Regret10 min read
"You Wanted Me Dead — Watch Me Return"
ButterPicks8 views
"I accept the sentence."
My voice floated across the Hall of Unending Water and hit the carved dais like a small, cold stone. I felt the ropes bite my wrists. I felt the bindings that had been tied to me since dawn. I watched faces tighten, soften, then harden.
"Do you?" Emory Moretti said from the sunlight-side seat, his voice like hard light. "Kyla — you want this? You admitted to everything?"
"I do," I said. "I did what I did to keep more people alive than would have died if I did not."
A murmur rose. Lincoln Kristensen, who sat on the high lotus like a judge of all skies, tilted his head.
"Then tell us why," he said. "Tell us in plain words."
"I already told you, Your Honor," Emory said. He did not look like a man who had lost anything. He looked like a man who had decided things. "She took our children to do what? To make a light that would replace the Sun? To make herself greater? She cut off what made her a dragon. She hurt us all."
"Emory," I said — and my voice was soft. "You loved me. You said you loved me."
He did not answer. He kept looking at the gathered gods and spirits. Antonella Matsumoto sat in the crowd with a thin smile like a slit of moon. Emil Seidel hovered at the back like a blue thread of wind.
"Play the memory," someone said.
Lincoln snapped his fingers. Sudden light fell across the hall. My life spilled out into the air in pieces — the sweet pieces, the broken pieces, the ugly pieces. People leaned forward. They wanted fuel for their anger. Emory watched them like a man waiting for thunder to strike his enemy.
I watched my own hand hold a small dagger. I watched the children's faces. I watched the bead of light that became a sun. I watched my tail cut away, my scales stripped, my bones bared. I watched myself walk into a well of pain and put every thing I had into the bead that became a new sun-eye on the shrine.
"She killed our children!" someone shouted.
"She cursed the world!" someone else said.
Antonella's eyes shone. Emil's expression folded into something like triumph.
"Stop." I said it because I had to. "Stop the memory."
It couldn't be stopped then. They made a show of my worst hours in public. They wanted me to fall apart. I made myself steady. I looked at Emory. I saw, for the first time, the raw place inside him — not hate at first, but fear. He had lost them before he knew he had, and that fear had become a blade.
Lincoln's hand rested on a wooden gavel made of old sea-root. "We have heard enough," he said. "Kyla Brennan, daughter of the Sea Dragon, protector of ocean life, betrayer of family — you are to be sent to the Pit of Endless Night."
I bowed my head. I had already made my choice. "I accept," I said again.
Emory stood. "No. No, I ask for one more: ashes. Let her be wiped from the world. I will not let her breathe where children live."
A low, hot thing began in my chest. I felt every eye on me as if a physical weight. I thought of the bead that still sat warm in the shrine. I thought of my children alive somewhere under new names. I thought of the man who had meant everything to me now asking for my death.
"Emory," I said. "Do you remember the night I told you the Sun was sick?"
He flinched. "You never told me he was sick."
"You knew," I said. "You did not need to understand. You left when I needed you most."
He looked at me then, and for a breath I saw the man who had been my sun. He tried to form an apology. He could not.
"It's enough," Emory said, and his voice was a blade. "End her."
Lincoln raised the gavel. The lake outside curled like a dark mirror. I closed my eyes and let myself fall.
*
They sent me away. The world kept moving: storms, prayers, harvests. The bead burned steady above a shrine where no one looked.
Emory carried on his duties. He learned to speak without me. He let me slip from his skin the way you let go of a garment you once loved. Antonella took small, safe steps toward him. Emil watched and waited and collected crumbs of my memory like a thief collecting jewels.
But the world does not obey the neat lines men and gods draw. The bead warmed in secret. The two small lives I had folded together would not die the way they were supposed to. They were given to a new life below the sky. In a village, under a different name, they grew. Jensen Makarov — a boy with a sharp laugh and a hand that favored a blade — and Jaelynn Patel — a girl with a bright mouth and a temper like sunlight — learned to walk and to love. They loved little things: a jar of sweet fruit, the smell of bread, the sound of the sea.
Years passed. Emory did not know the whole truth. He held onto fragments and let them become his religion.
Then one day the world made rooms for the truth. The bead bloomed. The new sun held fast. The old anger began to erode.
Someone needed to be called to answer. The ones who had fed the gossip, the ones who had let a woman be broken in public, would pay.
I sat at a lake's edge — a place called the Hall of Mirrors, where truths caught the wind and would not lie. I had been given a second form. I could walk. I could speak. I still smelled like salt. The memory of rope and blade were there, but so was a slow, steady heat: hope.
