Light in, Dark out

The stones cut into her knees. Blue-grey granite worn smooth by thousands of genuflecting limbs. She knew not to bleed on them. Blood attracted attention.

Seven hours since Morning Illumination. Her bones ached. Through the high window, light crawled across the floor—time permitted only in slivers. Measured in illumination's slow arc.

The woman entered without sound. Always did. The girl had learned to feel the pressure change when a door opened. She didn't look up, but something inside her flinched away. A part still unburned. The part that remembered before.

The woman smoothed her sleeve with two fingers—the ritual before correction. "Recite."

The words came automatically: "I am cleansed by light. I am emptied of shadow. I am made new in illumination." But her tongue tripped on the last phrase. A word gone missing.

The woman's foot shifted. The girl tensed.

"Again."

She tried. Her mouth opened. Closed. Instead of the missing word, a memory surfaced: yellow curtains, summer heat, a hand on her forehead. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, refusing the doctrine.

The slap caught her temple. She swayed but didn't fall. Falling meant starting over.

"You are not trying." The woman's voice had that edge—fine-grained sandpaper that emerged when disappointment hardened into purpose. Behind it vibrated something else: conviction layered over uncertainty. "Stand."

She stood. The white tiles drank the soles of her feet. Not heat. Not cold. Just wrong. A clinical wrongness that pulled memories through skin, bleeding identity into the compound below. Her thoughts bled into the grout where names went to die.

The woman's copper pendant caught the light. For three generations, the Covenant of Radiance had refined their methods—light frequencies that disrupted memory, purified thought. The Covenant claimed divine revelation. The records they'd burned spoke of military research, thought reform, targeted neurological manipulation. Both versions might be true.

"The corridor of thresholds waits," the woman announced, voice lifting into ceremonial register.

They moved through halls of identical white paths bordered by copper inlays. Other girls passed, heads down, steps measured. She recognised some by their walk—the slight drag of a left foot, the forward roll of shoulders against perpetual cold. The tall one who breathed only through her nose since Naming Day. Their faces had become interchangeable. Features smoothed by prayer into pale ovals, differentiated only by varying intensities of devotion.

The corridor stretched ahead. Twelve illuminated circles embedded in the floor, each ringed with microscopic script—the Twelve Renunciations. Amber for memory, cobalt for desire, crimson for ancestry. Twelve stages of surrendering the self.

"Renounce."

She drew breath, feeling the first circle—amber—warming beneath her feet. "I reject the dark that hides within me."

The circle pulsed once, accepting. She moved to the second, cobalt blue.

"I surrender all that I was before the light."

The third threshold: crimson that seemed to drink her shadow. Her knees began to tremble. The muscle in her right thigh spasmed—a small rebellion her body enacted before her mind could stop it. A trickle of sweat ran down her spine, cold as confession.

"I... I am grateful for my cleansing."

"Louder."

She repeated it, but the circle remained cold. Unlit. Her stomach clenched.

A flash of memory hit her: last month's failure. Her body arched against steel. Mouth stretched wide around a silent scream as they poured light directly into her eyes. The sound she'd made afterwards—not words, just animal noise. Three days without voice.

The woman's silence stretched behind her, gaining weight with each heartbeat. A faint click of tongue against palate—the tell that preceded advanced correction.

"Continue. Without light."

She moved through the remaining thresholds in darkness. Each confession vanished into void. The sacred circles refused to glow. The darkness pressed close—not the flat absence they taught her to fear, but something textured. At the final circle, she couldn't speak at all.

The woman's footsteps retreated. Left alone in the black, something inside her chest unknotted. Strange, how punishment could feel like privacy.

There were stories about what happened when the light took too much. Some said the broken ones began speaking to mirrors, addressing reflections by forbidden names. Others stopped sleeping, their dreams burned out. They always smiled, those ones. Wide. Unblinking. Their gaze fixed on something just above everyone's heads.

One girl whispered a name once. Not aloud, just enough for the light to hear during morning illumination.

They found her later, trying to dig out her own eyes, repeating "too dark inside" until her voice gave out.

Names weren't spoken after sundown. To speak any name when darkness fell invited the wrong ears to listen.

Her skin buzzed from the tiles' resonance. Like sunburn beneath her ribs. The taste never left her teeth—metallic and sterile.

"When you cannot remember the words," the woman said, returning to retrieve her, circling with the precise steps of authority, "it means you remember other things. What are you remembering?"

She remembered soup. Warm, orange, sweet at the edges. Autumn soup that steamed windows, made ghosts against glass. A pottery bowl with blue flowers climbing its side. The weight of the spoon in her small hand. The voice that said careful, it's hot. The smell of nutmeg that meant safety.

A voice from a doorway. A woman different from this one, whose hands moved like birds when she spoke. Who sang when she thought no one listened. Who called her—

Grass-stained knees. The dampness of earth after rain. A yellow raincoat with toggle buttons that clicked when she ran. The sound of her name carried across a green field. Someone calling her home.

The memories came faster now, unstoppable. Her eyes filled with tears she couldn't explain. The prayer lodged behind her tongue like a bone.

That was the edge of memory. Everything beyond belonged to the light—scrubbed away during her initial cleansing. Three days in the Chamber of Radiance, voices reciting protocols until she'd begged to be emptied.

The woman's fingers pressed into her shoulders, finding meridian junctions. "What. Are. You. Remembering?"

"Nothing." A whisper.

"Louder."

"Nothing." Her voice cracked.

"You lie even to yourself now. That's progress." The woman's grip softened momentarily. For a heartbeat, her expression fractured. As though she, too, remembered soup and grass stains. Then something else flickered in her eyes—recognition quickly masked.

The woman knew her. Before.

