Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 98: New Witches, New Abilities (Part 2)

The third witch’s name was Hummingbird — small enough that the name fit, with symmetrical dimples and a voice that seemed to be searching for the least possible volume. She’d come of age that year. When Roland asked her to demonstrate, she reached for her cup, held it a moment in both hands, and let go.

The cup stayed where it was.

Not quite floating — the table surface was still beneath it — but he could have moved it with a breath. Its weight had dropped to something close to nothing.

He asked her to elaborate. She explained carefully: she could remove nearly all of an object’s weight by touching it, and the effect held for several hours once applied. The larger the object, the longer the conversion took and the more power it cost. Limitations: physical contact required, living things excluded, no evolved branch ability yet.

That’s how the Association crossed the mountain range, he thought. A question that had been sitting at the back of his mind resolved neatly — forty-two people carrying enough food for months through the Impassable Mountain Range without pack animals. With Hummingbird lightening the loads, it was at least possible.

For logistics: obvious applications. For the upcoming campaign: he’d need to think carefully about the unknowns before committing to anything. He wrote at the bottom of her file: Train with stones of graduated weight — learn to calibrate output against desired reduction and duration. Establish reliable ratios.

He set her file aside and ordered another candle. The orange light had started to make his eyes work too hard.

The fourth witch: Soraya Zoen. Merchant family, Graycastle, nineteen years old. Brown coiled hair cut short, a freckle on the bridge of her nose that somehow improved rather than interrupted her face. Her ability, she said, was that she could paint exactly what she saw or imagined.

“Show me,” Roland said.

She produced a piece of paper from her sleeve and within three minutes had rendered his office in precise detail — every book, every ink bottle, the specific angle of light from the new candle, the position of the quill in his hand. Not approximate. Accurate. Every proportion exactly right.

Her evolved ability: a branch she called the Magic Pen, which produced images without paint or pigment — directly on any surface, durable, photographic in precision.

He thought: Survey maps. Technical diagrams. Courtroom documentation. He thought: Every time I have needed someone to draw a mechanism accurately enough to machine it from, I have had to do it myself.

He wrote on her file: Daily practice — architectural drawings, mechanical cross-sections, cartography. Priority: establishing consistent scale. He set it down.

The fifth: Echo. Tall, brown-skinned, from the deep south, with features that were entirely different from anyone else in the room. Her ability was sound mimicry — any animal call she’d ever heard, she could reproduce perfectly. After adulthood the quality had improved, she said, into something she could only describe as more. She had no branch ability and no obvious tactical function yet.

Roland thought for a moment. One thing at a time. He wrote: Practice — maintain and expand range. Potential for communication signals, distraction, reconnaissance support in wooded terrain. Revisit when we understand the full scope. He did not know yet. He left it at that.

Sixth: Lily. Sixteen, two ponytails, a face that expressed very little. She sat with her hands in her lap and answered questions in sentences so short they were almost single words.

Her ability: she kept food from rotting. She had used it constantly for months — the Association’s entire food supply for the journey through the mountains had been under her care. Without her, half of what they carried would have spoiled before they reached the wildlands.

Roland considered the mechanism. Bacterial suppression? Some kind of metabolic pause in the organic material? He wasn’t certain and she couldn’t tell him — she just knew it worked, and that it worked for days after application. He wrote: Test on varied materials — different meats, fruits, grains. Map duration against her available power. Determine minimum effective dose.

Hummingbird and Lily together, he noted, had probably been the reason the Association could operate as a mobile unit at all. Weight handled, spoilage handled. The infrastructure of survival, invisible until you thought about it.

He put Lily’s file on the pile. One file remained.

He rolled his neck, lit a third candle, and picked it up.

Seventh: Mystery Moon.

She’d come in at the end of the interviews, and Nightingale had stayed beside her. Afterward, while the others were being shown to their rooms, Nightingale had leaned close and told him, quietly, the reason for the girl’s fear: in the Association, her ability had been regarded as the most useless of all the witches’ gifts — something any blacksmith’s shop could replicate with an iron ore deposit and a good heat source. She had been forbidden, eventually, from using it at all, on grounds that it interfered with Hummingbird’s work. After years of being told her power was worthless and her presence a nuisance, she had arrived at Roland’s door half-convinced that he would turn her away too.

Her ability: magnetism.

Before adulthood she could magnetize iron and steel by direct touch. After adulthood she could magnetize anything — stone, wood, cloth, any object she could put her hands on. The process was slow: roughly half a day for a stone block the size of a fist. She had no branch ability. The magnetized state persisted without ongoing power investment.

In the Witch Cooperation Association, this had been a problem. A cup lightened by Hummingbird would fly toward Mystery Moon’s magnetized objects without warning. Cara had issued a prohibition.

Roland sat very still for a moment.

Magnetism. Material magnetism, controllable and persistent, applicable to any object, generated by a witch who was available, alive, and sitting in a room down the hall.

He knew what magnetism did when a conductor moved through it. He knew the names of the men who had worked out the mathematics — had learned them in a physics classroom and never expected to need them practically. He had been thinking, for months, about the gap between what Border Town currently was and what it could become, and the gap had always come back to the same bottleneck: without a reliable power source, without electricity, every other advancement was limited in ways that were difficult to work around.

Without electricity, there is no light after dark. Without light, productivity falls with the sun.

He thought: dynamo. He thought: wire, coil, rotation, current.

He thought about the girl down the hall who had survived years of being told her power was worthless, who had lived through the Demon’s Bite without the validation of being useful, whose desire to keep existing was clearly stronger than most people’s — and he was very, very glad Cara had never thought carefully about electromagnetism.

He wrote at the top of her file, in large letters: PRIORITY. Then below it: Train with objects of varied size and composition — map power consumption against object volume, establish reliable magnetization curves. Treat this as primary research.

He set down the quill.

Twelve witches now, counting the newcomers. He spread all the files across the table and looked at the array of them, and let himself think clearly about what he had.

He had been thinking about this classification problem for a while. Combat and non-combat was the traditional split, but it was analytically useless — it said nothing about how the abilities actually worked or what constraints applied to them.

Better: three functional types.

First, self-strengthening abilities. The power operated internally, modifying the witch herself. This was the rarest category, and as far as he could determine, God’s Stones of Retaliation had no effect on them — suppressing external magic did nothing to an ability that never left the body. Scroll was the only example he had.

Second, projection abilities. Magic summoned outside the body, operating at a distance — five meters was about the practical limit. Anna, Nightingale, Nana, Lightning, Wendy, Leaves, Soraya, Echo, Lily. This was the most common type and the most thoroughly neutralized by God’s Stones. Once inside the suppression zone, the projection stopped. But anything already accomplished before the suppression took effect was permanent.

Third, imprinting abilities. Magic applied through physical contact, converting the target over time into something with new inherent properties. Hummingbird, Mystery Moon. Slow, expensive, interruptible during the process — but once the conversion completed, the result was stable even inside a God’s Stone’s field. The lightened cup stayed light. The magnetized stone stayed magnetized. The suppression couldn’t undo what was already done.

He stared at that third category for a while.

The Demon’s Bite, he thought. God’s Stones can’t suppress the rampaging internal magic during an accumulation event. Why?

He worked through it. The Stone suppressed external projection — magic in the act of being deployed. It didn’t affect internal states, ongoing conversions, properties already transferred. It only operated on magic that was currently moving outward.

Inside versus outside. Flowing versus fixed. He wrote the thought down in the margin before he lost it.

He leaned back and looked at the ceiling. The candle flames bent slightly as he exhaled.

He was going to be very busy.

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