Sweet Romance13 min read
The Red Lotus on My Palm
ButterPicks12 views
I woke up already knowing I had been assigned the worst supporting-role fate in the book: the doctor’s daughter who only exists to hand the hero a bed, a blanket, and a night of devotion before being forgotten. I remembered the plot line like a scratched record. I remembered the cliff, the immortal healer, and the inevitable procession of beauties that would orbit him. I had been snatched into this world mid-sentence and dropped into a body named Elora Weaver.
"I will not be the footnote," I said out loud to the rafters of my little study. My voice sounded too small and stubborn at once.
"Elora," my father, Oliver Choi, called from the courtyard, "you practice your board breaks later. Do not overdo it yet."
"You!" I stuck my tongue out at his retreating figure, then went looking for the page in my private notebook where I had copied the whole arc of my miserable existence: the rescue, the debt, the short, sweet uses of my body, and then erasure. I circled the word "refuse" fifteen times.
Three days later a man with a face like a ruined statue tumbled into our valley, blood and gore and a broken sword. He groaned, and my heart did that stupid thing it used to do in old novels—flutter and decide. I did what any sensible, resentful transmigrator would: I tried to finish the script early.
"Father," I said, dragging the stranger in like a sack, "I think this one should die."
"No," Oliver Choi said with his chin in the air, like a cliff himself. "There is a line to every life. He will not die here. Bind him, we will see."
"He is the type in the story," I whispered. "The kind with 'kingly bearing' and 'destiny.' He is the one who takes wives and forgets them."
"You will not harm an injured man," Father said, and I learned then his stubbornness matched mine. He pulled a covering over the stranger's face and set to work.
The stranger woke with a memory like a man who had misread his life. "Who am I? Where am I?" he asked when he first opened his eyes.
"You are the neighbor's pig," I said out loud. He blinked, and the look in his eyes was not fear. It was the clear, stupid, dangerous interest of a man who had been given an odd second chance. I named him Gabriel Sandoval later, when he could stand and ask for food without fainting.
"I remember meeting you at twenty-four," he said once. "You were small, and you did not seem the sort to take a sword."
"I am a farm girl who practices breaking bricks," I replied, and watched him learn that my wrists were stronger than they looked.
"You should leave," I told him when he asked the question the story required. "We part ways. You go east. I go west. We will not be lovers."
"Your father said otherwise," he replied.
"Did he?" I shrugged. "He has been known to exaggerate."
"I will guard you from afar," Gabriel said. "If you are in trouble, I will come."
I signed the deal with a dismissive grin. "Fine. Then go meet your fate. I will live in peace and my fields."
When he left, I felt like a triumphant general who had outwitted a predictable foe. I had redirected the plot. I had written my own exit. I went down the mountain, cut my hair the short practical way the town liked, and opened a small medical clinic in a town scented with powder and flowers—Yan Frost City, called Yanshuang in old tales.
Within a few weeks I had skillfully cured the city lord's walking man—an old lord named Freeman Coelho, though everyone called him Fubo—and rumor made my name something like a candle in a draft. I put up a sign: "Elora Weaver, Physician." The sign worked exactly like flattery in the novels: it drew attention.
Late one night a pair of servants with rope among their tools took me from my bed and stuffed my head into a sack. I cursed all the cheery fortune that brought my little fame. I opened the sack and saw a woman on a throne like a dark flower—Charlotte Bradley, the lord of the city. She had a smile like a trap.
"You are the physician who fixed Fubo?" she purred.
"I am," I answered, because I could not help my pride. "Do you have an ailment?"
"A thousand questions," she laughed, and called for a wheelchair bearing a pale, fragile young man. He was the second son, Gabriel's counterpart in the original tale: fragile, like a deer that had learned to hold its breath. That man was the lord's brother. In our retelling his name became Gabriel's twin of fate—still Gabriel, I later learned. He told me to go.
"Let him refuse me," I thought. "Let me be free."
But he did not refuse. He watched with the cool indifference of a man who had long been used to people whispering about his body and not his mind. The lord herself bowed and asked me to stay until the second son healed.
"Stay," she said. "You shall have what you need."
I was restless. "I will look, but if I cannot cure him, I will leave."
"You are a daughter of a famous healer," the lord said, eyes like flat coin. "You will stay."
For seven days I did not see the second son at all. On the seventh day he rolled his chair into the courtyard with a pale rabbit on his knee and asked me, "Do you treat rabbits?"
"Of course," I said. "I treat anything with a pulse."
