Rewrite That Witch
CH317 · Rewrite
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Chapter 317: Ice Coffin

Every story she’d ever half-believed came back at once.

Demons from the abyss. Vengeful dead who kept their grudges past the grave. Wandering undead who lured the living with voices that sounded exactly like need, exactly like suffering. Thunder had called them nonsense—third-rate explorer’s campfire nonsense—but Thunder wasn’t here, and the voice was.

Because if it were one of those things: it would have killed the Devils itself. It could survive anything. It would be waiting for her now, patient, perfectly still, using the same seven words it had used for months because they were the most effective bait it had found.

But if it were not one of those things—if a real person had been calling for help since she’d last stood in this corridor—then the Devils were either still here, or—

She went back up for Maggie.

“We could go in without the torch,” Maggie said, after Lightning finished. “The Devils can’t see us. I can turn into an owl—the dark isn’t a problem for me.”

“But then we can’t see them.”

“You can’t. I can.” The pigeon rubbed her face with one wing. “Besides—you said yourself these ghost-stories were invented to frighten people.”

“My father said that.”

“Same thing.” Light burst from Maggie’s small form and expanded outward, wings widening and flattening, face reshaping into something calm and enormous-eyed. The owl regarded Lightning steadily. “And if there were terrible things that lived only in the dark, surely they wouldn’t be confined to the Fjords. You’d have heard of them in Graycastle too.” A pause. “I thought you liked legends.”

Lightning chewed on this for a moment. She did like legends. That was the entire problem—a good explorer verified things. She hadn’t come back here to stand in the forest working through the logic of folklore.

And there was the other thing. The reason she’d come at all. If she turned back now, without entering, she would have achieved nothing. She would have stood outside her fear a second time and walked away.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll do it your way.”

She glanced at the owl sidelong. “This isn’t about the eggs.”

The owl looked away.

Down the stairs again, no torch this time—only the weight of Maggie on her shoulder, only the owl’s warmth and the soft press of talons through her jacket, only the faint sound of her own breathing. The floor grew wet. Her boots found puddles at irregular intervals, each one startling her more than the last. The basement had filled with standing water; the drainage channels—four hundred years uncleared—had given up.

Maggie patted her head. Stairs ahead.

Lightning slowed. Stepped down. Turned the corner.

Light.

Yellow, soft, constant—not the flicker of torch or candle but a steady suffused glow that seemed to emanate from the stones themselves. It fell on the water below and shattered into moving pieces. She paused at the edge of the last stair, studying the gap between the door and the waterline. Knee-deep at minimum. She lifted off and floated through.

The space beyond was enormous—far larger than the tower’s footprint had suggested. The luminous stones outlined the chamber’s dimensions in dull gold, enough to see by, barely enough to trust. On a stone platform at the center stood four figures. Burly. Shell-backed, carapaced, each with a spear and a shield, arranged in formation around something she couldn’t yet see.

The voice came again. Clearer now—as though the walls had thinned.

Save me. Save me.

“What do we do?” she breathed.

“Go save her,” Maggie said into her ear.

“There are four Devils—”

“Look at them.”

She looked. Really looked, the way an explorer was supposed to look before she acted—and what she saw stopped her breath. The figures were motionless. Not still the way a sentry was still: motionless. The kind that had no intention behind it. Fine cracks ran across the carapace plating on each one, cobwebs strung between their legs, and through the visors of their helmets the eyes were pale and dry and long past anything they’d ever been asked to see.

Before she could speak, Maggie had launched herself off Lightning’s shoulder and was across the room.

One peck. The Devil crumbled—not broke, not collapsed—crumbled, the way old wood crumbled when you finally asked it to hold weight it could no longer hold. What had been a figure was a scatter of pale ash drifting down toward the water.

Lightning crossed the room. Three more strokes, three more small clouds of ancient dust.

She stood on the platform and looked at what the Devils had been guarding.

A cube. Transparent—not glass, not stone as she’d understood stone. Crystal, massive, sitting on the platform like something that had always been there and had simply been waiting for her to notice. From across the room it had looked like a column of pale stone. Up close it was something else entirely.

A woman floated inside it.

Gorgeous robes. Eyes closed. Arms extended slightly at her sides, hands open. Hair spread behind her as though she had been caught mid-fall—or mid-flight—and held there, suspended, every strand still moving in a wind that had stopped centuries ago.

“Is she a witch?” Maggie landed on top of the crystal and pecked at the surface. The sound rang clear and high—a bell-note in the dim room. “Very hard.”

Lightning pressed her palm flat against the side. Cold bit through her skin immediately, deep and absolute, the cold of something that had been maintaining itself for a very long time. A thick rime of dust lay across the surface. She wiped a patch clear with her sleeve and looked through.

The woman’s face was composed. Frowning slightly—brow drawn just enough to suggest confusion, or worry, or some unresolved question that had followed her into wherever she was. The skin was smooth. The lips held color.

She looked nothing like the dead Devils. She looked like someone who had simply stopped.

“Save me…”

It came from behind the crystal. From inside it.

Lightning’s hand stayed pressed against the surface and did not move.

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