Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1276: An Overlooked Ability

Roland took a blank sheet of paper from his desk and roughed out the math.

Average age in the urban core: forty to fifty. Temporary residential zone: around thirty-five. Fifteen years of difference, compressed into the span of one city. And that gap had opened in five years — since Border Town had been nothing more than a frontier outpost, a place refugees fled from rather than toward. Nana Pine and Lily had done most of it: healing, preventing infection, buying years back from the ordinary losses of medieval life. Five years to gain fifteen.

That was not a small thing.

“She can survey a thousand people in two days?” Roland asked, setting his paper aside. “She’s not examining them one by one.”

“No. If she has sufficient power, she can read the numbers for everyone in a given area at once.” Wendy kept her voice level. “But she’s never tested her limit before. She doesn’t know where it is.” A beat. “She’s always thought of her ability as a curse. She can see when people will die and can’t change anything about it.”

“Like watching everyone around her count down,” Nightingale said softly.

Roland thought this was entirely wrong — the framing, the conclusion, all of it. This was not a curse. This was a precision instrument arriving, by chance, exactly when it was needed.

Every government that reached a certain scale hit the same wall: policy without data was navigation without a map. You made decisions that affected tens of thousands of people and had no way to track whether they were working. Even a well-organized census took decades to build — and a census only told you who had lived, never who was going to die, and never why. You needed to know what the numbers meant: which conditions killed people young, which interventions extended life, which districts needed resources first.

Scroll had built Neverwinter’s administrative apparatus piece by piece, dispatching literate officials to local community offices, layering one reporting structure on another. It was remarkable work. It was also, still, the skeleton of something: a system that could tell you what had happened, but only after the fact.

Momo could skip everything. She could survey an entire district in an afternoon and return with lifespan data that would normally take a generation to accumulate. Once Wendy decoded the color system — once they understood what conditions darkened a number, whether it was hunger, disease, environmental contamination, something else — Momo could become the foundation of a statistical apparatus the kingdom had never had. Not a department that tracked deaths after they occurred, but one that predicted them while they could still be prevented. A live map of the kingdom’s health.

The nobles of the Kingdom of Wolfheart had let her go without understanding what she was. Roland was not going to make the same mistake.

He had already decided. Momo would have a position in the Administrative Office, working alongside Scroll. Minister was not an impossible endpoint.

“Does Nana have a slot today?” he asked, closing the report.

Wendy nodded. “She’s working. Would you like to visit?”

The hospital was the busiest location in the city in any normal week; after a major campaign, the waitlist stretched into the hundreds. Nana Pine moved from room to room with the schedule of someone who had long since stopped counting hours. Her ability had one rigid constraint: healing a shattered limb exhausted her magic in roughly fifteen minutes. Injuries that had cost more than a palm’s worth of flesh she no longer accepted — those patients received a certificate of disability instead. When Nana came of age, or upgraded, they would be allowed to the front of the queue.

The thought of Nana’s coming-of-age pulled a different memory up first, though: a small girl in a schoolyard cradling an injured chicken, looking at Roland as though he had personally designed suffering. That girl had been classmates with Anna. The woman running the hospital now had steady hands and efficient eyes and bled on her coat without blinking.

“Alright,” Roland said. “Let’s go.”

Momo had not expected hospitality. She had expected, at best, tolerance.

Instead: a room in the Witch Building, meals she had not tasted before, a steady stream of witches dropping by whose names she could not yet hold but whose faces were uniformly curious rather than hostile. Within two days, Neverwinter had dismantled her previous understanding of what being alive could feel like.

When Wendy told her she could see again — that Nana Pine could restore the eye — Momo threw herself forward and wept into Wendy’s shoulder. It was the first time since leaving the Kingdom of Wolfheart that she had cried without covering her face. In the Witch Building, weeping was not something to be done quietly in a corner. It was allowed.

Ring walked Momo to the hospital on the morning of her appointment, filling the walk with detail: Nana Pine, noble family, immense power, called Miss Angel by the residents of Neverwinter. A healer who could restore what seemed permanently lost. Momo assembled a picture: graceful, warmly dressed, the kind of person who moved through rooms and made them gentler.

Her palms were damp by the time Ring opened the door.

“Is this the next patient?” came a voice — silvery, precise.

“Yes. This is Momo. Also a witch.”

Momo lifted her eyes.

Standing at the center of the room were two people she had not anticipated: the king himself, watching with mild interest — and Nana Pine. Who was wearing a white coat with only her eyes visible above the collar. Whose clothing was plainer than any civilian Momo had seen on the street. Across whose chest ran a vivid stripe of fresh, dripping blood.

Momo did not scream, but only just.

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