Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 297: A Burning Heart

Roland opened his eyes to a ceiling he knew by its cracks.

He lay still for a moment, taking inventory. Left arm. Right arm. Fingers on both hands. He flexed them carefully. Everything answered. The ceiling continued to be exactly the ceiling of his own bedroom, unchanged, indifferent to whatever had happened to put him beneath it.

It wasn’t a dream. He knew that without needing to argue it. The Devils were real. The spear had been real. The fact that he was lying in a bed in Border Town with his arms attached meant they had escaped—and that, at least for now, everyone had survived.

Had everyone survived?

He tried to sit up. A wave of weakness broke from his injured arm across his whole body, and he abandoned the attempt. He opened his mouth to call out, and stopped.

Against the wall beside his bed, five figures leaned into one another in an uneven line—Anna, Nightingale, Lightning, Maggie in her small form, Nana. Their eyes were closed. Their breathing was the slow, rhythmic kind that had earned a night’s rest. Lightning had red marks still pressed into the skin around her eyes where the wind-goggles had been; even in sleep she looked like she’d spent the last twenty-four hours at full speed. Maggie had tucked herself under Lightning’s arm.

He drew the curtain back a fraction. The first light was coming in from the Redwater River direction—long golden threads across the floor, the color the sun makes when it has just barely committed to rising.

“You’re awake.”

He turned. Anna was rubbing her eyes with the heel of her hand, already on her feet, crossing the space between them with the slow deliberate steps of someone not yet fully certain their legs will do what they’re told.

“Yes.” He kept his voice low so the others wouldn’t stir. “The witches—”

“Everyone made it back. You were the only one injured.”

He breathed out. “That’s good—”

“Fool.”

She didn’t give him time to respond. Her arms went around him with a force that surprised him, pressing hard enough that he could feel her heartbeat against his chest—fast, still fast even now, the residue of days spent afraid.

He held her.

Behind them, one by one, the others woke.

“Your Highness—”

Lightning was the second to reach him, clinging to his uninjured side. Then Nana, then Maggie, who made a small urgent sound that was neither her pigeon voice nor her beast-form rumble but something in between. Nightingale hung back for a moment—a single heartbeat of hesitation, visible only as a pause—and then her arms came around the group as well.

For a while no one said anything. The morning light crossed the floor and nobody moved.

After breakfast, Roland sat in his office and worked through the days he’d lost.

Nana Pine had restored his arm, the torn tissue returned to what it had been—but the blood loss had been severe enough that he’d slept through an entire day. This was already the fourth morning since their departure.

He’d been careless. He understood that plainly now, without the self-forgiveness that distance usually provided. A balloon painted with sky camouflage, at two thousand meters, more than ten kilometers out—he had not expected them to be found. The multi-eyed Devil on the spire had apparently not been seeking anything in particular; Sylvie’s explanation was that it had simply been scanning in all directions when she focused her ability on it, and whatever mechanism of perception it used had detected that focus and turned every eye toward her. Within seconds, hundreds had come up from below.

That kind of detection had no analog in anything he knew. At that distance, with the red mist obscuring the spires, Sylvie’s ability should have been effectively invisible. That the other side had responded so immediately was—unsettling was the wrong word. Significant. It was a fact that would change how he planned future reconnaissance.

But the harvest had been real, for all the danger.

The Devils were not unknowable. They had cities, organized structure, what appeared to be a form of civilization—which meant they had weaknesses as civilizations always did. Their air capability was sparse; of the hundreds that had emerged from the ground, only two had given chase. Whether the flying mounts were rare or the riders were rare was still unclear, but the implication was the same: they could not simply bypass the southern mountains and descend on the Western Territory’s hinterlands from above. That threat, at least, was limited.

The discovery of their magic was more complex.

Nightingale’s report had been precise: the Devils who pursued them carried magic, but in a form unlike any witch’s ability. The Months of Demons had produced cyclone-shaped cores, constantly shifting. What she observed in the Devils was different—sparse, contained within mechanisms, activated by those shining stones rather than generated from within. It functioned more like a weapon than like a gift: repeatable, standard, mass-producible. Powerful for exactly what it was designed for, and nothing beyond that.

He had no way to confirm this. Both Devils had fallen into the sea.

The buildings remained the strangest piece. Those slender black spires were not dwelling places—their interiors were either hollow or filled with a red liquid that had no obvious parallel in anything he knew. The liquid and the red mist that clung above the structures might be the same substance in different states. And if the mist was the medium the Devils required to survive at full capacity—if its limited range explained why they hadn’t spread across all four kingdoms in four hundred years—then their threat was real but bounded.

For now. He set the analysis aside. Bounded didn’t mean dormant.

The blood loss caught up with him in the evening. The unfinished papers on his desk blurred and refused to come back into focus, and he recognized the particular exhaustion that argued for sleep with more authority than he had. He left it for morning.

He was sitting on the edge of the bed, reading a history volume without much interest, when a knock came through the door.

He sat with it for a moment, then got up and opened it.

Anna stood in the corridor. She hadn’t brought a book—not the Intermediate Physics she carried on ordinary evenings, not the Theoretical Foundation of Natural Science that had become as familiar a presence in his bedroom as the furniture. Her feet were bare. She wore only a white robe, and her hair, recently washed, hung loose around her shoulders, still carrying the warmth of it.

She stepped inside without speaking. Turned, closed the door, shot the bolt.

Then she took his hand and led him to the bed.

He could smell her hair—not the rose-petal soap but something underneath it, a warmth that came from her rather than from anything applied. Her lashes were long and fine where they rested against the swell of her cheek. Her face was flushed. Her blue eyes were steady on his, and whatever nervousness she carried was entirely in her cheeks and not at all in her expression—the look of someone who had made a decision and was fully committed to having made it.

“Cough. This—”

“I don’t want to wait anymore,” she said, quietly. “Not after everything we just went through.” A small pause—not uncertainty, but the spacing of someone choosing their words with care. “I don’t want to regret anything.”

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