Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 150: Stone Tower

Lightning had been flying for four hours when she began to lose her sense of scale.

It happened slowly. The forest was so large and so uniform from above — brown earth invisible beneath canopy, dark green in every direction to the limit of sight, gray and black where old growth deepened in the north — that after long enough the eye stopped reading it as distance and started reading it as color. The world flattened. She would realize she’d stopped calculating depth and speed and had been watching the green the way you watched a wall, and then she would force herself to look up at the sky until the vertigo passed and the ground reassembled itself back into ground.

She checked her position on the grid.

The search chart she had made — the map divided into small squares, each one crossed off as she covered it — was tucked against her chest. She knew her speed well enough to know distance by time. Every square she crossed off was a square she didn’t have to fly again. The method was her father’s, adapted from the systematic way he mapped new coastlines: if you were thorough, you found what was there. If you weren’t thorough, you found what happened to be in your path that day.

Half the squares were crossed off. She was half done.

Behind her, the clouds had been accumulating for two hours. They were the tall gray-black type that moved deliberately, and they had the quality of something patient and certain about its outcome. She could hear thunder from the direction of the mountains — long, low, the kind that traveled a long distance before arriving.

She dropped lower. The storm was closer than she had been estimating. Flying in heavy rain was not comfortable, and flying while soaked was significantly less controllable in a crosswind, and she was over a forest she did not know well, which meant landing options if something went wrong were not guaranteed.

Forty meters above the canopy, the world resolved itself again into details: individual trees, branch architecture, the gaps where old trunks had fallen and let light in. She adjusted her grid position and continued.

A gray flash at the edge of her vision.

She stopped.

Not movement — wrong color for a bird, wrong shape for any gap in the foliage she had learned to read. Something else. A hard edge where the forest had no hard edges.

She turned and retraced the last portion of her path at half speed.

There.

Behind two large oaks, almost perfectly screened by the summer weight of their canopy: a tower. Or what had been a tower. Its upper section was gone — not collapsed but removed, sheared off by something that had struck at an angle, leaving the remaining base in a slight tilt that looked wrong even from here. The trees around it had kept growing for four centuries, and the ones nearest had grown past the broken top, covering it in green. She would have missed it at altitude. She had missed it. Only the angle of her descent and the gray of the old stone, catching a break in the cloud cover, had given it away.

She circled three times.

No movement. No signs of recent use. Nothing suggesting anyone else had found this place. The base of the tower was enormous — she estimated Border Town’s castle, which she had flown around many times, would fit inside the footprint with room to spare. Stones that had once been the upper portion lay scattered in the undergrowth at every angle, the largest pieces still half-visible above the vegetation, the smallest buried entirely.

The storm was closer.

She looked at the sky and made a decision that she was aware was not the responsible decision, then made a second decision that it was the only practical one given the circumstances, then descended to the tower entrance.

Up close, the stone was not white. It had been white, perhaps, or light gray, but four hundred years of vines and moss and weather had turned it gray-green, the same gray-green as old forest in winter. She found the entrance by following the vine pattern to where a door had been: the gap in the vines was narrower than a body, but her knife and ten minutes of pulling cleared enough to crawl through. The wood of the original door had gone to nothing long ago.

Inside, the tower was open to the sky. Enough light to see, more than enough to count the stones in the walls, which she did out of habit. The walls were thick — three meters, possibly more. Whatever had hit the top had not penetrated. The floor was bare stone and old soil and dead leaves, with the accumulated forgetting of four centuries.

In the southwest quadrant: a hole in the floor, roughly rectangular, where stairs had once been. All trace of the stairs themselves had gone the way of the door.

She stood at the edge of the hole and looked down. Darkness, and the sound of rain beginning to reach the forest floor in isolated drops, and from down below — nothing. The smell of deep stone.

The basement access was aligned southwest. She looked at the hole, then at the direction, then looked up and noted that if she continued along that axis into the Wild Lands, she would be heading toward the location marked on the treasure map as Taquila.

The rain began in earnest.

It hit the broken top of the tower and found the open center and she was wet within thirty seconds. She looked up at the cloud, looked at the hole in the floor, and descended.

The channel below the floor was narrow, low-ceilinged, and smelled of earth and old air. She didn’t need a torch — the hole above admitted enough gray light to move by, and she moved carefully, one hand on the wall, feeling the channel turn once, then again. At the second turn: a door. Old wood, still standing against all probability, its surface soft under her fingers with decades of moisture. She could feel it ready to give.

She should turn back. She knew she should turn back. Record the location, mark it on the grid, return to Roland, let him decide what came next.

Outside, the rain became a downpour. She heard it hit the stone above her and the pitch of it changed — it was running now, finding every crack and gradient, beginning to find its way down the channel. Water was moving toward her feet.

She floated up two feet to keep her boots dry. Her torch and flint were in her bag. She opened her bag, found the flint, held it in her left hand, and pushed the door open with her right.

The wood split along its grain and fell backward in two pieces.

The figure stood directly before her.

It was enormous — twice her height, broad, body outlined in the faint light that came from the channel behind her. Three-fingered hand, massive, holding an axe whose blade had a dark stain along the edge. Body proportioned wrong, the proportions she had seen in the painting on Soraya’s wall, the painting she had looked at so many times she knew it by memory: shoulders too wide, head too low, stance of something that moved differently than a man moved.

The image in the painting was what the witches of the Association had fled from. It was what had killed them, and killed the others, and killed the civilization that had built this tower.

She had a fraction of a second in which to realize she had just opened the door of a very old basement in a very ruined tower and found—

The sound that came out of her echoed down the channel and up into the tower and back.

She threw the flint at it. She did not know why. It was in her hand and then it was not in her hand and then she was flying backward into the channel and up through the hole in the floor and out into the rain so fast that the rain felt still by comparison, and she did not stop flying until the tree line dropped away and Border Town’s wall appeared and she came in over the castle faster than was polite.

She did not notice the sound behind her when the flint hit.

She did not notice the cracks spreading from the point of impact across the surface of the figure, or the sound the stone made as it gave — a sharp, clean ring — or the pieces falling to the floor of the old basement and breaking apart in a cloud of pale dust, and the dust dispersing in the moving air until there was nothing left to see, and the basement was empty again, and the sound of rain above was the only thing in the room.

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