Rough hemp fibers bit deep into the skin of Nightingale's wrists, pulling her arms backward at a sharp, aching angle.
Before her eyes even opened, the cold smell of damp ash and wet stone told her she hadn't made it out of the cavern. A dull, throbbing numbness still lingered at the base of her skull from the neurotoxin, leaving her tongue heavy and her fingertips tingling like frostbite.
She had no idea how many minutes had slipped by since Cara's conjured viper sank its fangs into her calf.
When Nightingale forced her eyelids open and blinked away the blurry haze in her vision, the harsh reality of her situation hit her all at once.
She wasn't lying on the floor anymore.
Her back was pressed tight against a thick, rough-hewn wooden pillar near the center of the main hall—a heavy timber post originally wedged against the rock ceiling to shore up a loose fault line. Loop after loop of coarse shipping rope had been wound around her chest, her waist, and her ankles, pinning her to the stake from shoulder to boot.
Instinctively, Nightingale clenched her teeth and flexed her shoulders, throwing all her weight sideways against the bindings to test for slack.
The ropes didn't budge a single millimeter.
Whoever had tied the knots knew exactly how to bind a fighter; every time she strained her muscles, the hemp only dug tighter into her ribs, cutting off her breath and locking her limbs in place.
Fine. If I can't slip the knots by hand, I'll phase right through them, Nightingale thought, narrowing her eyes as she reached inward toward the familiar well of Magical Power resting beneath her ribs.
In the Mist World, physical ropes and wooden stakes were nothing more than harmless gray smoke. All she needed was half a heartbeat to open the veil, step out of the bindings, and bolt straight down the outer tunnel toward William.
She mentally pulled the trigger to summon her magic.
Nothing happened.
The stone hall didn't turn black and white. The ropes didn't dissolve.
Nightingale's heart skipped a beat. She tried again, digging deeper into her chest to force the energy out—only to slam straight into a cold, suffocating wall of absolute emptiness.
The lively current of magic that had hummed inside her veins since she was a teenager had vanished completely, leaving her feeling hollow, heavy, and terrifyingly ordinary.
Dropping her chin an inch, she looked down at the front of her wool tunic.
Resting squarely against her sternum, tied around her neck by a greasy leather cord, was a flat, six-sided amulet carved from a cloudy, prismatic mineral that seemed to suck the warmth right out of her skin.
A God's Stone of Retaliation.
— "I see our little songbird has finally woken up," — a hoarse, grating voice echoed across the quiet hall.
Footsteps scuffed slowly against the gravel floor.
Parting the front row of silent witches gathered around the central fire pit, Cara strolled into view, her dark green hair swaying around her shoulders as two conjured black vipers glided over her boots.
Stopping four paces in front of the wooden pillar, the founder of the Witch Cooperation Association folded her tattooed hands inside her wide sleeves and looked Nightingale up and down with cold satisfaction.
— "How did you like my little paralyzing kiss, Nightingale?" — Cara asked, tilting her head slightly. — "To be completely honest with you, I used to hold high hopes for your future. Out of all the scouts in this camp, you had the sharpest eyes and the quickest blade. It really is a pity to see how miserably you've failed me tonight."
Nightingale didn't answer right away. Her blue eyes swept past Cara's shoulder, looking at the faces of the sixty women standing around the fire pit.
No one stepped forward to untie her.
Several of the older combat witches—like Catherine and Windseeker—stood with their arms crossed, watching her tied to the post with icy indifference, as if seeing one of their own sisters bound like a criminal were the most normal sight in the world. Further back, the younger girls kept their heads down, too terrified of Cara's vipers to even meet Nightingale's gaze.
Looking back down at the Church amulet hanging against her chest, Nightingale felt a wave of bitter nausea rise in her throat.
