Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 736: The Giant Paintings and the Divine Will

Pasha was quiet for a moment, and Roland had the impression — irrational, given that she had no face — that she was studying him again.

“Phyllis told the truth,” she said at last. “You know a great deal about us. But what you just described — the Pope’s chamber, the secret temple beneath Hermes — that information couldn’t have come from Agatha. She fell before the church built it.”

He let a small silence make the point for him. “Don’t forget: the church was defeated by me. Every Pure Witch who held a management position in the Holy City of Hermes is currently in Neverwinter.”

“I see.”

Another pause — longer, and different in quality. Not reluctance, but the weight of something that had never been spoken to anyone from outside.

“I will tell you what the Divine Will is,” Pasha said. “But I need everyone present to agree to keep this secret. When people pursue something intangible, it sustains them through almost anything. When the same thing becomes concrete — measurable, limited — it often breaks them. If this information spread widely, it would do humanity no good.”

Roland looked to those around him — Nightingale, Tilly, Agatha, Wendy, Scroll — and found in each face the same answer. He turned back. “You have our word.”

“Then: the Divine Will is tangible. It is a physical object — transparent, shaped like a spindle, resembling a God’s Stone of Retaliation but with no effect on magic power, no other measurable function. What it does is simpler and stranger. If you open yourself near it — if you quiet your mind and hold still — you feel the call of the deities, and you see something.”

“What do you see?”

“An infinitely spacious hall. The Bloody Moon hanging above you. Four enormous paintings on the walls — each one alive, each one shifting.”

Tilly asked quietly: “What do the paintings mean?”

Every breath in the room held.

Pasha’s tentacles rose and settled. “That question consumed a thousand years of inquiry. The Quest Society never found an answer. Neither did we — until we decoded the recorded documents in the ruins of the maze. The four paintings represent the four civilizations: humanity, the demons, an unknown enemy, and the underground civilization. The shape of the Divine Will supports this reading. It is not a complete spindle but a quarter of one — a quarter-sphere. We call it the relic of the deities.”

Roland’s brows came together. “Four paintings, four civilizations, four quarters of a relic. Each civilization holds its own piece?”

“Not quite any longer. The underground civilization lost its portion. As a result, one of the four paintings has been black since the end of the first Battle of Divine Will. From the maze documents and the Union’s oldest texts, we believe that when a civilization loses its piece of the relic, it is removed from the Battle of Divine Will entirely. Permanently.”

Gooseflesh moved across the room. Roland felt it in the silence — a particular kind of cold.

Civilizations that had fought for hundreds of years, for a quarter of a stone. And losing that piece — not a battle, not a city, but the piece — meant becoming the black painting. The empty quarter. The absence where a civilization had been.

Who set this up?

The question arrived without warning and without a satisfying answer behind it. Is this an accident or architecture? Did someone design the competition, or is it simply the nature of what this world is? What is the relic’s purpose if the four pieces are gathered? Does the Bloody Moon’s periodicity connect to this? And — are the Taquila survivors reading these records correctly?

He was turning it over when a different shape emerged from the rubble of the question — not an answer, but a possibility. A substitution. What if I replace the word “deities” with something else?

“Your Majesty.” Pasha’s voice reached him, careful. “Your thoughts feel unsettled.”

“Only for a moment.” He came back to the room. “Can you perceive what I’m thinking?”

“No — only what you choose to transmit. You are directing your thoughts toward me now, so I can hear them. Your private thoughts remain your own.”

“Would thinking-communication be more efficient?”

“Considerably.”

He shook his head and smiled. “I prefer my voice. The confusion you sensed is nothing dangerous — I caught an interesting pattern. It won’t interfere.”

Tilly’s hands were folded in her lap. She looked at the curtain and asked: “If all four pieces were gathered — what would happen? Did the deities leave any guidance?”

“No one knows,” Pasha said. “The deities have never responded to our calls. They do not love us. They favor the winner.”

Wendy made a small sound. “We’ve fought for hundreds of years over a stone that might do nothing? The Divine Will is… so cruel.”

“So it appears,” Pasha said — not unkindly. “These words from the ruins may help. They are hard to understand, but they are what the underground civilization left: All of us are the deities’ children, but only a few of us will be able to see the dawn. Since we sensed magic power, we’ve been destined to lead a life uncommon. This competition has lasted for a long period of time. We are already one-in-a-thousand elite. Birds weren’t birds, and we weren’t us. Fighting makes things thrive, and competition makes living beings eternal.”

Something moved through Roland’s mind like lightning through a dark sky.

“Stop,” he said. “Repeat that.”

Scroll said it again without hesitation — every word, exactly as it had been spoken.

He sat with it.

Competition. Survival across vast spans. One-in-a-thousand. Fighting makes things thrive.

Not mysticism. Description.

The underground civilization was describing a process — one he recognized, though he had encountered it dressed in entirely different language. From the most primitive origins to whatever came at the end: every civilization that existed had outlasted countless others in its development. And the four he knew of shared a single trait — they all understood and could use magic power.

In humanity’s case: witches. In the demons’: their nature. The underground civilization had mastered it differently. The unknown enemy, whatever it was, possessed it too.

The Battles of Divine Will are not caused by the relic. The relic is the measure — the instrument by which the competition is recorded. The real process is older. A pressure that selects for civilizations capable of developing magic power to its limit. The “children” are the species gifted with that capacity. The competition is the mechanism that drives them forward.

The lithographs’ prediction suddenly made coherent sense: developing magic power to its deepest level would bring a civilization to equivalence with the deities — not because the deities loved them, but because that equivalence was the endpoint the whole system was designed to reach.

“Your Majesty.” Pasha’s voice, gently now. “Your mind still seems elsewhere.”

“I’m well.” He exhaled and let the pattern settle. “I found something — a thread I’ll follow later. It won’t affect our discussion.”

Rules were rules, and sometimes they existed without explanations a person could trace. Some pressures simply were. What mattered was not the origin of the pressure. What mattered was surviving it.

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