Page 95 of The Ascended
"What did you do?"
"I ran." She resumed walking, her stride aggressive, kicking up sand with each step. "I was eleven. Middle of the night, stole food from the temple kitchens."
"Eleven. Gods, Marx."
"I learned fast. How to hide, how to steal, how to make people leave me alone." She glanced at me, a shadow passing over her face. "That last one was easiest. Turns out, when you can make someone's teeth fall out just by glaring at them, they tend to give you space."
"Where did you go?"
"Everywhere. Nowhere." She shrugged. "Spent a few months in the capital, living in abandoned buildings. Made it to the coast,worked on fishing boats where they didn't ask questions about a child traveling alone. Turns out there are worse things than a curse."
I couldn’t find words. I had known something terrible must have plagued her past, but I’d never imagined it was this bad.
"Got worse as I got older. And harder to control." She looked past me, her gaze distant. "I'd settle somewhere, try to build something like a life. Get a job at an inn, or apprentice with someone desperate enough to overlook my reputation. It would be good for a while. Weeks, sometimes months."
"So what happened?"
"I'd get angry. Or scared. Or sometimes just tired." She sighed, the sound heavy with resignation. "And something would happen. The inn would burn down. Or my employer would have an accident."
"That's not entirely your fault. I mean, it's not exactly like you could control it." I reached for her arm, but she stepped away.
"Maybe not directly. But I was the common denominator. Every place I touched turned to shit eventually." Her voice held no self-pity, only a hard-won acceptance. “So I made it my mission to learn to control it." She looked past me, her gaze distant. "Eventually, I realized it wasn't just tied to my emotions. It was tied to my thoughts."
"So it was mental?"
"Exactly. I started paying attention. Really paying attention." She tapped her temple. "There was this... moment. Right before a curse would manifest. Like a switch flipping in my mind. Took me months to even notice it was there."
"How did you learn how to control the switch?"
"Trial and error. Lots of error." A wry smile crossed her face. "I'd sit alone for hours, thinking horrible things about rocks, trees, my own boots—anything that couldn't suffer. Trying to catch that moment, that switch, and hold it. Stop it from flipping."
"That sounds exhausting."
"It was. But I finally learned to flip the switch on purpose instead of by accident." She flexed her fingers, studyingthem. "Then came the hard part—learning to aim. To be specific. Instead of just thinking 'I hate you,' I had to think 'I want your left bootlace to snap.' Precise intentions, precise results."
"That's... actually brilliant."
"Had to be." She kicked at the sand. "By the time I was sixteen, I could curse a single thread in a piece of cloth. Make it unravel without touching anything else. All because I learned to control that switch in my mind, to direct my thoughts like arrows instead of letting them explode like wildfire."
We walked in silence for a moment before she spoke again. “Before that, I’d actually started to believe I really was cursed. Or maybe that I wasthe curse. That maybe my parents had been right, and I was some kind of abomination that needed to be purged."
"That's ridiculous?—"
She cut me off. "I know that now. These powers—it's just another kind of gift. A shitty, inconvenient, occasionally homicidal gift, but still." She looked at me directly, challenge in every line of her body.
“How did you get discovered?” I asked. “Or did you volunteer?”
"Of course I didn’t volunteer. I was nineteen. Working at a bakery in a port town called Greywich. The owner was half-blind and desperate for help, didn't care about what I did or who I was as long as I showed up on time." She peered out across the black sea. "That's where I met Finn."
The name came out soft, careful, like she was afraid it might break.
"He worked at the lumberyard. Used to come in every morning for bread, always with some terrible joke." Her lips twitched. "First person in years who didn't flinch when I looked at him. Found out later his sister had been blessed—taken to the Trials when he was twelve. He recognized the look in my eyes."
"He knew what you were?"
"Figured it out quick enough. Caught me one night practicing my control in the alley behind the bakery. I was ready to run, had my baghalf-packed before he said—" She paused, swallowing hard. "'You must be so tired of running.'"
Her gaze clouded.
