Rewrite That Witch
CH1220 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1220: The Origin of the Story

Roland had the most hectic week of his reign.

There had been signals — subtle ones, spread across weeks — that the Bloody Moon would come earlier than predicted. He had been preparing for it. But the church had forecast a decade; the Taquila witches had said two or three years at minimum. The moon had risen instead right on the heels of the immigration policy, without preamble, catching everyone with their preparations half-made and their breath half-drawn.

And that was only the beginning.

For a week, urgent reports had arrived from cities across the kingdom, all describing the same thing: no one had seen the moon approach. It had not risen. It had simply been there, suddenly present in a sky that had been ordinary moments before, as though it had always existed and the world had simply stopped pretending otherwise.

Roland had developed what he privately thought of as the Bloody Moon habit. Whatever he was doing, his attention would eventually drift to the window. The moon sat there in its red haze, not fully obscured, pressing against the glass with a patient, personal quality. Sometimes, in the unguarded moment before he caught himself, he had the distinct sensation that it was looking back.

According to the Union, the Bloody Moon’s emergence marked the opening of the Battle of Divine Will — the event Roland had been organizing his entire reign around. But preparation and arrival were different countries, and now that he was actually standing at the border between them, everything had a slightly unreal quality. No word from the Fertile Plains. The northern scouts had sent nothing. Neverwinter appeared to be the only city where visible effects had manifested, and the Administrative Office’s reports arrived every thirty minutes without mentioning demons once.

“Your Majesty?”

Nightingale’s voice pulled him back. He blinked. The window again.

“Staring at the sky,” she said.

“Sorry. I couldn’t help—”

She held a piece of dried fish in front of his mouth and waited until he took it. “Don’t apologize. Staring at the moon is fine. You’ve been running flat out. Taking occasional breaks is a reasonable survival strategy.” She settled back onto her couch, tucking one leg beneath her. “I’m happy to watch the moon with you, if it helps. Since the Bloody Moon has something to do with Divine Will, we could call it research.”

Roland shook his head, almost amused despite everything. She always had a framework ready. “I have work. Keep me honest — don’t let me drift.”

“Understood,” she said, and went back to her book.

He turned to the stack of reports.

The Bloody Moon had, in its first week, generated considerably more visible damage than any demon attack. According to the Administrative Office and the Security Bureau: four fires, sixteen crimes, twenty-one deaths inside the manufacturing plants — machinery failures triggered by Anna’s own preliminary investigation — and more than five hundred injuries, ninety percent of them occurring within the first twenty-four hours. The most chaotic week in Neverwinter’s history, by any measure.

His initial read had been simple: mass panic, people behaving badly under stress. But the incident patterns didn’t hold to that explanation. He had asked the Joint Investigation Team to dig further, and what they found was more precise. The chaos was not random fear. It was a physical event. The Bloody Moon’s appearance had caused fluctuations in magical power, and those fluctuations had propagated through every device in the city that ran on it.

Agatha’s report laid out the sequence.

The Bloody Moon had appeared at approximately 5:35 PM. From that moment, every magic-powered device in Neverwinter had been affected to some degree. The Sigil of Recording at the theater had been disrupted, causing the final sequence of The Dust of History to deviate from its recording and blur the line between film and reality for the audience. The electrical systems in the industrial zone had been overloaded, bringing down several machine tools powered by Dawn I. The worst single event occurred at Machinery Plant No. 1, where an aged boiler had detonated — hot steam flooding through the facility, burning workers where they stood. Subsequent inspection confirmed that the boiler had been a safety hazard for some time, its age outpacing the value of the upgrades Candle had applied to its critical components, including the pressure valve.

The disruption had lasted roughly ten minutes before conditions normalized. Ten minutes of overloaded circuits and failed machinery had been enough to touch off a cascade of secondary disasters that produced most of the casualties. The evacuation procedures, though drilled, had fallen apart under the pressure of actual emergency — the death toll would have climbed much higher without Neverwinter’s public health infrastructure. Nana’s contribution had been decisive.

One thing surprised Roland: the Taquila witches had no record of this effect. In the two previous Bloody Moon cycles, the phenomenon had presumably gone unnoticed — because in those eras, magic power had not been woven into the infrastructure of daily life. No one had been running industrial boilers or electric circuits or Sigils of Recording. The disruption had nowhere to go and nothing to damage. Now it did.

The response had been methodical. Plant workers had gone through every facility and removed obsolete equipment. The Administrative Office had drafted a new emergency protocol — calmer in language, more concrete in instructions — and the term “magic-caused accident” had appeared in an official document for the first time.

The theater had reopened after three days. The public had not stayed away — quite the opposite. Word of what had happened at the premiere had spread, inflated by retelling, and people arrived at every subsequent screening hoping to participate in the ending themselves. The film followed its original script now; the disruption had been singular. But the audiences came anyway, restless and expectant, half-believing that if they watched carefully enough, the threshold might dissolve again. It was, in the arithmetic of a very bad week, almost good news.

Still, Roland wasn’t ready to deploy the Magic Cube steam engine. He needed to know whether the magical fluctuation was a one-time event — a spike that coincided with the Bloody Moon’s arrival — or whether it would recur throughout the entire duration of the Battle of Divine Will. If it was confined to the moment of appearance, he could plan around it. If it was continuous, every magic-driven system in Neverwinter was a liability he needed to manage.

Dawn I and the Magic Cube were central to defeating the demons. They were also central to Graycastle’s industrialization. Once people had built their lives around those machines, they wouldn’t give them up easily. But building lives around machines that might fail catastrophically at any moment — that was a different calculation.

The telephone rang.

Administrative Office line. Normally that meant Barov.

Roland picked up. “What now?”

“Your Majesty…” Barov’s hesitation was audible, which was unusual. The man rarely equivocated. “The Astrologer of Dispersion Star just came through my door. He says he has made a major discovery about the Bloody Moon.” A pause. “He says you must come to the observatory and see it for yourself.”

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