The Cup
Every five years, on the night of the autumn equinox, the city of Thel held the Cup.
It was not a single cup. The Cup was the name of the ritual. Every adult in Thel — every citizen over thirteen — stood in their front courtyard, at the moment the bells rang at sundown, and drank a small porcelain cup full of a clear, slightly bitter liquid. The liquid had been mixed by the city's keepers. It had been mixed for five hundred years. It contained — the keepers said, without going into detail — the herb that allowed the city to *forget the worst* of the year just past.
The Cup did not erase a person's whole life. It erased, very precisely, the most recent twelve months. It was the city's way of staying gentle with itself. The keepers said: *every city carries grievances. Most cities let them rot. Thel does not. Thel takes the worst year of the cycle and lets it go. The peace we have, we have because we let go.*
Pia had been told this her whole life. She had watched, four times before, as her parents drank the Cup. They had blinked, set the cup down, and looked at each other with a kind of new kindness. Pia, as a child, had been told that the Cup was a gift. She had been told that one day, when she turned thirteen, she would join them.
Pia had turned thirteen the year before this Cup.
This was her first.
Her parents had explained, gently, what to expect. *You will not lose