Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1324: New Dream

When Scroll climbed the stairs to the third floor of the castle with a thick stack of papers in her arms, she found Nightingale at the office door, yawning and on the verge of leaving.

“You haven’t slept yet?” Nightingale stopped, eyebrows raised.

“I think it may be my age — sleep has been difficult recently.” Scroll smiled and shook her head. “Where is His Majesty? Has he gone to bed?”

“About half an hour ago.”

“Then why are you still in the office?” Scroll raised a hand to her mouth. “You weren’t secretly eating His Majesty’s snacks again, were you?”

“Ah — haha.” Nightingale blinked, then coughed. “Yes, actually. I ate his spicy shredded beef and drank some of his Chaos Drink. Don’t tell him, all right?”

Scroll stood still for a moment.

What had gotten into her? In the past, Nightingale would never admit to food theft unless caught in the act. Not even then, half the time.

Though thinking of how she and Wendy regularly pilfered Nightingale’s own drinks, Scroll found she had no ready reply.

“Well — goodnight.” Nightingale looked away and moved toward the stairs. “Don’t stay up too late. Roland told me the older you are, the worse the effects of sleep deprivation.” She glanced back up from the first landing. “Goodnight.”

”… Goodnight.” Scroll watched her go, mildly perplexed, then turned and walked into the office.

The fireplace was cold. Its warmth still hung in the room — someone had been in here recently, and for a while.

Without thinking about it further, Scroll went to the book cabinet, slotted the papers she had carried up into their categorized columns on the shelf, and removed the folder that required His Majesty’s attention. It held line upon line of extraordinarily long equations. She could tell from the handwriting that some sections were Roland’s, others Anna’s, others Celine’s. Part of her daily work was delivering material like this to the Arithmetic Academy, where the astrologers would work through the calculations, and then carrying the results back to the central carrier to check against their answers.

From the written descriptions, the material was connected to His Majesty’s new experiment. What she could not quite grasp was how you could derive the dimensions of an apparatus that no one had ever imagined — let alone built — purely through marks on paper. What was written there did not read like numbers. It read like a sketch of something that had not yet decided to exist. In her eyes, this was no different from predicting the future.

She never failed to be struck, whenever she saw Anna’s graceful handwriting, by a quiet wonder. Anna had been born in Border Town — a simple girl from a simple place — and had arrived somewhere the rest of them could no longer follow. In the early days, when everyone had gathered in this office to watch His Majesty’s science experiments, any one of them could have offered a comment or two. Now the only person who could keep pace with him was Anna.

Yet Scroll did not feel sad. She felt proud.

Because that was her sister.

She settled into the chair at Roland’s desk, opened the folder, and began to memorize — her usual practice, so that if a calculation was missing when she distributed the work, she would notice the gap in time.

Something stopped her.

“Are my eyes going bad?”

She rubbed them. Faint strings of characters floated beneath several of the equations — ghostly, barely there — as though someone had penciled in the answers in invisible ink.

It would not have been strange with test papers or residency files. Ever since she had discovered the shortcut in her rapid-search ability, one glance at a familiar document was often enough to surface all related knowledge and anticipate conclusions. But she had never seen this folder before. She could not parse the meaning of a single equation in it. And the drifting ‘answers’ beneath them were equally opaque.

They did not appear under every row. Most of the columns remained entirely blank.

Staring at the hazy, shifting characters too long made her head swim.

So Nightingale was right. Scroll sighed. Sleep deprivation was clearly catching up with her. Strange thing was, she had not felt sleepy at all recently; her mind ran at high speed all the time, relentlessly. Perhaps I should go to the hospital tomorrow and ask for a sleeping draught. The side effects on witches were minor — one or two doses wouldn’t hurt.

She forced herself to commit the full folder to memory. Then, without warning, a violent wave of dizziness struck her and her mind went briefly white. Her body tipped forward on its own and knocked the penholder off the desk with a clatter.

The dizzy spell vanished as quickly as it had come — gone within the span of a few breaths. More than gone: her thoughts were sharper than they had been in weeks, clear and precise in a way that almost startled her.

Scroll blinked several times. Body intact. She smiled faintly at herself and leaned down to pick up the penholder.

Then she stopped.

The floor had changed.

She would never misremember His Majesty’s office. The floorboards were pine from the Misty Forest, with sheep-wool carpet laid over them — worn, a little old-fashioned, never replaced. The carpet beneath her feet was still sheep wool. But the floor beyond it — the wood — had become something else.

Stone.

How is that possible?

Scroll raised her head carefully, and her unease deepened.

It was not only the floor. The entire office had transformed. Nightingale’s recliner was gone. In its place stood a row of old iron filing cabinets, dense and utilitarian — the kind you would find in the archives of an executive office.

But a moment ago, she had been inside Graycastle.

The window.

The floor-to-ceiling window was His Majesty’s prized feature, the office’s signature. Look out and you saw Neverwinter at night, scattered with light —

Scroll spun around and wrenched the velvet curtain aside.

A gray brick wall.

Undeniably, this was no longer the king’s office she knew.

She lurched to her feet and threw herself at the wall, striking it twice with her palms. A deep, steady echo answered — solid stone, not an illusion. Not going anywhere.

A wave of helplessness moved through her.

Anyone would feel this. Teleported without warning into an alien, sealed place with no visible exit.

She breathed in slowly and made herself think. It was not entirely sealed. In the corner between two rows of filing cabinets, almost the same color as the metal, sat an inconspicuous iron door. Easy to miss if you weren’t looking.

It seemed to be the only way out.

Where would it lead?

Another wall? A trap? Something else?

Scroll turned the questions over as her hand found the door handle and closed around it.

“Clack.”

The iron door opened.

Golden sunlight poured into the room and silence broke apart. Sound rushed in with the cold air — voices, whistles, the unrelenting drumbeat of footsteps. In front of her, a crowd of people moved in every direction with their heads down, absorbed in their own purposes. Every so often one of them looked up, caught sight of her, and their expression shifted into something like astonishment.

Behind the crowd, towering buildings rose and rose, occupying every part of the sky she could see.

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