Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 732: An Ideal Beginning

When the news settled, the hall became loud all at once.

“How can a common person contact God?” Alethea’s voice carried the force of something long-held and freshly tested. “That’s impossible. You’ve made an error somewhere.”

“Are you certain the orange beam came from his body?” Celine went to the precise point without preamble. “Have every witch in the western region of Graycastle verified it?”

These were the two questions every mind in the hall had reached simultaneously.

“I saw it myself,” Phyllis said, her voice careful and unhurried, the voice of someone who had already run this argument with herself. “His Key is so much more intricate than anything in Pasha’s requirements that the Five-Colored Stone couldn’t contain it — the orange light poured out from every seam like a mountain trying to fit inside a cup. I didn’t believe it at first either. But it is true.”

Pasha asked the last question she had — the one that carried what remained of her hope in it: “Does he have magic power?”

A beat. “He cannot activate the Instrument of Divine Retribution.”

The silence that followed had a different weight than the one before. This surprise had arrived the wrong way around — first elation, then the thing beneath it. They had found the Chosen One. That alone was miraculous, an outcome no one had dared to plan for in so short a time. And then: he had the Key but not the power to use what the Key was for. A door, perfectly shaped, and no way to turn it.

They had tested this thoroughly in the Taquila age. Common people could not endure sustained exposure to magic power. The toughest among them might sustain thirty minutes. They could not master the critical operations. They never could.

Pasha turned the situation over in her mind, examining it from each direction she had relied on for four centuries.

She had assumed the Chosen One would be a Senior Witch — had assumed that finding dozens of eligible candidates would be easier in an era when the Union controlled the Fertile Plains. What she had not planned for, had not been able to plan for, was the news Phyllis had just delivered: that in the small city of Neverwinter, more than ten higher ascendants already lived. More higher ascendants than some of the Union’s core organizations — the Quest Society, the Blessed Army — had ever gathered at their peak.

And still. Not one of them was the Chosen One.

Two thoughts ran in opposing directions inside her. The first: that defeating the demons would have been easier in the old days, and they had simply arrived too late at the ruin to know it. The second, darker and harder to dismiss — that they had never truly had access to what they sought. That the plan of the Chosen One had always been their own one-sided will. If Senior Witches of the highest order could not meet the requirements, had they been right to break with Starfall City? Had Lady Natalia’s resistance to the God’s Punishment Army plan been founded on something real, or on hope that could not bear the weight they had placed on it?

The thought frightened her. She moved past it with deliberate effort, pressing it down, and asked: “Phyllis — you mentioned the king of the common people wants to cooperate with us?”

“He wants to know us,” Phyllis said. “He’s willing to fight the demons alongside us. The specific terms would need to be negotiated.”

“Do you believe he has the capacity to fight them?”

“I’m not certain — his weapons are extraordinary, but I know too little about warfare to judge their full extent.” A pause. “Agatha is certain. In her assessment, if Neverwinter is given two or three more years, there is a real possibility of confining the demons to the west of the Impassable Mountain Range.”

“What does Agatha think of the relationship between us and Neverwinter?” Alethea asked, her voice careful and low.

“She considers herself a witch of Taquila,” Phyllis said. “But she will work in service of Roland Wimbledon. She believes the most urgent thing is defeating the demons — and that all forces on the continent must unify to face the third Battle of Divine Will.”

“Working for common people?” Alethea’s restraint broke. “Has she lost her mind? Has she forgotten why we lost the first Battle of Divine Will?”

The murmur that followed was immediate and broad.

Everyone here had learned that history. It could not be unlearned. Common people who had opened city gates to surrender to demons and been slaughtered anyway. Lords who had watched witches die outside their walls rather than admit them. Armies of twenty thousand men with the fighting capacity of a hundred-witch team. And in the worst of it: common people weaponizing God’s Stones of Retaliation against the witches fighting on their behalf.

This was why the human retreat from the Land of Dawn to the Fertile Plains had been necessary. This was why the witches had considered replacing common rule entirely.

Pasha watched Alethea’s body express its frustration in the only way that remained to them — the whole mass of it shifting in agitation — and felt the same weight herself. Phyllis’s account of Roland Wimbledon painted a man who seemed genuinely extraordinary. But one extraordinary man could not change what common people were, collectively. If other kings made the old mistakes — if Roland himself changed, or died, or if his heirs did not share his convictions — what then? Forty or fifty years from now, would his descendants hold what he had built?

Not every person was willing to trade their body for an extended life. Even if Roland himself consented, there was no guarantee his successors would understand, or accept, what that meant.

These questions had no easy answers. She knew it. She let them sit.

What remained was this: any cost was worth bearing if it meant the demons could be defeated. Alice had believed that. Natalia had believed it. As long as human beings and witches survived, the witches would reclaim their rightful place — that was the conviction that separated them, at the deepest level, from common people with their single lives and their short memories.

But what concerned her most was not the cost. It was the possibility of paying everything and still losing.

“Let’s speak with Roland first,” Celine said. She pressed one of her main tentacles gently against Alethea’s agitated form — a gesture of steadying, of patience. “When I was in the Quest Society, I had dealings with Agatha. She was sympathetic to common people, yes, but she thought carefully before she acted. And consider: we were already planning to make contact with the kingdoms of the secular world. Now there is a king who does not discriminate against witches, who is preparing for the Battle of Divine Will before it arrives — is that not precisely the kind of beginning we were hoping to find?”

“Agreed. We can’t defeat the demons alone.”

“We could expand our influence among witch organizations through him.”

“He’s already recruiting witches — that makes Phyllis more likely to find another Chosen One.”

“Those gunpowder weapons interest me. Against demons, as well as demonic beasts?”

The God’s Punishment Witches talked across each other, low and urgent, the way they had not talked in a long time.

They’re eager, Pasha thought. They’ve been waiting four centuries for something to change.

“Celine is right,” she said at last. The hall quieted. “Given that we must cooperate with the common world, a king as open as Roland Wimbledon is the most suitable counterpart we could find — whatever shape the New Union takes. We cannot plan our road beyond this point until we have spoken with him.” She let a moment pass. “Perhaps he holds the same thought.”

She turned back toward Phyllis through the light curtain and dipped her tentacles — the acknowledgment, the consent.

“Please tell His Majesty Roland Wimbledon we are ready to speak.”

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