Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 348: Mortals and Extraordinaries

When Agatha woke, she was alone.

The thick curtains were drawn tight, and the room held the particular silence of deep winter — not empty, but sealed. Someone had left a candle burning on the bedside table. She watched it for a long time: the flame steady and orange, not a drop of wax overflowing, the wick impossibly unchanged.

Magic, she thought. What else.

The quilt was filled with something light and warm — fine cotton, probably, stuffed with down. Comparable to what she’d had in Taquila, which surprised her. She hadn’t expected this kind of quality in a place the Holy City once called Barbarian Land.

She flexed her fingers. Most of her strength had returned. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and tested her ability — cold ran immediately from her fingers, clean and responsive. The prince hadn’t cheated her. He’d removed the God’s Stone as promised, given her back at least that much freedom.

She went to the window and parted the curtains by a hand’s width.

Total darkness outside. No stars, no moon — the sky swallowed whole, only a few smeared lights trembling somewhere in the distance. She could hear the wind working at the glass, and occasionally she caught the flash of snow driving past. Winter, then. A good season for witches to awaken. In Taquila, winter nights had never looked like this — the city celebrated each night of the cold months, bonfires burning in the streets until dawn. From the high towers, the city had looked like a field of fallen stars: every fire a prayer, every fire a promise that another witch might wake before spring.

Families changed when a witch awoke among them. No more hunger. No more uncertainty. The whole weight of one life simply lifted.

Agatha unlatched the window and pushed it open. The cold came in immediately — curtains snapping back, the candle guttering out. The room plunged dark. She stood at the open window while her eyes adjusted, and eventually the accumulated snow on the distant rooftops found its shape, a faint white outline in the black.

Not a large town. Just what the prince had called it: Border Town.

She felt nothing from the cold. Her body managed it automatically, expelling whatever chill crossed her skin. The last time she’d genuinely felt cold was before her awakening. She’d forgotten what it felt like — not the sensation, exactly, but the fear beneath the sensation, the body’s reminder of its own fragility.

She closed her eyes, and Nightingale’s words came back to her in pieces.

The Union died. The witches became the Church’s monsters. They’ve been hunting us with God’s Stones for four hundred years.

And the diary — Alice and Natalia had fled the Fertile Plains. If they’d failed to stop what came after, the Union was already gone. But how? How had two Transcendents been defeated by ordinary people? The question circled back to her each time she pushed it away.

“Aren’t you cold?”

Agatha spun around.

A girl sat in the room’s dark corner, by the bed — completely still, her face invisible in the shadow. She had moved through a closed door without a sound, without so much as a floorboard shifting. Like something that didn’t need to use the door at all.

“If you’ll close the window, I can relight the candle,” the girl said.

Agatha’s first instinct was threat-assessment. She let a thin hard shell of ice form across her skin — not obvious, not thick, just there — and then nodded and closed the window.

The girl opened the bedside drawer and drew out a flint. When the candle caught, Agatha saw her properly: golden curls, slender eyebrows that sharpened the gaze beneath them. Not someone Agatha recognized from any of the day’s gatherings.

“Nice to meet you.” The girl raised one corner of her mouth. “Well — again, I suppose. We’ve met before, though you might not remember it.”

She’d been in the crowd earlier too, invisible. “Is that your ability?” Agatha asked, keeping her voice level. “Are you one of the High Awakened?”

Even if the girl was High Awakened, it was rude to enter without knocking. Agatha did not say this.

“Evolution, you mean.” The girl shook her head. “I’m not like Anna — she finished a book called The Theory of Natural Selection in what felt like an afternoon, and I still can’t look at the formulas without my head going wrong. Maybe I don’t have that kind of luck.” She settled more comfortably in her chair. “My name is Nightingale.”

Agatha needed a moment. She’d expected a certain archetype from someone who served a mortal lord — deferential, carefully composed. This one was neither.

“Is that what the prince calls knowledge?” Agatha said. “The book you mentioned — could I read it?”

“Of course. Once you join the Witch Union and swear loyalty to His Highness.”

“To serve a mortal.” Agatha let the words land flatly. After a moment she said, “I thought I was the strange one. But you’re further gone than I am.”

Nightingale tilted her head. “Strange? Gone? Why?”

“In the Holy City of Taquila, most awakened witches treated ordinary people as servants. Inferiors. Breeding stock, at the worst of it.” She kept her voice even. “I didn’t agree with that — I thought mortals could learn, could think, could become useful, and I gave some of them real responsibilities in my tower. That made me unusual enough to be talked about. But you have pledged yourself to one of them. You take his orders.”

“His Highness Roland doesn’t treat us as servants.” Nightingale’s mouth went slightly crooked. “I don’t know what picture you’ve drawn of what loyalty means, but what actually happened is: he found witches the Church had broken and took them in. He built something for them here, in the Western Region, alongside ordinary people. We’re fighting the Church together. And after that, the demons.”

“That model failed.” Agatha couldn’t keep the edge out of her voice. “Four hundred years ago — eight hundred from your perspective — the world was governed jointly, witches and mortals together. Humans lived throughout the entire Dawn Region. When the demons came, we lost nearly everything. We barely held the Fertile Plains.” She looked at Nightingale steadily. “The east of the Barbarian Land is the Swirling Sea. There’s nowhere left to retreat to. The third Battle of Divine Will is already near — and you have no concept of what’s coming. The only answer is to rebuild the Union, unite the witches, improve the rate of high awakening through knowledge. That is the only path.”

Nightingale was quiet for a moment.

“Why do you keep saying it that way?”

“Saying what?”

“Four hundred years have passed.” She exhaled slowly — not quite a sigh, but close. “You know that, right? A lot can change in that time. Why are you still inside those old patterns?” She paused. “His Highness said, before you woke, that mortals can defeat demons. You heard him say it. He’s also uniting everyone — not just witches. Every ordinary person on the continent, because he believes the people across the land are the most powerful force there is.”

“The Barbarian Land—” Agatha started, and then stopped.

She says it like she already knows how it ends. The girl wasn’t performing confidence. She wasn’t pretending. Could four hundred years actually change something that fundamental? Could a prince with grey eyes and a strange calmness genuinely be what these witches thought he was?

“You seem to have caught yourself,” Nightingale said, and something shifted in her expression — not quite warmth, but the near neighbor to it. “We still have time. Why not open your eyes and see what’s actually here?”

Agatha said nothing for a long moment. Then: “You don’t like me.”

Nightingale didn’t deny it.

“The witches of the Quest Society looked at me the same way, once they found out I’d given real responsibilities to mortal assistants.” Agatha folded her hands in her lap. “You obviously dislike me. So why are you here telling me any of this?”

“I don’t hate you — not as long as you’re willing to put that arrogance down and treat His Highness like a person.” Nightingale met her eyes. “As for why.” She paused. “Because the prince said he didn’t want to see you abandoned by the times. Again.”

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