Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1390: Right Thing To Do

The words on the letter were unmistakably the Demon race’s written language, yet distorted — as though someone had painstakingly copied each character by hand, unfamiliar with the shapes they were tracing.

Hackzord read it once. Then again.

The vocabulary, the sentence structures — they carried a distinct, archaic cast entirely unlike anything his race used at present. Old forms. Ceremonial phrasings. The kind of diction that belonged to a different era altogether.

A sense of déjà vu crawled up the back of his mind.

He focused, dredging memory — and then the recognition struck him like a fist to the chest.

“Where did this letter come from?” He seized Marwayne by the collar and roared directly into the man’s face. The surge of emotion shattered his carefully maintained composure; he could feel it happening and could do nothing to stop it.

Marwayne did not dare wipe the spittle from his face. He simply pointed and scurried toward the human assembly grounds.

Damn it.

Hackzord knew he had lost himself. He could not recover the fact.

The words were Valkries’s. The Nightmare Lord’s. He was certain of it now — reading it again had stripped away the last of his doubt. The style was over a thousand years old, the phrasing of the race’s enlightened ones from the age before the second Battle of Divine Will. It contained, too, a faint inflection of the way humans told stories — a habit Valkries had acquired during her long tenure at the Cloud School. Among all the higher ascendants who had survived from the first Battle of Divine Will to the present era, only Nightmare Lord had ever studied among humans long enough to let their patterns seep into her writing.

Valkries. You have somehow kept yourself.

But how? You have been adrift in the Realm of Mind for months.

The contents of the letter were, if anything, more staggering than the authorship.

The Battle of Divine Will is merely a trap that repeats itself.

The Realm of Mind is the Bottomless Land at the extreme end of the continent’s Ridge.

The Deity of Gods is not safe.

A few short sentences. An impossible weight of implication. Hackzord stood with questions stacking in his skull, each one pressing against the next with nowhere to go.

How did she preserve herself in that sea of surging magic power?

How did she manage to get a message out?

Can I be certain this is truly from her?

Do I report it to the King?

“My Lord, Sky Lord…” Marwayne’s voice came quietly from beside him. “The person you asked for. I’ve brought him.”

Hackzord turned and regarded them both with cold eyes. “I want to know everything about how this letter came to be. Leave nothing out.”

Fifteen minutes later, the picture was plain — and plainly useless for tracing. The letter had passed through a migrant citizen who had accepted a few gold royals to serve as an unknowing courier, a man who had no idea what he was carrying. Even under pressure, neither of these men could give him an origin. The chain ended here.

He turned the fact over in his mind. To entrust a letter of such gravity to such a crude and accidental relay — either the sender was audaciously reckless, or the one Valkries had entrusted was not human.

“You’re dismissed.” Hackzord waved them off. “Tell no one of this letter. If any further letters of this kind reach you, see that they come to my hands immediately. Understood?”

“Yes, yes — of course, My Lord.” Both nobles bent low, declarations spilling over one another.

When they were gone, Sky Lord turned his gaze north and let his thoughts settle.

He noticed, without meaning to, that something in him had eased.

The pressure that had accumulated since Nightmare Lord’s disappearance — a weight he had carried without acknowledging it — had, quietly, lightened.

Perhaps no one in the race could ignore what she meant to them.

Whatever the truth of it, Hackzord found himself leaning toward belief. An individual’s style of expression was extraordinarily difficult to counterfeit. And even if a human had somehow mastered the Demon race’s written language, to forge a letter that carried the precise cognitive texture of Valkries — her vocabulary, her syntax, her particular admixture of the ancient and the human — was another matter entirely. The most natural explanation was that Nightmare Lord remained trapped in the Realm of Mind and had relied on a human intermediary because she had no other means.

Why a human? That, too, was not difficult to reason through. Her one-way journey into the Realm had been driven by the pursuit of the humans’ legacy shard. Some Witches, it followed, might possess the ability to touch the Realm of Mind. The pieces fit.

The more he turned it over, the more it cohered.

But the real question remains. Did Valkries convince a Witch and draw her into this plan willingly? Or is she being used — compelled by the enemy to write?

He did not believe Nightmare Lord would yield to humans. That was not who she was.

But the Realm of Mind was not ordinary captivity. To drift endlessly through a sea of churning magic power, conscious invaded without pause — the mind could not hold its shape indefinitely under such conditions. If she had been worn down, hypnotized, the outcome would be unrecognizable from genuine cooperation.

The gap between those two possibilities was the width of the world.

If it was the latter — if the letter was a trap — then at worst, Hackzord fell into it alone.

But if it was the former. If Valkries believed what she had written. Then the entire race had been walking the wrong road.

And the one who had led them there was not Hackzord.

So why did she send this to me, and not to the creator of the Deity of Gods?

The thought arrived like a cold blade. He severed it immediately, driving it down hard, refusing to let it run further.

He opened a Distortion Door and stepped through into open sky.

Far below, the Impassable Mountain Range stretched in a gray, wriggling line across the edge of the continent. In a week, the flames of war would erupt along it again. The Deity of Gods moved beneath him, its vast bulk grinding south with a kind of grim tenacity, carrying fire and Red Mist toward the human kingdoms. He could not imagine how they would resist once the cannons and aerial weapons were rendered irrelevant.

It was supposed to be a war with only one ending.

But Valkries believed the Deity of Gods was not safe.

Hackzord did not want to believe that the humans could threaten that structure. Every past failure of his, though, had begun with exactly that dismissal — the thing he had judged impossible, proving otherwise. And this warning had not come from some frightened guess. It had come from the Nightmare Lord.

Even granting that the letter was a trap, the trap could do him little harm. With the Deity of Gods advancing and Silent Disaster holding the front, his role was logistics and rear stability. A side expedition changed little. While the other side carried real risk — if Valkries was right and he had done nothing — the calculus was simple.

He turned north again.

According to the letter, everything began in the Realm of Mind — the source of magic power, the origin of all of it — situated at the far end of the Ridge, at a place called the Bottomless Land. If he went north on the pretext of securing the continent’s spine before the main assault, his presence along the Ridge would raise no suspicion. He would be able to verify whether the Bottomless Land existed at all.

And if it did, he would know.

If it did not, he would have lost a week.

Even if the King asked questions afterward, he would have an answer ready.

Or perhaps it simply was the right thing to do.

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