Rewrite That Witch
CH426 · Rewrite
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Chapter 426: The Shining Starlight

After dinner, the witches came to Lucia White’s room.

She sat on the edge of the bed with Bell’s weight against her side and listened to them tell her she would be fine, that it always looked worse than it was, that the pain was survivable. Her eyes kept filling. She blinked them clear again and again, refusing on principle to cry in front of Nightingale — and certainly not in front of her little sister.

Set an example. You’re the older one.

She had come to Border Town with no particular hope. A cure for Bell’s demonic plague, a place that would not drive them out — that was everything she had asked for. What she found instead was this: a room full of people who felt, inexplicably, like family. The first time she had felt that since the pirate attack took their parents.

“Is my sister really in danger?” Bell asked against Lucia’s arm. “How bad does a magic power bite feel?”

“Like thousands of knives from the inside,” Nightingale said, cheerful as if describing the weather. “Only a few witches survive their Day of Adulthood. One or two out of ten, probably.”

Bell went rigid.

“Don’t frighten her.” Wendy fixed Nightingale with a look. “That was during the Witch Cooperation Association era. Things were different.”

“All you need to do is practice every day and release your magic power fully before each Day of Awakening,” Scroll said, with the patient reassurance of someone who had looked up the answer specifically. “It should be fine. Even Anna slept through hers.”

“Her first High Awakening happened at the same moment,” Agatha said, and yawned behind her hand. “That would have caused quite a stir back in Taquila, four hundred years ago. No witch had ever reached enlightenment in her sleep.”

Roland looked at Agatha. “Are you all right? Work is important, but—”

“The Battle of Divine Will is approaching.” She covered another yawn. “If I’m not pushing now…” A shrug. “If we fail this time, sleeping forever stops being a problem.”

“We won’t fail.”

“I decided to put in extra effort because I feel optimistic about your invention.” She rolled her eyes at him with the energy of someone too tired to do it properly. “Otherwise, do you think I enjoy spending every day in a laboratory?” She turned away and muttered, almost to herself: “It’s not as if I could do anything to you if you broke your promise anyway.”

“This isn’t the time for those conversations,” Wendy said firmly, and shifted the room’s attention. “Didn’t we agree that each witch gets a wish on her Day of Awakening? It’s Lucia’s turn.”

Lucia found herself suddenly the center of a circle of expectant faces.

“Get ice cream bread!” Bell said immediately, sitting up straight, eyes bright. “Ten of them. We’ll split five each.”

All she thinks about is food. Lucia knocked her gently on the forehead and looked toward Roland. “May I save this wish for later?”

“Of course.” He smiled. “It won’t compound interest, though.”

“One wish is enough.” She said it simply, and meant it. She had everything she needed here. The only thing left to ask for was Bell’s future — her sister was not a witch, which meant she would one day leave and build a life with someone else, start her own family. If anything changed between now and then, a wish set aside might be the difference.

That was enough to hold onto.

Then the emptiness arrived.

It came without warning — a sudden hollow in her chest, as though her body had been quietly waiting for this exact moment. And then the magic power began to flow in, not through any effort of hers but from the void itself, pouring into her as though filling a vessel that had not known it was empty.

“It’s started,” Nightingale said.

Lucia gripped the blanket. Her palms had gone cold, and the soles of her feet. She told herself this was nerves — only nerves — but the cold was spreading and the magic kept coming.

“Relax.” Wendy took her hands. “The magic power is part of us. It belongs here.”

“Should we talk about something to distract her?” A voice — Lily, probably.

“What should we talk about?” Mystery Moon.

“What about the second batch of test results?” Lily’s voice had a particular deliberateness to it. “Every time someone brings them up, Mystery Moon immediately changes the subject—”

“Don’t—”

“There it is.”

Lucia almost laughed. She felt the smile form and felt it freeze on her face — because the heat had started. Internal, sourceless, scorching, as though something inside her had begun to burn. With it came a contraction she had no word for, a tightening deep in the body that pulled inward and kept pulling, while the magic accelerated, more and more of it, until she felt she was drawing in the whole room.

“What was Lucia’s test result?” Mystery Moon asked, her voice now with a slightly desperate quality.

“Her average was 86,” Roland replied.

“What?”

“That’s extremely high—”

“She didn’t even try to stop us.”

“Now it’s punishment time—”

“Get away from me—”

“Stop fighting, Lucia doesn’t look right.”

She could hear them. Nightingale’s voice, then the others, then Nightingale again — but they were receding, going distant while the room stayed where it was, and then her vision went wrong.

Everyone in the room became — squares. Not faces anymore, not bodies, but compositions of small planes of color, tessellated, some large and some small, each one a different shade, all of them shifting as they moved. She tried to scream and could not make her throat produce anything but breath.

The contraction became pain. Then it became worse than pain, the kind that stops being a sensation and starts being the only fact that exists. Lucia clenched her teeth and held her head up by force of will, watching through the fragmenting light as the witches around her began to move with sudden purpose.

Nightingale was right. This is worse. This is much worse.

Then something entered her.

A strange magic power — not hers, not the surge that was tearing at her from the inside. It came like a tube pressed into a whirlpool, offering a channel where there had been only pressure. She did not make a decision. Her body made it for her, yielding toward the offered path, driving her magic power into it and feeling, with each increment released, the pain ease by exactly that much.

She kept going. She pushed everything she had into the channel. The contraction loosened. The magic power stopped spiraling and became something solid, something that had found its shape and settled into it.

She blinked.

The tessellated squares resolved back into faces. Into the room. Into Bell, eyes wide and frightened, waiting.

Lucia reached over and patted her sister’s head. “It’s all right now.” Her voice came out rough, almost unrecognizable. “I’m all right.”

She became aware, slowly, that she was soaked through. Her clothes, the blanket, the hair against her neck — all of it wet with sweat. And there was wind. Cold, direct, from the direction of the wall.

She turned her head.

Two windows were gone. The wall facing the garden had split apart in two places, the gaps wide enough for the winter night to pour through. Through them she could see the dark sky and the scattered small lights of the town below, tiny and remote and steady.

Anna stood in front of the gaps, the Sigil of God’s Will glowing in her hand, watching Lucia with quiet concern.

“Her ability has crystallized,” Nightingale said.

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