Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 857: The Nature of the Erosion

The Battle of Divine Will.

The words landed in Roland’s chest with a weight he hadn’t expected.

Why would there be a Battle of Divine Will in the Dream World too?

He glanced at Garcia. Her face had not changed at all — either she already knew, or she had decided not to care. Neither interpretation was comfortable. He kept his questions to himself and followed the crowd as the lights shifted and everyone began to move.

The square was vaster than it had first appeared. Passages honeeycombed the towering rock walls — the structure of them like a cross-section of something biological, each channel lined with elevator rails. Gondolas moved in all directions, rising and descending in the half-dark like fireflies. As his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, he could pick out dozens of them in motion simultaneously. There was something genuinely beautiful about it.

Also: thoroughly impractical.

Elevators as the primary means of transit between levels. In a fire, a power outage, any emergency that disabled the rails — evacuation would be a nightmare. As a landmark, the design would be spectacular. Underground, it served no one looking up at it, and endangered anyone who needed to move quickly through it.

Which meant the location was not chosen for convenience.

Something else was down here. Something that made the inconvenience worthwhile.

They entered Aisle 24. The floor moved under him — a horizontal escalator, carrying everyone forward without effort. Underground moving walkways. He had stopped being surprised by the Association’s resources, but he noted it anyway.

Garcia shrugged when she caught his expression. “There was a mine here originally. The elevator aisles are partly built into the old tunnels — the new sections were excavated as the Erosion expanded. The whole thing was designed around it.”

“The Erosion happened in the mine?”

“Not exactly. Think of it that way for now.”

“And the headquarters being underground — that’s to contain the Erosion?”

She gave him a look he could not entirely read. “No. It’s to guard against awakened ones with ulterior motives.”

He wanted to push further, but she shook her head. “You’ll understand soon.”

The passage emptied into a hall built in descending tiers — a lecture theater, the podium at the lowest point. The defensive presence here was obvious: martialists in identical clothing posted on both sides of every row, expressionless, not greeting anyone. They watched the newcomers with a careful blankness that was not hostility so much as readiness.

Shouldn’t warriors be passionate? This attitude isn’t going to recruit anyone, he thought, and then caught himself — perhaps that was precisely the point. Not everyone needed to be recruited. Demonstrations of competence served better than charm, in the end.

When everyone had settled, Lan stepped to the podium.

She said nothing. She drew back a curtain.

Roland frowned.

Inside a large glass chest: a dark red crystal, floating unsupported, roughly the size and general shape of something he’d seen before. Something in Taquila. It reminded him of a magic core — but the Force of Nature in this world didn’t produce the shifting, living effects he’d seen from magic power. This crystal had none of that animation.

What it had was wrong.

It looked, to his eye, like a bad render from a three-dimensional modeling program — the angular surfaces processed through software that had estimated them instead of capturing them. Not quite real. His mind kept sorting it into the category of screen image while his eyes insisted it occupied physical space.

He was still trying to resolve the contradiction when Lan picked up an iron rod and pushed it into the crystal.

He expected it to pass through an illusion.

The rod disappeared instead.

One end in Lan’s hand, the rest simply — gone. Three cameras on hanging rods fed the screens behind her, each from a different angle. He could see the rod’s surface detail clearly in each image: the grinding marks, the irregular facets. The red spot sat in all three images identically. The rod was entering from three different directions, as far as the cameras were concerned, and disappearing into the same point in each.

When Lan withdrew the rod, it was shorter.

The hall went completely quiet.

Then: “Can I come up?”

Lan nodded.

The man who came forward had a particular quality of movement — deliberate, measured, not quite ordinary. When he reached the crystal, he stood studying it. Then, with a shout — skin shimmering silver with the Force of Nature made visible, the display of someone who had survived enough real danger that the ability had become automatic — he reached into it.

Garcia had once told Roland that people who could externalize the Force of Nature that way were rare. Talented, or seasoned past the point where ordinary competence applied. They were hard to damage with normal weapons.

This was probably why they were arrogant.

Lan did not move.

His hand vanished into the crystal. His face changed immediately. He drew it back.

Half a palm remained.

The hall breathed in — a single collective sound.

Roland finally understood what Garcia had meant: you’d never want to touch it. The crystal was not a solid object taking up space. It was an absence. Anything entering its boundary did not encounter resistance — it ceased to occupy this world at the boundary’s edge, and only what remained outside returned.

The injured man was taken away. Others came forward — more cautiously, circling, crouching to look at it from angles. Lan let them all approach. Then she organized turns, and Roland waited for his.

When he stood before it, he circled it twice, keeping his hands still. He studied the internal light: deep red, stirring faintly, like something with its own slow pulse.

He knew that light.

He had seen something very like it once, in the Divine Land. Above him, at that time, a red light that the others had called the Bloody Moon — the mechanism behind the transformation of magic power, the basis for the Dreamland’s existence, the thing that acted like a background process behind both worlds.

Here it was, floating in a glass box underground.

His heart felt heavier than the moment warranted.

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