Chapter 345: Bygones (Part II)
The immensity of what they were telling her kept pressing against the limits of what she could accept.
She told herself not to believe any of it. But their accounts were too coherent, too internally consistent, too detailed in the particular way that lies never managed for long — no fabrication could have invented the texture of what they described. And there was a harder truth underneath: she could not imagine how a witch could conjure a history this specific from nothing. Not the slow erosion of the Federation’s reputation into complete invisibility. Not the inversion of the witch-mortal hierarchy. Not the name of Taqila becoming a word that meant nothing to anyone.
Even ordinary people in the Holy City — those who had never condensed a drop of magic — had been treated as human beings, not livestock. Witches had governed, yes, and governed with the full weight of that authority. But they had not hunted the people they governed.
What happened to you all, in four hundred years?
The exhaustion arrived all at once, the way it does after you have been rigid for too long. Wendy noticed before she said anything. The cup of hot milk appeared at her bedside with the calm efficiency of someone who had been tending to people in shock before.
“Drink this.”
She drank. The warmth went down in a slow, sweet current and reached something in her chest that had been braced and cold. She lay back and let herself rest for a while before she continued.
She understood their wariness toward her. She did not understand it well enough to feel it as anything other than an inconvenience, but she recognized its logic: they did not know her, and she had woken up disoriented and hostile. If she wanted the shackle removed, she would have to earn the right first.
And she wanted to see the world with her own eyes. The story of the Union’s collapse — she would not accept it as real until she stood somewhere she recognized and saw for herself that everything she remembered was gone.
“My name is Agatha,” she said, when she was ready. “I was a member of the Taqila Exploration Society. In the thirtieth year of the Battle of Divine Will, Taqila — the last Holy City — fell. Most of our people went into exile. I went to the Concealing Forest to retrieve materials I had left at the laboratory.”
“Wait.” Roland leaned forward. “You were fighting the Devils?”
“Who else was going to fight them? Were we supposed to rely on—” She stopped herself. Adjusting her tone cost something. “We had mortal guards. But mortals cannot defeat Devils. So yes. Witches fought them.”
“Was there something like the Church in your time? An organization that hunted witches?”
“I have never heard of anything called the Church.” She said it with the same impatience she would give to a nonsensical question. “What is it?”
“We can get to that. Tell me more about Taqila — about how it was organized.”
She settled against the pillow and began. “Taqila was not alone. All of the Holy Cities were built and governed by witches, but they housed large mortal populations as well — ordinary people responsible for reproduction, agriculture, craftsmanship. Children were raised until their magic manifested; those who awakened were transferred to the appropriate department for training. Those suited for combat were assigned to the Union. The majority of the mortal population lived alongside witches without incident.” She paused. “In fact, I believed — and still believe — that excluding ordinary people from important decisions was a mistake. You cannot keep mortals out of something forever simply by making the language illegible to them.”
Roland took a book from somewhere and placed it in her hands. “Can you read this?”
She skimmed the first lines and stopped. Her attention had been caught before she expected it to be. “This is a witch’s diary.”
“Did you write in this script?” asked a witch with light-grey hair.
“The Union created this writing system specifically to keep upper-level affairs out of mortal reach,” Agatha said. “The mechanism is simple — it requires magic to read. I personally found the policy shortsighted.”
“How does preventing ordinary people from reading something actually work if they can learn the system the same way anyone learns a language?” the grey-haired witch asked.
“It requires magic to engage with the text, not just exposure. The letters don’t resolve into meaning without it.” She glanced at the woman. “You’re a witch — I could teach you.”
“Language is a tool for communication,” Roland said. “The more people who can use it, the more useful it becomes. What the Union did was needlessly limiting. Trained ordinary people can do most jobs. Their only disadvantage is that they cannot use magic.”
She agreed with the substance of this. She had argued something similar herself, more than once, in the Exploration Society. But being told it by a mortal, in a tone that carried gentle criticism of the Union’s decisions — that was a different thing to hear, and she found she did not have to pretend that it sat easily.
