Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 742: Love From a Distance

Combined, the two techniques would allow a telephone signal to travel several hundred kilometers without a relay—enough to span most of the Western Region’s populated areas and connect Neverwinter directly to the defensive line in the Impassable Mountain Range in real time.

To extend it further would require signal repeaters.

Roland had chosen the wire telephone not only because Anna’s words had suggested it, but because its practical value was enormous: control over political communications, centralized governance, coordinated wartime command. The phone was the nervous system a kingdom needed.

There was a second reason, more immediate.

Neverwinter’s industrial capacity had reached saturation. New immigrants still had to complete primary education before they could be absorbed into the workforce, and the four major industries—civil construction, mineral processing, machine manufacturing, and chemical production—already occupied more than ninety percent of it. Once the incoming workers cleared that threshold, those industries could easily absorb sixty to seventy thousand people. As they were essential to the war effort, their production couldn’t be interrupted.

The bicycle plant was a lesson he had learned and quietly shelved. He would never admit this to Barov, but the factory he’d built with such enthusiasm had never managed to meet even the First Army’s demand. The city hall routinely shut it down during power shortages and stripped its workers whenever the steam engine plant needed more hands. Kingdom Main Street and Route 67 were finished; the Border Area had neither horses nor stables; and with the railway already under construction, no one had ever actually started cycling between the Border Area and the Longsong Area. A strategic miscalculation. He had taken careful note.

The phone would not burden Neverwinter’s output. It required almost no maintenance.

His plan was narrow by design. He would not offer telephones to the market—only for military communication and basic links between the Border Area and Longsong. A single cable connecting both sides. Point-to-point, not a network. This meant the entire manufacturing effort could run on Anna, Mystery Moon, and Soraya working in their spare time, without drawing on the city’s labor. And once they eventually managed to produce vacuum tubes, public telecommunications could follow.

A wire telephone first. The Great Snow Mountain expedition with the Taquila survivors second.

The prototyping went faster than expected. By afternoon, two functional telephones sat on the workbench in the backyard of North Slope Mountain.

They were bare of any housing—coils of wire wound around magnets, connected to a hand-operated generator and one of the “Mini Dawn” batteries. The battery was no thicker than a finger; the phone’s power demands were low enough that it would last at least a month without recharging, saving Roland the trouble of building a separate dry battery.

“How does this work?” Mystery Moon tilted her head at the assembly. “Can my ability really do anything here?”

Roland ignored the second question. “Straightforward. Watch.” He gripped the small generator’s handle and cranked it quickly—and across the yard, the magnetic bell rang out in a bright jingle. “That sound means there’s a call coming in.”

He caught Anna’s eye. She lifted the earpiece and voice tube from the second device.

“When the earpiece is picked up, the switch toggles and the voice line opens. Both sides can speak. The current carrying the signal comes from Mini Dawn—without the copper bar Mystery Moon has enchanted, the phone can ring but carry no voice.”

Mystery Moon straightened proudly and nodded twice.

“May I try?” Soraya asked.

“And me!” Ring shot her hand up.

“Naturally. You all built it. You should be among the first people in history to use this.” Roland smiled. There was nothing he needed to say about what the telephone meant—about how it changed the shape of distance between people. “The yard’s small enough that ordinary copper wire will do without any signal loss.”

In a quiet, snow-covered garden, a bell rang.

They could simply have spoken to each other across the distance—but no one wanted to start that way. Instead they went back to the beginning: crank the handle, wait for the ring, then speak. The witches, separated by the garden wall, competed cheerfully to get their hands on the voice tube.

“There really is a voice!”

“That sounds like Lucia!”

“What should I say?”

“Make her guess who you are!”

Laughter echoed from both ends of the yard.

Roland tried the earpiece twice. To be honest, the prototype was rough—the voice fluctuated, interrupted by static, distinctly below any standard he would accept. But the correction was straightforward: adjust the reed’s dimensions and the spacing between the electromagnets until the parameters aligned. He knew from the Dream World that this was a problem of calibration, not of principle.

The voice tube reached his hand again.

He shook his head with a small smile and held the earpiece to his ear—and without thinking, out of some old reflex, said: “Hello?”

Only faint interference answered. The copper wire’s conductance was weak and the line hissed with it.

Yet somehow, without any reason he could name, he knew.

“Anna?”

A silence. Then—her voice came back, slightly distorted, unmistakably hers:

“I like you… Roland.”

Nightingale returned to her bedroom in a bad mood.

It wasn’t the first time. It happened whenever the conversation moved into territory she couldn’t follow, which happened often enough that she had mapped the reliable remedies: dried fish, ice cream bread, and—more recently—Chaos Drinks. The last was Wendy’s discovery and Nightingale had adopted it with gratitude.

She tried not to think too clearly about what specifically had put her in this mood. She had a sense of the shape of it: Roland and Anna, and the way they occupied a room together without meaning to exclude anyone.

She understood it. She even thought it was right. That didn’t make it smaller.

The more invested she got in her feelings, the deeper the thorns dug. She had thought she would grow accustomed to it eventually. She had been wrong.

Wendy warned me, she thought. She tried to explain it. Maybe now I understand.

She crossed to the table and pulled open the drawer. Empty.

She frowned. Wrong one. She tried the next drawer. Also empty.

“Wendy?” she called, turning. “My Chaos—”

Before she could finish, Wendy had wrapped both arms around her from behind, pulling her into her ample chest with enough force to squeeze the air from her lungs.

“Nightingale. How many years have we known each other? You’ve been with me since you left the Gilen family in Silver City, yes?”

“Yes—almost four or five years—but my Chaos—”

“We’ve been through so much together. Dangers, hardships—nothing could undermine our friendship, right?”

“Of course. I’ve always thought of you as a sister—but my Chaos—”

“I drank all of them. I’m so sorry.” Wendy held on tighter. “I’ll replace them with my share next month. I swear.”

All of them.

Nightingale fumbled for the bag of dried fish. Empty.

Only three things had ever reliably helped: dried fish, ice cream bread, and Chaos Drinks.

All three were gone.

She heard something crack inside her chest—small, clean, irrevocable.

The bitterness came flooding back.

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