"Are you ready?" Jaelynn — who had grown into a poised, sharp girl — asked. She did not take my hand in the small, casual way a friend might. She stood with the posture that had belonged to me.
Jensen came up behind her. He was taller. His jaw was set.
"I am ready," I said.
We stepped toward the Court of Open Truth. It was midday. Gods and spirits and a crowd of onlookers pressed into the grass. The names that had been whispered in hallways were called aloud today. They would not be allowed to hide.
Antonella sat in the front row. Pride had painted her cheekbones pale. Emil lingered near an iron tree. Lincoln Kristensen presided. Emory was there, his robes weather-worn and his eyes empty.
Jaelynn stepped forward. Her voice was small at first and then clearer. "Antonella Matsumoto," she said.
Antonella smiled the thin smile of someone who expects applause.
"You lied." Jaelynn's voice grew. "You fed the fire. You told stories until the crowd burned what was not yours to burn. You led the Blue of the Peak to me to steal from my mother."
Antonella did not speak.
"You stood and you counted coins of shame," Jens—Jensen—said then. "You let the world speak over a woman who gave her life to save the sun."
The crowd murmured. Antonella's eyes flashed.
"You think you are clever," Emory said suddenly from his seat. "You embroidered truth until it fit you. You pretended to be a light and you were a match."
Antonella's face crumpled then in a way that surprised everyone. She had been so small and sharp, but her mask slid and the real thing underneath was a woman terrified.
"I did what I had to," she said. "I needed him to look my way. I was young. I—"
"You cheated with lies," Jaelynn cut. "You pretended to be the hand that held him when he needed saving. You led a blue thing — Emil Seidel — into our life. You fed him stories. You let him hurt my mother."
Antonella's hands curled. "You'll never know how hard it is to be ignored," she whispered.
"You chose to hurt," I said. "You chose to hide in the crowd while someone else burned. You chose a small, safe fame."
She began to cry. "I am sorry."
"That is not enough," Jaelynn said.
Then the sentence was called.
"You are to be taken to the Pit Gate," Lincoln said. "A public penance. You will stand in the lake of night and we will see if your courage is real."
Antonella went pale. Emil stepped forward with him like a shadow.
"No," Emory said, but his voice had no force left. He had given his voice to shame years ago. "No, I will oversee it. I will see what guilt does."
The crowd moved like the sea. They led Antonella forward. The path to the Pit Gate was long and lined with those who had come to watch — the same ones who had once shouted that I was a demon. Now their eyes shifted. Some wanted spectacle; others wanted justice.
They reached the rim. The Pit Gate opened like a mouth of dark water. The judge's assistants bound Antonella in soft cords so she could stand. Jaelynn and Jensen were allowed to step close. I kept silent. I watched.
"Antonella," said Jaelynn. "You will speak to what you did."
She began with a whisper and then unrolled the whole string of lies she had told, the stories she had sown, the times she had smiled while others fell, the blue thread she had tied with Emil to hide a truth.
She wanted to explain. She wanted to be understood.
"I wanted his look," Antonella said. "I wanted to be seen. I am so small. I thought if I gave him a reason —"
"That is a reason for nothing," Jaelynn said. "You wrote pain."
The lake water steamed. A guard poured cold ashwater over Antonella's head. The ashwater smelled like old things. Antonella inhaled, screamed, and then tried to laugh to stay brave. The crowd made space for the performance.
Here is the part the watchers wanted: the fall.
"Get on your knees," Emory said.
Antonella dropped to her knees. The cords did not hold her. The crowd was close enough to touch. Someone in the rear clicked a glyph to start the Penitence — a living light that tested the soul's fault.
The Penitence burned like a silver brand. Antonella's face changed. It shifted from anger to denial to fear. She started to plead.
"Please. I did not—"
"You lied," Jaelynn said. "You pushed. You egged him on. You used the world’s gossip like a blade. You let my mother be burned."
She kept speaking, step by step, line by line. Antonella's defense unravelled. The Penitence found the lies and flamed. Her hands shook. Tears came faster. She tried to cover her face. She clutched the cords. Her voice climbed to the high, thin pitch of someone who knew she could not hide.
"Forgive me," she said, then, "Please."
"Beg," Jaelynn told her. "Beg in front of those who watched my mother die."
Antonella threw herself into the dirt and began to beg: "I—please—I'm sorry—Emory—Emory—"
Emory's face was unmoving. He listened to her beg and saw the smallness he once had fed. He saw how he had left rage to grow into a forest, and that forest had shaded him from seeing the light.
