Clarissa

"Is there life after death?" —Clarissa, aged eight Clarissa was ten when a maid found her dissecting a rat, her scream piercing through the night. "I only wished to know how it lived," Clarissa said. "Opening it seemed the proper way." She was the daughter of a famed royal physician—one trusted with both the living and the dead. His work filled their halls with the scent of antiseptic and iron. From a young age, she watched closely. When her father found the two girls, each horrified by the other, all he could muster was a sheepish grin. Naturally, he would not punish Clarissa. Not truly, anyways. He only said that while there were certain methods—some knowledge required restraint. Clarissa understood the first lesson. She decided to ignore the second. At sixteen, she was discovered standing over a dying servant's child, her father's surgical blade poised delicately above the boy's chest. She was sent away that same night with a handful of trusted servants to keep close watch over her. The blade, however, she had managed to hide in her stocking. For Clarissa, exile meant freedom. Her tools followed her first. The books and tomes came next—silently acquired, and gravely forbidden. Clarissa continued her study on the boundary separating life and death, but found the results… imprecise. At first, she worked with corpses brought from nearby graves in the dead of night. The decay, however, obscured too much. Rot stole away the answers she sought. So, Clarissa turned to fresher subjects. Recent disappearances drew attention, which in turn brought soldiers. Unlike her father, however, they did not debate with her. Clarissa was tried, condemned, and—fatefully—executed with a single, decisive stroke of a greatsword. As the blade fell, Clarissa looked into its descending arc with a quaint smile. "At last," she thought, "I will have my answer." — She opened her eyes beside a river that did not reflect her. "Curious," said a man watching her. "The current refuses you." "Then, death is not the end?" Clarissa replied, examining her faint, unraveling form. "Not today, not for you," he said. She smiled. — Clarissa awoke where her body had fallen. The world felt distant. Unstable. Her hands slipped through solid matter; her form threatened to scatter like mist. Incomplete. Then she found the blade, the greatsword that had taken her life. When she lifted it, something held. Not the steel—the blood. Understanding followed. Without it, she faded; with it, she remained. So, she began to cut. First, she found the executioner, asleep next to his wife. Then she found their children. Each body she opened anchored her, sharpening her presence while satiating certain curiosities that had plagued her since childhood. And yet, that first incision still lingers in her mind—the way everything in the room stopped when she proved what lay beneath the rat's skin. Emboldened by exile once more, she intends to find out how far that silence can be stretched.