Rewrite That Witch
CH770 · Rewrite

Chapter 770: Echo and Drow Silvermoon

“Siyaaaaa!”

The Four-winged Eagle’s cry came at a pitch the throat of a normal creature did not produce. It had not expected the target to come at it. Whatever its intelligence was, the possibility of a counterattack had not been included in it. The beak opened. It struck without correcting its descent — no time to dodge, no impulse to try.

What happened next was not what the crowd had been preparing itself for.

Lorgar transformed in the air.

The massive Desert Wolf met the strange bird’s face with the full weight of her body and the inertia of her arc and a two-handed strike that landed with a sound like a struck bell. The eagle’s head snapped sideways. Its beak — large enough to lift a man cleanly — buckled at the joint and broke away.

The timing left neither of them an option but collision. They came together hard.

Lorgar coughed blood again on impact, but her teeth were already in the creature’s flesh and she did not release. The hybrid felt the wound at its neck and reacted to it the way anything alive reacts to pain in its throat — with wings beating in panic, trying for altitude it could not reach. The wings were wide and strong. They were not strong enough. The weight of a Desert Wolf was simply the weight of a Desert Wolf.

“Andrea!” Ashes called.

“I knew you’d end up depending on me.” Andrea reversed her grip on the rifle, threw it back to Echo, and stepped up onto the platform in the same motion. The Magical Longbow was already forming in her hand as she cleared the edge.

The two beasts came down together.

A flash of white light, and the Desert Wolf that had been pinning the eagle was simply gone. Lorgar had spent what she had, and what she had had been enough. The outcome was decided.

Ashes took a dead Sand Nation warrior’s robe from where it had fallen and crossed the platform to the wreckage. The hybrid was staggering on the ground now, head swaying without purpose. Looking closely, she could see the accumulated damage: scratches across the back, small punctures in the abdominal shell weeping a green-grey fluid and a blue that the eye registered as wrong before the word blood formed for it. The First Army’s fire had been hitting the whole time. None of the shots had killed it. All of them, together, had brought it here.

She found Lorgar in the gap between the fallen wings and lifted her down off the platform.

From the corner of her eye, she registered the longbow in Andrea’s hands taking on the gold she remembered — a small sun gathering at the bow’s center.

The hybrid, swaying, had not yet noticed. Then it did. Something resembling a sun had appeared on the platform with it, and the part of it that had remained functional through all of this finally understood what it was looking at.

“Hey,” Andrea said, with the particular flatness of someone enjoying themselves. “What are you looking at? Fly away if you can.”

“Shriek—” The wings spread. It tried.

A ray of light left the bow with the sound of something carrying weight at speed. It went through the creature’s body in a line that did not deviate, and in the moment after, the body itself was alight — countless beams pouring outward as though a small sun was trying to break free from inside it and was about to succeed.

When the brightness ended, a shallow crater a few yards wide was where the eagle had stood. What remained of the beast was a piece of body at the crater’s edge and a fine pattern across the platform that was best described, charitably, as rain.

Andrea stood in the after-light of her own shot, the bow still drawn back, the silhouette of her hair and figure cleanly outlined against the brightness.

Ashes, below, stood up. “Why are you still holding the bow? You’re going to burn through the rest of your magic for nothing.”

“Of course I am. I’m letting the people here remember my heroic figure.” A pause, and a hand half-rising to her mouth. “Damn — your fault for making me talk. What if a piece of bird meat fell in?”

Ashes rolled her eyes and said nothing.

The Wildflame chief, Guelz, received his daughter from Ashes with hands that were not entirely steady. His shoulders moved once — small, quickly suppressed. “Is Lorgar—”

“Still alive,” Ashes said. “But the condition is poor. Even the best herbal medicine can only buy her time.”

“You — you have a way to treat her?”

“Yes. And she can be returned exactly as she was before the duel.”

He stared at her with the long stare of a man trying to determine whether what he had heard could be true. Finally: “Then — what is the price?”

“You’ll know soon enough.” She tugged her hand gently and asked her own question. “What I want to know first: will you acknowledge the result of the holy duel?”

“Wildflame is not Iron Whip,” Guelz said. “We do not deny victories won through blood and honor.” He exhaled. “And besides — no one could deny it now. You can hear it yourself.”

She had already heard it.

It had started somewhere in the platform’s upper ring and spread downward and outward in the way fires take buildings — quickly at first, then everywhere, until the only sound in the arena was a single name repeated by every voice.

“Osha. Osha. Osha.”

It was through that cheer that Echo climbed onto the platform.

She stood at its center, small in the smoldering space, and when she spoke her voice arrived in every ear without apparent effort — placed there by her ability, the way she had learned to place it across long months of practice.

“I am the chief of the Osha clan, Drow Silvermoon. But I also have another name. Echo of Graycastle’s Witch Union.”

A murmur moved through the crowd and stilled.

“I lost everything after the Iron Whip clan’s betrayal. My clan was exiled. I was sold into slavery — from the Port of Clearwater, across the desert, all the way to the King’s City in Graycastle. I was fortunate enough to be rescued by a witch organization. After that, I was placed in a small town in the Western Region, and my name became Echo.”

She paused. The crowd was fully quiet now.

“I prefer the name Echo to Drow Silvermoon — though what I went through to arrive at it was painful, I have been happier since than I ever was in this desert. That town, which was once a desolate border settlement, has become a thriving city. Most of what it became was brought there by one man — His Majesty Roland Wimbledon of Graycastle, who changed my fate.”

Below the platform, Ashes blinked. “This — this isn’t the rehearsed speech.”

“Well.” Andrea chuckled, low. “It’s what she has been wanting to say. At this point all we can do is applaud.”

Echo had been nervous in her opening lines — the voice slightly tighter, the pauses a little longer. But as she moved into the descriptions of Neverwinter, the city itself and the life it had given her, the delivery loosened. She was no longer reciting. She was remembering.

“I know what you’re wondering. A distant city in the North — no matter how prosperous it is, no matter how beautiful, what does it have to do with the people of the Sand Nation?” She looked out across the platform’s edge. “Perhaps once it was true that the answer was nothing. That is no longer true.”

“His Majesty’s principle is that Neverwinter does not discriminate based on origin. His city holds people of every background — ordinary Graycastle citizens, witches, even people from foreign clans. That alone should tell you something about the man. He wishes to do for the Ironsand people of the Mojin Clan what he has already done for the witches — to bring you out of this blood-soaked, barren desert and into a better life. And I am here, carrying His Majesty Roland Wimbledon’s will, to deliver this to all of you in the name of the strongest clan.”

Her voice rose.

“He has decided to become the chief of the Mojin Clan. To unify the entire desert. And to treat every one of you as his own people.”

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