The crowd leaned in. Someone sobbed. Someone began to chant "No more lies." Another took out a small mirror and filmed the scene. The video would go everywhere. That was part of the justice now: the world had watched me humiliated. The world would watch them humiliated back.
"Do you repent?" Lincoln asked.
Antonella choked on words. "Yes."
"Then stand."
She tried to stand and staggered. She looked at Emory. "Please—"
Emory stepped forward. For a moment everyone thought he would strike. Instead he took off his cloak and threw it across Antonella's shoulders.
"Take it," he said softly. "Wear it. And do not think you can wear truth after this without cleaning it."
He did not spurn her in the spectacle. He did not let the crowd enjoy her brokenness as monster-sport. He gave her a cloak like a cold rebuke. Her knees bent. She hid her face in cloth.
The crowd hissed. Some spat. Some clapped. The Penitence slowly died.
Emil Seidel had been led forward then. The blue butterfly man who had turned cruel specter into physical humiliation was not a small thing. He had his pride. He had been cruel. The court ordered his punishment to be public as well.
Emory looked at Emil and said, "You will lose what you stole from my wife."
A line of priests rose. They sang. The words pulled blue light from Emil like thread. He screamed as those threads were shown to the crowd — the stolen memories he had wrapped inside himself as comfort. He lost his hold on the bead of my mother's faintest thought. He knelt and cried. Those who had watched him once ridicule the helpless now watched him fall.
That day ended in a silence like a held breath. The videos of the punishments would run for days. People would talk. Some would say it was vengeance; some would call it closure. For me the sight of them in pain did not fill my heart with joy. It filled it with something quieter: a sense that truth had been named.
Later, Emory came to me. He had watched the punishments unravel. He had seen Antonella plead and Emil break. He knelt before me, the same way he knelt the day he first promised.
"Kyla," he said. "I was a poor guardian to you. I let rumors make me a coward. I let anger make me stupid. I am sorry. I will spend myself right this time."
I looked at him. Around us the crowd thinned. Jaelynn and Jensen stood together, hands clasped.
"Then show it," I said. "Stay. Let me be the one to know your worst and best."
He looked up like a man seeing the sea after a desert. "I will," he said.
We returned to the hall of the new sun. The bead on the shrine pulsed like a heart. Lincoln waved his hand and smiled sadly. "Justice is not always neat," he said.
"It is never neat," I replied.
Years moved like tides. Antonella and Emil faded into small corners of legend where they were symbols of vanity and cruelty, not giants. Their punishments were retold as a public moment: how a small woman had been almost broken, and how truth and shame had been spread across open air. People watched the tapes and learned a dangerous, good thing: that a lie can make a town, and a truth can break it.
Emory kept his promise. He sat with me in cold nights and helped me stitch what pain was left into a life that moved forward. Jensen and Jaelynn grew into their roles — not as trophies but as hands to carry the world when it was heavy.
One evening, after a long day of sun duties, I stood on the shrine steps. A breeze lifted my hair. Emory came and took my hand like someone asking a favor.
"Kyla," he said, and he said the thing that had once stopped the world. "Marry me again. Not as god and goddess. As two people who have seen what loss does. Marry me as someone who will not let you go."
I looked at him. I looked at the bead on the shrine, steady and kind as a small sun. I thought of the lake, of the Hall, of Antonella on her knees, of Emil unmade.
"Yes," I said.
We married not under thunder but under a low, steady light. People came — some to gawk, some to celebrate. Jaelynn stood as our witness. Jensen carried the ring.
Emory was not made perfect in public then. He had to be made right in small ways. He learned to listen. He learned to be present. He learned to not let pride make monsters of him. That is a long work.
I live now in a softer world. The bead shines. The sun goes on, steady. People rarely judge quickly anymore — or they are quieter about it. When they do shout, the crowd that learned what they can do sometimes answers.
At night I go to the water and watch my reflection. I do not think of my death as an end; I think of it as a turning. I gave what I had. It was not perfect. It was not clean. It made messes. But the bead burns. My children live and laugh and drink bad wine and annoy me like children do. Emory and I have seasons of ease and seasons of storm.
Once, someone asked me in the Hall of Mirrors, "Would you do it again?"
I looked at my hands. "If the world needed it," I said simply. "And if there were a way to do less harm, I would. But I would not let small cruelty convince me to watch a world die."
We are still human, after all.
The End
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