Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1349: Time

It was a thin explanation and they all knew it, but Anna and Scroll could find no immediate evidence to contradict it. His body temperature, breathing, pulse — everything read completely normal, so normal that Roland himself couldn’t make sense of the gap between what his body said and what had happened. The dizzy spell had arrived without any warning he could identify, and it had ended his consciousness as cleanly as cutting a thread.

He had no memory of being moved from North Slope Mountain to the castle.

While he was being examined, he used the opportunity to piece together what had happened after he fell. Anna’s cry had stopped everyone in the room — but none of them had seen Roland fall. The moment he lost consciousness, Nightingale had pulled him into the Mist with her. Anna had told the others that she’d slipped, a brief stumble, and the explanation had held. By the time anyone thought to look for His Majesty specifically, the Mist had already closed and taken him with it.

Where the King of Graycastle went after a successful communications trial was not something any of his staff needed to know. He didn’t report his movements to them. Nightingale’s presence made personal guards redundant — there was no environment in which she could not protect him. So everyone had assumed he’d departed after the demonstration, as he sometimes did, with no ceremony.

Only Anna, Scroll, and Nightingale knew differently.

Roland let the relief settle. Nightingale had made the right call at the worst possible moment. All of Graycastle’s affairs ran through him. The war at the borders demanded that every person involved maintain their morale and their focus. A fainting king — even briefly, even fully recovered — would generate speculation that no reassurance could completely contain. People would look at every decision, every order, and wonder whether the man giving them was well. The best solution was to act as though nothing had happened.

“I owe you.” Roland smiled at Nightingale.

She didn’t ask for Chaos Drinks. She looked at her hands and said, “No, it’s nothing. As long as you’re fine.”

He noticed that too.

By the time the kitchen sent up food it was past eight in the evening. Anna refused to let him go back to the office — the blueprints for the Fire of Heaven revision would wait; a sick person rested — and Roland, lacking any strong argument against it, agreed. He also canceled the Dream World visit. The fainting had unsettled him in a specific way, and the instinct to rest rather than push through felt, this time, like the correct one.

After they said goodnight, all three left the room.

Darkness came in from every corner. The only light came from outside — the city below, the narrow seam of glow at the gap between the curtains, barely enough to touch a small square of glass.

Fifteen minutes passed.

The velvet curtains moved. No wind. No draft. They stirred with the small, careful motion of someone arriving quietly, not wanting to be heard.

Roland looked over. A shadow had taken up position by the window, blocking that thin line of outside light. From where he lay, the glow outlined her — a silver edge on a dark shape.

He knew that outline.

He sat up. “Would you like to tell me now what actually happened?”

The shadow went still. A beat of silence. “You knew I’d come back?”

“You’re never like that.” He reached under his pillow and found the glowing magic stone, slotted it into the groove in the headboard. Warm light filled the room. “Your face said everything.”

Nightingale’s hand moved instinctively to cover her expression. The curled hair, the careful stillness — undone by one sentence.

“Anna,” she started.

“She noticed too.” Roland settled back against the headboard. “That’s why she insisted I stay in bed and left you alone with me. If she decided not to ask — that’s trust. It means she agreed with your judgment: that if you thought others shouldn’t know, she wasn’t going to push.”

The complicated thing that moved through Nightingale’s eyes lasted only a moment.

“I feel fine,” Roland continued, “and I wasn’t lying to reassure you — you can see that yourself. So why are you still worried? What aren’t you saying?”

Nightingale looked down. “The people who know about your collapse — it isn’t just the three of us.”

He waited.

“Nana isn’t in Neverwinter. Lily can’t treat something like this. There was no one who could make any judgment in the moment.” She spoke slowly, working through it. “In the middle of everything, I thought of someone. She can’t address the specifics of an illness, but she could give a complete answer about the broader picture. I kept her away from Anna and brought her into the room.”

“You mean…”

“Momo.”

Roland’s heart gave a single, sharp jump.

Momo. The right choice, and not an obvious one — revealing the number on someone’s life was its own kind of answer. Nightingale had been in the middle of a crisis, in the wrong kind of quiet, and she had still thought clearly enough to find the right tool for the question she needed to ask. That was something. But the fact that she had needed to ask at all —

“What did Momo see?”

Nightingale held his gaze for a long time before she said it. ”… Fourteen. The number changed from seventeen to fourteen.”

“It decreased by three years?” He heard himself frowning.

If it were ordinary illness there would have been signs — fatigue, pain, something gradual. He felt nothing like that. He felt, in this moment, genuinely well. Better than he had in some time, even. The number did not match any model of illness he could construct.

Nightingale seemed to read the direction of his thinking. “It isn’t an illness. It isn’t fatigue. I checked the miners — compared what I saw against what their numbers do when they’re sick or worn down. None of it matched. Three years gone in a few months isn’t a normal decline pattern; if it were ordinary deterioration, the past four or five years would have taken thirty or forty years off the total. This is something specific. Something recent.”

Recent. Roland turned it over. “But I haven’t encountered anything unusual in this period—”

“There is one thing.” She leaned closer. “You may not have noticed it yourself, but I’ve been watching. In the past few months, the number of times you’ve entered the Dream World has increased significantly — several times more than before.” Her voice found an edge. “I can’t think of any other explanation.” She reached across and took his hand, her grip tightening. “Promise me. Stop going into the Dream World. Please.”

The pieces assembled themselves.

The Dream World. The right variable — not the frequency itself, but what the frequency corresponded to. The absorption of the Force of Nature cores. Lan had told him that the magic of the Dream World would continue expanding until it pressed against the boundary of God’s Territory. He didn’t know what the endpoint would look like, but he could feel that the world was in a process of self-enrichment — gathering itself toward something. And he was the creator, which meant the weight of that process was not somewhere outside him. It was in him.

When the pressure increased, the cost increased. Three years, in a few months.

We don’t have much time.

Lan had said it with a solemnity Roland had read, at the time, as being about the Divine Will — the war, the timeline of the Battles, the approaching end of things. But sitting in the warm light of his bedroom with Nightingale’s hand tight around his, he turned the phrase over and found a second meaning underneath the first.

Perhaps Lan had not been speaking about the war at all.

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