Rewrite That Witch
CH655 · Rewrite
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Chapter 655: In the Depth of the Limestone Cave

Holding a Stone of Lighting, Banach Lothar made his way down into the depths of Black Money’s territory.

The ramp was steep enough that he stumbled despite his servants’ help.

I’ve grown old. The thought arrived without ceremony, as it had been doing more often these past years. Since his twenties he had run the family business — built it, really, from a modest trading house into a Chamber of Commerce whose reach and wealth placed him alongside the three noble families of the Kingdom of Dawn, though he would never receive more than a knight’s honorary title for it. The struggle had been extraordinary. He had loved it.

But he had no certainty of what came after him. As the Chamber expanded, he had invited in senior merchants and upper nobility to consolidate its strength. Reliable pillars while he lived. Threats the moment he was gone. He had five sons and a daughter; the most gifted of them, his fourth son Victor, was only twenty-one — talented, genuinely so, but not yet able to command the respect of men who had been in the Chamber for decades. If Banach died now and Victor tried to claim leadership, the Chamber would fracture. And fractured, it would not simply break apart — his children would be at risk.

If he surrendered the Chamber outright — the life’s work, the thing he had given everything to build — that was its own form of destruction.

He stumbled again.

“Sir!” The servants caught him.

He steadied himself. His body had been failing him for years. He was sixty-nine. The ramp was steep and the moss was wet. He had to be faster about this than the ramp was comfortable to walk.

The Oracle’s promise steadied his heartbeat whenever he thought of it.

Only by becoming one of them could this problem be made to disappear entirely.

Gradually the ramp leveled, and the air turned damp and close. He heard the underground river before he reached it — a continuous thunder, dull and solid, water striking rock in the dark below. He had never liked this place. It was sufficiently hidden, but it offered no sense of permanence; any sufficiently motivated flood might reclaim these passages. Several tunnels in this same cave network had already become pools, sealed off when the undercurrent reversed and filled them. Black Money occupied a fraction of this system. Given time and resources, the whole complex might become an underground city.

He would not have the time.

At the bottom of the ramp the cave opened up — enormously, suddenly — and his Stone of Lighting became inadequate, swallowed by a space too large for it. He could no longer see the walls on either side. The undercurrent below was extremely loud now, a branch of it running directly underfoot, beneath some layer of stone or through some channel he couldn’t see.

Two yellow lights burned in the distance: the Oracle’s guards, come to collect him.

“Stop here and wait.” He raised a hand to his servants.

“Sir, it’s still—”

“I’ll walk the last part alone.” His years of authority were heavier than any argument they could offer. They fell silent.

He crossed the central cave carefully. This deepest section was shaped like an island — a central rise of rock surrounded by unseeable drops, connected to the ramp passage by a narrow stone bridge. Walking it meant walking in total darkness beyond the reach of his Stone, guided only by the yellow flames at the far end. The roaring from below rose and fell like something breathing. If he let himself think about what lay beneath the bridge, he thought of hell, and the roaring was the sound of it.

Mist rose as he neared the rock island, thickening the air, narrowing his circle of light further still. Moss on wet stone. He placed each step with care.

He was panting by the time he arrived.

The guards turned without ceremony. “Come with me. The Oracle has been waiting.”

The island’s summit was perhaps a hundred paces across. The meeting room was within the rockhill itself, reached by stone stairs. Before he climbed them, he noticed something he had noted on prior visits and confirmed again now: at the far end of the island, a second cave opened — large, round, its edges too smooth for natural formation. It aligned precisely with the ramp passage he had descended. The guards of the Oracle used it. He was increasingly certain it was how they moved through the Kingdom of Dawn unobserved.

Inside the rockhill, the stone room was perhaps ten paces across. Cushions had been set out for him. A heavy cloth curtain blocked the sounds of the river. He sat and caught his breath while the guards withdrew to their positions.

“Are you ready?” one asked.

“Yes.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead. Exhausted in body; full of expectation in everything else. “Please allow me to meet the Oracle.”

His Stone of Lighting flashed.

The guards’ stones flashed.

Then all three went dark, one after another, until the stone room was completely without light.

This was not his first time. He did not flinch.

A curtain of purple light rose from the ground and the darkness became a different world entirely.

It was underground, but not this underground — a vast cavity illuminated from below by flowing lava, rivers of flame threading from rock openings in all directions, converging at the bottom into a webwork of fire. And suspended above it, clinging to the rock wall: the Oracle herself.

She was enormous. A tumor-mass of flesh hung from the cave ceiling by countless roots and tendrils, each as large as a man’s torso, all of them pulsing slowly as if breathing. Her surface heaved and contracted in long, rhythmic waves. She had no face — no eyes, no mouth — but she could see and she could speak, both of them happening directly inside his mind, without sound or movement of any kind.

This was the Oracle’s true body.

She needed no human form. She was already beyond ordinary expression.

Banach Lothar bowed his head.

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