Rewrite That Witch
CH735 · Rewrite
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Chapter 735: Legacy of the Civilization

Roland could see how the rest of it had gone.

Once the Taquila survivors knew the God’s Punishment Army was no longer the only viable path against the demons, those who had not wanted to reduce their own people to raw material for shells must have moved against Alice. The Battle of Faiths that the church had written into history — the neat story of doctrinal dispute — was almost certainly a cover for this: a fight over what witches were allowed to become. Over whether there was a future at all.

The disagreement ran deeper than choosing between two strategies. At that moment, the leaders of the Union must have understood clearly that neither strategy guaranteed victory. Neither was safe.

According to Phyllis’s account, the Starfall City plan to place the God’s Punishment Army in everlasting sleep would produce three to four thousand powerful, battle-hardened warriors by the time the third Battle of Divine Will arrived. But the survivors had also seen the fatal flaw: souls required a long time to adapt to their shells, and once the army suffered losses in wartime, no replacement could be made quickly. Such a force might hold the demons for a decade — might even, in the best case, retake the ruins of Taquila. But it could never reclaim the whole of the Land of Dawn.

Searching for the Chosen One was a more desperate gamble, its odds far worse. Yet the potential return was categorically different: a human victory at minimal cost, and — if the lithographs were right — a path toward something that had never existed in any age.

The God’s Punishment Army plan was betting on the present. The Chosen One plan was betting on the future. Neither side was wrong about what they feared.

“What was the outcome?” Roland asked. “Did Taquila defeat Starfall City?”

“No one won,” Pasha said, and something in her voice made the word no one feel like its own kind of monument. “When both sides had lost their Transcendents, Lady Eleanor stepped forward. She stopped the internal fighting and merged herself into the central carrier. The first witch to do so.”

Agatha’s voice dropped. “You’re saying — in the ruins of the maze, all three of the Three Chiefs—”

“Yes.” A long stillness. “The Union lost all three Transcendents in that struggle. It was the end of the Three Chiefs system as it had existed. With that loss, the ruins of the maze became inseparable from everything that remained of the Union. Both sides stopped fighting. They negotiated a settlement.”

“The survivors of Taquila stayed in the ruins to study the magic core. The survivors of Starfall City withdrew to Hermes and built a new Holy City there. Given the limited number of original carriers, Starfall City agreed to provide us with a certain number of empty shells over the following century.”

“The agreement also stipulated: if we failed to make any breakthrough on the Chosen One plan — or found no leads — they would have the right to claim all research results from the ruins, including the soul containers and the original carriers. They said they would return with their God’s Punishment Warriors at that point. If we broke the agreement, they would never compromise again.”

Something in the account snagged. Roland leaned forward. “Wait. After a hundred years, the church never came for you, did they?”

From everything he knew, the Taquila witches had spent those centuries concealed underground, with no voice in the world. Meanwhile, the church’s God’s Punishment Warriors had all been soulless — hollow, purposeless, whatever the church had made of them. Despite that defect, the church’s forces had vastly outnumbered the Taquila survivors. Yet they had never sent troops to the maze ruins. Either the agreement had been forgotten, or something else had happened in Hermes that made following through impossible.

“We had no way to know what was happening in the outer world for a long time,” Pasha said. “The original carriers couldn’t be exposed to sunlight. Those who transferred their souls into new bodies needed extensive time to adapt. By the time we were able to move outside and gather information, we found that Starfall City had built something entirely different from what Lady Alice had intended.”

Agatha’s voice came out tightly, between clenched teeth. “I knew it. Lady Alice would never have created rules like those. What the church built was the destruction of everything witches were meant to be.”

Agreement rippled through the other voices — immediate, complete, carrying a four-hundred-year depth of grievance.

Roland waited until the murmur subsided, then shifted the direction. “What is the central carrier? You’ve mentioned it alongside the original carriers — what distinguishes them?”

A different voice answered, softer and more precise than Pasha’s, with the particular quality of someone for whom explanation is not a burden but a pleasure: “Both are shells. The underground civilization was extremely fragile and required shells to survive. The shells themselves are essentially immortal, though we have found no record in the documents of where they originated. The original carriers are the most common type. The central carrier looks similar from the outside, but it contains an accumulation of unconscious memory — think of it as an original carrier that has been in use for a very long time but has lost its self-awareness. Merging new consciousnesses into it allows us to access and interpret the civilization’s deeper recorded experiments. The more witches who join, the faster its responses become.”

Roland looked toward the voice — toward the blob from which it came — and tried to place it. Academic. Methodical. The kind of mind that finds a question more interesting than an answer.

“Thank you for explaining. You are—”

“Celine, Your Majesty. I was a member of the Quest Society. Agatha and I worked in the same research tower, though on different floors.”

Agatha moved to his side and spoke quietly near his ear. “I didn’t know her well. We were in the same building, but she was always absorbed in her own work. Word was that she was very quiet — until the subject turned to magic power, and then she was entirely different.”

Of course, Roland thought. Someone like that would have followed Natalia without hesitation.

He turned back. “So — the witches who merged with the central carrier. Are they still alive?”

“Not quite.” Celine’s voice didn’t waver, but there was something in it that had been said before, had been settled with long before he asked. “Beyond the dozen who died of wounds sustained in the internal battle, thirty-six of us volunteered to follow Lady Eleanor. We merged into the carrier together. Not everyone was willing — to become something like this—” A pause, small but felt. “To spend the remainder of existence in a body that can sense nothing. Their sacrifice completed the activation of the central carrier. Unfortunately, it can only respond in binary — yes or no — and cannot hold a normal conversation.”

Roland straightened. “It can answer yes or no to any question?”

Celine’s voice brightened almost imperceptibly. “Only to questions it understands, and it responds faster when the question is precise and specific. It allows us to calibrate and adjust the magic core. Think of it as the combined willpower of all the Taquila witches who chose to join Lady Eleanor — and the more who join, the sharper its responses become. For us, accompanying her was the last contribution we could make to the search for magic power’s potential.”

Roland’s thoughts had already moved ahead. Input and binary feedback. Variable response speed based on specificity of query. If I could establish a complete logical framework of conditions — if I could make the questions precise enough — could it solve equations? Could it process complex calculations independently?

He wanted to take the central carrier to Neverwinter. He wanted to study it for the next decade. He forced both impulses down with effort; that was a request for another conversation.

He drank what remained in his cup and set it on the table. “I have a basic picture of your situation now. One more question. You, the church, and the ancient documents all reference Divine Will — and I’ve been told that in a chamber exclusive to the Pope, beneath the Hermes Plateau, one could genuinely feel the presence of the deities. What is the Divine Will?”

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