She missed Kraft.
He had never told her that her organization was making mistakes. He had simply shown her, every day, what it looked like when the principles she believed in were actually practiced.
“Miss Agatha,” said the mature-looking witch suddenly — introducing herself as Scroll — “have you ever heard the name Alice?”
Agatha went still. “Where did you hear that name? I was told that all records from four hundred and fifty years ago had been lost.”
“I found an ancient book in ruins near the eastern border of Greycastle’s royal capital,” Scroll said. “The one you’re holding. Her name is on the last page — written in the common script.”
Agatha turned to the back page. She read it slowly. Then she set the book down and was quiet for a while.
The image that formed behind her eyes was not from memory so much as from a kind of compressed knowing — a figure with a raised sword, light radiating outward from her in all directions, dazzling everyone who looked at her. And then, gradually, that figure growing smaller, fainter, receding into darkness until there was nothing left of her at all.
“Alice was the Queen of Meteor City,” she said finally, “and one of the three leaders of the Union. She was an Extraordinary — a Transcendent. Even among the Blessed Ones, she was the strongest.”
A murmur ran through the room.
“Since those records were lost, it’s natural that none of you would have heard of this.” She steadied herself. “An awakened witch’s ability continues to develop after she comes of age — growing stronger, more refined, more precisely controlled. But that ordinary growth is not the ceiling. A small number of witches achieve what we called the High Awakening: a transformation of the ability itself, a qualitative change rather than a quantitative one. There is no fixed limit to how many times this can occur, and no guaranteed path to reaching it. It is rare. Genuinely rare — even within the Union, which had more gifted witches than anywhere else in the world.”
“Hm.” Roland touched the back of his head. “Four witches in the Witch Union have undergone this kind of evolution.”
She looked at him. “Four?”
“Yes.”
“How many witches does your Witch Union have?”
He counted on his fingers. “More than ten.”
“Stop talking nonsense.” The words came out before she could moderate them. “Four out of ten? Do you have any understanding of what a High Awakening actually involves? This is not a consolidation skill on the Day of Adulthood. It is not a derivative ability. It requires talent, preparation, and a form of insight that cannot be manufactured. Even the most gifted witches in the Union sometimes went decades without a single Awakening. Decades. How could four witches in a group this small have achieved it?”
Roland looked mildly composed in the face of her outburst, and gestured toward a young woman sitting near the foot of the bed.
Extraordinarily beautiful, Agatha noted reflexively. Blue eyes clear as still water. Features that would have made her exceptional even among the Union’s witches. Young — recently come of age, by the look of her. Far too young, Agatha’s professional judgment said, to have accumulated the experience and long meditative practice that preceded a High Awakening. She herself had evolved at twenty-six, and at the time she had been considered almost offensively talented. This girl was — what, seventeen? Eighteen?
They must be counting consolidated skills as Awakenings. That would explain it.
A ball of orange fire appeared in the young woman’s palm.
Fire-summoning. A combat ability, common in category. Ranked by maximum temperature and heating rate. Agatha assessed it quickly: warm, controlled, no excessive spread. Good baseline. She opened her mouth to say so.
The orange fire dimmed. Then it changed — deepening through shades of green, darkening at the core, brightening at the edges, drawing the ambient light toward itself as it intensified. The color was wrong for any fire she had catalogued. It was not absorbing heat. It was absorbing something else.
“That consolidated skill she developed on her Day of Adulthood,” Roland said. “And you’ll see the most important one in a moment.”
“That is not a consolidated skill.” The correction left her on its own. “A consolidated skill would show a hotter core, greater spread. This is — this has a different mechanism entirely.” She was sitting up without having decided to. “What is her primary ability?”
The green flame extinguished.
In the young woman’s palm, a small black cube appeared — solid, smooth, precise at every edge, with the dense material quality of something that had always existed and simply been waiting to be called.