Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 640: Dream World Hypotheses

Isabella lowered her head and waited.

“Your ability saved you,” Roland said. His tone was the same one he’d used throughout—level, without theater. “Not because it’s rare, but because it can’t kill. Whatever your role in the events that put me in that coma—you were an accessory, not a principal. I can spare your life. But you’ll still make amends, like anyone else who breaks the law here.”

Something unclenched in her. She hadn’t been afraid of death. She simply preferred not to die.

“As long as you fight the demons,” she said, “I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“I’ll fight the demons.” A pause. “But not the way the church fought them. My goal isn’t to win the Battle of Divine Will at the cost of burning everything human out of people beforehand. That means you’ll need to revise some of what you’re accustomed to. From today, you’re not a pure witch of the church. You’re an atoning witch.”

Zero, you were wrong about him. Isabella turned the thought over. He’d known about the demons and the Union long before she arrived here—had already begun preparing for the Battle of Divine Will. He was a common man whose life would end in decades, but he now held Zero’s limitless lifespan. If the old stories meant anything, that made him something chosen.

She went to her knees, chains and all. She let her hair fall forward across the floor.

“Yes, my lord.”

“This isn’t the Holy City,” Roland said, as she rose. “And you’re not a servant. You’re a prisoner making amends—but I’m not sending you to the mines for twenty years.” He gestured slightly toward Agatha. “What I need from you is cooperation with her research on magic power. That’s all.”

Isabella stared at him.

“Five years,” Roland continued. “After that, you’re free. Wendy will arrange new quarters. During the atonement period, no shackles—but limited movement. Your residence and Agatha’s Spellcaster Tower. Anywhere else, you go under the Witch Union’s supervision.”

“Yes. I understand.”

“One more thing—are you certain no other witches remain in Holy City?”

She’d answered this question several times since her capture. She thought it through again and shook her head. “For the final battle, Zero converted every non-combat witch into a God’s Punishment Warrior and brought all the others to the field. There are still girls in the cloisters, but new awakenings rarely happen outside the Months of Demons. Vanilla, Margie, and myself are almost certainly the only pure witches of the church still living.”

Roland nodded once and turned toward the door. The blonde witch stepped forward and unfastened the shackles.

Isabella looked down at her bare wrists.

No prison. No humiliation. No torture. Is this really the whole of my sentence?

“Your Majesty,” she said. “What about Vanilla and Margie?”

He looked back at her. “They’re better off than you. They were shaped by distorted cloister education, but they didn’t choose to act on it the way you did. If they’re willing to let go of those ideas, they may even join the Witch Union.”

He left. The two witches followed. The cell door groaned shut.

Isabella stood in the sunlight for a moment, then lay down on the plank bed. Through the iron bars the sky was an even, cloudless blue. She squinted into it.

What a lovely day.

Back in the office, Nightingale said flatly, “Her punishment is too light. She nearly got you killed.”

“Zero nearly got me killed. Not her.” Roland held out a strip of dried fish.

She took it with her teeth and chewed. “She created the opening. Without her, you couldn’t have been dragged into the Soul Battlefield to begin with.”

“She genuinely wants to fight the demons. You confirmed it.” Roland kept his voice patient. “She didn’t commit an unforgivable act, and I’m standing here. That’s enough for what she gets.” He laced his hands together behind his back. “There’s another purpose. When people see how she’s treated, they understand something: that as long as you don’t cross the legal threshold, atonement is possible here. That matters for the people who are still deciding which side to stand on.”

Nightingale twitched her mouth. “Fine. I’ll watch her for you.”

Roland walked to the window.

He went back over what Isabella had told him. The memories Zero absorbed had come in two kinds. One kind: disorganized, threaded through with the residual consciousness of the loser, affecting Zero herself—changing her thinking, her personality, her very beliefs over years. The other kind: orderly and complete, accessible on demand, like archived files she could open and put aside.

The first kind was harder to recall. Easier to lose. The second kind remained intact.

He turned it over. Was that why she kept persuading me to surrender during the battle? If a loser gave up willingly, their memories arrived whole and uncontaminated—no residual consciousness embedded in the transfer. Zero could absorb the data without the interference. She bore no side effects from the compliant ones.

That’s why she hesitated at every critical moment. She wanted him to stop fighting. She wanted a clean acquisition.

She wanted his complete memories, undisrupted by his resistance.

He found a parallel without looking for it. When he had come to inhabit Prince Roland’s body, the prince’s memories had been exactly like that second kind—complete, orderly, always available. He could search them at will, reference a face or a name or a conversation from years past, then set it aside. It was like reading a well-indexed archive. Prince Roland had died without resistance—taken by an assassin’s blade, with no will left to push back. By Zero’s own taxonomy, a loser who gave up entirely.

Which raised the next question.

What happened to the ones who didn’t give up? Who kept fighting even as they lost?

Based on Isabella’s account, those memories were the difficult ones—tangled, residual, full of the echo of a consciousness that refused to dissolve. They affected Zero, complicated her, changed her in ways she couldn’t fully predict or control. Two centuries of that, thousands of absorbed souls, each one leaving traces—no wonder she had become so strange, so layered, so difficult to map.

If she had wanted to truly destroy him, she would have poured all of it into him at once—every disorganized fragment from every unyielding mind. The result would have shattered him, and then she might have been able to reassemble herself from the chaos.

But she hadn’t expected him to be who he was.

He was not a man of this age. He came from a world of information overload—a world where a single day’s intake exceeded what someone in this era might absorb in months. His mind had been trained, without his awareness, to sort and prioritize and discard at speed. The flood of memory fragments hadn’t overwhelmed him. They had been sorted. Filed. Reorganized around a structure his own mind had built to contain them.

The Dream World.

That structure now existed outside him—stable, consistent, populated with people from Zero’s collection and images from his own life, all of it folded together into something neither of them had planned.

He couldn’t ask Zero what she made of it. She had lost everything—her memories as a witch, her centuries of history—and in their place was a twelve-year-old girl who made breakfast and worried about grocery money.

He stood at the window for a long time, looking out over Neverwinter.

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