Rewrite That Witch
CH1112 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1112: The Truth

Farrina dreamed of a white room.

The floor was polished, reflective. Nothing in it but a single stone door, tall and lofty, and from behind it — faint, beautiful, eerie — music. She could not name the melody. She had not heard it before, and somehow she understood she would not hear it again after she passed through.

This is probably what the afterlife looks like.

She should have felt peace. The whip and the iron needle and the hammer — all of it fading. The pain going thin, then thinner. She had not broken. She had held. That was everything.

But the reconciliation with herself was not complete. Lorenzo lived. The church was ash. Tucker Torr’s work — her work — all of it undone, and she had not even managed to end the man responsible.

She had failed Torr. She had known, finally, that she was not equal to the task she’d been given. A good leader would have been.

That was all she could do.

The floor was cold under her feet as she walked toward the door. She set her hand on it.

“Farrina…”

A voice. Distant, as if coming through stone.

She stilled.

Joe hadn’t participated in the operation. Lorenzo never caught him. This is a hallucination.

Even knowing it, the tension in her chest released.

That was the thing she hadn’t named — hadn’t let herself name — until this moment. She had not wanted to leave alone.

She had wanted to be needed. Even by a dream.

“Don’t go,” she said. “Stay a while.”

“I’ll be with you,” the voice said, indistinct, words blurring together at the edges. “Wherever you go — until death do us part.”

That would be enough. An illusion would do.

She pushed the door open. The light was blinding.

The light faded.

Farrina opened her eyes to a swirling ceiling. Wooden planks. The slow creak of something moving.

God’s kingdom.

Not what she had imagined.

She turned her head, and a face swam into focus — familiar, exhausted, sleeping on his arm beside her. She called his name twice before he stirred.

Joe opened his eyes and was instantly, completely awake.

“You finally woke up!”

“Woke up.” She repeated it slowly. The pain had returned — her hands, her legs, the deep ache of the brands. Nothing had faded. “Didn’t I just — ”

“You passed out,” Joe said. His hand rested on her hair, light and careful. “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”

It took her a full minute to accept that she was not dead. She had escaped. Lorenzo was —

“Lorenzo.”

“Dead.”

The word landed in her like a stone dropped in still water. She stared at the ceiling, then at Joe, then at the ceiling again.

“How?” She looked around. The room was wrong — not the dungeon, not the Archduke Island. The floor moved in a slow, steady rhythm. “Where are we?”

“A ship. Heading to Neverwinter.” He was watching her with an expression that tried to be calm and was not quite. “You were in a coma three days. The First Army’s medicine saved you. Take it easy. I’ll explain everything.”

He explained for an hour.

“As for the king’s trial,” Joe said — and here the brightness came back into him, the excitement he had been containing — “Sean told me that as long as you’ve never killed or persecuted a witch or a Graycastle citizen, you’re not likely to be sentenced to death. You were in the Vanguard Battalion. I was an assistant priest. Neither of us ever harmed a witch. We’ll survive this, Farrina. All of us.”

He leaned forward. “And your injuries — there’s a witch in Neverwinter, Nana, who can heal anything. Anything at all. I’ll find the money. I’ll do whatever it takes to cure your legs.”

Lorenzo had broken her hands and legs. Had used a hammer on her knees. She could not stand, could not walk. She had catalogued this already, quietly, the way you catalogue something that has already happened and cannot be undone.

But it was not what she heard in his voice that made her chest seize.

“Just because of me,” she said.

“What?”

“Just because of me — ” Her voice tore loose. “You sold yourself to the devil! He destroyed the church, destroyed all of it — how could you go to him? How could you ask that man for help? My life is nothing against the Battle of Divine Will. What is the point — I would rather wait for him to fall than accept — ”

The coughing took her. Wet and deep and wrong.

“Farrina!”

“Don’t — don’t touch me.” Blood on the corner of her mouth. She did not look at it. “He ruined the world. He ruined everything human. How could you ask him — ”

Clap. Clap. Clap.

Applause, from outside the room.

The door opened.

“That’s so touching.” A woman’s voice, dry as chalk, carrying something that might have been genuine curiosity. “I didn’t expect to have a mortal’s support after 400 years. A pleasant surprise.”

“I support the church that protected the human race, not — ” Farrina turned.

She stopped.

The woman in the doorway was tall and unhurried, moving with the ease of someone who had long since stopped being surprised by rooms. She looked perhaps thirty-five. She looked like the portrait in the Martial Arts Hall of Fame — the one that had hung at eye-level since Farrina was a girl, the one she’d stood before more than once trying to understand what it took to become what that woman had become.

Army Commander Enova. Commander of the Premium Corps of the Judgement Army. 400 years dead.

Standing in the doorway of a Graycastle ship, wearing something like a patient smile.

“Go on,” the woman said. She leaned against the bedframe and crossed her arms. “I want to know how much you really mean it. I haven’t been flattered by a mortal in a very long time.”

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