Chapter 546: The Mystery of God’s Stones
Anna’s portion of the rehearsal was separate from everyone else’s.
Only after the others had run the full hunting procedure until it was automatic did Agatha call a pause and gesture toward the center of the field. There was a particular quality to the silence that fell over the assembled witches — not expectation so much as attention, the kind of stillness that happens when people are about to see something they have learned not to take for granted.
Do they rarely see this? Iffy watched Anna walk out carrying a small panel of metal — barely larger than a palm, perfectly flat, set with four gemstones that caught the light without glittering. Nothing about her posture was combat. She moved the way a person moves when they are utterly certain of themselves and have no need to show it.
“Release the balloons,” Agatha said, facing the Misty Forest.
After a moment, several bright-colored shapes rose above the tree canopy and climbed into the sky.
“Shoot them down.”
Iffy looked at the distance. Two hundred and fifty meters, at least. More. The balloons were small at that range — bright specks against grey sky. Without flight? Without elevation? She cannot—
Anna raised the panel.
The four gemstones lit simultaneously. The metal flared gold. Then the sky opened.
There was no other word for it. Thunder rolled across a cloudless morning as though the weather itself had failed to receive the right order. Light wove through the clouds in racing lines, a weaving of energy that looked, for a single disorienting moment, like a new sun being assembled piece by piece above their heads.
Then the golden beam came. Not a slow thing — immediate, total. The light rays in the sky organized themselves and fell together in a single concentrated strike, following the initial trajectory exactly, thunderbolts running the same path as the beam until they swept through the location of every balloon at once.
The sound arrived in the body before the ears could process it. Iffy’s skull rang. By the time the last light faded, she could feel her own heartbeat in her teeth.
The sky above the forest was empty.
Even if every combat witch of the Bloodfang Association stood together — every single one of us — we could not produce what she just did. Iffy’s hands were trembling, and she pressed them together to stop it. Was that her own ability? Or the device she was holding? Or both?
It was not the power of the strongest among them. It was the power of the senior witches — of a civilization’s worth of accumulated craft, distilled into a sheet of metal the size of a hand.
He was right, she thought, and the thought settled into her without ceremony. His Majesty was right.
It was also the first time Roland had seen the full demonstration.
He stood at the edge of the field and worked through what he had observed. The initial beam left a track — visible only in the way that lightning’s path becomes clear a moment later, in the branching of what follows. The thunderbolts had run that track exactly, striking first at the forest’s edge before expanding outward. Which meant the Sigil’s user could direct the spread: hold it concentrated for the first distance, then release it in a fan.
Each final ray had covered roughly fifty meters on its own. In a battle of cold iron and flesh, the word “apocalyptic” was not an exaggeration. Nothing survived in that radius. There was nothing to survive with.
He turned to Nightingale. “Are those rays made of magic power?”
Nightingale hesitated in a way she seldom did. “Probably yes.”
“Probably?”
“In the Mist, I could see the surge — enormous, frenzied. But the color—” She frowned. “It’s different from any magic power I’ve seen. Any kind.”
“What color?”
“Black. Or — no light. Like the absence of it.” She looked at her own hands, then back at the empty sky. “It looked like the dark hollow the God’s Stone of Retaliation creates.”
Roland went very still.
The Sigil of God’s Will — gold light, golden thunderbolts, activation so intense it disrupts the Stone of Measuring — and in Nightingale’s Mist, it appears black. The same color as the interference zone of the God’s Stone.
He turned back toward the castle. This needed to be examined.
In his office, Agatha sat across from him while he laid out the theory.
“The God’s Stone of Retaliation doesn’t neutralize magic power by creating a void,” he said. “I think the stone itself contains a tremendous concentration of magic power — dense enough that it overwhelms and disrupts any other magical operation in its vicinity. The Sigil of God’s Will does something similar: it creates a field with the same properties as the God’s Stone, but one generated by the user’s own magic power, rather than stored in crystal. That’s why it causes the Stone of Measuring to fail. And that’s why, in the Mist, both the God’s Stone and the Sigil appear the same color — black.”
Agatha had been there when the Taquila researchers documented the Sigil’s activation. “The trainee who observed the magic power reported gold,” she said, before Roland could pose his next point. “We recorded gold.”
“Because the Sigil’s light was blinding,” Roland said. “In a lit room, shadows are swallowed by the light above them. What color can a trainee observe when the source of their observation produces a more intense light than anything they’ve seen? The color of the light.” He looked at Nightingale. “In the Mist, only magic power has color. She can stare directly at the sun without it affecting what she sees. That’s why the Quest Society never made this discovery. The Stone of Measuring was accurate in what it measured, and blind to what it couldn’t.”
Observing magic power was a derivative skill — constrained by the individual witch’s visual range, affected by day and night, by distance, by interference. This was precisely why the Quest Society had relied on the Stone of Measuring: its accuracy was independent of who operated it. When the Sigil caused it to fail, they fell back on the observer’s report — an observer who had been staring into something brighter than anything she had ever seen.
Agatha listened with the expression of someone mentally cataloguing the argument for weaknesses. She found one quickly.
“If dark hollow results from immense magic power — why doesn’t the same thing happen to the witch herself?” She crossed her arms. “Anna has enough magic power to activate the Sigil twice. By your reasoning, she should be more powerful than any God’s Stone. But her Blackfire still fails in the presence of the God’s Stone. It doesn’t create its own interference zone. Her magic power in the Mist appears as a solid cube, not a hollow — completely different from the stone’s appearance. Your theory doesn’t account for that.”
Roland was quiet. She was right, and he knew it. Even the weakest God’s Stone of Retaliation could suppress a witch completely. Anna was no exception. The cube and the hollow were different shapes, which might mean different underlying structures — but he had nothing specific enough to say so.
“Second question,” Agatha continued. “Why can magic stones only be activated by magic power? Even if a stone has lost some of its original intensity, the remaining power should still be present. Common people cannot operate them at all. The Quest Society confirmed that magic power in magic stones is not transferable — it cannot be extracted and used as fuel. Magic stones are identical to ordinary gems before they are charged or shaped into sigils.” She paused. “My supervisor believed only living beings can retain magic power. Dead matter cannot hold it. The Quest Society accepted this conclusion. I’m not refusing to hear a different theory — but magic stones are a problem for it.”
Roland couldn’t answer either question. The connection felt true — the identical appearance in the Mist was not coincidence — but true connections could still have mechanisms he didn’t yet understand.
In another era, he’d have called for spectrometers, for electron microscopes, for any of a dozen instruments that reduced the invisible to numbers. He had Nightingale’s eyes. He had the Stone of Measuring. He had what could be observed, which was only the broadest outline of what was real.
He set it aside. Not because it didn’t matter — it would matter enormously, eventually, when they began manufacturing new sigils — but because the operation launched in three days and he had nothing useful to add to the question today.
Agatha watched him settle the thought away.
“You’ll find the answer during sigil production,” she said, and it wasn’t quite a question.
“I expect so,” he said.
They were both, in their different ways, people who could wait.