Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 75: Holy Mountain (Part 1)

Cara could hear the shortened breathing of the witches around her.

“Someone else takes over,” she said. “Leaves — you carry me next.”

The Impassable Mountain range was brutal in any season. In winter it was something close to malice. Every day, the forty-two witches spent hours finding a campsite that would let them re-empower their badges through the night — the small enchanted discs that held the worst of the cold at bay. Without them, sleep would become unconsciousness, and unconsciousness would become something they did not name.

“Yes, respected Mentor.” The witch ahead crouched, and Cara summoned one of her magic snakes and let it coil around Leaves’ arm, using it to haul herself upright. She felt Leaves tremble slightly when the serpent touched her skin.

Damn Nightingale. The anger was always there, a coal that never went fully cold. If the traitor had simply accepted the mercy offered to her — twice, patiently — Cara would have brought her back into the fold without incident. Instead she had taken the first chance to run, and at the end, had driven a skewer through Cara’s spine.

The herb witch Leaves had stopped the bleeding. She could not restore what the wound had taken. Cara’s legs hung useless below her, carried everywhere, a constant reminder of what generosity cost.

Wait until the Holy Mountain. There I will have the power to gather more witches, and with their help, one day I will repay every debt.

“Respected Mentor — demonic beasts ahead.”

Scarlett, the scout. Her eyes could see through obstacles, could track a crossbow bolt mid-flight and knock it aside with a bare hand. If Scarlett said it, it was true.

“Set me down. Leaves, go assist them.”

Leaves crouched and lowered Cara onto a stone. Cara’s hand landed in a drift of snow, cold spreading up her arm immediately. She did not say anything. Leaves was irreplaceable — had always been, even more so now that Wendy was gone. Wendy with her warm temper had been the one who recruited; Leaves was the one who held the sisters together when the days grew hard, who kept courage from draining away into exhaustion. Without her, Cara suspected they would have lost half the group to despair before they’d left the lowlands.

Wendy. The hurt was different from the anger — sharper, with an edge she could not quite locate. She had not wanted to kill her. The venom from Suffering was slow and painful and precisely not fatal; it was designed to teach, not to end. She had intended to let Nothingness follow afterward, dissolve the toxin once the lesson had settled. A demonstration. But Nightingale had taken Wendy away before it could resolve, which meant the venom had run its course with no antidote — which meant Wendy was dead, somewhere, without ever reaching the mountain they had spent years walking toward.

That was Nightingale’s doing. Not hers.

As for Lightning — a child, barely initiated, always questioning the Holy Book with the cheerful confidence of someone who had never had a reason to need it. Cara had no patience to mourn that departure. Good riddance to the interruptions.

The demonic beasts came around the bend in the mountain path — two wolf-shapes, black-blooded and heavy-shouldered, faster than anything natural. The sisters were ready. Leaves sent green tendrils through the snow to lock them at the ankles; the air-controller witch began pulling the oxygen from the space around their heads. The beasts stumbled, choked, foamed at the muzzle, and fell.

Within seconds.

This is what we are. Mortals with swords would have fought for their lives and lost some of them. The witches had barely broken pace. The magic that the Church called sin, called devil’s work, called the mark of corruption — it had just saved forty-two lives in a matter of moments. Cara felt the familiar surge of righteous certainty. Only we are loved by the divine. The God’s Stone of Retaliation was the Church’s weapon, not God’s — a tool of suppression dressed in theology.

She spat into the snow.

They rested at noon in a leeward hollow with less snow than the surrounding terrain. The stone-worker witch cleared the ground — soil and gravel shifting, snow shoved aside until the earth lay flat and dry beneath them. A fire went up. Porridge. The red-haired girl, the one whose ability let her heat anything she touched, moved through the group collecting badges to recharge. Her power had seemed trivial when she’d first arrived. It had kept them alive in the passes.

“According to my calculation,” Cara said, once the porridge was finished and the sisters were shouldering their packs again, “the Gates of Hell are the entrance to the Holy Mountain. The Church renamed them to keep us away. Three stone gates, the last barrier before the open lands. They emerge from the ground only during the blood moon.”

The witches listened. They always listened.

“We have been walking the mountain range for half a month. We are close.”

The demonic beasts had been appearing more frequently over the last several days — a sign, Cara believed, that the territory around the mountain was active, contested. That things were converging.

Then someone screamed.

Not in pain. In shock — the particular sound of someone who has seen something their mind cannot immediately accommodate.

Cara turned.

There was a city in the sky.

The clouds were low and grey, the snow still falling in slow curtains, and through the clouds, partly obscured and partly revealed, rose a skyline of spires unlike anything she had a reference for. Buildings stacked against one another, each tower reaching heights that made the Hermes Cathedral — the Church’s proudest monument, fifty meters at its peak — look like a garden wall. If the dark specks in the spire faces were windows of ordinary size, then the towers themselves rose hundreds of meters into the grey air. Nothing human had built this.

Which meant it had been built by something else.

Cara’s heart hammered in her chest. Throughout the whole journey, in every hour of cold and every day of carrying and every night of pain, this had been the destination. The voice she had followed since she was a girl, the promise in the Holy Book, the conviction that had held the association together when everything else had tried to break it.

I found it.

The thought arrived without ceremony, without the words to contain it.

I found the Holy Mountain.

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