Chapter 1240: The Witches’ War
“Surrounded? Stop performing. Sir Alpha can sense every fluctuation of the Force of Nature, there’s no way —”
A flying shipping box caught the traitor in the nose. He folded backward and didn’t get up.
The second man stood with his mouth open and watched the witches come out from everywhere. Some dropped from above; some rose from beneath the ground; most appeared at close range from nothing, as though they had simply been standing there all along, patient and invisible, waiting for the word.
It made no sense. These women had been within ten meters of him. Even without a Force of Nature, he should have heard their breathing. He should have heard their feet.
Why hadn’t the scouts warned him?
He had no time to work out the answer.
The two sides crashed together. The quiet port became loud all at once.
Ling was in the shadow of a shipping container, eight meters above the ground.
Light and shadow always traveled together. The dump site’s sodium lamps were bright, but the containers they illuminated threw shadows that were absolute — compressed, definite, opaque — and Ling existed inside them the way water exists inside a vessel. If someone had looked at her from behind, they would have seen half a head protruding from the dark, a few small bubbles escaping her nostrils in silence. The rest of her was darkness wearing her shape.
She had always loved submerging into shadows. It was warmer than a hot spring, more complete than any other sensation she knew. She had believed that pleasure gone forever after becoming a God’s Punishment Witch — surrendered with everything else her body used to feel. Then Phyllis had told her about the Dream World a year ago, and she had discovered that the world gave it back.
It gave back more than shadows.
Ling had come to love this place from her first visit. King Roland — a mortal with a will too large for his body, now the Chosen One whose authority inside the Dream World could not be challenged, even if he still couldn’t activate the instrument — had been badgered constantly by Ling, Pasha, and Celine to bring them here. Ling had specifically lobbied to become guardian of the three witches sent to school, and she had won.
She knew she had demons to kill. She had always had demons to kill. It didn’t mean she couldn’t also want something else.
Anyone who tried to damage this world was an enemy of the Taquila witches. Simple as that.
The moment Roland’s fingers snapped, Ling rose out of the shadow like smoke reversing, and drove her dagger into the chest of the nearest Fallen Evil on the high ground. Ordinary steel couldn’t damage a Fallen Evil fatally. She pushed magic power through the blade behind the thrust, and felt the two forces interfere with each other inside the creature — the Fallen Evil’s power destabilizing, the energy turning against itself. More evidence for what His Majesty had theorized: Force of Nature and magic were the same substance, only differently addressed. Both from the Erosion. Both responsive to each other the way fire responds to fuel.
She pulled out the corrupted core before the body finished collapsing.
Then she was moving again, three meters, five meters, over a container’s edge and behind the next Fallen Evil before it understood what had happened to the first.
The scouts were gone inside two minutes.
Ling stood at the highest point of the loading area and watched the battle spread below.
All the witches were fighting at full capacity — which meant, for God’s Punishment Warriors, at a level sharper than they had managed four hundred years ago. The transformation had stripped sensation and left behind something purer: speed, precision, endurance that didn’t tire. Their morale, though, was what she was watching. You could train a body. Morale was different.
Betty was holding an iron shipping box in one hand and driving through a cluster of Fallen Evils like a wedge splitting timber. Her strength tipped briefly into Transcendent range and she didn’t waste it on anything delicate.
Twinkle and Phyllis moved as though they shared one rehearsed mind: Twinkle’s ability saturated the enemy’s sight and then Phyllis’s Blade Claws were already reaching the vital point, already withdrawing, already moving on. They had been partners a long time.
Dawnen and Rother were quieter but just as effective.
Ling watched them and felt the Taquila age for a moment — not as grief, but as a specific, located thing she could hold in her hands and examine. The darkness after the three Holy Cities fell. The collapse of the Union. The long centuries when every resource of the self went into surviving the new body, adapting to the absence of sensation, the absence of taste and warmth and pain. Morale had drained away like water from a cracked vessel. She had thought, at the lowest point, that they might not survive long enough to be killed by demons — that they would simply dissolve under accumulated pressure.
Then the Third Border City had gotten noisy and crowded and full of food, and someone had asked where the best take-out was, and something that had been held very tightly for a very long time had loosened.
The Dream World had continued what Graycastle began. It gave back what the transformation had taken: appetite, curiosity, the small pleasures that accumulate into a reason to persist. And with the pleasures came the anger that goes with having something to lose.
That was why their morale was what it was.
That was why none of them could tolerate an Erosion here.
Ling dropped from the container, landed on the back of a Fallen Evil, and rejoined the fight.
The moment Betty launched the shipping box, Roland was already moving toward the leader.
He had learned from experience what the red and black field generated by magic creatures could do, and what the black tentacles meant. Even witches struggled with both. But the magic creature couldn’t harm Roland. That gave him a specific job: hold the leader, anchor him, and let the witches clear the field around them.
Alpha couldn’t break free. The composure in his voice came apart in pieces.
“You —”
“I told you I was the creator,” Roland said, and didn’t let him finish. He knew what was coming. He’d heard the speech before — variations of it, the disbelief, the bargaining dressed as argument. He had no patience for it. He drove Alpha to the ground and hit him, again and again, not with art but with the systematic intent of someone settling something, until the mask fractured and fell away and revealed what was underneath.
An astrolabe. The man’s core was his face.
Roland ripped it free.
