Chapter 1420: A New Extraordinary
“What is it?” Roland turned. “You recognize it?”
“It looks like something I killed before.” Nightingale spread her hands, buying time for herself. “But the one I killed was much smaller. And less — ” she gestured at the drawing’s proportions — “that.”
“Wait.” He straightened. “You mean the investigation at Great Snow Mountain?”
She nodded. “And before that — the search for the Ice Witch. Based on what this thing can apparently do, the invisibility, it would explain why the humans in the reports called it a ghost.”
“Can you be more specific about the differences between what you encountered and what’s in this drawing?”
“Let me think.” She took the parchment. “It was a few years ago. What I met was at most half the height of this. Front claws in the same scythe shape, but smaller — less developed. The belly was just for climbing, not loaded with extra appendages the way this one is. The head—” she paused. “The one I killed didn’t have an obvious mouth with teeth like that. This one looks like a predator built for active hunting. The one I encountered, I honestly would have categorized as a hybrid demonic beast if not for the scythe claws and the invisibility. They didn’t seem to belong together.”
The shape of Roland’s expression changed.
“But we determined afterward that they belong to the Sky-sea Realm.”
The implication settled into the room without being stated.
Demonic beasts posed a real tactical threat — the attack on Neverwinter had demonstrated that clearly enough. But the Sky-sea Realm was a different order of problem entirely. As participants in the Battle of Divine Will, they had operated at a level capable of pressuring the demons from an unknown rear position for centuries. For a Sky-sea Realm creature to appear in the Western Region was not an incursion; it was a warning about what was coming.
But the geography made no sense. The northern Fertile Plains had been demon-held since the Battle of Divine Will. The Sky-sea Realm operated from coastal positions, pushing inward only through the Months of Demons spore cycle. The interior of the continent was as deep inside demon-controlled territory as anywhere on the Land of Dawn.
Unless —
A thought moved through Roland’s mind, large and unpleasant, not yet fully assembled.
“The First Army encountered the demonic beasts in the snow mountain ruins,” Nightingale said, more carefully. “You could call it coincidence, or you could call it a pattern. But are the demonic beasts and the Sky-sea Realm working together?”
Roland and Isabella both turned to look at her at the same moment.
“I was just saying.” She covered her mouth. “You don’t have to take it seriously.”
He did, though. He couldn’t avoid it.
“This problem is more complicated than I first assumed.” He rapped his knuckles gently on the table, a habit he had when he was thinking faster than he was speaking. “Whatever the relationship is between the demonic beasts and the Sky-sea Realm, Neverwinter cannot be exposed. It is the industrial core of everything we have. If the attack is connected to the Sky-sea Realm, then even the most cautious countermeasures may not be sufficient.” He turned to Isabella. “What you’ve told me is genuinely useful. Go and rest — a member of the General Staff will be in contact with you soon.”
Isabella did not move.
“Your Majesty. There is one more thing.”
“Tell me.”
“While I was in Hermes, I continued my experiments with God’s Stones.” She produced a draft from somewhere in her clothing and set it on the table. “Do you remember Agatha’s conclusion — that what blocks God’s Stones isn’t dense magic power but some other factor? I ran repeated experiments and identified something that may be related to what I can only describe as frequency.”
“Frequency.”
“I consulted the Natural Science Theoretical Foundation you compiled. I recognize that the term may not be precisely accurate, but I couldn’t find a better one.” She gathered herself and laid out the discovery in compact terms. “In any case — after working through this, my magic power underwent condensation.”
Nightingale blinked. She looked at Isabella for a moment with the particular attention she gave to anything she observed through her ability. “That’s true. I didn’t notice it had happened.”
Roland smiled. “So the Witch Union has a new Extraordinary. Congratulations on the breakthrough.”
Isabella shook her head. “It was only possible because you gave me the opportunity.”
“Persisting in the research was your choice.” He held the point. “What does the evolved ability feel like from the inside?”
She extended her palm. On her middle finger was a ring — the setting occupied by a stone that, as she held it out, began to emit a soft and steady light.
Any other observer would have found this simply interesting. Roland’s attention went to something different: the shape of the stone itself. Magic stones from the demons were characteristically oval — uncut, unfinished, their appearance irrelevant to their function. This stone had been worked. Clean geometric facets, a polyhedron, the cuts unmistakably deliberate — the kind of finishing only a human craftsperson would apply. But humans could not create magic stones. Every one in existence had been captured from the demons or excavated from ruins. Cutting and polishing a stone after its creation would alter its composition; therefore, to cut it, the stone had to have been worked before the transformation into a magic stone.
“This stone isn’t from the demons,” Nightingale said.
“No,” Isabella confirmed. “It was originally a God’s Locket of Retribution belonging to the Church — one of the ones no longer used to restrain any Witch. This was my first experiment after the evolution.”
Roland looked at her. “You converted a God’s Stone into a light-emitting magic stone.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “If my ability before was to entirely repel the waves emitted by a God’s Stone, my ability now is to attenuate a specific frequency — and the result is what you’re looking at. At present, only certain magic stones respond to this. It may be related to the limits of my understanding of the subject.”
He spent the next half hour with questions and manuscripts working through it. What Isabella had accomplished, in terms he could apply, was this: she had built a bridge between her ability and her empirical knowledge of God’s Stones. To her perception, the undulating waves from the stones had previously appeared as a field of absolute stillness — too powerful to resolve into component parts, the frequencies indistinguishable from each other. Finding one specific frequency within that field was what had enabled the God’s Stone ability to isolate magical powers in the first place; everything simply stopped when all frequencies were cancelled together. But Isabella had learned to hear the individual frequencies, which allowed her to cancel only one while leaving others operational — and the residual energy, redirected, had to go somewhere.
It produced light, for now. Because that was the limit of what she understood.
The analogy to what Lan had described returned to him. When two minds stood on very different ground, even description became a barrier — the more sophisticated understanding could not fully translate itself into the vocabulary of the lesser one, and the lesser one could not ask the right questions because it didn’t know what it was missing. Isabella had managed the crossing herself, which was rarer and more significant than he’d made apparent to her.
He had wanted it to be weapons, was the honest version of it. If she could produce powerful magic stones in quantity, that transformed what Combat Witches could carry into the field. But he knew better than to speak that wish aloud. What she’d opened was a door — a crack in a door that had been sealed since the demons first appeared as the sole manufacturers of the technology. Every step forward from here would come from her, and from whoever followed her, and from the years she still had ahead of her.
“No one else can walk this path for you,” he said. “But that’s exactly what makes it worth walking.”
“I’ll do my best.” She gathered the draft back into her clothing. “One more thing — I found something in Hermes that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.” She hesitated, as though choosing her words against some internal resistance. “Agatha’s hypothesis may not be wrong. God’s Stones may be living things.”