Rewrite That Witch
CH1419 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 1419: Dual Identity

A procession moved through the City of Glow.

The crowds along the street had been gathering since morning. City Knights led the column — armor polished, banners at attention, the full ceremonial weight of an institution that had not shown its face publicly in a long time. Behind them came the flags of the Church, and behind the flags came the woman everyone had been looking at since the column appeared at the city gates.

She wore a crown and a gown of some expense, and she walked with the unhurried composure of someone who had spent enough time in dangerous places to find a street crowd beneath her concern. This was the new Pope — the one whose election had, as the stories told it, ended a rebellion and returned Hermes to its proper course. The Church had been deliberately vague about its relationship to the Kingdoms of Wolfheart and Everwinter and the invasions that had swept through them, but the Pope’s personal history was harder to obscure. She had traveled with relief columns to refugee lines. She had stood at the edge of battlefields. She had nodded and smiled at the people who lined the roads to see her, and everywhere she had done so, cheers had followed and stories had spread back to the City of Glow by whatever route stories travel. The crowd’s interest was genuine — not the ceremonial enthusiasm that authority could arrange, but the real kind that follows a person when something specific about them has reached people before their arrival.

The procession arrived before the inner city walls. The Pope dismounted and climbed the steps with the deliberate pace of someone who had chosen that pace rather than defaulted to it.

King Roland Wimbledon waited at the top.

They extended their hands and held them briefly — the Graycastle greeting, unfamiliar to most of the crowd but legible even so: equal to equal, not supplicant to sovereign. The rumor that the new Pope governed with Graycastle’s backing had circulated widely enough to have lost its novelty; this confirmed it in a more useful way, showing the crowd not dependency but partnership. The applause was loud and continued until the doors closed.

Inside, the composure broke first.

The woman moved to kneel, and Roland stopped her with a hand.

“No — none of that. And I’d point out that you’re no longer the Pure Witch you were, and the Witch Union doesn’t stand on complicated formalities. Have you been in the Holy City long enough to forget?”

The woman was Isabella — sent to Hermes in the capacity of the Church’s new representative, tasked with managing the Holy City’s aftermath: the orphans, the nuns, the prevention of the Pill of Madness from spreading beyond the walls it had already touched.

“Of course not.” She finished processing his opening words and stopped. Her head came up sharply. “Your Majesty — you just said—”

“Yes. Wendy suggested admitting you to the Witch Union some time ago, and I agreed. Your punishment was five years. You’ve served it, and you’ve served it well.” He met her expression. “Consider this a reward.”

A long pause. “But Your Majesty, I—”

“Upon joining the Union, you’ll receive a fixed monthly allotment of Chaos Drinks.”

“Uh—” Whatever objection she had prepared lodged itself somewhere before it reached her mouth.

“I know what you want to say.” He sighed, not unkindly. “Pure Witches like you have a remarkable commitment to the more theatrical forms of self-punishment — chains, leg-irons, the complete aesthetic. But atonement isn’t only about what you make yourself endure. If I have to source hardware for your penance on an ongoing basis, it creates administrative difficulties. So. Thank Wendy, like the others do.”

“Yes.” She bit her lower lip. Looked down. “I understand.”

“I know you’ve spent your life inside structures of responsibility and command. That won’t be easy to set aside. But there will come a time when the new life feels natural.” He moved on to the practical reason for the meeting. “This reception was a good public opportunity and deserved more ceremony, but I didn’t want to lose time. You’re aware of the demonic beast attack on Neverwinter.”

“Yes.” The shift to working matters was, he noticed, a visible relief to her. The gratitude had been harder to sit with than the briefing would be. “You called for my presence because you wanted the Church’s records on demonic beasts.”

“The Church has spent a hundred years as the primary line of resistance. I assumed you’d accumulated relevant information.”

“Everything I know is yours.”

When Roland had first heard about the attack four days ago, he hadn’t treated it as cause for serious alarm. Humanity had built enough military strength to handle demonic beasts without crisis, and while the timing was unusual — outside the Months of Demons, appearing in numbers — the First Army had handled stranger things in the north. He had noted it and moved on.

Then the telegrams had started coming from the North Slope Mountain, and stopped, and been replaced by more.

The situation had developed rapidly after some inflection point he couldn’t quite locate in the sequence of reports. Demonic beasts crossing the Taquila front line. Developing grounds under attack. Stationed troops engaging and failing to hold. Armored vehicle reinforcements arriving in time to prevent worse. And buried in the reports, a detail that had stayed with him: a monster described as something like a ghost. Fast. Silent. Effectively invisible, known only by the trails it left — the blood, the bodies, the absence of anything you could aim at.

He had underestimated the demonic beasts. He was certain of that now.

Isabella’s account went on for some time.

What she described was not the relatively contained Months of Demons that the Western Region had experienced. The Church’s hundred years of resistance had acquainted Hermes with types of demonic beast that no one in Graycastle had seen or catalogued. Hybrids that bore little resemblance to the original animal — so thoroughly changed by the transformation that the source species could no longer be identified. Among those she described: creatures with long, serpentine bodies capable of both burrowing underground and scaling sheer walls; and bird-bodied beasts with goat horns whose cold, sustained howls posed a unique threat to unprotected humans.

The tunnel-capable beasts would explain the appearance of the horde behind the development area — behind the front line, without any of the warning systems having been triggered. They’d come from below.

But that still didn’t explain the ghost reports. Isabella had made no mention of anything that could turn invisible. Roland listened to her entire account and waited for it to appear.

It didn’t.

A chamberlain appeared at the door.

“Your Majesty — Neverwinter has sent a new letter.”

“A letter? Not a telegram?”

“Delivered by air, Your Majesty.”

“Open it.”

The parcel contained a sheet of parchment. Roland unfolded it across the table.

It was a portraiture, rendered with the specificity that only Soraya could achieve — cleaner information than any written report, because a written report could only approximate what the artist’s eye captured directly. Good — even without combat capability, they’re finding ways to contribute.

His attention caught on one of the depicted carcasses immediately.

Half of it was pressed flat against a train’s metal exterior — collision damage. But the half that remained recognizable was not consistent with anything Isabella had described. The proportions were wrong. The structural features were wrong. Whatever this thing was, it belonged to a different taxonomy than the demonic beasts of Hermes.

“Have you seen this hybrid before? In Hermes?” He slid the drawing in front of Isabella.

She studied it. Shook her head.

Behind Roland, Nightingale made a short sound — not a word, just the particular syllable that meant something had connected.

Discussion

Suggest a change