Rewrite That Witch
CH733 · Rewrite
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Chapter 733: The Time Before the Past

The light curtain took up half a wall.

Roland stopped in the doorway of the living room and simply looked at it for a moment. The edges pulsed with a slow, cold purple — not decorative, not theatrical, but the color of something functioning at its limit — and through the curtain itself the scene was dark: a vast underground cavity with walls lit in thin red ribbons, lava threading through the rock in patterns like a map of veins, the dome above lost in shadows. From here it looked like a window cut directly through the wall of the world, showing what lay on the other side of it.

He sat down facing the curtain. Nightingale, Tilly, Agatha, Wendy, and Scroll arranged themselves in the seats beside and behind him, by that particular instinct of long-practiced trust that required no discussion.

The monster on the other side was several meters tall, covered in something like scales, and its tentacles spread around it in a wide and slow geometry. It had no face he could read.

A voice arrived directly in his mind, bypassing his ears entirely.

“I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Your Majesty Roland Wimbledon, king of Graycastle. I am Pasha, one of the survivors of Taquila. I believe Phyllis has spoken of us.”

“She has.” He kept his voice even, conversational. “Good that you two had time to talk — saves the introductions.” A beat. “You don’t seem surprised that I’m not afraid of you.”

“No,” Pasha said, with what might have been amusement. “I thought it would take longer.”

Appendages and prosthetics. The concepts aren’t foreign — they just arrived from a different direction. But that was not the thing to say. “With the Bloody Moon approaching, neither of us can afford time on ceremony. You’ve been rulers of this continent — I imagine you understand that as well as I do.”

A pause. Then: “Phyllis was right about you.”

“She’s generous.” He spread his hands. “Let’s get to the matter. We share an enemy and therefore share at least one goal. The purposes Phyllis was sent out with were to find the Chosen One and to make contact with a worldly kingdom — correct?”

“Yes. At first we intended to proceed covertly — infiltrate, recruit, search. But watching the church fall made us understand another path was possible: to show ourselves openly and gather all the witches who would come.”

“And Graycastle became the destination.”

“Sleeping Island holds the largest witch organization in the Fjords, and its leader is your sister. Graycastle is the kingdom that defeated the church. It was the logical choice — but I expected the search to take two or three years. Phyllis reached you within months.”

“Then we’ve saved ourselves two or three years.” He smiled. “The meeting alone is worth recording.”

“It is,” Pasha said, “assuming we survive to record it. Assuming the demons are defeated and something remains to prosper in the Land of Dawn.”

“On that we agree completely.” He paused. “I can help in the search for the Chosen One — it can only benefit us to have another powerful weapon against the demons. But cooperation requires understanding each other first. Shall I ask questions?”

“Whatever you wish, Your Majesty.”

He turned for a moment and looked at the faces around him — Tilly, attentive and still; Agatha, watching the curtain with an expression of contained recognition; Wendy, Scroll — and then turned back.

“After hearing what history had been buried,” he said, “my deepest confusion has been this: what exactly did you find in the ruin? What was it that made the cost of breaking with Starfall City — the collapse of the Union itself — worth paying?”

This was the question he had needed most to ask since he first heard Phyllis’s account. The technique of Soul Transfer alone would represent a leap beyond anything modern science had approached. And the Instrument of Divine Retribution — if it could replace the entire God’s Punishment Army plan, render the demons as vulnerable as demonic beasts — it was not a thing to be assessed blindly against his own knowledge. The assumption that what he’d carried forward from his previous life was complete had always been wrong. It was more wrong in a magic world than anywhere else.

The voices that rose in response to the question came from all directions at once — worry, warning, indignation flooding the edges of his consciousness—

“Pasha! Are you certain you want to tell him all of this?”

“That is God’s secret—”

“We sacrificed so much to—”

“It is precisely because we sacrificed,” Pasha said, cutting across them. “If we cannot survive the demons’ next great advance, do you want to carry this secret into the ground with us, like those tombstones we found when we arrived?”

Silence.

Roland filed it away: she had spoken, and they had yielded. Not without reluctance — but they had yielded. Pasha’s authority was real.

“Forgive me,” she said, her tentacles bending toward the room in something that read as apology. “This information carries a weight that makes it difficult to speak of casually. But between us, it cannot remain secret any longer.” A pause. “What I should tell you first is this: we did not find the ruin. The ruin found us.”

“Found you?”

“Not Taquila specifically. It reached out before our time — approximately at the beginning of the first Battle of Divine Will.”

Roland calculated without meaning to. Eight hundred years ago. Something cold moved through the room, though the fire in the hearth had not changed.

“We didn’t understand what it meant when it happened,” Pasha said. Her voice carried the particular flatness of someone describing a loss too large to grieve fully. “What reached out to us was a civilization. One that had disappeared underground.”

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