Rewrite That Witch
CH723 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 723: Power to Shake the Sky

The Months of Demons had never had a sun. That had not changed in the four centuries Phyllis had been alive to observe it — the sky was a flat grey curtain, the snow an event without beginning or end, the distinction between morning and evening a matter of shade rather than light. Today had been light snow only, which in Neverwinter’s accounting passed for clear weather.

The white flash made the difference obvious.

When it came, it came from the ground — from the buried charges in the field simultaneously, a brightness that had no equivalent in anything the sky produced during the Months of Demons. It lasted perhaps half a second. In that half second it illuminated everything: the wall, the crowd, the smoke from the earlier artillery, the snowfield, the distant tree line. It cast shadows backward from objects that didn’t usually produce them.

Phyllis held her breath.

The light contracted, and what followed it was not darkness but fire — an orange mass rising from the ground at a kilometer’s distance, the snowfield beneath it lifting in a soft arc as if the earth were made of something other than earth. Stone and frozen soil became briefly liquid in their behavior, rising, separating, the fireball pushing through the surface above it.

Then the two phenomena split apart. The fireball continued upward. The ground came apart.

The sound reached the wall a fraction of a second later — not as sound exactly, but as physical fact. The overpressure hit first, a wave that had no noise but that the body recognized. The sound followed, and it was large enough that the crowd around her didn’t speak. It was large enough that most of them needed a moment to reorient before they could remember to respond.

What rose from the far field in the aftermath was a column of smoke and debris that extended from the burned ground toward the cloud ceiling without appearing to slow. The material it carried — earth, ash, shredded wood, whatever had been in the cages — rained back down across a wide radius, mixing with the snow.

This is what she called key, Phyllis thought. This is what she wanted me to understand.

She understood.

A Senior Demon wouldn’t survive that. The underground fire, the overpressure, the debris field — these were not things that could be endured through superior physical construction. This was the kind of force that decided questions by removing the capacity for further questions.

And the common people of Neverwinter had produced it.

She turned the fact over in her mind and found it wouldn’t fit into any category she’d had before today.

Three alchemists stood together on the wall’s viewing platform, and none of them were watching the crowd.

Retnin was watching the smoke column. He had been watching it since the moment of detonation, tracking it upward, noting the rate at which it dispersed against the upper atmosphere, estimating the initial temperature from the color the fireball had produced in its first few seconds. His companions were doing the same thing, and he knew this without looking at them because they’d had the same training from the same source and had developed the same observational habits.

The column was still rising. The fireball had faded through orange to dark red to a persistent glow at the center of the smoke, and the smoke itself had climbed high enough that it was beginning to shear against the upper winds.

This was not the fire and colored smoke of sulfur compounds. This was not the slow controlled burn of anything he had classified as chemistry until this moment.

This was what chemistry actually meant. The purer light and the purer heat. The thing underneath the imitations.

He was forty-nine years old. He had spent thirty-five years in pursuit of the alchemical tradition — twenty-five of them in King’s City’s highest position, respected enough that his name would appear in the record alongside Sage’s. He had been proud of this.

He now understood that he had been proud of the wrong things.

Rayleigh and Archer were turned toward him, and their faces had the particular quality he recognized from his own earliest memories — ten years old, the day the workshop doors had first opened. The quality of someone who has just learned that the world is much larger than they had been assuming, and who is not frightened by this but grateful.

“The lab,” Retnin said.

“Kyle Sichi’s office first,” Archer said.

“Then the lab,” Rayleigh said.

All three of them said these things simultaneously and then laughed, and the laugh was the laugh of men who have very suddenly run out of time and are very glad that the time that remains is available.

They left the wall together at a fast walk.

“Do you understand now,” Edith said, “why I want you to stay?”

She didn’t look at Cole when she said it. She was looking at the smoke column, which was still visible above the city’s rooflines, drifting now with the upper winds.

Cole was quiet for a moment. His face had gone pale when the detonation hit, and some of the color hadn’t come back.

“Because of the explosion?” he asked.

“Because no one can withstand Roland Wimbledon.” She said it flatly, as a statement of fact rather than admiration. “The aristocracy — the landed titles, the hereditary right, all of it — is a system built on the assumption that military power derives from controlling land and the men attached to it. That assumption is incorrect now. It was becoming incorrect before this, but today it is conclusively incorrect.” She paused. “The nobles who contested his abolition of their titles did so because they thought their power was real. Their power was never real. It was always borrowed from an older arrangement, and the older arrangement is gone.”

Cole looked at his hands. “We’re aristocrats too.”

“We’re former aristocrats.” She moved toward the wall’s edge. The snow was thin today, and the burned field was visible at distance — the dark scar of it against the white, the furrow and scatter of the blast radius. It looked like plowed ground. “Aristocracy was never about the title. The title was a record of something else — capability, resources, the ability to protect and to project. Strip away the land and the rights that came with it, and what remains is still real. What remains is the thing the title was meant to describe.” She turned to look at Cole. “If you want to be an aristocrat in the era that’s starting now, you integrate yourself into the new structure and become valuable within it. The title comes afterward. It always comes afterward.”

Cole studied her face.

There was color in her cheeks that the cold alone didn’t account for, and her expression, usually so precisely controlled, had something in it she wasn’t bothering to manage. He had seen this on her face occasionally — not often, not predictably, and never when she was discussing politics or administration.

He was quite sure she didn’t know she looked this way.

He decided not to mention it.

“I’ll stay,” he said. “And I won’t argue about going home.”

“Good.” She looked back at the smoke.

“Is my sister interested in explosions?” he wondered, privately, and then decided that some questions were better left in the category of things one did not say aloud.

Discussion

Suggest a change