Rewrite That Witch
CH1383 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1383: Sending a Message over a Thousand Kilometers

“Are you certain of what you saw?”

Iron Axe rarely let surprise reach his face. He let it show now, and when he glanced at Edith, she was wearing the same expression back at him—two people reading the same impossible thing in each other’s eyes.

Tilly had hesitated before coming to them. The intelligence was extraordinary enough that she’d turned it over in her mind on the flight back, testing it for hallucination, for misreading distance, for the ordinary explanations that always deserved first consideration. There were none. But she knew what an account like this could do to men who were already holding the line through will alone.

“We didn’t make a mistake—coo.” Maggie patted her own chest with the gravity of a formal oath. “Lightning and I have both been to the ridge of the continent before. There was no mountain like that. It wasn’t there.”

Lightning nodded once. “We can’t confirm whether the demons are responsible. But one thing is certain: whatever it is appeared within the last half month.”

Edith was quiet for a moment. Then, without visible strain, she said: “In that case, everything fits.”

Tilly blinked. “You believe us?”

She had expected a delay—time to absorb, to arrange reconnaissance, to wait for corroboration before acting. The Pearl of the Northern Region had accepted their words as though they were the last piece of a puzzle she’d been holding incomplete.

“Blame Roland for that.” Edith sighed, but not unhappily. “Three years ago I’d have sent for a physician. Now I think almost anything is possible. If I’d stayed in that small corner of the world my whole life, I’d never have understood how much it had already changed around me.”

She folded her hands on the table. “There’s more. The forced migration.” She relayed what Hill Fawkes had brought to her—the pattern of dispatches, the northern movement, the numbers that made no sense against any city in Everwinter. “No noble’s holdings can absorb a migration on that scale. But a floating island might.”

Lightning went still. “Demons—accepting humans?”

“It isn’t without precedent.” Edith shrugged. “Agatha has told us what happened in the first Battle of Divine Will. Some humans formed alliances with the demons against the Witches. They were afraid of Witches then. The variable that’s changed now is His Majesty Roland. Some people will not bend, will not be part of whatever the future becomes, and when a man has decided that a slow end and an immediate one are equivalent—he will choose the one he can frame as a choice.”

Tilly’s hands had curled into fists on the arms of her chair without her noticing. “They didn’t heed the warnings about the Battle of Divine Will.”

“No.” Edith’s smile carried something strange in it—not cruelty, not pity, something older than both. “And even if they had, some of them would have made the same decision anyway. If His Majesty takes your land, your title, everything that made you you in the world you understood—that can feel no different from death. Immediate death and delayed death; one of those you can call sacrifice.”

“That’s enough.” Iron Axe broke in before the thread could unspool further. He had seen Edith in this mode before—the analysis deepening until it became a soliloquy, elegant and true and liable to unsettle everyone in the room, himself included. “The question is what we do about the floating island.”

Edith’s face reset to its working expression. “Nothing—not directly. If it’s been positioned over the ridge of the continent since the beginning, we can study it. But if it moved there, if it came from somewhere else and can be moved again, we are dealing with something beyond the scope of ordinary military planning. Her Highness saw it from hundreds of kilometers away. Think about what that implies about its size. Do you think the Fires of Heaven can destroy part of the Impassable Mountain Range?”

Silence answered her.

“We need to inform Roland,” Tilly said.

“I agree.” Edith nodded. “This is beyond our decisions. The only person who can determine our next step is His Majesty.”

Iron Axe had already moved to the desk and was reaching for pen and paper. “Then we send a flying messenger first. Everything else waits.”

“There’s no need.” Tilly rose. “With the Phoenix, I can reach Neverwinter before midday tomorrow if I leave at dawn. That’s faster than any messenger we have.” She paused. “And I had other reasons to want to thank him for the plane.”

She turned to Lightning and Maggie. “Would the two of you continue the investigation west of the Impassable Mountain Range?”

They answered together, no hesitation in it.

The next morning, Tilly flew east to the coast and then south along the shoreline, the sea a gray band below her right wing. In under four hours the Aerial Knight Academy appeared—the buildings of King’s City spread out behind it, small and orderly from altitude.

Many people in the streets that day stopped and looked up. What they saw, they remembered later as a red shooting star.

Tilly leaped down from the Phoenix and ran. The guards at the castle gates took one look at her gray hair and stepped aside without a word.

She pushed open the office door.

Roland blinked at her from behind his desk—the expression of a man who has been presented with something his categories don’t immediately cover. Then, almost as a reflex: “Is something wrong with the plane?”

Tilly stopped. A small sharp feeling moved through her chest. Has it really come to that—his first thought when he sees me is whether something broke? “No. The Phoenix—the personal plane—it’s far better than I expected.” She met his eyes. “Thank you, Brother. I mean it.”

“Phew.” The relief crossed his face before he could contain it; then his expression shifted into the one he wore when the world was about to require something. “Then the reason you came—you have important information.”

“Yes.” She sat down. “During the maiden flight, we found something.”

She told him everything—the speed competition, the drift northwest, the clouds, the altitude, the crack in the overcast, and what they had seen through it. Roland listened without interrupting. When she finished, his gaze was on the middle distance, turning the dimensions of the problem.

She could see him doing the mathematics: distance, apparent size, obstruction. Anything visible from that range, past a mountain range of that height, past the Red Mist—the object could not be small. Not small in any way that ordinary language accounted for.

The demons can move an island through the sky.

He was quiet for a long enough moment that she noticed it. Then he reached for the telephone on his desk and dialed.

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