Chapter 344: Past Events (Part 1)
Your Highness.
What a peculiar form of address. She had heard it only in old stories.
Moving her eyes took effort. She turned them toward the sound and found a grey-haired man entering the edge of her vision, several women arrayed behind him.
“How do you feel?” he asked, his voice measured.
She did not answer the question. “Where am I?”
“Border Town. Western territory of the Kingdom of Greycastle.”
She took stock of herself quickly. Unknown location. Unknown time. Unknown people. She attempted to sit up, and found she could not move a single limb with any strength worth the name.
“I am Roland Wimbledon,” he continued, “fourth prince of the Kingdom of Greycastle and Feudal Lord of Border Town. These girls are members of the Witch Union.” A small pause. “Do you not remember anything?”
Witch Union. She turned the term over. An organization she had never heard of — but the women behind him had the feel of witches, the quality of magic about them. So: witches organized under a man. Strange, and requiring explanation. But at minimum they were like her.
Wait. Prince.
She searched her memory. The title was not entirely unknown — she had encountered it in historical documents about the secular regimes of the First War of God’s Will, four hundred years or more ago. Could it be — had she come back? Had the gods given her a second chance to prepare, to reinforce the Holy City’s defenses before the assault?
No. She stopped herself. That kind of completely illogical outcome belongs in a tavern story, not in the real world.
Right. She forced herself to recall the final moments. The laboratory basement. Mad Demons. She had discharged everything into an ice barrier and set a magic stone of reverberation signaling for help, designed to endure until the witches returned and found her again. She was not in the past. She had simply been found.
“Were you the ones who rescued me?” There was no other possibility — if she was awake, the barrier had opened, meaning the witch-army had come back. “Have the Devils withdrawn? Have we won? The Holy City — what has become of the Holy City of Taqila?”
She watched the faces on the other side of the room change.
They looked at one another. Not with answers, but with a complicated expression she could not quite read — something between relief and excitement and the barest shadow of difficulty. “We really did find you in the basement of a stone tower,” said one of the women, auburn-haired, maturity in her face. She couldn’t seem to stop herself from asking: “Are you truly someone from four hundred and fifty years ago?”
The auburn hair caught her attention before anything else. She had seen hair that color before — the Holy Warrior at the south gate, that woman who had shaped her sword into light and burned the enemy from the field. The resemblance was probably coincidence. But she found herself more willing to answer this witch than to answer the grey-haired man. She had nothing against social hierarchies on principle, but being interrogated by a commoner — even one with authority — was not something she was accustomed to, and the reflex ran deep.
If my old master had been here, this man would already have been reprimanded.
“My name is Agatha.” She kept her voice even. “I was a member of the Taqila Exploration Society.” A breath. “What do you mean, four hundred and fifty years? Don’t tell me — you have been fighting the Devils for over four centuries? That is impossible.”
“You’ve slept for a very long time,” the man called Roland said. “Things may be somewhat different from what you expect. If your body is up to it, we can walk you through it slowly.”
“Go ahead.”
She closed her eyes, took a breath, and let him speak.
As the man began detailing the history of Greycastle and the development of the Four Great Kingdoms, Agatha felt something cold and precise moving up her spine that had nothing to do with her ability.
The Concealing Forest. The Impassable Mountain Range. She knew both names — she had walked their edges, catalogued their terrain. They were real places. Specific, geographically anchored, unchanged by any retelling.
But the rest of what he described mapped to her world the way a cracked mirror maps a face — recognizable, but wrong in every proportion. The Four Great Kingdoms occupied what she remembered as the desolate lands: a narrow coastal strip between the mountains and the sea that her contemporaries had considered too marginal for serious settlement. The forbidden wastelands he described — those lay where she remembered the fertile plains. And the Holy City of Taqila? The name meant nothing to anyone currently alive. It had vanished so thoroughly that even the ruins were lost, buried somewhere in a wilderness that had once been a world.
Four hundred and fifty years. She turned the number over.
Then came the part that was worse.
The status of witches had not merely declined — it had inverted. According to this man, witches were currently the targets of organized persecution across all four kingdoms. The ordinary people he described as powerless and peripheral had, in the intervening centuries, acquired the political structures, the armies, and the sanctioned authority to hunt witches down. Kings. Lords. Churches.
Antediluvian playthings, she thought, and felt something that was not quite contempt but lived in its neighborhood. They called themselves kings before the First War of God’s Will and we thought they were already too pleased with themselves.
“Preposterous.” She heard the word come from her own mouth. “That witches would actually be killed by ordinary people — who would dare?”
Her arm extended. The cold gathered at her palm, the first motion of frost formation.
Nothing discharged.
She looked down. A metal shackle at her ankle. A God’s Stone of Retaliation embedded in the clasp, dull and grey and functional. She lifted the blanket. There was no mistaking it.
“Are you insane?” She stared at the group of witches — her own kind — with a disbelief she did not bother to modulate. “You would help a common man suppress a senior witch? You are using a God’s Stone of Retaliation without Federation authorization — that is a violation punishable by death! Only the law enforcement division has that right. Anyone else who carries, sells, modifies, or destroys a God’s Stone is subject to the most severe penalties!”
“This was what I was afraid of.” The prince exhaled.
“I’ll talk to her,” the auburn-haired witch said quietly. She settled at the bedside with an unhurried confidence — the manner of someone who had explained difficult things before and was prepared to do it again. “Don’t worry. I’ll sort this out.” She looked at Agatha directly. “My name is Wendy. The things he told you are true — all of them. I have never heard the name of the Federation. I don’t know what the Holy City was like four hundred and fifty years ago. But now — witches spend their lives in hiding, moving from town to town, hoping not to be found.”
She did not rush. Her voice had a warmth in it that was not performance.
“Prince Roland gave us a place to stay. He encouraged us to use our abilities openly. He researched ways our powers might genuinely change the world for the better. Here, we live without hiding, without fear of persecution by the Church or by ordinary people. You should understand: God’s Stones of Retaliation are everywhere now. A witch without her power is no stronger than a common person. He placed that shackle on you because he didn’t know who you were yet — not to harm you.”
Agatha was silent.
The Federation was not a small thing. It had been a vast, interlocking structure — multiple witch kingdoms united under common governance, trained armies, courts of law, diplomatic channels, a bureaucracy capable of managing the affairs of entire cities. It had absorbed every Holy City into its structure. It had trained witches for war, resolved disputes across hundreds of thousands of people, maintained public order. It had been the foundational architecture of civilization.
And an organization that powerful simply… stopped. Left no records anyone could read. Left no living memory. Left nothing but ruins in a forest at the eastern border of a kingdom that did not yet exist when the Federation fell.
Those refugees. The ones who crossed the mountains to reestablish order. Her hands were cold in the bedclothes. Where are they now? What did they build? What happened to it?
She had no answer. She had never had less of one.