Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 290: Investigation Plan

Roland was at his desk, working through the geometry of an aerial attack on an imperial palace, when something struck the French window behind him.

He turned. Lightning was pressed against the glass from outside, face flattened and white with something he didn’t immediately recognize as fear, because Lightning’s face didn’t usually do that. Maggie crouched on her head, pecking at the window with the focused urgency of a woodpecker who understood the stakes.

Nightingale opened the latch. Lightning came through and buried herself in Roland’s arms before he could speak.

“What happened?”

“Black stone, goo!” Maggie landed on the table and beat her wings for emphasis. “An enormous snow-capped mountain, goo! A red—”

“That’s not all,” Lightning said into Roland’s shoulder. Her voice was muffled and steady, which was worse than if it had been shaking. “The Devils. I saw the Devils.”

Roland’s hand stilled on her back.

“Don’t panic,” he said carefully. “Tell me slowly.”

It took her a few minutes to free herself from the embrace and sit across from him at the table, legs swinging, cheeks flushed from the high-speed return flight, red rings around her eyes where the windproof glasses had failed to protect her. She’d forgotten to put them on, he realized. She’d forgotten in the panic to flee.

She told him everything. The western edge of the Concealing Forest. The field of black stone. The enormous snow-capped mountain where the Redwater River found its source. Her flight out over the sea, the view around the mountain’s flank. The reddish-brown fog that lay over the mountains beyond—thick, still, the color of blood, extending west as far as she’d been able to see.

Two hundred kilometers from Border Town. Less.

Roland sat for a moment after she finished, staring at the middle distance. That fog—the red mist they need to survive—it’s at our backs. West of the Concealing Forest, past the mountains. Two hundred kilometers.

He looked at Nightingale. She was already moving toward the door. “I’ll call the others.”

Within the hour, every member of the Witch Union with experience from that night in the wilderness was gathered in the office.

When Roland finished relaying what Lightning had seen, the room went quiet in the specific way that a room goes quiet when no one knows how to be the first to speak. The witches who had fought that night—who had seen what those creatures could do, who had seen what their own abilities could not do—let the silence say what they wouldn’t. Leaves covered her mouth with one hand and made a small, involuntary sound.

Scroll was the first to speak. “I recommend a scouting mission. Lightning saw the fog from a significant distance and at high speed. We can’t be certain the Devils are living there—only that the fog exists. We also don’t know whether they’re capable of crossing the mountain range or navigating the coastline to reach the mainland.” She folded her hands. “Preparation is more useful than waiting.”

“Agreed,” Wendy said. “Even if they’re powerful, preparing to defend is always preferable to being caught without warning.”

As the two oldest and most experienced members of the Witch Union, Scroll and Wendy had a particular effect on the room’s temperature. Fear didn’t vanish—but it contracted, became manageable, took a form that could be acted on. No one was suggesting they sit still and accept whatever came.

Roland preferred that. He’d learned to prefer it.

“We’ll use the cloud gazer,” Anna said. “The reconnaissance balloon is already painted with sky camouflage. We can use cloud cover over the ocean and approach without being seen.”

“Take Sylvie,” Nightingale added. “Her ability is precisely suited to this kind of investigation.”

“Yes.” Roland nodded. He let one beat pass, then said: “I’ll be coming as well.”

The objection was immediate and simultaneous. Wendy, Scroll, and Nightingale all spoke at once: “Your Highness—you cannot take this risk.”

Roland raised both hands. “Listen. If they could cross high mountains or navigate open ocean, they would have spread across all four kingdoms by now. They haven’t. They’re still concentrated in the Far West. That tells us something about their limitations.” He paused. “And there’s another reason I haven’t mentioned: judging the level of an unknown civilization—understanding its structure, its capabilities, its weaknesses—I am better suited to that than anyone in this room. If I can see their city, even from a distance, it changes what we’re able to plan.”

Wendy’s expression didn’t change. She was still worried.

“We won’t go close,” Roland said. “We observe from distance. If I judge at any point that the observation itself is dangerous, we leave immediately. I won’t put you in the path of something I can’t account for.”

The room was quiet again, but a different kind of quiet.

“Then I’m coming too,” Nightingale said. Not as a request. Her gaze was fixed on Roland’s face with the steadiness of a door that had been decided, not proposed.

He looked at her for a moment. “I know.”

He named the party: himself, Anna, Wendy, Soraya, Sylvie, Nightingale, Lightning, Maggie. One week to prepare. Food reserves. Tents. Weapons for every member, regardless of combat designation—revolvers, to be practiced with over the coming seven days. The cloud gazer traveled far slower than Lightning alone; the distance was more than two hundred kilometers; they would need to camp one night in the wilderness.

“Yes, Your Highness,” the witches said together.

After the room emptied, Roland turned to the black stones Lightning had brought back.

“You said this kind of stone covered the ground in all directions?”

“Yes.” Lightning had calmed, though the red marks around her eyes hadn’t faded and her legs still swung slightly from the edge of the chair. “The closer to the mountain’s base, the more of it. From above, the area it covers is many times larger than Border Town.”

Roland picked up a piece and weighed it in his hand.

Lighter than ordinary stone. He turned it. Doesn’t look like ore. Hard, not brittle. And that sheen in the sunlight—

He called Anna back.

Her black flame touched the stone. It didn’t melt immediately—it heated slowly, the surface going bright red the way iron did in a smelting furnace. Then it held. Anna withdrew the flame, and the orange glow didn’t fade. If anything it strengthened. A pale blue flame shivered on the surface for a moment, hovering, then settled.

“Anthracite,” Roland said. High-quality anthracite, lying on open ground, in a deposit many times larger than Border Town.

“This is a coal mine?” Lightning leaned forward with her elbows on the table. “I always imagined it would look like charcoal—fragile, dusty, black powder on everything you touched.”

“That’s processed coal—after crushing and refining. Raw coal from a seam looks like stone in general, and the higher the quality, the denser and harder it is.” Roland set the piece down. “The best raw anthracite reflects light. Like this.”

The discovery was cleaner than he’d expected to feel given what had come before it. Coal was not rare in Graycastle—Fallen Dragon Ridge and Silver City both had deposits, used for kilns and heating. But the true range of coal’s applications was barely touched in this era. Before internal combustion became dominant in his world, coal had powered an entire civilization: coking coal replaced charcoal for steel smelting, which was both cleaner and more efficient than burning forests. Coal distillation produced gas, hydrogen, asphalt. Coal generation produced electricity. Even well into the electrical age, coal had remained an indispensable fuel.

And here was an open-surface deposit the size of a small city, two hundred kilometers up the Redwater River.

The only question is transport. He looked at Lightning’s newly drawn map—the river, the mountain, the black field at the forest’s edge.

A steam-driven cement boat. That was the answer—and now the reason to build one urgently had two sources instead of one.

Roland set the stone down beside the map and held both things in his mind at once: the red fog to the west, and the coal beneath his hand. Threat and resource. Crisis and possibility.

He was beginning to recognize that they usually arrived together.

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