Over the next days a strange rhythm grew between us: my annoyingly direct meddling, his grudging patience. He would hang back and say "Don't be foolish," and then, a moment later, do something impossibly brave, like lift his chair and save me when a branch cracked with me on it. He called me names that made me laugh. He called me "little doctor," and I called him "river to be crossed."
"You are not fit to be the story's bartered bride," I told him once.
"Why?" he asked softly.
"Because I plan to live."
"Then live," he said, "live near me. You'll be safe and hungry and liked."
I felt my defenses drop in a way that is dangerous and delicious. The world had given me a second path, one that wound around rivers and rabbit hutches and midnight baths. I found myself stealing into the small sanctuary of that pale man. His name was Gabriel Sandoval; he kept rabbits and fish and a ridiculous reserve of dignity.
"You're not even a little afraid," he said the night I demanded his help in a silly, childish scheme.
"I am afraid of being forgotten," I answered. "I am afraid of being written out."
He looked at me like someone who had read the end of a book and still wanted to change the last page. "Then we'll write a different end," he said.
He tried to protect me the way a man, beaten by the past, learns to protect what remains. One night the city shifted and became a stage for something darker. I found the city in ruin, streets emptied, a lantern dying, and bodies—so many bodies—lying in dust. I saw a name in the center of that ruin: Charlotte Bradley. The noble lady I had bowed to like a polite insect had burned the city and sucked its life for a potion called a falling-pearl pill, made from stolen human life.
"It is her," I said, trembling. "She is taking souls."
"She is trying to make me stand," Gabriel said. "She would steal a thousand breaths to put me on my feet."
"That is monstrous!" I cried.
"It is monstrous," he agreed. "And also... I will not let her rule this city with death."
We chased the threads of the deed to one man I already knew: Phoenix Petersen, a man who came back into the world with too much ambition and none of the pity he needed. Phoenix had once been righteous in the myths—then he became rage. He had refined every cruel prayer into a plan. He was the man who, in the earlier tale, had called himself a savior. In this life he had listened to promises of empire and helped Charlotte Bradley find the spell for the falling-pearl pills. He thought power would keep him safe from consequence.
"I am done being used," I told Gabriel. "If the old story claims its victims, then we will reclaim them."
"We will," Gabriel said. "But you are small. You are a doctor. You are not a soldier."
"Then we'll make a spectacle," I said. "We will take the truth to the square."
We found the proof—copper bowls stained with the red-thread resin the pills used, a ledger where Charlotte had marked the nights she had "harvested," and worst of all, jars that held something like slow glowing smoke, the remnants of stolen life. We took these to the city gates.
"We must expose them where everyone can see," Gabriel said. "In public. We must tear the velvet mask."
"Do you promise?" I asked.
"I promise," he answered, and his voice was a folding of iron and moonlight.
We announced a public "healing demonstration." The square filled. I felt like a child again playing at a trial. Gabriel stood at my side, pale and fierce, the rabbits tied to a post like ridiculous symbols. We opened the jars. The scent hit the crowd. Charlotte's face, when she saw the jars, cracked like lacquer.
"You cannot!" she rasped.
"She cannot?" Phoenix erupted with the practiced charm of a charlatan. "What proof have you?"
"Proof," I said, and I held up the ledger. "She wrote her name."
"That ledger could be forged," Phoenix sneered. "This woman is a liar. See how she smiles? She is a mountebank."
"Then listen to those who have suffered," Gabriel said. He stepped forward and described names, days, the small details Phoenix had not foreseen—how a child's kite had been stolen the day before, how a fisherman had disappeared at dawn. People gasped. My hands shook so badly I thought the jars would fall.
"You lied!" Charlotte screamed, and she lunged for the ledger like all great villains who panic and then claw at their alibis. Guards pushed in. Shouts became a colorless roar. A boy I had once bandaged pushed into the front and pointed a shaking finger.
"It was Lady Charlotte who took our neighbor. I saw her at night," he shouted.
"It is a witch!" another cried.
"Burn the ledger!" Phoenix commanded to the guards. "Burn it and silence this pitiful doctor."
"Hang on," I said. "If you will act on a ledger, then let us have the notary and the witnesses. Bring forth the servant who sold herbs last moon." I kept naming specifics like a woman throwing pebbles into calm water until the pond rippled.
The crowd swelled, and then turned. There were more than we thought—people who had been keeping quiet out of fear. They began to chant, "Tell the truth! Tell the truth!" A line of women I recalled from the market pushed forward, each holding a scrap of cloth that matched a name in Charlotte's book. Faces weeping, hands shaking, they said the same thing: "She took my brother. She took my sister."
