked me how I had endured false accusation.
"I learned to be brave when nobody watched," I said. "I learned to find a small light that would not go out."
At the temple gate, the jade bottle hung from my belt. In it lived the memory of a fish with a bright grin and a stubborn heart. People who knew the story would say, "You are the one who saved the fish."
The world learned to call me "the Moon Sage." I liked the name because it was honest. I liked it because it came from the nights when Cabot would whisper, "You are the moon, small and bright and steady."
"You did not become the woman who destroyed the mountain," Nicolas said once when hecame to see how the people sang. "You became someone else."
"I became someone who keeps watch," I answered.
We stood by the pool as a new generation of small fish swam, and a young disciple, cheeks pale and eyes big, came and asked, "Will the mountain forgive?"
"We will teach them to," I said. "Teach them to face what they fear."
Cabot's small smile would have been proud. I traced the jade bottle with my thumb and felt its smooth curve. Inside it, memory laughed like a little fish.
"You were never alone," Cabot had said. "You were only waiting."
I had lost much. I had found the truth. And in the pool under the moon, where light trembled and the white flowers opened, I planted a small seed for those who had no one to call them heroine.
The End
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