Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1146: In the Name of Rose

He chewed the foie gras without tasting it.

The hall moved around him — conversation, music, the mechanical brightness of press cameras — and Roland stood in the noise and ran the problem from the beginning.

Someone is watching me in this Dream World.

Not the witches. Not Zero, who was defeated and contained. Someone else — someone who had access to a level of the Dream World that the Force of Nature didn’t reach, who had written in his champagne without leaving any trace in the surrounding power, who had left a note in a borrowed book weeks earlier. The same hand, almost certainly.

Rose Café, No. 302. We’ll meet when we receive divine revelation.

He’d been turning that second sentence over since he first read it. Divine revelation. In the vocabulary of this world, the phrase had no obvious referent — it was the kind of thing people said in sermons, in poetry, in the ceremony of the martialist circuit. But Roland had a different frame of reference, and in that frame, there was one event that qualified as revelation: the appearance of the Bloody Moon.

The Bloody Moon announced the Battle of Divine Will.

That was when they wanted to meet.

He could accept that — if it was true. It told him the messenger knew things about both worlds, which confirmed they were not simply a construct of the Dream World, not one of the countless people moving through it like figures on a stage. They had access to real information. They were real.

But it raised the secondary problem: where was Rose Café?

He had asked the witches to look for it. No one had found it. The Dream World was built from Zero’s memories — or his own, or some combination — and if Rose Café wasn’t in either, it might not exist as a physical location.

He turned the foie gras over on the little plate Saint Miran had pressed into his hand.

Across the room, two businessmen paused near him, deep in conversation.

“—heard you hired a master for the naming.”

“I had to. Three million, but worth it. Good luck starts with a good name, and I can always earn more. You heard what he called the golf course?”

“Tell me.”

“Green Meadow. Right across from the Clover Group’s green project. Pleasant coincidence.”

“Ha.”

The men drifted past. Roland stood very still.

You can always name it yourself.

The thought arrived fully formed and clean, the way the best engineering solutions did — not built step by step but suddenly present, as if it had been waiting for him to stop looking for it.

He had spent weeks searching for a café that might not exist. But the message said Rose Café, No. 302 — it didn’t say find it. Whoever had sent the message possessed enough power to write in his champagne. They would certainly know what happened in the Dream World between his visits. If he built something and gave it a name, they would know.

And if someone with that level of access had chosen a name that currently belonged to nowhere, perhaps they had expected him to understand that the name was his to create.

Roland did a quick mental inventory. He had taken over the second floor of the warehouse building — that was already arranged, the witches had established it as their gathering space. The ground floor had additional units. He would need to rent two more adjacent to each other, knock through a wall, set in tables and a bar counter. The witches could serve as staff. He had some funds — not unlimited, but enough. If the goal was simply to create a room that matched the coordinates the messenger had given him, he could have something functional within a few weeks.

Room 302. He’d make it 302.

If you want to give someone an address, Roland thought, give them an address that already exists. If they can’t find it — make it exist.

He felt the familiar pressure in his chest that signaled a plan coming into alignment. The same feeling he got when the tolerances worked out on a component design, when the numbers stopped fighting him and started cooperating.

He filed it. He would work out the details back in the waking world.

Fei Yuhan waited until Roland and his witches moved toward the far end of the hall before she crossed to the table where he’d set his glass.

She had seen the moment clearly from thirty meters away. The man had gone absolutely still — the kind of still you didn’t choose, the kind that happened to you — and his hand had tightened on the glass stem so hard that the crystal had cracked. She could see the hairline fracture from here. She confirmed it when she picked it up.

Something in the wine, she thought first. She brought the rim to her nose. Nothing unusual — alcohol, residue of the specific champagne varietal, the slight metallic note of the crystal itself. She drank the remainder in one swallow and stood with the empty glass in her hand, considering.

Not the wine. The wine was ordinary. Which meant whatever had startled him had existed inside the glass without being the wine — which was, by any physics she understood, impossible.

Unless it wasn’t physics. Unless it was something else.

She had been awake for six years. She had fought in forty-three matches and eleven Fallen Evil encounters. She had seen martialists perform feats that redefined her understanding of what a body could do. She had never seen anything that could not, eventually, be explained by the Force of Nature.

Roland had seen something in a wine glass at a business party in Crown Hotel that made him crack the stem.

She set the glass down and looked toward where he had gone, the three young women trailing him like planets.

She had heard their conversation while he was speaking with Garde. Brief fragments — the king of the two worlds, our ministers — which she had taken initially as roleplay or shorthand, the kind of informal language that formed between close friends. But then she had seen his face when he looked at his wine, and she had revised that.

There was too much there. Too much weight in the young women’s expressions, too much practiced authority in Roland’s carriage — not the confidence of someone who had learned it, but the density of someone who had been carrying it for a very long time.

She set the cracked glass down precisely where she’d found it.

Something happened at that moment, she thought. Something real. Something that frightened a licensed hunter.

In Fei Yuhan’s experience, very few things frightened people who had been shaped by actual fear. The things that did were not usually found in champagne glasses.

She looked at the exit. Roland and his witches had already passed through it — she had tracked the movement peripherally. The evening air would be cool outside.

She thought about what she had heard them say, and what she had seen him hold in his face while he said ordinary things to the Clover patriarch.

Who are you, she thought, really?

The question stayed with her all the way to her car. She drove home in the dark with the city’s lights sliding past the windows, and she did not stop thinking about it.

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