Revenge15 min read
Three Wishes, One Abyss — The Truth at the Sect Altar
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I say this at the start, plain and sharp: I was a vicious woman.
"You were vicious long before I met you," Beau Harris mutters between two sips of tea, as if he is naming weather.
"Shut up," I tell him, but the corner of my mouth lifts. "You would have done worse."
He smiles, the kind he kept when we were thieves together. "Maybe. But I never fell in love the way you did."
"You fell in love with me the way thieves fall in love with treasure," I say. "Because it helped you survive."
"Both are true," he says, as if that explains everything.
I remember how I was found. I remember the night a man in white took me off a gutter, brushed the mud from my hair and called me disciple. "Come with me," he said. "I will teach you words and how to stand upright."
"Why?" I asked.
He looked at me as if seeing the shape under the mud. "Some things deserve a chance."
"Then marry me," I told him later, after he taught me to write a straight stroke, after he showed me how to hold a sword without trembling. "I will repay you."
He did not take me as a lover then. He punished me for my jokes. He tutored me, and I learned how to be a weapon and a woman. He was strict, white-robed, careful as frost. He was Jackson Clayton.
"Jackson," I whisper. The name tastes like memory.
When I was younger, in the brothel, it was Beau who smuggled me bread. It was Beau who slid me a knife when ropes bound me. Beau who kept watch as I crawled from dung and rose. He is the man I married with a ceremony and a plan.
"Are you sure this is necessary?" Beau asks now. "You killed him in the courtyard. You slit his heart."
"I did what I swore to do," I tell him. "I avenged my mother."
"Your mother," he says softly. "You have never told me why you wanted that revenge so badly."
"It was him." I look at Jackson's portrait in the sect hall. It was once the portrait they stuck on all badges: tall, severe, the man who rescued orphans. "He took the pearl from her and left her dying. I learned later it was worse and tangled, but—"
"You killed in good faith," Beau says. "I erased the trail."
"You erased the trail?" I press my hand flat on the table. "Beau, you hid my blood. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I did not want you dragged into the long law," he says. "I wanted you to live."
"Live to what end?" I laugh, too loud. "To marry a man who holds your heart elsewhere?"
"Caroline—"
"Don't you call me that now," I warn him.
He flinches and then sighs. "Fine. But this is not about me. This is about him."
I picture the deep pit, the abyss where they lock up people who break sect rules. I remember how they lowered me down by a thin rope and left me to spell out dust. I remember something else there—another voice.
"Three wishes," the voice used to hum at midnight. "One for freedom, one for power, one for love."
I said, "I will bargain."
The abyss took months from me as if they were flies. It ate maps of my days. But it gave something too. The being I called Devil when I was drunk and friend when I was weak—he taught me patterns of magic I had never imagined. We named each other in that dark. He called me "little traitor" and "beloved" at the same time.
"You bargained for what?" Beau asks. "Caroline, did you bargain with a demon?"
"I made a deal," I admit. "I asked to be released. I asked strength. I asked him to make Jackson love me."
Beau's hands quiver. "Why would you ask that?"
"Because I wanted his warmth," I say plainly. "Because the person who took me in should have owed me more than a life of study and cold commands. I wanted to be more than follower number six. I wanted the one who saved me to be the one who loved me forever."
"You are a fool," Beau says softly. "You played with fire."
"I am also a survivor," I say. "I returned to the world a soldier."
The three wishes worked. They pulled me to the surface, poured power into my limbs like oil into an engine. They gave me the sharp edge that cut through demons on the battlefield. They gave Jackson a fondness for me—so I thought. The truth would take years to unspool.
"Beau," I say. "You married me at my plan. You drank the tea I laced with mischief so that Jackson would be forced to notice. You played a part."
"I loved you," he says simply. "I still do."
"You love me like one loves an old oath." I admit, and the edges of my heart soften toward him despite everything. "I used you. I used us. I wanted him to look at me."
"Did he ever?" Beau asks.
"He did. He watched me in a way that choked me," I say. "Once I thought he loved me. Once I thought killing him would be revenge."
I stabbed him once. Fear closed my throat. I did not expect the abyss to smoke with a whisper and then fold his chest in light. I expected death, but instead the man lay there and breathed—then vanished into something else and returned whole.
