Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 347: Confusions

“How is she?”

Roland set down his pen and looked up at Nightingale, who had appeared in the office without a sound.

“She’s fallen asleep. Had a bowl of oatmeal first — good appetite.” Nightingale crossed to the table and settled into her usual chair. “Silvio’s watching her now.”

“That’s something.”

“Do you believe what she told us?”

“Once we remove the God’s Stone of Retaliation tomorrow, you’ll be able to judge for yourself whether she’s lying.” Roland paused. “But I think most of it is true.”

“Why?”

“Have you noticed anything strange?” He laced his fingers under his chin. “She’s a woman from four hundred years ago, yet she speaks exactly the same language we do. Two territories separated by the Impassable Mountain Range — that kind of linguistic unity is virtually impossible unless both territories share a common origin and maintained regular contact.”

“She called the Four Kingdoms the Barbarian Land.”

“That’s precisely the point.” He leaned forward. “I don’t know what this region looked like four centuries ago. Maybe it was nothing more than scattered villages — criminals and outcasts exiled from the witch world. The kingdom’s history books place the founding of most major cities at two or three hundred years back, and it was roughly that same period when the astrologers appeared.” He paused, something clicking into place behind his eyes. “It always puzzled me that astrologers — who never produced any notable research — were called ‘sages,’ the same honorific as alchemists. Now I think I understand. The Union fled here with their survivors, their language, their civilization entire. They mixed with the locals, and helped them build the regimes and fortresses and cities that eventually became the Four Kingdoms.”

“You say it as though you watched it happen.” Nightingale shook her head, smiling.

“It’s the only explanation that fits.” Roland spread his hands. “We speak her language because we came from the same source. And over those four hundred years, civilization has been rebuilding itself — painstakingly, without ever quite recovering what was lost.”

“Well.” Nightingale rested her chin on one hand. “You’ll have your answer tomorrow. And if your theory is wrong, you owe me a luxury lunch.”

The luxury lunch was a specific thing: corn soup, roast chicken drumstick, ice cream bread. It was served once a week, and Nightingale had strong opinions about it.

“And if you’re wrong?”

“Whatever you want.” She tilted her head, a slow squint, the line of her cheek and throat catching the candlelight in a way that made the thought difficult to complete. There was an old saying that any gesture made by a beautiful person looked like an invitation. Roland was beginning to believe it.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, with two deliberate coughs, and turned back to his notebook.

Agatha had only recently woken after four decades of frozen sleep. Roland hadn’t wanted to press her too hard in their first session — he’d followed her train of thought rather than guiding it, which meant the information he’d gathered was disordered and full of gaps. What he was doing now was reconstructing it: sorting the fragments, identifying what he still needed to know.

The most pressing matter was the demons.

What had started the war? Why had they stopped? Neither question had a clean answer. Demon behavior defied the usual logic of territorial conflict — they hadn’t occupied the Barbarian Land. They hadn’t plundered it. What they’d done looked, from a distance, like slaughter for its own sake.

Agatha had also used the phrase Battle of Divine Will. Two sides locked in war under the will of God — but at that time the Church hadn’t existed yet, and the singular God the Church proclaimed had no precedent. Without accounting for that, nothing settled correctly in Roland’s mind.

He would also need to understand the basic shape of the Holy City’s civilization: how it was fed, how it governed itself, how it measured economic capacity. He needed that information to understand what kind of force the Union had actually been, and to extrapolate the demons’ capabilities from it.

The Union itself didn’t worry him as much as the Magic Stones did. Tilly’s account suggested those stones could compensate dramatically for a witch’s unstable abilities — they could extend a witch’s effective range, turn auxiliary witches into combatants. But Roland’s instinct ran the opposite direction: he’d rather turn all the combat witches into factory workers and build industrial capacity instead. Sending witches into war with Magic Stones was putting the cart before the horse.

What he couldn’t explain was why the Union — a civilization overflowing with witches — had chosen to build the God’s Punishment Army rather than leverage those stones. Magic Stones had obvious limitations, or their production was prohibitively difficult. He didn’t know which yet.

Fortunately, Agatha had been a member of the Quest Society — something like an alchemy workshop, but focused on Magic Stones and the nature of magical power itself. A society of highly talented witches, dedicated to research. There was information there he hadn’t yet begun to extract.

The last column in his notes was circled: The Church.

He couldn’t expect Agatha to explain the Church’s origins or internal development — she’d been frozen since before any of that began. But from the scattered things she had said, he could already build a rough picture. The Church had been founded after the witches’ defeat. It had taken what the Union knew and buried it, declaring witches the embodiment of evil — a useful lie, given that the conquered population would have no civilization of its own, no written history, nothing to push back against a fabricated theology. The four kingdoms’ population, descended from those original outcasts, would have been especially vulnerable. No records, no competing tradition.

But something didn’t fit.

The Union had possessed Bliss Warriors, Extraordinary Witches, even Transcendents. Even armed with God’s Stones of Retaliation, how had the Church managed to destroy an organization that powerful? Pure hatred was not sufficient. Some military force, some structural advantage, some piece of the puzzle was still missing.

He drew a question mark next to the circle.

“That witch seems to dislike you,” Nightingale said.

“She comes from a world where witches were the ruling class.” Roland set down his pen. “To her, I’m probably indistinguishable from roadside weeds.”

“Does that bother you?”

“Why would it?” He shook his head. “She’s a woman abandoned by her own era. She went into that coffin with an entire civilization behind her and woke up to find four hundred years had passed and everything was ash. Of course she’s afraid. Of course she builds walls. Once she’s had time to take in what’s actually around her, she’ll probably see things differently.”

Nightingale smiled at that — quietly, to herself — and said nothing for a moment. Then: “Don’t worry. I won’t let her treat you badly.”

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