Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 668: Dispersion Star Astrologer

“About the Bloody Moon prophecy?” Dispersion Star settled into the chair.

“Partly. Since you’ve raised it, we’ll start there.” Roland rose, poured a cup of tea, and set it in front of the astrologer—an act of condescension, by the standards of every court Dispersion Star had served. Timothy Wimbledon would sooner have thrown the cup. “The prophecy traces back more than a thousand years. Before the Kingdom of Graycastle existed. Before the Wimbledon family.”

“Your Majesty—our records extend only about 450 years…”

“The earlier period was documented and then deliberately concealed.” Roland returned to his seat and folded his hands. “It’s a long story. Let me tell you all of it.”

What followed was extraordinary.

The Barbarian Land, a thousand years ago, uninhabited by humans. A prolonged war between men and demons. The Bloody Moon as signal rather than punishment. A witch empire whose rise and fall preceded the current kingdoms. The origins of Graycastle, of the church—the whole architecture of the known world redrawn from a perspective that Dispersion Star had never been offered and would, from any other source, have immediately dismissed.

He did not dismiss it now. Roland’s face throughout was entirely serious, and Dispersion Star was not a man who survived four kings by misreading expressions.

He sat in the aftermath and found he could not breathe properly.

He had believed, with great confidence, that the Bloody Moon represented divine punishment—catastrophe of the natural sort, however terrible, that human civilization could survive with sufficient preparation. Earthquakes, fire, storm. He had spent his life calculating the orbital paths of something that, in his understanding, was an announcement of misery rather than obliteration.

But if Roland was correct, the Bloody Moon was not divine punishment at all. It was a military signal. The war had been fought twice. Men had lost both times. The third time would be the end.

“Your Majesty.” Dispersion Star found his voice with some difficulty. “Where did you learn all of this?”

Roland held up two fingers. “The witch empire and the church. Both have connections to the founding of the Four Kingdoms, including Graycastle. I’ve met demons in the western field—they’re a genuine race, with their own civilization and armies.”

“And the smile of deities?”

“Unknown. Perhaps we’ll learn it when the Battle of Divine Will actually arrives.”

Dispersion Star was quiet for a long time. He turned the account over, examined it from angles the king couldn’t have anticipated. It connected. The rise of the Wimbledon family, the peculiar history of the church, the political geography of the Four Kingdoms—all of it cohered in a way that random invention could not have produced. Rulers did not concoct complex false histories to share with visiting astrologers in private at midnight. There was no gain in it.

More than that: if witches did not receive their power from demons, then they were not demons’ servants. They were something else entirely. In that light, Roland’s decision to trust them—to build an entire military and industrial apparatus around them—became the most rational choice he could have made, rather than the recklessness everyone in the king’s city had assumed.

The rumors of innocence that had circulated about witches—dismissed as Roland’s eccentricity—were simply the visible edge of a truth the king had chosen not to release in full, because releasing it in full would have caused panic. A careful, deliberate disclosure. Not eccentricity. Caution.

The one thing Dispersion Star still could not understand was the exact relationship between the Star of Extinction in the sky and what Roland was calling the Gates of Hell.

“What can I do for you, Your Majesty?”

The question was an acknowledgment as much as an offer. Dimly, Dispersion Star had already guessed that the invitation to relocate hadn’t been primarily about the telescope. Roland knew more about the Star of Extinction than any astrologer alive. He had not summoned 312 people to improve his observation capacity.

“That’s what I want to discuss next.” Roland reached into the pile on his desk and produced a slim volume, setting it on the edge nearest to the astrologer. “Read this first.”

The cover bore a title in an unfamiliar arrangement of words and a color of ink—blue, deep blue, the kind that required fine pigment—that Dispersion Star associated with expensive official documents. He sounded it out.

“Analytic… geometry?”

“Take your time with it. If you don’t understand it all tonight, that’s expected. There’s a great deal you’ll need to learn before it fully opens up.”

Dispersion Star lifted the book. He had carefully protected his eyes for decades—late-night reading in poor light was the kind of small cruelty that accumulated into ruined vision over years, and an astrologer who could not see the sky was no astrologer at all. He intended to glance at the prologue, express appropriate interest, and return to it in better light tomorrow.

His eyes reached the first page and did not leave it.

To describe the orbits of moving objects with arithmetic formulas. To reconstruct the entire path from a handful of parameters.

He turned the page.

Coordinate systems—two straight lines intersecting, dividing space into four quadrants. In each section, a shape: a diagonal line, a curve, an oval, a compound form. Simple enough. But beside each shape was a small cluster of symbols—a formula—and the formula for the circle, when he looked at it, made him stop completely.

He could not parse the notation. The symbols were ones he had never encountered. And yet something in the structure—the way it began and ended with the same expression, the symmetry of it—was unmistakable. Beautiful was not a word he applied to arithmetic formulas. He applied it now.

And this: the formula for a circle looked structurally similar to the formula for the oval. For the curve. The diagonal line and the oval were separated by visual appearance in every system of description he had ever used, and here they were described by formulas that were, in structure, variations on the same thing.

Could every shape be represented by a corresponding arithmetic formula?

His hands turned the page without his consciously deciding to. Then the next. Then the next.

When he closed the book, his neck had stiffened to the point of discomfort. He became aware that Roland was still at the desk, writing, apparently quite absorbed. More than an hour had passed.

“Your Majesty—I apologize, I—”

“Finished?” Roland looked up and smiled. “I expect there are many things you don’t yet understand.”

“Yes. And none of the court tutors—nine out of ten were from the Association—ever taught anything like this.” He set the book down with the care of a man handling something irreplaceable. “The symbols, the formula conversions—I couldn’t follow the more complex ones. But it is… remarkable.”

“That’s because the foundation is missing. You need to learn equations first—that’s the prerequisite for analytic geometry.” Roland produced a stack of books from somewhere on the desk and arranged them in front of the astrologer. The spines bore titles in the same unfamiliar style, some blue-lettered, some green. “Take all of these.”

Dispersion Star’s hands were unsteady as he gathered them. “May I bring them back to my quarters?”

“Of course. And I want all the astrologers and their students working through these, not just you.” Roland paused, and then said the thing that would have seemed absurd coming from anyone else: “The second point I want to make is this—don’t let the Bloody Moon worry you too much. Once your people have learned what’s in those books, the Astrology Association will be irreplaceable in the war against demons. These are a starting point. What comes after will be harder, and more profound. By the time you reach it, you’ll be able to calculate the orbit of a moving object—any object. Cannonball. Cloud. Star. The motion of every stone and tree on the earth’s surface, if you choose. Every visible body in the sky.” He let that settle. “Are you willing to try?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The words were out before Dispersion Star had consciously formed them. The dejection that had settled over him when Roland first declined to express appropriate astonishment at the Star of Extinction—that sense of his life’s work falling into an indifferent silence—had evaporated completely. He saw it now for what it was: not ignorance, but a different level of knowledge that had simply outrun the Association entirely.

Somewhere ahead of him, thousands of stars moved along paths he could calculate.

Roland smiled at him. It was an odd smile—warm and patient and also faintly predatory, like a man watching something exactly where he’d laid the trap for it.

“Good. Don’t be discouraged if you hit walls—that’s how it’s supposed to feel. You’ll get there.”

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