The moment closed like a door. The woman's face reassembled. The light returned to her eyes. But the glimpse remained—the proof that something existed before illumination.

They moved her to the small chamber. Ten paces, left turn, second door marked "Reconciliation." The stones here were colder. She'd left parts of herself in them before—blood, tears, sweat. Three nights last week when she'd tried to keep her eyes closed during purification baths. They'd held her lids open until they bled.

Darkness touched her like wet cloth.

She curled against the wall. Copper-salt air. In black, memory moved wrong. Voices. Shapes.

She started counting heartbeats. One-two-pause. Lost track when her ribs began shivering in prayer cadence: light in, dark out. Her body knew the rhythm even when her mind wandered.

Later—when her fingernails had softened and her mouth dried—the woman returned. Found her in the corner, arms wrapped tight around herself.

"Have you remembered how to pray?"

The words were there again, lined up like soldiers. "I am cleansed by light. I am emptied of shadow. I am made new in illumination's grace." The missing word had returned—grace. The word that completed the circuit.

But something else had taken precedence. A question she'd never dared ask.

"What was I called? Before?"

Silence stretched until she thought she'd only imagined speaking. The darkness gathered around her question, giving it substance.

The woman crouched beside her. Robe rustling like paper burning. She smelled of soap and something underneath—salt or fear. A human scent the purification regimen hadn't erased.

"You must forget such things." Her voice softened unexpectedly. "Names are anchors to the past. The illuminated need no anchors."

A pause. Then, barely audible: "I was called something, once."

Her palm connected with the girl's cheek. Soft. Almost gentle. Like adjusting a picture frame.

The words escaped before she could catch them. Not the required line. Not doctrine. Just a raw, broken sound: "I don't understand." Tears came with the words—unauthorised, forbidden. Her lungs forgot the prayer cadence. Her breath caught, uneven, uncontrolled. "I don't—I can't—"

She reached for the light. The inner radiance they'd taught her to summon. Gone. The space where doctrine lived was hollow.

"Please," she begged. Wrong word. Wrong tone. "Cleanse—" Her voice broke. "Fix me." She clawed at her own face, trying to erase the tears, trying to make herself clean again. But her hands weren't sanctified. They smeared impurity.

The woman's eyes widened. For one unguarded moment, they shared the same pain. Something in the woman's posture faltered—her shoulders curving inward like wilting stems. Her hand rose halfway to her own face before catching itself. A tremor passed through her body, visible only in the flutter of her sleeve.

Then the door slammed in the woman's gaze.

"Understanding is not required. Obedience is." She stood, smoothing her robe. "Enlightenment comes after surrender, not before."

But the woman was already gone, leaving only the confession's echo. And a proof: something. Even the enforcers had names before. Even they could remember.

After the woman left, she tried on words in the dark. Not prayers. Just sounds:

River. Stone. Bone.

None fit. Like wearing someone else's clothes.

Three days after the confession, she found it scratched behind the water basin. Gouged deep by someone's fingernail, strokes ragged with desperation: Élysie.

She stared until the letters blurred, pulsing with their own internal light—not the sterile brilliance of the Covenant but something warmer, belonging to flesh and blood. She touched it. Pulled back like it might bite.

That night, she traced the letters with one finger, feeling each groove like a map home.

The next morning, she spoke it into her palm. The sound sat wrong, dangerous. Yet familiar.

That evening, heart crashing against ribs, she faced the empty chamber.

"Élysie."

Her skull split at the seams.

Behind her eyes, cascading images: a hobby horse with a golden mane. A yellow dog with one brown ear. Green curtains moving in summer wind. A woman calling her in from play, a name on her lips—this name. Her name.

Blood welled where she'd bitten her tongue. Her fists curled, nails cutting crescents into her palms.

"Élysie," she repeated, louder.

Panic rose. What had she done? The name was poison. The Covenant warned that old names were traps laid by the darkness. She tried to force herself to vomit the name out, to cleanse herself. She pressed fingers down her throat, gagging. But the name wouldn't come up. It had already rooted inside her.

Her stomach convulsed. She vomited bile tasting of metal. The purification rituals had hollowed her out, leaving room for the light's invasion. Now something else filled those spaces—something that predated the Covenant's cleansing.

Herself.

Her shadow moved wrong. It rippled against the wall where no light source disturbed it—a dark echo of her form stretching, testing its edges. Reaching.

The pendant around her neck—the one given at initiation, the small silver disk incised with the sacred eight-point star—cracked. A hairline fracture dividing light from dark. The pain that followed was instant: a slicing behind her eyes as the Covenant's channel fractured. Blood dripped from her left nostril. She tasted blood drawn from stone.

On her knees, she tried one more prayer: "I am cleansed by—" But the words turned to ash in her mouth. The light no longer reached her. Or she no longer reached for it.

The woman's voice whispered from the corridor. Not her stolen name but her given one: Light-blessed.

There was no one. Just the building settling. Just the sound of evening lockdown. Yet the walls seemed to listen—the same way they always had. The tiles beneath her palms felt warmer. Aware.

She wondered if others remembered their names, or if they'd surrendered them willingly. Some said complete illumination left a shine in the eyes—too bright, too empty. Like polished metal reflecting everything, containing nothing.

She had reclaimed what they'd taken. Not given. Not earned. Stolen back.

That night, after final bell, she whispered her true name into the dark.

"Élysie."

Nothing stirred.

Not the walls.

Not the light.

But inside her chest, something ancient awoke. A rhythm different from the cadence of prayer. Not light in, dark out—but a wild pattern, syncopated and alive. The sound of herself, returning.

The copper inlay near the door flickered once. A small, acknowledging pulse.

The light was still watching. It always would be.

That night, while she slept, something moved through the dormitory. Silent. Shadow-shaped. Counting beds.