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Chapter 1154: A Repeated Fate

By the time Agatha, Iron Axe, and Edith reached the front, Tower Station No. 10 was three days from completion.

She knew it from the maps, had tracked its progress in briefings for months, but knowing it on paper and seeing the railway actually bending toward Taquila were two different experiences. The double track had split into four at the last junction, spreading out to accommodate the final assault’s supply demands. The terminus station they might never use. The railhead that had begun as a line through empty Fertile Plains and was now a fortified corridor — she had watched it grow kilometer by kilometer in Sylvie’s Eye of Magic reports, and she had thought she understood it.

She had not stood at the lookout tower and seen Taquila before.

It was the third day after their arrival, and the railway was within twelve kilometers. Iron Axe had climbed the tower to review firing angles. Edith was behind her somewhere, talking to the duty officers. Agatha stood at the parapet and looked south.

She recognized it.

Half-buried in the thick growth that had claimed every surface the Red Mist hadn’t actively maintained, the outline of the Holy City was still there beneath four centuries of damage and ruin. The proportions were wrong — walls collapsed or missing, the great towers reduced to stumps — but the shape survived. The shape of a city built on a certain scale, to accommodate a certain density of life. She had walked those streets as a young woman. She had run them, the morning of the fall, because running was the only option left.

“Were you born there?”

Edith had come up beside her. She asked the question in her usual tone — precise, direct, not unkind.

“Grown there,” Agatha said. “I was a child when I was brought to Taquila. I was already a High Awakened when it fell.”

The memory came without her invitation, the way it always came — not as story but as sensation. The specific quality of sound on certain mornings in the Hall of the Quest Society. The weight of a particular ice experiment. The arguments she’d had, the ones she’d won and the ones that had cost her too much to call victories.

You’re really the youngest High Awakened in the history of time. She had been seventeen. It had seemed important then.

This is an order signed by Lady Alice. If you can’t accept it, you’re free to leave. She had not been free to leave. She had stayed and conducted the experiments and carried the decision in her body for the next four hundred years.

The city is breached. Let’s get out of here!

But my sister hasn’t come back yet.

She’s a member of the Defending Army. She’ll never abandon her post.

Her sister had been twenty-three years old. She had chosen her post over escape, because that was the kind of person she was, and Agatha had spent four hundred years simultaneously being grateful for the kind of person her sister was and being unable to forgive herself for leaving.

The ruins in the distance were very still. The Giant Skeletons were still standing inside them, too far to make out in detail, but present.

Now run for your life.

But where can we go? Taquila is gone.

There’s still hope. Cross the mountain. Head to the Barbarian Land.

She had made it. Others had not. The ones who hadn’t made it were under those walls somewhere, four centuries down, their bones pressed into the ground of the city they’d died defending.

Edith waited beside her without speaking. She had the unusual quality, for a person who worked in words and arguments and strategy, of knowing when words stopped being useful.

“I have a request,” Agatha said.

Iron Axe, who had come down from the lookout to join them, looked at her.

“When the First Army is within ten kilometers,” she said, “I’d like the God’s Punishment Witches and I to fire first.”

He understood immediately. She could see it in the way his attention sharpened without his expression changing — the particular focus of a man who had learned to hear what was underneath a request.

“That can be arranged,” he said.

She looked back at the ruins.

She had lived four hundred years carrying two things: the belief that she would see Taquila again, and the guilt that she had survived to see it. She had told herself, over and over, across the centuries, that survival was not cowardice — that she had lived in order to return, that her death in the ruin would have served no purpose, that the purpose was this moment.

She still believed it. She also knew that belief and forgiveness were not the same thing, and that she would not get forgiveness from anyone except the dead.

But she could give them this.

The thunder and flame that would raze what remained of the walls. The sound of the Longsong Cannons rolling across the Fertile Plains, into the ruin, through everything that had been left standing. The relic would come down. The remains of her sisters and her companions and her sister — her actual sister, twenty-three years old, who had chosen her post — would finally rest in the earth of the Fertile Plains without the demon occupation weighing over them.

Taquila would not be rebuilt as it had been. It couldn’t be. Four centuries had happened to it, and to the world, and nothing would unmake that.

But it could be something else.

The plains were fertile. The ground was good. Given time and cleared of the Red Mist, the ruins would become a field, and the field would become the place where the next generation grew their crops and built their houses and lived the kind of ordinary life that the witches of the Union had fought and died to make possible.

That was not a small thing.

She stood at the lookout and looked at the ruins and thought: You’ll be something better. You’ll be what we were trying to make room for.

On the evening of the third day, the alarm sounded.

Sylvie’s voice came through the Sigil immediately: a large force of Mad Demons emerging from the Red Mist-corrupted ground, moving toward the First Army’s lines. Two enormous shapes materializing at the edge of the ruin — massive cylinders of God’s Stone, trailing the specific blankness that meant the Eye of Magic was blocked.

Giant God’s Stones of Retaliation, Agatha thought. The last they have. This is what they’ve been saving it for.

She was already moving for the headquarters stairs when the alarm split the air above the encampment. Around her, the First Army had already begun its response — soldiers moving in practiced quiet, the evacuation flowing into the bunkers in the pattern they’d rehearsed for months.

The battle had come.

She had waited four hundred years for it, and now she ran to meet it, and she was not afraid.

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