Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1306: The Bloodstained Message

After he finished reading the letter, cold settled into Smarty’s spine.

A demon lord who could open gates to Hell itself — letting armies pass through as easily as a man steps through a doorway.

This was intelligence of the highest order. He had been puzzling over the fall of Snow Reflection Castle for weeks: how a fortress of that size could have been taken without a single credible account of the attack. The only thing any survivor could confirm was that the demons had come from the north. Every other testimony contradicted the next.

Now he understood why. Everyone who had seen the demons arrive had died in the invasion.

But what stopped him cold was something else entirely. The demon lord described in the letter understood human laws — not as an observer might, but as a practitioner. He had engaged with the nobility with enough proficiency to become the kingdom’s true ruler from behind a curtain of proxies. The citizens drafted under his hand were offered rewards no Graycastle lord could match.

The letter’s portrait of the drafting patterns was especially valuable. It wasn’t an intelligence map of demon power distribution, but from it, you could trace where resources were flowing. And the letter’s author was no Rat or traveling merchant — the perspective was unmistakably that of someone inside Everwinter’s upper nobility. The writing was organized, logical, and economical. There was nothing to cut, nothing to add. Smarty could send it on as-is.

In terms of priority, it was absolute.

The problem was timing. The merchant group that carried intelligence out of the city had left Snow Reflection Castle yesterday. Black Money kept only one man embedded inside it — a cart driver, who had no authority to turn the whole caravan around. The next group wouldn’t depart until next week. Add the time for stops along the route and the delay stretched further still.

Smarty sat with it for a long time.

Then he got up, gathered the papers from the table, locked them in the drawer, and left only the letter where it lay. He sealed it with waterproof wax, blew out the candle, tucked the letter against his body, and went downstairs. He signed to the silent warrior: I’m leaving the city for a while. If anything unprecedented happens, burn the oil downstairs.

He was already turning for the door when the silent warrior’s hand caught his arm. A small, deliberate shake of the head. Then the warrior pointed to himself.

Let me go instead.

Smarty laughed quietly. “I’m just delivering a letter. Two or three days at most. You can’t speak, and you don’t know where the exchange point is.” He couldn’t sign all of that, so he settled for one gesture: This is a command.

The hand released.

He patted the warrior’s chest and left without looking back.

His master had told him to support Graycastle with everything he had. The most important thing he could do right now was get this letter moving. As the Graycastle men put it: intelligence depends on timeliness. The longer it sits, the more the world changes around it, and the less it is worth.

For exactly this kind of emergency they had established a contact point just over five kilometers outside the city boundary. There, Graycastle kept an animal courier capable of reaching the Kingdom of Dawn in days. That village was his destination.

Leaving Snow Reflection Castle without permission carried risks, but manageable ones. People were fleeing the Northern Region by every route imaginable — even out of Everwinter itself. The red haze and the blood-red moon overhead had done nothing to their daily lives in any practical sense, but Graycastle’s propaganda and the whispered stories about demons had burrowed too deep to be dislodged by any feudal lord’s reassurances. Fear moved people whether the danger was real or not.

Those daily fugitives were his best cover.

Moving alone, the chance of being spotted by flying demons was low. The street guards were easier still — gold royals remained the universal passage in the human world.

Reality matched his expectations. By dawn the following morning, Smarty had passed through the southern gate. The guard on duty, preferring to keep the gold royals for himself, quietly opened the smaller door inside the main gate without waking anyone else. Once across the icy moat, the path ahead would be clear.

Each time a black shape crossed the sky above him, Smarty dropped flat into the snow. His white coat blended with the landscape, and from the air, his tracks were indistinguishable from those of a wild animal.

By afternoon, he could already make out the thin thread of smoke rising from the village chimneys.

He wiped the frost from his nose and quickened his pace.

He didn’t need to meet anyone directly. He only had to leave the letter at the agreed location and mark it with the right signal.

Then he heard hoofbeats behind him.

He spun around. His stomach dropped.

Snow Reflection Castle soldiers. Here.

Graycastle had chosen this village for its remoteness. If a patrol wanted to intercept refugees, it would be positioned on a main road — there was no logical reason for soldiers to be here. But they were, and they had already seen him. No point in running.

Smarty stopped walking and turned to face them, arranging an ingratiating smile across his face. Two riders. Enough gold would handle two riders.

The first reined in above him, looking down. “Younger brother,” he said, “I told you they’d take the back roads. Here’s one, just as I said.”

“Lucky us.”

A fugitive patrol. Of course.

“M-My lord, I beg of you!” Smarty collapsed to his knees in the snow and held up his money bag in both hands, letting the gold royals catch the light. “I couldn’t bear to stay in the same city as those monsters — they’d eat a man without a second thought! Take everything I have, just let me pass!”

“You’ve saved up quite a bit.” The rider took the bag with something like pleasure.

“It’s all yours — I have relatives in the Kingdom of Wolfheart. Let me go and I’ll find a way to repay you, I swear it.”

“You can stand up.”

Smarty released a slow, silent breath. This was usually the moment things resolved. A refugee with gold royals was rare. A refugee with foreign relatives was rarer. Killing him offered nothing; letting him go cost nothing. The logic was obvious.

But the rider didn’t wave him off. He raised his visor instead.

“Look at me carefully.”

A scar ran across the man’s cheek in a ragged diagonal, as though something had bitten through the flesh and kept pulling. His ear was gone. Half his eye was deformed and collapsed inward, the skin loose and newly healed.

“My lord — what happened to you—”

“Graycastle’s firearms,” the knight said, quietly and precisely. “I thought I was dead. I survived. Even now I can still feel the heat going through my face. It reminds me every single day who is responsible.”

The warmth left his voice entirely.

Smarty felt the alarm before his body could act on it. He had no time to widen the distance. The second rider — the younger brother — raised his horse whip and brought it across Smarty’s face in one clean motion.

The world went dark. Smarty went down with both hands pressed to his face.

“You! If it weren’t for filth like you running away, why would I be fighting Graycastle at all? What ‘Battle of Divine Will,’ what ‘fate of mankind’ — it’s all lies!” The voice had broken into a roar. “Don’t worry. I won’t drag you back and I won’t kill you here — I only want you to feel what I feel!”

He gathered the reins and drove the horse forward across Smarty’s legs.

The crack of bone. Pain without precedent, so complete it seemed to replace thought. Smarty heard himself scream before he knew he was screaming.

Then the second leg.

The horse stopped only when the snow was red and what lay below Smarty’s waist no longer resembled legs.

“Calm yourself,” the knight said, something close to amusement in his voice. “You are not the first. You will not be the last. Now — run as far as you like.”

Smarty did not register when the riders left.

He bit through his own lip before he could gather his thoughts back together.

Below his waist, everything had gone numb. The snow was drawing the heat out of him steadily, impersonally.

He reached inside his coat. The letter was still there, pressed to his ribs.

To those two men, he was already a corpse.

He did not hate them. He could not muster the feeling — pain and cold had stripped him down to one thing. Not rage. Not despair. Only the awareness of the letter against his chest, and the need to move it forward.

With what remained of his strength, Smarty began to drag himself through the snow toward the agreed location.

By the time he had hauled himself to the top of the hill that overlooked the village, night was coming down. The scattered lights in the houses below seemed both terribly close and impossibly distant — like stars that had lowered themselves to the treeline without becoming reachable.

He had not placed the letter in the hiding spot.

He himself was its vessel now.

In the moment before the darkness took everything, his master’s face surfaced in front of him — Banach Lothar, with his particular quality of gentleness.

Smarty closed his eyes.

“Father,” he murmured.

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