Phoenix's expression went from contempt to thinly veiled panic. He had counted on fear splitting the crowd, not uniting it. Charlotte, who had been regal a breath before, began to crumble.
"You will not get away with this," Phoenix spat. "I am a man of renown. I will call the sects. They will not let a liar stand."
"Then call them," Gabriel said softly. "Let them come and see you standing over bones."
At that moment we did something precisely theatrical: we had prepared a simple concoction—an old healer's acid that eats lacquer— and poured it onto the pillar where Charlotte's crest hung. The crest bubbled and peeled, revealing under it a ledger-binding nail. We pulled at the nails and found strips of paper, written in Charlotte's hand, with dates, names, and times.
"It is all there," I said. "All of it."
Then came the punishment scene—public, precise, and long enough that I remember it by the taste of dust.
"Bring her to the dais," I instructed. They carried Charlotte to the raised platform by the fountain. The square was full: townsfolk, guildmen, market children, cloaked messengers from nearby strongholds. The monks from the hill temple stood at one end, copper bells in their hands. The air smelled of oil and boiled cabbage and a thousand small hates. I could see Phoenix beside her, his back to the crowd, fingers sharp on his fan like a predator tensing.
"Lady Charlotte," the notary intoned, "you stand accused by the people of Yanshuang of murdering and consuming the life-spark of your citizens to fuel your brother's cure. What do you plead?"
She opened her mouth. For a second she tried her old voice—cool, cultivated. "I am innocent," she began.
"You wrote the dates," cried the fisherman who had returned, his hair white with dust. "You signed them!"
"I was protecting the city," Charlotte cried. "I was desperate. I am the lord. I act for the many."
"You did not act for the many," Gabriel said, moving forward with his voice clear and steadier than the town crier. "You acted for the one you loved. You stole breaths over a century to arrange your grief. You bartered the lives of thousands for a fantasy."
Phoenix clapped slowly. "A good speech. But what of proof?"
A haggard woman who had been the cook came forward, hair loose, apron stained. "She burned my brother's name and said it was a sacrifice. He was alive and then he was gone," she said. "They lured them at night, took their pulse, and left soot."
The monk with the bell stepped forward and rung once. "We will judge by the old law," he said. "Where the lord honors life by stewardship, not by devouring it. Where one who steals life is made to see what she has done."
I had prepared more than accusation; I had prepared an exposure. We had a box filled with the pill molds, and inside, skeletal dust—residual, shimmered, the smell of burnt fat and old iron. We opened it and the smell rolled through the crowd like a storm.
"See," I said. "See what she created with our people's breaths."
They howled.
Phoenix made a last attempt. "If you condemn us, if you condemn me, what will you have left? Disorder, death! I will not go quietly."
"Then listen to the people," Gabriel said. He walked to the very edge of the dais and forced his voice out. "You will see them in their houses, the wives who wept, the children who had no supper. You will see the fish pond emptied and the shops closed. You will see your city hollow. You will stand in the center and feel what you made."
He looked at Charlotte and then at Phoenix. "I don't want you to die in secret," he said, and the crowd hung on the words. "Go to the steps of the city gate. There will be a public reckoning. We will not kill you in secret. We will look at what you did, you will listen, and you will be judged in the light. The sects will be called to witness. The monks will ring the bells. If repentance is genuine, then confession will be recorded. If not—" He did not finish; he didn't need to. The people understood.
They dragged them to the gate. The procession walked slow. People spat; some threw rotten fruit that hit the faces of recruits for Phoenix's force. A child ran up and shoved a small scrap of cloth into Charlotte's hands—a locket with a photograph of the brother she had loved. The crowd roared.
At the gate, Charlotte was made to kneel. Gabriel stood near her and said nothing, only looked. The monks rang their bell three times. Phoenix sneered a last time and then fell silent because the ritual required him to listen. The town elders stepped forward, and each one read a testament from families who had lost someone. They read the names. They made the crime loud. Charlotte tried to weep but her tears were thin and theatrical. The monks took her hands, wrapped them in cloth, and laid the ledger across her knees. The ledger pages were displayed where anyone could touch them.
"Why?" a woman asked finally, her voice thin with rage and grief.
Charlotte tried to answer. "For love," she said. "For the man I could not lose."
"Then feel what you took," Gabriel said in a voice that sounded like stone. He took the ledger and, with the monk's permission, opened a page where a child's name lay. He read aloud a passage of the ledger—an entry noting how the child had been lured and the outcome. Gabriel read each line with such clarity that the words were no longer ink but the child's last breaths, given back to the air. The crowd fell silent. They had their reasons to cull their empathy, but now they had the facts.