"He came back," I tell Beau. "But not as himself."
"You mean the being who taught you?" Beau's face darkens. "The demon."
"It was both," I say. "Jackson's face, Jackson's memory—someone else smiling in his eyes."
That is where the sect is now. The man who stands at the head of the hall is Jackson Clayton, but sometimes the smile slides, and the eyes are wolfish and naughty, and the voice says things Jackson never would. He laughs with a glitter in his sentence that feels like teeth.
"Caroline," Jackson said to me once, his hand on my shoulder in the courtyard, "my little Caroline. I did not think you would do that. But I am here."
"You are here," I told him, "and yet you are not. You smell of wine and violet. You mock me."
"Do you want me to punish you?" he asked, the old teacher voice cracking through like brittle ice. "For what you did? For your crime?"
"I already punished myself," I said.
He stared and then for a heartbeat he went fragile. "You think the loss of my life is nothing?"
"You think giving me your pardon makes you good?" I spat. "You think taking my past from me makes clean slate?"
That night he left, and the sect murmured. I walked through corridors filled with curious faces that secretly looked at me with a new kind of fear.
"She killed the man who raised her," they said.
"But she is so brave on the field," others answered.
Days grew into a festival of whispers. The elders hung garlands and chanted as if to bury scandal. But I wanted truth, not chants.
"Tell them," Beau said, in low voice. "We can force a truth-sealing at the altar."
"I will," I said. "I will make a spectacle."
Isabelle, our small, moon-eyed sister, smiled at me with a secret. "Sister Caroline," she said once when she brought soup, "you should let things rest."
"Why do you say that?" I asked.
"Because not everything is worth spoiling," she smiled. "Sometimes people are kinder when we leave them as they wish to be."
I watched her then. Something in her ease was practiced, a softness used as a weapon. I remember that thought later.
Days later the large hall filled. Elder Briggs Voigt and Phoenix Sandberg sat like statues. The disciples came with quick eyes, the market sellers with gossip, the farmers who were allowed to watch for the occasion. I had arranged everything openly.
"I want the truth," I told them as my voice moved like a blade. "I want Jackson to stand where he always stands, and I want him to answer."
Beau stood at my side, hand on my sleeve like a tether.
Jackson came in his clean white robe. He looked like winter, which made him harder to hate and easier to doubt. He saluted the elders and then turned his eyes on me.
"Caroline." His voice hit the room like a bell. "You ask for public airing? Very well."
"Tell them," I said. "Tell them the truth about the abyss and the three wishes. Tell them what you are."
Jackson's face did not change. "I am what I have always been: disciple, teacher, a man with burdens."
"Then answer this," I said. "When I stabbed you—"
"You stabbed me?" he interrupted with obvious confusion. "You stabbed me and then how did you—"
"Don't play coy." I raised my chin. "Don't pretend you cannot be seen through. Jackson, are you whole?"
For a breath he did not answer. Then his face twisted—not Jackson's twist, but another flavor. The voice that came out had the same timbre but the edges were sharper, amused.
"Caroline," it said, and the hall shivered, "we are both in here."
"You are a liar," I said. "When my mother died—"
"She gave me the pearl," Jackson said quietly. "She gave me the pearl to protect you."
I blinked. The hall forgot to breathe. "What?"
He repeated, softer, steadier. "She pulled it out herself. She trusted me to keep you."
"But—" The past rearranged like a puzzle. "You didn't tell me. You let me go into a brothel."
"I wanted to save you from the truth too," he said. "I thought if you grew up knowing, you would never let hatred live in you."
"You let me hate instead," I said. "You let me become a weapon for my own anger."
"It was a different time." He looked like he might cry and then laughed, and the laugh had a rasp. "It became complicated."
I did not see it coming—the demon's reveal. He blinked, and skin pooled like ink in light. For a moment he stepped back from Jackson's face as if showing a mask, and the hall flinched as if someone had flipped a page in a story.
"Everyone," I said. "Look at him."
The elder faces sucked back in surprise. "The demon," murmured Phoenix. "The old seal—"
"Is broken," the other finished. "Impossible."
"Is it?" I asked.
Beau's voice cracked. "Caroline, what do you want us to see?"
