Rewrite That Witch
CH572 · Rewrite
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Chapter 572: The Song of Praise

By the time Snaketooth and Tigerclaw reached the square, the crowd was already immense — five thousand by his rough count, maybe more, packed onto steps and spilling across the surrounding ground. He had never seen so many people gathered in one place, not even in Longsong Stronghold during relief grain distribution.

The square itself had been remade since he arrived. Where flat ground had once forced people to stand until their legs went numb, there was now a sunken bowl of shaped stone — an amphitheater, the locals called it. The third rebuild of this site, apparently, completed in half a month, and no one had seen where the excavated earth went. The stone steps fanned out in wide rings, each one a perch from which even those far back could see the stage without craning.

Tigerclaw squeezed into the last open row and wedged space for two. “Not bad. We made it.”

Snaketooth sat carefully, the cloth bag pressed to his chest. Two months of savings inside. In crowds like this one, instinct still overrode reassurance — his hands remembered Longsong Stronghold, where Rats moved freely through packed bodies. He knew the Border Area had no Rats. He watched anyway.

The last afterglow drained from the sky. Torches ringed the square. The stage sat dark — no bonfire, no firewood, no preparation he could understand.

Then a beam of light struck the platform.

Pure, brilliant, motionless — nothing like torch flame. The crowd drew a single collective breath. A second beam appeared. Then a third. The stage emerged from the dark as if the light had always been waiting inside it.

“Nightless light!” someone nearby gasped.

“It’s called electric light,” came a snort from his other side. “Runs on electricity. Made by the machines the witches build. His Majesty planned to put them in every household, but the witch who produces the current can’t support that many at once. For now, only the plants get them.”

Tigerclaw leaned forward. “How do you know all that?”

The man shrugged. “You two aren’t official residents yet, are you? The City Hall runs electricity lectures — how to use them safely, what they’re made of. Like fire but different. When you finish primary education, you’ll understand.”

“Is there a faster way to become a subject? What’s primary education?”

Snaketooth started to ask more, but Tigerclaw hauled him upright as the square erupted.

The Star Flower Troupe stepped onto the stage.

Ms. May! Ms. May! Ms. Irene! Mr. Gait!

The names rose in waves. Snaketooth had seen nothing like it — people calling out to performers who were neither nobles nor scholars, not untouchable, not distant. People exactly like this crowd, only standing in the light.

He wanted that. The want arrived without warning, clear and strange.

When the cheering died, the play began.

He had expected to be bored. He had always assumed drama was a nobles’ amusement — stiff figures reciting elevated language about elevated problems. What appeared on the stage instead was a free citizen, a refugee, and a Rat.

Three people who could have been anyone in the square.

They arrived in Star City from different directions, carrying different wounds. They helped each other without being asked to. They confided things to strangers that they couldn’t say to family. They missed their home towns with the specific grief of people who knew the homes they missed no longer existed as they remembered. And then, slowly, they stopped missing and started building.

The square went absolutely quiet. Five thousand people holding their breath together. Snaketooth felt it like pressure — the silence of people who recognized something too clearly to speak.

When the final notes played, nobody moved. Then someone near the front pressed a hand to their face, and the motion spread — not crying exactly, but something that happened before crying, some private reckoning.

He pressed his knuckles to his eyes. Next to him, Tigerclaw wept openly, face expressionless with it, as if weeping were a fact of weather.

Even if no one said it: Star City was Neverwinter. The story was already theirs.

Even a Rat can have this.

Then a figure emerged from behind the background screens.

She was tall, with bluish-gray hair that fell to her waist. The white dress caught the electric light and held it. She did not look like anyone from the square, or anyone from the stage — she looked like something older, a figure from a painting of something he had no name for.

She opened her mouth and sang.

Nothing he had heard before prepared him for it. The music before had moved through him like a tide — this broke over him like a wave breaking onto rock. Her voice was power in the most literal sense: it praised the workers, the builders, the people who had swung the hammers and carried the stone and eaten the thin soup at the end of each shifting day and called it enough. She did not sing at the crowd. She sang the crowd into the song. She made it impossible not to feel that the sweat had been worth something — that the work existed, had mattered, was being held up for the world to witness.

The crowd came apart. Applause roared. Strangers gripped each other’s arms. The emotion the play had compressed into stillness finally had somewhere to go and it went everywhere.

They are all His Majesty’s subjects. The glorious workers. The builders of Neverwinter.

Afterward, His Majesty departed by the temporary raised platform with the witches, and Snaketooth strained his eyes across the crowd for Paper’s face. He didn’t find her.

He found, to his surprise, that the disappointment was smaller than he’d expected.

The song was still inside him, filling the space where despair usually sat. He would find her. This was the city where that would happen — the same city where everyone in the play had eventually found each other. It was not an accident. It was already written into the logic of this place, and all he had to do was stay.

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