The Inquisition does not burn books. That is a common misconception. A fire lit up by books doesn't burn as bright as the bodies of the the people who read them. The inquisition lusts for the bright sparks of righteousness and purification in order to warm their hands.

  I know this. I am the ash they left behind.

  My memory starts at age twelve. I wish I knew what my life was before that. When I try to remember it's just white noise. Static. A hole in my heart where my childhood should be. They call it "The Washing." A poetic name for taking a girl whose mother smelled like dried sage and healing poultices, and scrubbing her brain with holy fire until she forgot her own name. They renamed her Nyssara. They put a sword in her hand, dressed her in black leather, and told her she was on the right path now.

  I believed them. God, I believed them.

  Thankfully I wasn't alone in the dark. There was also Selyse. The one who slept in the bunk above mine. She was faster than me, stronger than me, brighter than me. When the conditioning made me scream, she was the one who held my hand through the bars of the bed frame.

  "It's just weakness leaving the body," she would whisper. "We’re being forged, Nys. Iron doesn't ask why it's in the furnace."

  She was the perfect weapon, a blade that loved to be swung. I was just the stubborn one who refused to break. For fourteen years, we hunted heretics together. We killed things that bled and begged and looked disturbingly similar to the people we were supposed to be protecting. Selyse called it justice with pride in her voice. I called it duty and went to sleep early.

  I was efficient. And hollow as well.

  One day I remember vividly. The raid on the apothecary’s hidden basement. Selyse was upstairs, securing the perimeter, keeping the world at bay while I tore through the "heretical artifacts."That’s when I found the journal. It wasn't a grimoire. It was a journal; bound in cracked blue leather, smelling of lavender and rot. The handwriting was jagged, frantic—a woman writing by candlelight while the hunters banged on the door.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  "My daughter has grey eyes. The color of a storm before it breaks. She is kind. She cries when she steps on a beetle. She will be a better healer than I ever was."

  I looked in the mirror that night.

  I had grey eyes. Storm eyes.

  But I wasn't kind. I hadn't cried in a decade. And I wasn't a healer. I was a murderer in the name of god who knew quite a few ways to sever a hamstring but couldn't remember how to bandage a scraped knee. I didn't burn the journal. I slipped it inside my tunic, against my skin. It burned colder than any fire. Selyse asked me later what I’d found. "Just trash," I told her. It was the first time I lied to her. And the reasons to lie to her stacked up so fast.

  Then came the curse-blade. The mission where I hesitated, and the rot took my future. "You will survive," the doctors said, their eyes full of professional pity. "But your womb got damaged too. You will never carry life."

  Selyse told me it was a blessing. "Now nothing ties you to the earth," she said. "Now you are purely the mission."

  She meant it as comfort. She never thought about what I wanted in life. I started reading novels. The ones with the cheap, painted covers and titles like The Knight’s Vow or Love in the Time of Dragons. They smell like cheap glue and desperate fantasy. I read them by candlelight and felt like they were glimpses into a world many women chose for themselves. I know life isn't like that. I know the knight usually dies of dysentery and the dragon eats the princess. But they always follow a script. In those pages, broken things get fixed. Mistakes are forgiven. Whatever burnt to ash reunites with the tree it came from.

  And then I met Yozi.

  He is not a hero. He is a calculator in a tattered scarf. He views people as variables in an equation he is desperately trying to solve. He should be everything I hate—a criminal, a pact-bearer, a thief. But when he cut his own side... when he carved a wound into his flesh just to balance the ledger against mine? It introduced enirely new digits into the math I was taught.

  He is a good man trying to convince the world he is a monster so he can survive. I am a monster trying to remember how to be the girl with the grey eyes who cried over beetles.

  We are a mess, the two of us. A comedy with no punchline. But as I sharpen my blade in the dim light of this safehouse, listening to him argue with the demon in his head, I realize something.

  I am not what Selyse saw in me. I am not the perfect weapon. I am not the ash in the furnace anymore.

  I am Nyssara. And I just started burning for real.