I had a plan. I had told Beau to be ready. I had asked for the old rites, the truth-binding ritual that required a witness and a sacrificial proof. The altar was lit. People gathered like moths.
"What I want is for him to answer for what he has done—not only to me but to the sect," I said. "If he is Jackson only part, then let this hall judge."
Jackson stepped forward. The demon in him tasted of opal and iron. "So be it," he said, with a voice that was not quite his. "Open your truth, Caroline."
I pulled a charred scrap of the abyss rope from my sleeve—the rope that had been cut when I escaped. I placed it on the altar. "This proves the bargain," I said. "I will speak the words I spoke then, and if he resists, we will bind him in the old way."
The elders hesitated. Then Briggs Voigt rose. "Do this," he said. "If you make a fault, we will decide."
"Good," I said.
What followed was a public punishment scene that the sect would speak of for years.
I began. I told the story of my mother and the pearl. I told the story of the abyss and the three wishes. I told how the demon taught me magic and how the third wish bent Jackson's heart into a shape I had wanted.
The demon answered through Jackson in fits, first with a smile, then with mockery, then with fury. "She lies," the demon said, and the voice made the candles tremble. "She bargained with me. She was mine."
"You used her," I said. "You used my grief to barter for power."
"No," Jackson said, then. "No, she bargained."
"Both of you," I told the crowd. "And now we will see."
Elder Briggs called for the truth-binding. The ritual required being bound by what one loved most. Jackson—who wore the pearl once when he thought to hide it—had to face the altar with hands free. "If you are an outsider, you will find your power drained," Briggs said. "If you are our master, you will stand."
The demon stepped forward first. It shuddered in his chest like a storm. "I will not be caged like an animal," it hissed.
"Then we will show you you are only a guest," I said.
They lit incense that smelled of crushed mountain leaf. Phoenix chanted. The crowd chanted back. I stepped close and whispered the words of binding I had learned in the abyss; I had changed them to fit the hall.
"Bind now what hides in his skin," I intoned.
The demon lashed. It flared its mind outward—visions of blood and hunger, of me kneeling in the dark and making deals. The crowd backed away, seeing things they had only imagined.
"Do you see?" I called. "Do you see what you let into our house?"
An elder woman in the back sobbed out loud. "All those children—"
"Enough," Jackson snarled, but the demon's hand moved, as if to push him into silence. His face scrunched, an actual Jackson face crumpling with pain.
At the altar, Phoenix and Briggs poured two bowls of water: one cleansed by prayer, one blackened with ash from the abyss. They forced Jackson to drink the blackened water.
"Drink truth," Briggs said.
Jackson swallowed. He coughed. For a moment he fell to his knees, and I thought he would die.
"He cannot hold it," the demon screamed behind his voice. "You will never take me out."
"Then we force you," I said.
They tied a wreath around Jackson's brow—a ring used for calving demons—made of sacred vines that tighten when deception breathes. The vines coiled with a sound like a thousand bracelets sliding on an iron wrist. The crowd gasped. I watched Jackson's pupils spiral, and the demon's grin faltered.
"Stop!" he cried, and the sound was both my teacher and a stranger.
Then the punishment turned into spectacle and purgation. Jackson convulsed. The demon roared and thrashed as if inside a glass bottle. Its face showed on Jackson like reflections on wet stone: for a single awful beat the hall saw a face that was neither. Then the vines glowed blue, and things sloughed off.
Isabelle screamed and ran forward in the crowd, face pale. "Stop!" she cried. "No—he is needed!"
"You traitor," I said. "You were always a knife under a smile."
She turned at me. "You don't understand." Her voice cracked. "You do not see that I—"
"You were in league with them," I cut in. "You were their spy in our midst."
The crowd's mood cooled into hot fear. People started whispering fast. Beau's hand closed on mine like a vice.
"You will be judged," Elder Phoenix said. "Not by sword, but by truth."
They put Isabelle on a stone slab in front of everyone. For her treachery, the elders decreed different punishments. She would be stripped of her rank, her charms removed, sent with watchful guards to atone in the outer farms. Public exile was the first punishment.
"Anyone who colluded to undermine the sect will be publicized," Briggs said. "The names will be called, and the proof will be displayed."
"Isabelle," I said, leaning forward, chest raw. "Did you like Jackson? Did you love him?"
