Rewrite That Witch
CH100 · Rewrite
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Chapter 100: The Ancient Book and the Traces It Gives (Part 1)

After breakfast a maid arrived and brought them all to Roland’s office, where he handed them the contract — fine parchment, legible hand. Scroll read it aloud for the ones who couldn’t, and they signed it in turn with their fingerprints.

Roland watched them. He knew most of them couldn’t parse the legal phrasing and wouldn’t understand what they were agreeing to in any precise sense, not yet. He also knew that if he had handed them the worst document possible — chains written in ink — they would still have pressed their fingers to it, because they had nowhere else to be and he had given them a warm room and dinner. Both of those facts were true, and he held them both, and he had written neither of those two kinds of contract.

He would not lose his principles for small conveniences. Whatever he was building here, it was a foundation, and a foundation built on exploitation rotted from underneath before you saw the problem.

He handed out the training plans he’d developed the previous night and went through them individually with each witch. When the others had been sent off to begin, he called Leaves, Scroll, and Soraya back.

The door closed. Nightingale appeared from the wall and gave a salute that made two of the newcomers flinch.

Roland drew back the curtains. Morning light came in hard and clean.

“I’ve been thinking about what Wendy told me,” he said. “The attack in the wildlands. Seven survivors. I need to understand what you encountered. Were they demonic beasts?”

“Not beasts,” Leaves said. She was steady — he had noticed that she was nearly always steady, even when the steadiness was costing her something. “They came from beyond the Gate of Hell. Tall, heavily built. They rode demonic beasts. They had magic abilities.” She paused. “Like ours.”

Roland frowned. “Soraya — you were there.”

The young witch nodded.

“Can you draw what you saw?”

She closed her eyes. He could see her working against the memory — the precise cost of having that kind of mind — before she took the paper and went to the table.

The Magic Pen activated with a faint luminescence, moving without her looking, as if her hands were simply copying what her mind had already fixed in place. The image formed gradually: a wide foreground of snow and dark rock, and in the middle distance, figures. Tall. Wrong proportions. Metal gauntlets on one. A second figure holding something that was not a spear but functioned like one. And bodies in the foreground.

When she set down the pen, there was sweat on her forehead.

Roland stepped close and looked at the image. He corrected the word painting in his head: this was documentation. A record. First-person perspective from the moment of the attack, rendered with accuracy she hadn’t chosen but had been unable to prevent.

“This one,” Leaves said, pointing to the figure with the gauntlets. “He could summon lightning. The other one threw spears — much faster than an arrow, further than a bow. They killed more than a dozen of our sisters.” Her voice was level, matter-of-fact, the way you get when you have thought about something enough times that it no longer surprises you even if it still costs you. “But the ability wasn’t constant. There were intervals. When this one’s interval came, I was able to use the opening.”

“You killed them?”

“Cara’s snake had already opened a pipe on Ironhand’s body — something he wore, a container of some kind. Red gas inside. When it leaked, he died. I used the same method on the other one, with a crossbow.”

Roland looked at the picture again. Armored figures in patched leather. Carrying some kind of pressure device that held breathable gas. He thought: oxygen supply. Or something analogous. He thought: creatures that need supplemental air to operate in this environment. He thought: not invincible. Not supernatural. They can be killed.

The technology looked crude — leather and metal and salvage. Whatever they were, they had not crossed some vast technological gulf. They had cobbled together solutions to their own limitations, the same as anyone. The fact that their limitations included needing to carry their own breathing medium said something important about where they had come from.

But that’s a problem for later, he noted internally. The important thing is: they die.

“One more thing,” Leaves said. “In the deep wildlands, we saw a city.”

Roland looked up.

“In the sky. Floating. No matter which direction we moved, it stayed in front of us — always the same distance away. Lightning had called something similar a mirage, when she told stories about the open sea.”

He turned to Soraya. She was still pale, but she took the paper when he offered it and closed her eyes again.

The second image took longer. When it was finished: structures elevated above a landscape he couldn’t identify, vague at the edges in the way of things seen from very far away, with what looked like red cloud cover above them.

He studied it. He couldn’t get enough detail to say anything definitive. But a mirage reflected something real — if this was one, there was a city somewhere in the wildlands that these creatures called home. The red atmosphere above it might be the gas they required. It would explain why they needed to carry it with them, outside their territory.

A second civilization, he thought. Behind the mountain range, further than anyone has gone. He did not say it aloud. There was nothing useful to do with the hypothesis yet.

He set the picture aside. “Scroll. The ancient book — Cara found it at the eastern ruins. You’ve read it.”

Scroll’s expression shifted. “She didn’t allow us to read it. But I — yes. I saw some of it.” She paused. “The text is disordered. And strange. I don’t recommend reading it with the expectation that it describes anything real. The Holy Mountain is not there. We’ve confirmed that.”

“I’d like to see it anyway.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she raised her right hand.

A book materialized in the air — formed of golden light, substantial enough to hold — and its pages turned rapidly, cover to cover, as if being reviewed in fast-forward. When it reached the end, it settled into solid form and came to rest in her hands.

“Your Highness.” She held it out. “I ask that you be the only one to read it. I don’t want my sisters to become what Cara became.”

He took it. “Understood.”

The witches filed out. Nightingale materialized on the couch with her feet on the side table and a strip of dried fish, eating with the focused contentment of someone who had earned a quiet morning.

“You don’t want to look at it?” Roland sat down at the table and opened the book.

“I have no interest in anything that woman obsessed over,” Nightingale said flatly.

He read.

Scroll had been accurate: the text was largely incomprehensible, and not because of the difficulty of the subject matter. The grammar was wrong in a way that went below the level of translation — as if the thought structure itself were different. Isolated words surfaced that he recognized. Blood moon. Stone gate. No Holy City. No road toward salvation. Just long passages that meant nothing to him, even when he could read the individual terms.

Either the original was written this way, or the glimpse Scroll had was incomplete. He had no way to know which.

He moved through quickly, skimming. Most pages were dense with the corrupted text and then blank for stretches, as if the writer had stopped and started repeatedly, or as if pages had been left for content that never arrived.

Near the end, the handwriting changed.

The careful hand from the earlier sections disappeared entirely. What replaced it was urgent, cramped, the pen pressing hard into the page in a way that suggested someone had been writing fast and in poor light or in fear or both.

He slowed down.

He read the first line of the new section. Then he sat back.

We have failed. Mortals cannot overcome the Devil.

He read it again.

We have failed. Mortals cannot overcome the Devil.

The fire on the opposite wall made no sound. Nightingale chewed steadily, looking at the ceiling. Outside, somewhere in the town, someone was hammering.

Roland read the next line.

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