Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1493: Origins

“Could it be that you—”

“Yes.” Something lifted from the Custodian’s face. The furrows around its eyes eased, and for a moment it looked almost at rest. “As for you—I must say this plainly. Time is a terrifying thing. In the thousands, ten thousands, or millions of years ahead, you will remain inside this tiny Cradle. You may believe you have endless things to study. You are wrong. The solitude will find you sooner than you expect. Millions of years are a snap of the fingers against the scale of the cosmos.”

It paused.

“There are moments when I think time is its own form of magic. You can feel it pass. And in passing, it changes you. To preserve your sanity across that infinite span, you must surrender your emotions—otherwise the void will take you apart, piece by piece.” A faint humor entered its voice. “Of course, it is already too late for regret.”

Roland looked at the Custodian in surprise. He had never seen it smile before.

“So I become a machine in the end?” He kept his voice light. “Relax. I don’t plan to stay forever. Before I go numb, I’ll take the first step—without breaking the agreement. When the time comes, I’ll find the most suitable lifeform to carry on. Who knows—we may meet again on the other side of the universe.”

“See if you can last that long,” the Custodian said flatly.

“Right—since you are the Cradle’s core, can you leave under your own power?” Roland caught himself on a detail he had somehow missed. “Will this world collapse the moment you go?”

The Custodian stared at him. “You don’t understand even that much, and you’re already making grand promises?” It exhaled through its nose, then answered. “First: any system of adequate quality maintains multiple redundancies. A creation designed to hold the memory of a myriad of civilizations is no different.

“Second: the Cradle’s memory bank is vast—unsuitable for transfer—but it holds everything since Project Gateway’s inception: the characteristic seeding for filtered lifeforms, the full arc of their evolution. I have no need of those records. I take only what belongs to me since the moment of my own birth.

“Third: once you are connected to the database, you will understand how to operate the Cradle naturally. Follow normal procedure and it will run on its own for tens of thousands of years. You will still need to watch over it—the Cradle itself is difficult to break. The life within it is not.”

Roland let out a slow breath. The tension he had been carrying for so long left his body all at once.

He noticed the change in the Custodian. Not much time had passed, yet it seemed a different entity stood before him—not only the lightness in its expression, but its manner of speech had acquired an edge, an arrogance, something almost vivid.

“Ask me what you wish while I am still here.” It crossed its arms. “This is your opportunity.”

“That fast?”

“Have you not noticed the drain the Realm of Mind places on you?” It shrugged. “If you want to remain yourself after the consciousness merges, do it soon.”

Roland’s mouth twisted. The red numbers ticking steadily downward above his head—that was the Dream World bleeding into him. He turned the question over before speaking it.

“Have you ever heard of a place called Earth?”

He said it in his native tongue.

The Custodian closed its eyes. A silence, as though it were reaching into a deep archive. “Yes. There are 3,251 planets with similar phonetic profiles—but accounting for lifeform characteristics and geological markers, the planet you are asking about is a solid-surface world on the arm of Milky Way 3.”

“What has become of it?”

“What has become of it?” The Custodian opened its eyes. “It ceased to exist when the rift opened. According to records, that civilization’s footprints reached the borders of its galaxy. The memory library holds what remains of them.” Then it stopped. Turned to Roland with an expression he had never seen on it before—genuine shock. “Wait. Everything that occurred on that planet happened nearly 9.4 million years ago. If you were born from the Cradle, how could you possibly know it?”

“That,” Roland said quietly, “is the question that has kept me up the longest.”

He told the Custodian everything. All of it—the fever, the novel, waking in a body not his own, the years of building something in the ruins of someone else’s life.

The Custodian listened without interrupting. When he finished, its expression was not pity but pure fascination. “To think such a thing could occur.” It extended both hands, turning them over as though holding something invisible. “The temporal bundling is not uniform after all.”

“The what?”

“Consider this.” It spread its palms. “You are familiar with the hypothesis of parallel universes—that when a divergence of sufficient force occurs, reality splits into two trajectories. Each branch develops its own temporal variation, its own time bubble. Observers within those bubbles can perceive the passage of time, but each observer belongs to one branch, so the hypothesis has always remained unverifiable.”

Roland’s throat tightened.

“That’s right.” The Custodian pressed on. “The immense energy that Project Gateway discharged may have triggered your arrival—as an impact on parallel membranes will trigger a temporary fold. The bifurcation split our universe in two: one suffused with magic power, one in which Project Gateway failed and the universe maintained its original state. But because the two time bubbles run at different rates, it appears as though you have crossed millions of years. In fact, everything is happening simultaneously.”

“That is…” Roland rubbed his temple. “Difficult.”

“Understandably so. But your existence here may represent a method of breaking the universe’s march toward entropy—a connection between parallel realities that even the Creator never touched. But that is no longer my problem.” The Custodian’s voice carried something almost fond. “It is yours. To explore and to study.”

It raised one hand in a gesture that was not quite farewell, turned, and walked to the far end of the platform. A small door had appeared at the edge, opening onto a sheet of scarlet.

Then they came.

From every direction, figures materialized—translucent, luminous, wearing forms human and demon and shapes Roland had no name for. They ran toward the Custodian and merged with it, one after another, like tributaries finding the sea.

Among the human shapes, he recognized Lan. He recognized Epsilon.

Epsilon looked at him, contented in a way she had never quite managed while alive—satisfied, as though she had finally found what she had spent centuries searching for.

Lan paused beside him. A breath, two. Her lips moved.

Thank you.

Then they were gone—all of them folded into the Custodian, which walked through the scarlet door and did not look back.

The pure white space came apart.

It dissolved in pieces, and Roland’s body dissolved with it, yet he felt nothing—no pain, no terror, only weightlessness, as though he had shrugged off a shell he had worn so long he had forgotten it was not his skin. A vast torrent of information broke over him. He felt himself expand: eyes by the hundreds, the thousands, turning outward toward the barrier and the cold universe beyond it, turning inward toward everything alive and breathing and moving within the world below.

He had become the Cradle.

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