For Phoenix, the punishment was different. He had been cunning, a manipulative force, and his fall needed to be public humiliation of power. They stripped him of his fan and confiscated his garments. The city smith forged a ring that marked him as outlaw; they fitted it with a broken blade. They led him to the rafters and cut his banner down. Children threw pebbles at him. He howled like a beast that had been removed from its throne.
Charlotte was kept on the dais and made to face the people. They then did something older and firmer than execution: they subjected her to the seeing—an old rite where the accused must walk through the market holding the ledger and listen to everyone speak their truth. Tears, curses, stories, the sound of names. Each person who had lost someone stepped forward and said their name and what had been lost. Charlotte listened. She tried to plead, she tried to bargain, but words fell through like silt. The seeing lasted until the sun dipped. It finished with a sentence from the chief monk: "A life taken for selfish love will weigh upon your hands. You will mend what you can; you will serve and rebuild and never be left in the dark of a single room."
The town did not kill her. They did not need blood to make justice. They required her to recover the city's names, to find the remaining living, to heal the ones she could. Phoenix was exiled with a shamed ring. He was forced to walk to the border where the sign read: "No man with a debt to his people may pass." They beat his fan, and he fled into the night.
When the punishment ended, when the chants faded and the bells stopped, the crowd did not immediately cheer. They had been given words and work and an awful clarity. I sat down on the steps and felt the weight of what we had done.
"Elora," Gabriel said, sitting beside me. "You were brave."
"I was reckless," I answered. "I wanted them to see. I wanted to be the one who shouted the truth."
He smiled, soft as the rabbit's fur. "You were the one."
In the following weeks the city healed slowly. Charlotte worked under watch, cleaning and rebuilding, and the ledger—once a mark of shame—became a map toward restitution. Phoenix's name was cursed, and men would spit if it was spoken. People came to my clinic asking only for small things, and I treated them, each stitch an apology.
Gabriel and I had our own slow repair. We learned to laugh again. "Do you remember when you called me a pig?" he asked once.
"I called you worse things," I said, and then pressed my palm into his, showing him the bleeding lotus mark I had revealed for the antidote. "You saved me the way men in stories save princesses. You saved me by being stubborn in the right way."
"Then stay," he said. "Stay and make my life loud and full."
"I will stay," I said.
At last, on a day when the pond was clear and the rabbits fed, Oliver Choi came from the hill and stood at the gate.
"I heard you caused a spectacle," he said to me, raising a brow like a mountain ridge.
"I did," I answered. "We saved a city."
He looked at Gabriel, and then me, and his eyes twinkled with something like pride. "Then you'd better keep doing both."
After all the unspooling, after the ledger had been read and the bells had rung and the city had woken up like someone who had been drugged for a long time, I learned three truths a transmigrator must know.
First: you may come into a story with your fate written in bold, but ink can be smudged.
Second: men who seem carved from stone sometimes soften when you give them a reason to stand.
Third: the thing that names you—be it a red lotus on your palm or the rabbit in your lap—will be the last thing you look at before sleep, and the first thing you wake to in the morning.
We had our tenderness: a stolen kiss by the fish pond, a wicked bargain that turned into a promise, the small thefts of boiled fish from Gabriel's stoop. We had our anger: the ledger, the jars, the nights hearing the city's bones creak. We had our victory: the square full of voices.
One night Gabriel held my face and laughed. "You told me 'not your bride' when we first met," he said.
"I did," I admitted.
"Good thing you changed your mind," he whispered.
"Good thing," I agreed.
When the last of the dust settled and the ledger was burned and the city had a new way of keeping watch over its own, I walked out to the pond and touched the water. A small white rabbit watched me from the reeds and tipped its head.
"Do you want to be dinner?" I asked it.
The rabbit blinked, and I laughed. Gabriel's voice came from behind me, low and full.
"Not today," he said. "Not ever."
I leaned into him, feeling the small, miraculous ordinary weight of a hand on my shoulder. Around the city, people still spoke of the red-lotus mark on my palm, and of the day the town decided to look at itself.
When Phoenix's exile was announced in a tavern three months later, men cheered and drank. "The tyrant is dead!" some shouted, though it was more a boast than a truth. But I could not celebrate cruelties. I had seen punishment, and I had seen repentance. I had seen a ledger become a map. That day the road smelled like fried fish and rain.
I had come to this world to avoid a fate. Instead, I found a life I would not trade.
The End
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