She wept. "I loved him the way a child loves a story," she whispered. "He was my mission; then I drifted—"
"Drifted into betrayal," I said. "You used all your softness as bait."
"Please," she begged. "Don't let them throw me to wolves."
People were already filming with enchanted mirrors, capturing everything. The crowd's reaction turned to a hunger for truth: some pointed, some clucked tongues, others looked away and cried. Old women called for her banishment. Young men spat. The market folk took bets. A child wailed because the day promised more spectacle than grain.
Isabelle was dragged away, shouting protests and melancholic pleas. The elders read out charges. They pinned her deeds like arrows on a board, and people murmured and made marks with charcoal.
The demonstration of the demon's binding took longer.
Jackson thrashed as something tried to tear outward. His voice split into two. I spoke in the middle of the chaos, calmer than I felt.
"Stop fighting," I said. "If you are within him, know this: you are the guest who overstepped."
A ripple passed over the assembled. People shifted uncomfortably. Someone hissed.
"You think you can order me?" the demon scoffed through Jackson.
"No," I said. "But we can name you and strip your hold."
They brought out a relic from the old storehouse: the Maitreya Pearl's twin—the proof that once belonged to my mother and had been kept hidden. It sat like a dull moon in a velvet cradle. When I touched it, a heat ran up my arm.
"Beau, now," I said.
He stepped forward and recited an oath. He had always been steady with his words. He declared that the sect had been lied to, that falsehood had been let in, and that all who aided the demon—those with marked leaves—would be named and expelled.
At that moment, Jackson's voice broke into ragged syllables. Tears ran down his face, involuntary. "Caroline," he said, with Jackson's old timbre. "I—"
The demon howled—pure contrast. It begged, bargained, spat accusations. "She used me! She wanted him to feel! You cannot do this!"
The elders tightened the ritual wheel. They wound the binding rope around Jackson, that rope heavier than any chain, a rope that had listened to my cries years ago. It burned cold on his skin but did not cut.
And then the final act: they opened a public ledger and read aloud the names of those who had conspired with the demon—seeded agents who had been secretly feeding it, including a few peripheral keepers whose names had long been whispered. Their shame was displayed. Some ran; others dropped like broken branches.
The punishment for each conspirator was different. One was publicly unmasked and expelled; his robes were slashed in plain sight. Another, an elder who had bartered texts for minor favors, was made to kneel and chant for a hundred sunrises while the children spat on his sandals. Isabelle's exile was a humiliation; yet known traitors had worse: loss of name, loss of rank, and for those who had used the demon to harm others, forced cleansing—standing in the northern ice pool until the scars healed.
And Jackson? The vines tightened and glowed, and for the first time in years he seemed to hate the thing that had lived inside him. He said, in a voice that cracked: "If I was complicit, I am sorry."
The crowd's change was kinetic. Some applauded the elders' courage. Some cried. A woman in the back called out, "She saved us from the devils on the ridge by herself!" Another man spat and said, "She murdered her master!"
I stood up. "Judge me," I said. "I stabbed him. I took his life and I did not know if it was right. But I know one thing now: I cannot be used any more."
The demon shrieked as if the light itself were knives. It pushed and pushed. The vines tightened to a bright white; in a last furious sweep, the demon's voice said, "You will all be ruined for this," and then it was squeezed thin, peeled out like smoke, and wrenched into a small black token that Phoenix sealed with a word.
The token hissed and watched. The elders flung it into the holy well, and the water steamed, purifying the thing. The hall felt lighter, and the audience let out a single long exhale.
"What now?" Beau asked, his hand still on mine. He sounded hollow and relieved all at once.
"Now," I said, "we mend what we can. We make reparations where we must. For those who aided the demon, their punishment is public: exile, labor, humiliation. For Jackson—if he can reclaim himself—he will answer to the sect and to me."
Jackson turned to me, and in his eyes was a crack where something both terrible and tender bled through.
"Caroline," he said, "I loved you before this. I loved you in secret and in fear."
"You let me rot in the abyss with a bargain," I said, voice tight. "Why didn't you stop it?"
"I feared that telling you would make you crueler," he confessed. "I thought the pain could be borne in smaller pieces."
"You made a calculus out of my life," I said. "That's a confession, too."
"I am telling the truth now," he insisted.
