Rewrite That Witch
CH076 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 76: Holy Mountain (Part 2)

“Sisters — it’s the Holy Mountain! We found it!”

Cara’s voice cracked with joy, and around her the witches broke from their stunned silence in different ways: some rooted in place, some weeping, some jumping in the snow with a childish abandon that all their weeks of hardship had not worn away.

Scarlett did not jump. She stood with her eyes fixed on the floating city — those extraordinary eyes that could track a crossbow bolt, that could see through stone and fog and darkness — and her mouth was tight.

“Is this really the Holy Mountain?”

Leaves moved to her side immediately. “What do you mean? Is something wrong?”

Scarlett did not look away from the spires. “Something moved into one of those openings. I couldn’t see it clearly enough.” A pause. “It didn’t look like a god.”

The hairs on Leaves’ arms rose. She kept her face still, but the feeling was difficult to contain — a cold that had nothing to do with the altitude, spreading from somewhere near her sternum. Scarlett’s sight was the sharpest thing any of them possessed. If she said it didn’t look like a god, the observation deserved weight.

The Holy Book described the mountain as golden. Splendorous. The kind of place light originated from. What floated in the clouds above them was neither gold nor splendorous — it was grey-black, all its spires the color of cold iron, bleak even against a sky that was already grey. And above the city, pooled between the towers, a red fog drifted like something that had dried in the air without ever fully setting.

It looked less like sanctuary and more like a warning.

“Sisters!” Cara’s hands were raised, her voice carrying over all of it. “The Holy Mountain waits for us — one last effort, and we reach Eternity! We cannot stop now!”

Leaves watched her for a moment, then looked at Stone, who had been carrying Cara’s weight the most since they’d left the mountains. Stone’s face was unreadable.

Two weeks ago, a witch had questioned Cara’s interpretation of the Holy Book’s directions. The confrontation had resolved quickly, in Cara’s favor, and the witch who questioned her had not raised the subject again. There was a lesson in that which Leaves had learned thoroughly.

She took the first step forward.

The descent from the mountains felt, briefly, like relief. The snow thinned as they left the treeline and moved into the lowland beyond, and the temperature — still cold, still winter — was measurably less severe. These were the forbidden lands, the territory no mortal was supposed to enter, and yet the ground held footprints not their own.

If Lightning were here, Leaves thought, she would be thrilled by those footprints. The thought carried its own small ache. Lightning, who wanted to be an explorer and not an adventurer, who would have run ahead to document the tracks while Nightingale watched from the air with that dry, careful expression. They were both in Border Town now — whatever that place was, whatever the Prince had built there. When Nightingale had returned to the camp that last night and described it with quiet certainty, something in Leaves had wanted to step forward and say her name.

She had not crossed that threshold. She was still not sure whether that was loyalty or fear, and the question no longer seemed answerable.

She put the thought away. The forbidden lands stretched ahead, flat and featureless, swept by a cold wind that had nowhere to break against. The sky city floated in the clouds above, the same distance it had been when they started walking.

After an hour it was still the same distance.

“Respected Mentor,” Stone said finally, her voice stripped of anything that could be called argument, only stating fact. “The sisters are exhausted. We need a rest.”

“No.” Cara’s voice was sharp, immediate. “This is a test. If we stop, we prove we are unworthy. We continue.”

The pace held. Through two waves of demonic beasts. The second wave brought something larger — hybrid creatures, outside the categories Leaves knew, and her tendrils couldn’t find purchase on them. She tried twice, watching the green shoots dissolve against the beasts’ hides like water on hot stone. One sister was caught in the moment between Leaves’ failure and anyone else’s response. The claws took her neck. Her blood was very bright against the white ground.

They killed the creatures eventually. They stood looking at what remained of Sherry.

“We have to withdraw to the mountains,” a witch said. “Scarlett can guide us through the dark. If we leave now—”

“No.” Cara did not look at Sherry. “We have spent the afternoon reaching this point. We cannot maintain that pace in reverse. Forward.”

“What about Sherry?”

A silence.

“Leave her. The earth will take her.”

Leaves closed her eyes. Another. Another name to carry, another face she would keep in her memory because no stone would ever mark this ground.

She opened her eyes when Stone exclaimed: “The city — look at the sky—”

The city was gone.

Where the spires had floated for hours, the grey-black sky was empty. No towers, no red fog, no shapes between the clouds. Simply: nothing.

Forty-two witches stood in the darkening plains and looked at empty sky.

The silence lasted long enough to become something else — a particular quality of stillness that comes when many people are revising their understanding of the last several hours simultaneously.

It was Leaves who said it first. The memory arrived from some half-remembered story of Lightning’s — sea voyages and heat and mirages over flat water. She had been listening half-attentively when Lightning told it, had thought it was simply another explorer’s tale.

“We’ve been deceived.” Her voice was barely a sound. Then, louder: “We’ve been deceived — that wasn’t the Holy Mountain. It was a mirage.”

“Mirage?” Cara turned. Her face had gone pale, and the expression there was not the one Leaves expected — not rage, but something older and more fragile.

“A phenomenon Lightning described. Common at sea, rare on land. An image of something real — but distant. The actual city could be far from here, or in an entirely different direction. We walked toward a reflection.”

“Does that mean the city exists somewhere?” Cara asked. Her voice was almost nothing.

“I — don’t know.”

“Careful!” Scarlett’s voice, stripped of everything but terror: “Something is coming — left flank—”

The air-controller witch dropped into her fighting stance. “How many? Are they beasts?”

“No.” Scarlett was stepping backward, her extraordinary eyes locked on a darkness that the rest of them could not yet parse. “I don’t know what it—”

The shadow resolved out of the distance without transition — one moment far, the next instant here — and struck Scarlett in the chest with a sound like a hammer on wet wood.

It did not stop at Scarlett. It kept going.

When the motion ceased, several witches had been run through in a line: Scarlett at the front, two others behind her, all impaled on the same object and dropped to the frozen ground.

In the dim light of a dying sky, the witches finally saw what had done it.

A spear.

Discussion

Suggest a change