Rewrite That Witch
CH667 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 667: Chaos Drinks

The cups that followed were revelations.

One tasted of coffee—not the thin, bitter approximation Roland had encountered in this era, but the real thing: dark and intense, with an exotic fragrance that lingered long after the cup was empty. One tasted like a rich broth, warming in a way that traveled from the throat downward, as if it had opinions about where cold lived in the body and intended to settle every one of them.

The last had no equivalent he could locate.

If pressed, he might have called it Fire Dragon Wine—not for any ingredient it contained, but for the experience of drinking it. The first sip arrived like something poured from a forge: a wall of heat that didn’t burn so much as announce itself, followed by the smell of char, the sensation of a tongue very briefly persuaded it had been roasted. And then, beneath all of that, the fruit—faint, almost delicate, mixed with a light vinous depth that emerged only after the first impact had faded. The aftertaste was long. It didn’t so much end as withdraw.

He held the cup and considered what he’d just drunk.

Beside him, Nightingale materialized from the grey without making a production of it. She had clearly been watching his face. “It really tastes that good?”

He held out a cup.

She drank. Her eyes bent into crescents. “Oh.”

“I tasted it before he did,” Wendy said from the other side of the desk, wearing a similar expression. “It’s genuinely hard to resist.”

Roland looked at the last empty cup with a feeling that was, in a small but real way, mourning. “Is there more like that last one?”

Evelyn shook her head. “I can’t reproduce it. The ability is entirely random—I can’t control the result at all.”

“Explain the mechanics to me.”

Wendy filled in the details. Roland listened carefully.

The ability transformed liquids—water, wine, other beverages—into drinks. But which drink emerged from the transformation was completely outside Evelyn’s control. Each use produced something different. The magic power required to transform a drink was substantially greater than what the old ability had consumed for producing alcohol. One transformation per day; quantity equivalent to roughly one barrel.

In the days since her awakening, Evelyn had cast the new ability five times. Five drinks. None the same.

Roland understood now why she’d looked dejected when she walked in.

High advancement was supposed to be a rebirth—an expansion that could turn a non-combat witch into a combat witch, that was supposed to open new domains rather than simply reconfigure existing ones. Evelyn had come from Sleeping Island, where the hierarchy of abilities was long established and quietly rigid in people’s minds. Her ability had grown in quantity and complexity, but in essence it remained what it had always been—brewing. And now even the thing she had improved—control, reliability, the capacity to replicate a good result—had been stripped away. She made extraordinary things she couldn’t make again.

He could see why she was struggling with that.

There was nothing he could say to collapse the years it would take for her to adjust her perspective. The assistant witches of Neverwinter were doing that work gradually, showing by accumulation what unconventional abilities could become—but it was a process, not a speech.

What he could do was think about what she actually had.

The silk trade. Porcelain. Perfume. The entire history of the Modern Navigation Times was a history of people willing to sail off the edge of known maps in pursuit of luxuries—things that served no practical function and were worth whatever a merchant could make someone pay. The logic of luxury was ancient and persistent: the rarer the thing, the more beautiful the experience, the more reliably some portion of any population would sacrifice to obtain it.

These drinks were perfect luxuries.

Each one was genuinely extraordinary—the Fire Dragon Wine alone, bottled and transported to the Fjords or the eastern kingdoms, would command prices that would make even hardened merchants look twice. A unique drink, unrepeatable, produced by a source no other kingdom could replicate or compete with. The scarcity was not a disadvantage. It was the product.

And beyond trade, there was another use. Soldiers garrisoned at the edge of the Impassable Mountain Range, fighting in the cold for years with no clear end to the war in sight—a barrel of something unprecedented, delivered from the warmth of Neverwinter, said something that no speech could quite replicate.

He leaned forward. “I want to build you a dedicated space—a storage facility, purpose-built for your production. And going forward, rather than transforming wine, I want you transforming the highest-quality liquids we can provide as a base.” He paused. “Your ability will bring you more opportunity than you can currently see. I genuinely believe every person who drinks what you make will become someone who wants more of it.”

Evelyn looked down at the bottles on the desk. “I’ll do my best, Your Majesty.”

She didn’t sound convinced.

He didn’t push it. She would see what her ability produced in the world before she fully believed him, and that was fine. The believing could come later.

“Chaos Drinks,” he said. “That’s what we’ll call them.”

When the welcome dinner wound down, Astrologer of Dispersion Star arrived at Roland’s study.

He had worked for three kings in succession—Wimbledon I, Wimbledon II, Wimbledon III—and Roland was the fourth. In the astrologer’s experience, kings followed recognizable patterns, whatever their individual variations. Pride. Vanity. A hunger for historical significance. The need to be seen as serious. These could be managed by a man who understood them.

Roland Wimbledon did not fit any of those patterns.

The rumor from the king’s city had painted him as ridiculous, flighty, prone to strange obsessions. But the man Dispersion Star had encountered since arriving in Neverwinter was nothing like that. He was neither arrogant nor performing composure—he simply seemed to operate on a set of priorities that didn’t correspond to anything the astrologer had reference for. Elusory was the word that kept returning.

The letter had been the first sign. Every previous king who had received news of the Star of Extinction had responded with fear, urgency, theological concern—the full register of a man confronting divine portent. Roland’s reply had extended greetings, offered the better telescope in Neverwinter, and mentioned new clues about the Bloody Moon as an afterthought, in the same tone someone might use to mention that they’d left a package at the door. Even when Dispersion Star had personally shown him the Star of Extinction at the observatory, Roland had seemed more interested than alarmed.

A calm king was a gift. But a king who remained calm while learning about the end of the world was something different.

The study was bright and busy with papers. Roland set his pen aside when the astrologer entered and gestured toward a chair.

“Good evening, Your Majesty. The Astrology Association pays its respects.” Dispersion Star bowed.

“You’re here. Good. Sit down—I have things to discuss with you.”

Discussion

Suggest a change