The elders called for a period of atonement. For days afterward, the market shared tales. People came to bless Caroline or condemn her. The children picked sides as easily as playing teams.
Isabelle's punishment rumbled on. She was stripped of her delicate ornaments; her hair was cut short, and she was given a basket and sent to the outer farms to sow grain till she bled. She was not punished by nails or fire; she was punished by weariness and public disdain. She caught my eye once as she left and mouthed, "Forgive me." I did not answer because forgiveness would make the wound heal too soon.
The conspirators suffered in ways fitting their crimes. The elder who sold texts had to chant apologies in the market while people watched. A scribe who had sent letters to the demon's allies had to record atonement truths for the poor in public records for two years. Their reactions varied: shock, denial, rage, begging. Some pretended humility, only to return later under new names; others wept and walked away.
I watched them all. At the center of the stage, Jackson sat on a stone step and looked small. The vines had been removed, but the ring of the ritual had left marks that would not fade entirely. He lifted his head, and his voice was low.
"Do with me what you will," he said. "If your punishment must be fire or exile, take it. If your mercy is shut, I understand."
The sect debated. They could not simply cast him out—his knowledge was valuable; his crimes were mixed. They spoke of long atonement, public service, and a vow to teach nothing to the young but humility. They asked him to resign from his post for a time, to guard the outer gates, to spend tenfold in pilgrimage.
"You must be honest with her," Beau snapped. "No more half-truths."
"I will be," Jackson nodded slowly. "But understand—my life has been built of decisions I thought would save others."
"Then now you must accept that you failed," I said. "You hurt me. Punish me if you wish, but do not hide behind the ghost of a demon."
He pressed his palms on his knees and looked at me as if seeing me for the first time, stripped of schemes, only human.
"If I am forgiven, I will spend the rest of my life proving it," he said. "If not, then I will accept exile."
The hall made a sound like rain. An elder spoke. "We give Jackson the sentence of long atonement with public service, and we banish those directly aiding the demon as per our laws."
They read the decree. The crowd murmured approval. Then, as final theater, they led Isabelle out with drumming and flutes, a parade of shame. She kept her head high until the last step, then fell, sobbing.
It was not perfect justice. The demon was sealed in a token and sunk into the holy well, where legend claimed it would twine itself into fishes' dreams. The conspirators' names were burned onto tablets. The sect tried to make a new order from the shards.
That night I could not sleep. Beau slept with his arm over his face. Jackson walked the outer wall and left fresh water for the guards. In the quiet, he called to me.
"Caroline," he said. "Do you want to stay?"
"Stay where?" I asked.
"With me, in this life—if you can accept a life without bargains," he said.
I tasted the offer. It was warm and dangerous. "Do you mean it, or is this another truth the demon taught you to feign?"
"No," he said. "This time I know. The abyss taught me too—what I let in. I want to do right."
"Then start by telling Beau the truth about your feelings." My voice was small.
He looked at Beau, who raised his head and met his eyes. They both looked like men who had hidden their hearts under stones. Beau nodded once.
"Do it," Beau said. "Beckon me to the new life too."
Jackson put out his hand to me, whole and tentative. "Caroline," he said, "I will not demand you. I will ask."
I put my hand in his. The hall had seen a punishment; now it saw a fragile reconciliation.
"Will you promise to never bargain again?" I asked the demonless face.
"No more bargains," he promised.
We did not live happily ever after. There were murmurs, new suspicions, and the market still had its knives. But we lived true. I married justice to my name, not to fear.
Months later, each time I walked past the holy well where the demon token slumbered, I would smile wryly and whisper, "Three wishes are a poor trade."
And when someone asked me what I would wish for now, I said, "Only one thing. That the Maitreya Pearl would sit on my shelf and never be used as bait again."
The sect's journal later recorded the public shame of the conspirators, the exile of Isabelle, and the binding of the demon. People made songs of it, and children asked troubling questions about bargains. They would recite my name with caution, as the woman who bargained, killed, and then bound a demon in front of everyone.
The end of my story is not a promise. It is a memory: the altar, the rope, the pearl. It is the taste of vine and the sound of a crowd exhaling. It is Beau's steady hand, Jackson's shaky promise, and the moment when a woman who had been vicious learned that vengeance could also be a cage.
The End
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