Chapter 707: The Queen of Starfall City’s Path
Roland turned the implication over in his mind.
An experienced soul in a God’s Punishment Warrior body — not the newly-converted soldiers the Church had deployed, who were strong and pain-blind but still fundamentally new, still learning the range of what they could do. A warrior with two centuries of accumulated reflex and combat judgment, wearing an ageless body. Ashes had said it once: the God’s Punishment Army’s limitation wasn’t strength or reaction time but wisdom — they were powerful but young, all of them, in the ways that counted. Put a witch’s accumulated mind in there, running on centuries of experience, and the calculation changed entirely.
If he had faced that version of the army at Coldwind Ridge, they wouldn’t have needed a frontal assault. They could have split into squads, moved at night, harassed supply lines, surfaced at multiple points simultaneously. No fixed fortification holds against an enemy that doesn’t need to sleep or feel pain or plan around attrition. The bunker line would have been a set of individual problems, each one solvable given enough time and distributed pressure. They would have had both.
The civil war within the Union was starting to make more sense.
“How many shells could Alice create before the Bloody Moon?” he asked. “There’s a ceiling. A shell enters old age around a century. If someone joins the process at twenty, you get seven or eight decades of use before you need another. Even without accounting for transformation failures, each witch produces only two shells across their lifetime. That puts a hard limit on corps size.”
Phyllis bit her lip.
“All.”
He paused. “I’m sorry?”
“She intended to transform all of them.” She said it again, clearly. “Every witch — except the Transcendents — into the God’s Punishment Army. Every one, before the Bloody Moon fell.”
He worked the arithmetic again. “The training model doesn’t support that. If you want warriors with real capability, they need decades in the shell. You can’t produce a useful force at scale without holding shells in reserve for the transfer cycle. The numbers don’t close.”
“There was another method of preservation.” Phyllis’s voice was steady. “Moving the soul into a vessel — not a body, not a shell. Something inert. During that period, the person hibernating consumes nothing, feels nothing, waits.” She paused. “We call it hibernation. That’s how the survivors made it through the years after the split — we had no usable shells, so we endured on hibernation alone. With one exception.”
“Pasha.”
“When you see her, you’ll understand.” She didn’t elaborate. “Alice’s plan: train sophisticated warriors over a century, then hibernate the souls to interrupt the consumption of shells. Starfall City could run continuous transformation — more output per witch, because the experienced souls weren’t using shells between training cycles. When the Bloody Moon arrived, every hibernated soul would be awakened simultaneously. The result: a force far beyond what the surviving witch population could sustain through any conventional means.”
He looked at Wendy. Sylvie. Leaf. Their faces had gone the color of old paper.
Every witch alive on the eve of the battle. That was what the plan required. Not volunteers. Not the ones who agreed. Everyone.
He said it quietly. “And Alice herself? Did she intend to transfer?”
“No.” A breath. “She and her inner circle — they never planned to extend their lives. They intended to stay in their original bodies and govern the plan through to completion. Only by remaining Transcendent did she have the authority and the presence to hold the structure together. A transferred soul spends decades relearning how to hold a cup. During that time, they can’t lead.” She paused. “And there was the other thing. The symbol.”
“The red hair.”
“Starfall City’s emblem. The Queen’s hair. A symbol of something that doesn’t end.” Her voice was careful now, controlled in the way that careful control usually means something is being held. “She was going to die in her original body when her time came. She accepted that from the beginning. Everything she built, she built knowing she would not live to see what it produced.”
A silence settled over the room.
Roland sat with it.
He and Alice were on opposite sides of everything that had followed — her plan had produced the Church, which had produced the God’s Punishment Army that had nearly destroyed everything he was trying to build. But the plan itself: a woman who had looked at the approaching extinction of everything her civilization had built and had chosen, as her response, to burn herself up preventing it. No personal continuity. No transfer. Just the work, and the plan, and the willingness to die for both at whatever point the body gave out.
She deserves the respect, even if everything that came after her was wrong.
“After her death,” Roland said, “Starfall City drifted.”
“Gradually. Without the Queen to hold the original intent, the organization’s structure remained, but the meaning inside it shifted.” Phyllis looked at the table. “That is the Church.”
The historical record completed itself. The civil war: two factions facing extinction, one with a plan that could work and a cost that was total, one with a discovery that offered a different path. The split was not irrationality — it was two different answers to the same question about how much was acceptable to sacrifice. When the ruins produced a third option, the faction that had been resisting everything the first option required had finally found ground to stand on.
“Was the discovery in the ruins — the vessel, Soul Transfer, the Chosen One — all connected?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And you still won’t say what it was.”
“Only Lady Pasha can decide that. I’m sorry.”
Roland considered this. Then: “I can’t agree to cooperation without knowing more than I currently do. That’s not stubbornness — it’s the minimum standard for a real agreement.”
“I understand.” Phyllis’s expression was open rather than defensive. “What I can offer: the confirmation process for the Chosen One carries no risk to Neverwinter’s witches. No harm to anyone. We ask only for an ability demonstration — the same as any ordinary test. Taquila did not survive four centuries by harming its own kind. Lady Natalyae’s faction broke with Alice precisely because they would not.” A pause. “After confirmation, Lady Pasha will speak with you directly. At that point, all of it becomes discussable.”
“Through the ring?”
“Through the Five-Colors Stone. Once I crush it, she’ll locate me immediately. I’ve been saving that use for the confirmed Chosen One.” She set the ring on her palm. “The researcher overseeing the instrument itself is Celine. When Pasha speaks to you, she can tell you what’s actually possible. I only know fragments.”
Roland turned his tea cup. “This afternoon. The castle garden. If every member of the Witch Union demonstrates their ability once, that’s sufficient?”
“Yes.” Something in her posture eased — barely visible, but present.
“Then we’ll do it this afternoon.”
She rose and performed the formal salute — hand to chest, the deep bow, the gesture of a civilization’s representative before a foreign king. “Thank you, Your Majesty. When the demons have been defeated, your name will be honored alongside Taquila’s.”
Roland nodded and said nothing.
He had agreed because he wanted to know what was in the ruins. And because Agatha had pointed him here, and Agatha’s judgment had, over time, stopped being something he second-guessed. But the speech about his name and Taquila’s — he filed it away in the category of things said with sincerity that he would not be holding anyone to. What the future honored or didn’t honor was not something he was planning around.
The present had enough in it already.