Rewrite That Witch
CH703 · Rewrite
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Chapter 703: Coming from the Past

She was certain.

Even with four hundred years between the memory and this moment, the recognition was absolute. No. 76 had spent too many hours of that intervening time cataloguing and reviewing the records of every witch she’d known in the Taquila era — names, abilities, faces, histories — for any of those faces to become uncertain.

The ceremony came back to her in its details: the hall with its banners, the assembled witches of the garrison watching from the lower rows, the Three Chiefs on the elevated platform at the front. And the blue-haired witch kneeling before them — young, composed, with the particular quality of composure that belongs to people who have worked very hard for something and have arrived, finally, at the moment the work was for. The cope draped across her shoulders. The scepter lifted from the table and placed in her hands. The Quest Society’s leader murmuring the words of the blessing.

And then the new Senior Witch rising and turning to face the audience.

No. 76 had been sitting in the garrison ranks. An ordinary combat witch, unremarkable, assigned to wall rotation. She had looked up at the youngest High Awakened that Taquila had produced in a generation, and felt the clean difficult combination of admiration and the knowledge that the distance between herself and that stage was permanent.

So that is Agatha.

The fragments of later information assembled themselves: the falling-out with the Quest Society over the principle of never involving common people in Union research. Agatha’s refusal to recant. The exile to her own tower outside the city walls — not a punishment exactly, because her rank protected her from that, but a removing from resources and access that would have felt like punishment to anyone who cared about the work. No. 76 had, at the time, found it difficult to understand. The war had needed every Senior Witch. The Quest Society had needed Agatha’s particular mind. The decision had wasted something that couldn’t be replaced.

Four hundred years had changed her perspective on this as on most things.

The former impatience with Agatha’s choices had dissolved entirely. What remained was something closer to happiness — unexpected, forceful, the happiness of an outcome she had stopped believing was possible. A Taquila witch. Here. Intact.

That was the thing she couldn’t yet account for.

The others had survived only as souls — transferred into containers, maintained through methods that had no gentleness in them, existing in the ruins of the maze as consciousness without the body that consciousness had inhabited. No. 76 herself had no original body left to return to. She wore this one the way you wear a tool, because the tool was functional and there was work to be done.

But Agatha’s body was here. The face she’d looked up at from the garrison benches: unchanged, unhurried by four centuries. As though time had simply agreed to stop at a particular point and wait.

The crystal coffin, she thought. The ruins of the stone tower. There had been accounts — fragmentary, uncertain, reaching them through Lightning’s report and the subsequent discussions. A woman in suspension. Rescued. Brought to Roland’s city.

Agatha had been in the coffin. Agatha had slept for four hundred years in physical space rather than the maze, and had emerged from it the same way she had entered.

No. 76 watched her walk toward the gate without looking back, and let her go.

She knew what she needed to do.

“She jumped from the second-floor corridor window,” Sylvie said. The evening had brought its wind sharp and specific; both of them were watching the city from the castle office, the Eye of Truth extending Sylvie’s sight far below. “The iron railing on the frame — it came free when she shook it. Old rust. She went over the wall before the guards at the door had looked that direction.”

Nightingale absorbed this. “And she’s been loose since then.”

“Since this afternoon, yes. She returned to her room for a rest after the mine tour — genuinely seemed tired, her lip movements said so. I thought the day had settled. But at twilight…” Sylvie’s expression shifted. “She’s moving. South, along the small street outside the Castle District.”

Roland closed his book. He was following the report with the focused attention of someone tracking a game that had become more interesting than expected. “An ordinary person who can evade lie detection and remove iron window railings with her bare hands is, in fact, quite extraordinary.”

“I’ll establish how she managed it after I’ve caught her,” Nightingale said, with the tone of someone putting an item on a list.

“She’s stopped,” Sylvie said. “Beside the street. She’s… waiting.”

“No weapons. No magic signature.” Nightingale thought it through. “If she’s after intelligence, she’d sit on it longer, build slowly. The speed of this — acting the same evening she found what she was looking for — suggests she’s not waiting for a better moment. She’s decided tonight is it.”

“Attack on whom?”

“We’ll know shortly.”

Ten minutes.

Then Sylvie’s voice changed register entirely. “She’s moving again. She’s following—” A pause. “That’s Agatha.”

“Agatha changes her route through that street when the work shift ends,” Nightingale said slowly. “No. 76 would have had to know the timing. Which means she’s been planning this since this morning.” She frowned. “But Agatha is a combat witch. Why would someone without magic or weapons go after her?”

“She’s reacted—” Sylvie stopped. Her voice went strange. “Agatha moved to intercept and No. 76 just—” Another stop. “No. 76 is showing the signature of a God’s Stone of Retaliation.”

The silence in the room lasted approximately one second.

“Nightingale—”

She was already in the Mist before Roland finished her name. “Sylvie, stay with His Majesty.”

The ice had formed.

Agatha had heard the footsteps tracking her through the empty street and turned without hesitation, calling up the cold before she’d consciously decided to — four hundred years of reflex, always the same. Her Ice rose in the air between them, shaped to close around the feet and hold.

And then it dissolved.

Not blocked. Not deflected. Dissolved — as though the magic itself had been unmade. One second the ice was there, angled and fully formed. The next second it wasn’t, and there was no residue.

“That’s not a God’s Stone.” Agatha kept her hands raised, reassessing. A God’s Stone suppressed the ability at the source; the ice shouldn’t have formed at all. But it had formed, and then ceased. Something had interrupted the magic after it left her, not before.

She didn’t know the mechanism. She knew she was in a street with no witnesses, being approached by someone who had anticipated her ability and brought a counter for it. Rational, prepared, specific.

She calculated her next move.

What the woman did stopped her.

A gesture she hadn’t seen in four centuries: elbows raised to level, fingers overlapping at the center of the chest, the body bending from the waist in a precise and deliberate arc downward.

The formal greeting of a Union member to a superior of the Taquila age.

Agatha stood completely still.

“My respects to you, Lady Agatha.” The woman’s voice was even. Not afraid. “The youngest High Awakened.” A breath. “Could we find somewhere to speak?”

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