Rewrite That Witch
CH914 · Rewrite
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Chapter 914: Anna’s Prediction

After the affairs of the Kingdom of Dawn were settled, Roland walked back through the campsite to the merchant’s manor that served as his temporary residence — several stone houses joined together around a front yard, the buildings belonging until recently to a man who had gone missing during the Hermes riots, leaving behind furniture, wine, and rooms that smelled of someone else’s prosperity.

When he pushed open the bedroom door, Anna was at his desk.

She had the Dream World book open in her lap and was reading in the particular way she read difficult material — not turning pages quickly but sitting with a passage, the sunlight through the window striking her bangs and laying a rim of gold along her cheek. She looked up at his footsteps, and whatever had been in her face before he arrived cleared.

“Is the meeting over?”

“Done. Nana and the others leave first thing in the morning.”

“Sit down.” Anna closed the book, rose, and set a water basin on the stool beside the bed. She removed his boots herself — the heavy plateau leather, which had been giving him sore feet for weeks — and lowered them into the water. At first he had insisted on doing it himself, and she had disagreed with the calm finality of someone who is not going to argue but is also not going to move. He had stopped insisting.

“Too cold?”

Her Blackfire sank into the water at the basin’s bottom, and the warmth came up through his soles.

“A little hotter — there. Perfect.”

He let out a breath. The Blackfire could also shift into a rolling form, working along the arch of his foot, then expand to dry the water residue when he was done. He had decided weeks ago that he was simply going to accept this as his life now.

Anna settled beside him. “Are you leaving with Nana?”

“No. Sylvie goes — her monitoring ability is too valuable to the garrison here. Maggie will ferry them first, then come back for us.” He took her hand. “My being back will reassure people, but they also need to learn to manage without me present. And the main force isn’t ready yet — I’d be standing around watching. Better to wait.”

The problem was time. Maggie could carry two people at a stretch, depending on weight, and even flying through the night without stopping to eat, the Hermes-to-Neverwinter distance took nearly three days. Lightning could carry one passenger, but she flew much lower under load — nearly brushing the treetops — which made her unsuitable for anything longer than an emergency run. The only solution was to prioritize by urgency and move people in sequence, trusting that the troops’ march south along the inland river would shorten the gap as they went.

“If only there were a faster way.” Anna tilted her head. The lake-blue eyes went distant for a moment — that particular look she had when a problem interested her. “Something that could move through the sky.”

“That’s not easy to—” Roland stopped. An idea arrived with the abruptness of something that had been waiting for the right moment. He withdrew the sentence before it finished. “Wait. Actually — that may be possible.”

“How?” The blue eyes sharpened.

“Wendy and Mystery Moon.” He was thinking aloud now, the way he thought best. “If we don’t need to generalize or mass-produce — if we’re building for a specific operational use case — a lot of witch abilities can substitute for machines. Maggie’s bombing run proved that.”

He had already obtained light aluminum materials in Neverwinter, and the Arithmetic Academy could support large-scale computational verification. The two things together gave him a path to a viable glider frame.

The central principle: an aircraft flies because its engine produces thrust while an airflow differential across the upper and lower wing surfaces generates lift. Neverwinter’s current electric motors could not produce enough thrust to get a plane airborne. But Wendy’s wind could create the pressure differential directly — not by pushing the plane forward but by generating the upward lift force itself, removing the engine’s primary burden. The motor would only need to provide horizontal thrust. The way Lightning had redirected bombs during the Humming Bird runs, Wendy could provide precisely calibrated upward force during the critical moment of ascent.

“The wings would need to be as wide as possible,” Roland said, sketching with his hands. “A wide span to catch Wendy’s full wind-control area and maximize lift on takeoff. And as long as the magic power held, the glider could stay airborne indefinitely — there would be no need to rely on thermals, since Wendy herself would be the source of the upward current.”

He was getting excited. He could feel it — the particular animation that overtook him whenever an engineering problem resolved into clean principles. A dedicated runway at the destination. Ten passengers at minimum capacity. Even the slowest glider, properly built, could reach over two hundred kilometers per hour — three times Maggie’s Devilbeast form. Any city in Graycastle within a day.

The prototype would be slow and the pilot training slow and none of it would be ready before the witches and the army arrived by conventional means. But the idea itself — the proof that it was possible — lit something up.

Anna had gotten out paper. She was already taking notes.

They stayed with it for a long time: the sketch of the glider growing across the page, the wingspan calculations, the question of how to train a pilot who had never felt anything like controlled flight before. For human beings who came from and returned to the ground, flight had always been the outermost ambition — not the balloon, which merely floated, but something that moved through the sky, that answered to intent.

Anna set the papers aside with the precise care she gave to anything she intended to find again.

“By the way,” she said, smoothing the stack. “Was there anything good in the meeting? You’ve been carrying something since the Neverwinter letters arrived. Today you look almost like yourself.”

“More or less.” He smiled. He gave her a brief account of the conversation with the Pearl of the Northern Region — Edith’s argument, the century-long logic, the analysis of witch distribution and technological succession.

When he finished, Anna laughed.

He had not expected that. “What?”

“She’s overestimating how fast we’ll understand everything.” The laugh had settled into a wry, fond expression. “Learning everything you’ve taught us? I’m still struggling with advanced mathematics. Physics and chemistry on top of that —” She grimaced. “I feel like I’ll never fully understand the orange book, even if you give me another hundred years.”

“There are many similar books in the Dream World.”

“And I don’t think the future will turn out the way she thinks,” Anna said.

“No? What do you see instead?”

She was quiet for a moment — not uncertain, but measuring. When she spoke, her voice had the particular weight of someone who rarely discusses this kind of thing and is therefore careful with every word.

“Edith thinks the best outcome, if you can’t dominate the continent through the flanking attack, is letting the Kingdom of Dawn collapse. But I think she’s only counting one kind of respect.” Anna looked at him steadily. “When you lead us to defeat demons — when you eliminate the enemies that have terrified everyone for generations — you’ll receive something no other king can take from you. Not territory. Not a treaty. Reverence. When you eradicate the church and win the Battle of Divine Will, every witch will remember it. The Taquila witches will carry it in their bones. Your name will be in every book you’ve written, attached permanently to the knowledge you brought into the world. The lords of other kingdoms will come seeking your protection, asking to be placed under your jurisdiction — not because your army is at their gates but because they want what you’ve built.” She paused. “In the foreseeable future, there may only be one kingdom. Its territory reaching to the Fertile Plains. The human race rebuilding itself.” Another pause, shorter. “Is there anything wrong with that prediction?”

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