Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1413: Beyond the Western Region

Damn it…

Roland took a slow breath and pressed his fingers against his cheek. They came away wet.

That felt a little too real.

The pretense of calm was exactly that — pretense. His hands still trembled when he lowered them, and the back of his shirt was soaked through with cold sweat. He knew it, too. The relaxed posture was something he’d arranged over himself like a coat, to keep the shaking inside from being visible to no one in particular.

What he’d just lived through was not a dream and not a vision. Or rather — it had been both, and neither word was large enough. An instant in real time; an eternity inside. He had felt the Gateway Plan not as spectator but as participant, had dissolved into every struggling form of life from the worms writhing in the soil to the birds arresting mid-flight. The catastrophe had moved through him the way a fever breaks: total, systematic, and final. Every corner of a world undone. The sound of it — that vast, dimensionless chorus of suffering — had followed him back.

This tear is for them.

For a long time Roland would not leave the strip of sunlight falling through his window. The street below held no particular beauty. Sewage pipes bracketed the walls. An advertisement for animal furs had been pasted crookedly over an older one. But the ordinary scale of it — the dirt, the commerce, the people moving without catastrophe — was something he pressed himself against until his breathing steadied.

When the trembling finally stopped, he could think again.

One thing was now certain: magic power had not existed at the world’s creation. Anna had raised the hypothesis in the Second Act. He now had the verification. Magic power was a byproduct of the Gateway Plan — an outcome no one had anticipated, neither the gray shadow that pressed forward through the unpredictable risks nor the voice that had warned against it. The catastrophe that followed was the price God had mentioned; the spreading of power was not a gift but a detonation, impossible to contain within any short timeframe, and the people who had spoken in that void had not escaped it.

The world he’d been returned to was the result.

He understood that much now. But it was only the surface of the problem. What was the Gateway Plan? Why had the gray shadow been so fixated on it? How did the Battle of Divine Will fit against all of this — was it consequence, or was it the mechanism through which others were meant to close the gap?

Roland looked at the express delivery package for a long time before he reached for his phone.

“Hello, Mister Rock. I need the Association to locate someone for me.”

Neverwinter, Fertile Plains, Tower Station No. 2.

A train eased into the transfer bay with the long, spent sigh of a machine that had earned its rest.

“Buddy — I’m heading out first.” Charms was off the platform before the wheels stopped turning, not bothering to wait for the carriage door to settle.

“Hey, you brat, you can’t expect me to handle this refillable boiler by myself—”

“Drinks on me tonight, I swear it!”

He left Hank’s voice behind him and made for the cargo carriage at a sprint.

His military conscription had ended at Taquila without delivering what he’d imagined for himself. His father and elder brothers had been decorated by His Majesty for their sacrifice; the family’s four names were on medals and citations. The Administrative Office had looked at Charms and his father, pulled them both from the First Army’s roster, and transferred them to the rail lines.

His father had accepted it without complaint. Trains still needed driving when the war was over, and the work along the Fertile Plains was expanding: not fewer vehicles but more, as the fertile ground north of the Impassable Mountain Range was settled station by station. Every position serves the King, his father said.

The pay was better than the infantry. That part was true.

But Charms had wanted the rifle, not the throttle. He’d wanted to take more of what the demons had taken — specifically his second-oldest brother, who had died defending a camp and left a shape in the family that nothing had filled since. The train gave him no avenue for that. And to make it worse, his second brother had been promoted into the First Army’s elite force, which felt like the universe delivering its opinion of the situation directly.

This is a little too unfair.

He’d assumed the years ahead would be grey and monotonous, the desolate plains unspooling past his window in an endless repetition. But the north had surprised him. Farms and residential clusters appeared faster than new stops could be built. The pubs welcomed train drivers the way ports welcome ships — with curiosity and free drinks. Every session ended with locals and migrants alike leaning forward over their cups, their voices pitched high with the particular excitement of people who believed they were part of something being built. The stigma of the old “Cursed Lands” had not merely faded; it had inverted into a kind of ambition.

But the true reason Charms looked forward to Station No. 2 had nothing to do with any of that.

“Everyone please line up — those in line will receive their own puppets!”

She was already calling out across the unloading bay, one hand cupped to her mouth. When she spotted him she dropped the call entirely and waved both arms with the unselfconscious enthusiasm of someone who had not yet learned to manage her expressions.

“You’re here!”

Seeing that smile, Charms found himself thinking — not for the first time — that being a train driver was not so bad.

“I’m here to help.” He rolled up his sleeves.

“Good.” She was already reaching into the goods, pulling out a small straw doll. She rose onto her toes to hang it over his neck. “You can take one for yourself too.”

“Oh. Trying to earn favor, are we.” Another voice, cold and flat, came from somewhere among the stacked cargo. A second girl dropped down and fixed him with a stare that could have salted a field.

Charms stared back. The two held it for a full measure, neither conceding an inch, until the first girl stepped between them.

“Come on, Balshan — Mister Charms has been kind to us. Didn’t he help us when we were lost?”

The mention of being lost did something to Balshan’s face — a brief, involuntary freeze. She turned away and snorted. “I can’t be bothered with this today. I have work.” She hoisted two bags of seed and walked toward the plaza without looking back.

“I’m sorry.” The first girl bowed with the gravity of someone personally responsible for the weather. “Balshan is just—”

“It’s nothing.” Charms waved it off and shouldered a seed bag of his own. He fell into step alongside her.

He had rehearsed this particular walk many times in his head, usually with different staging. There was a new play at Neverwinter’s theater; he had tickets. In most versions of the scenario, Balshan was not present.

The two women were Witches of the Sleeping Spell. The story of their first meeting was the kind that worked well in pubs. The girl — and it had taken him weeks to learn her name — had boarded the train for the first time to help with construction at Station No. 2, and she and Balshan had missed their stop completely. When Charms found them, she was standing at the window staring out at nothing, the plains stretching away to the horizon on all sides and nowhere recognizable in any direction, her cheeks wet and her composure entirely absent. Balshan had stood beside her in furious silence, coiled like a spring — frightened, but refusing to show it, the way a cat holds its ground when there is nowhere left to run.

Charms had stopped the train. He’d flagged down the westbound service and explained the situation to the driver and gotten them to their stop by nightfall.

He’d assumed that was the end of it.

He’d been wrong. The Witch Union had assigned both women to Station No. 2 for the long term. Over months of arrivals and departures, conversations had accumulated, and names had finally been exchanged.

Her name was Dusk.

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