The energy in him detonated outward through his palm as light — a beam so sharp it scoured the air around it. In the same moment, every core of every Fallen Evil in the port tore loose and shattered, thousands of fragments of cold fire that rose and converged overhead and lit the dark sky from below, as though the port had briefly been given its own private constellation.
Roland felt the world shift. Not dramatically — not like tectonic movement — but a small, definite adjustment, the way a shoulder settles after a bone moves back into place.
Then the light swallowed him.
Something poured into his skull. The pain was clean and total, an erasure rather than a wound, and for a long moment he had no body to stand in — only static, the snow-screen noise of a television tuned to a dead channel. His vision dissolved into it, the pixels dense and white and hissing.
On the static he saw a pit.
Not a crater. Not a sinkhole. A pit scaled to dwarf everything beside it — something at the bottom of which there might be no bottom. The surrounding land was flat and featureless and enormous, and around the pit’s rim, black dots moved with the purposeful agitation of ants mobilizing. Slowly a platform rose, small against the pit’s scale as a coin on a tabletop.
He had seen material like this before. On the mural in the Temple of the Cursed.
Roland focused, and the image sharpened. The black dots were creatures — wriggly, radiating — the Radiation Clan, the subjects of the mural, the ones who had stood at the center of an ancient story he’d only glimpsed before.
A dozen of them mounted the platform carrying what appeared to be fragments of something. A relic. They encircled the platform and their bodies contracted and expanded in a rhythm he recognized as ceremonial.
Below, thousands of others — Match Men — were pushed into the pit.
The last piece was inserted. The transparent crystal sealed itself, complete, and erupted with light, and drifted downward toward the darkness.
This was the Bottomless Land. He was nearly certain. The place Lan had named.
Then the orange column erupted from the pit and punched the sky. Far above, a Bloody Moon hung at the column’s upper end, and Roland understood in an instant what he was seeing: the Bottomless Land and the Erosion were the same phenomenon viewed from two ends. Entrance and exit. Aperture and sky.
The Radiation Clan surged toward the pit — not falling, but rising, as though the column carried them, lifting each black dot from the earth and bearing it upward. Drifting like ash, but going the wrong direction, going up. In moments the column was dense with them, innumerable, dissolving into a new realm.
A civilization’s upgrade. He found no better phrase for it.
Then a sigh — deep and singular, reverberating through the space his skull occupied, too clear to be a product of the noise. A voice that had lived a long time.
Time accelerated. The pixels thickened.
The image resolved again: cities and small towns arrayed around the pit, inhabited by those who had stayed. Not everyone had gone through. Some had been unwilling — afraid of the sky, afraid of what came after, or simply attached to what they already knew. Roland watched the last few enter the column and vanish, small and individual, like the final travelers departing a station long after the trains had stopped running. They looked, at that distance, extremely lonely.
The column dimmed.
Flickered.
Went dark.
Static reclaimed the screen — and Roland was ready to believe it was finished, that the story had ended in peace, that the remaining Radiation Clan would rebuild and live and in time fill their cities with new noise.
Then the wall appeared.
At first he thought it was an artifact of the noise, a compression error in whatever was projecting this into his mind. But it kept coming, a line across the horizon that thickened and rose and kept rising. A wave. The top of it reached toward the clouds, and where the sun caught it, it built a new skyline out of moving water, and then it hit the little towns and the pit and everything around the pit, and all of it was gone.
The disaster didn’t stop there.
Volcanoes, at distances that had seemed safe, uncapped themselves and threw ash in every direction until the sun was a rumor. Lightning split the sky. Rain that turned to ice before it stopped. A winter with no bottom to it. The land remade itself in ways that suggested the planet itself was revising its own geography, shaking loose what hadn’t been required.
Static again. Dense.
Before it closed completely, a last frame: ice retreating. A green stalk splitting cold soil, going up.
“Your Majesty —”
“Your Majesty, are you all right?”
Hands on his shoulders. Someone shaking him with controlled urgency.
Roland blinked. The pixels vanished. The port was around him — the lights, the containers, the smell of river water and machine oil — everything precisely where he’d left it.
“All done?” he said, and looked at his palm.
Phyllis thought the question was directed at her. “Yes. Not one escaped. The magic cores dissolved a few minutes after. You were just standing here — like you’d fallen asleep on your feet.” Her voice held the restrained worry of someone who had been waiting longer than she wanted to admit. “Are you actually all right?”
Roland wasn’t certain yet. What he’d seen had not felt like a vision. It had felt like memory — not his, but fully inhabited, every detail crisp and retrievable in the way only real events are, carrying with it the specific exhaustion of a life lived across millennia compressed into minutes. He understood the sigh now. He couldn’t have explained how, but he did.
He thought of what Lan had told him.
The truth is always what you understand.
Was that the final Battle of Divine Will? Not a war but a natural catastrophe at the end of a civilization’s arc? He held the question and didn’t force an answer.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I saw something strange.”
“Strange phenomena are not our most pressing concern right now,” Phyllis said, with the precise emphasis of someone who had been patient long enough. “That light beam just now was visible from half the port. We need to go before the Association traces it back here.”
“Understood.” Roland nodded. “Same routes back.”
He didn’t know whether what he’d seen belonged to Alpha or to something older. But the certainty moved through him quietly and settled: one day he would understand all of it.
And the day was coming.