Have all of you lost your minds?! she screamed silently inside her head, glaring at the stony faces around the hall. Do you know how many inquisitors we had to kill to take that stone off a dead priest's neck?! For four hundred years, the Church of Hermes has used these collars to chain us in dungeons and drag us to the stake—and now our own Mentor hangs one around a sister's neck while you stand there and watch?!
She hasn't built a sanctuary from the Church, Nightingale realized with chilling clarity. She has turned herself into the exact same monster we swore to hate!
As if reading the disgust in her prisoner's eyes, Cara reached out and tapped a pale fingernail against the prismatic stone on Nightingale's chest.
— "Don't look at me with those self-righteous eyes, girl," — Cara said, her tone devoid of any warmth or guilt. — "A stone is just a tool. When the priests use it, they use it to murder our kind. When I use it, it serves to discipline rebellious children who forget their place and threaten the survival of the flock."
Cara leaned in half a foot closer, her sunken eyes narrowing as a cruel, mocking sneer twisted her painted lips.
— "And you, Nightingale, have been begging for a lesson ever since you walked back into this cave," — Cara hissed. — "Or perhaps I should stop using that proud codename and call you by the name your noble father gave you? Veronica."
Nightingale's jaw tightened until her teeth ached.
— "Once a pampered little aristocrat, always an aristocrat, isn't that right, Veronica?" — Cara raised her voice, turning slightly so the entire circle of witches could hear every word of the accusation. — "You were born in a silk bed in the capital, waited on hand and foot by mortal servants! Even after your magic woke up and your own noble family threw you into the gutter like trash, you never truly washed the stink of high society out of your blood! All these years you spent sleeping on cold stone beside us, you were secretly scheming for a way to crawl back to the top of that mortal filth!"
— "I have no idea what kind of crazy lie you're trying to spin, Cara!" — Nightingale shot back, her voice raw as her eyes flashed with fury.
— "A lie? Look at yourself!" — Cara barked out a dry, ugly laugh, shaking her head in theatrical disappointment. — "When Wendy dragged you out of that alley years ago half-dead and raving, I took you in! I believed your hatred for the nobility was as pure as mine! Yet the very moment we stand a few days' march from the gates of the Holy Mountain, you waltz back from Graycastle trying to sabotage our sacred march!"
Cara stepped back toward the center fire, sweeping her arm toward the bound assassin.
— "Listen to what this traitor asked you to do ten minutes ago, sisters!" — Cara shouted. — "She wants sixty free witches to walk down this mountain and hand themselves over to a royal prince! Why? Because three weeks of eating roast meat in a castle has rotted her spine! She missed the taste of noble captivity so badly that she can't stand living without a master's boot to lick!"
Across the hall, angry murmurs rippled through the front rows as Cara's poison sank into the crowd's deepest fears.
— "Worse than that!" — Cara pointed an accusing finger back at the stake. — "Do you really think a Wimbledon prince offered her gold coins for nothing?! No! Veronica struck a bargain with him! She planned to herd the entire Witch Cooperation Association down into his valley like a flock of sheep, selling all of your lives to the royal court in exchange for her old noble title and a warm manor of her own!"
Nightingale's chest heaved against the tight ropes, pure rage burning behind her ribs.
For half a second, she wanted to scream—to curse Cara's name and spit straight into the old woman's tattooed face.
Yet right before the shout left her lips, Arthur's cold lessons on negotiation and William's warning at the mouth of the gorge flashed through her mind.
If you lose your temper in front of a crowd that's already scared, you hand the liar the victory, Nightingale told herself, forcing her breathing down with iron discipline. Cara isn't talking to me right now. She's putting on a show for the younger girls so none of them dare think about what I said regarding the Demonic Bite.
Swallowing the bile in her throat, Nightingale raised her chin against the wooden post and looked past Cara, speaking directly to the sixty women watching from the shadows in a steady, measured voice.
— "If I wanted a noble title and a soft bed for myself, I wouldn't have walked three days through a mountain blizzard to come back to this freezing cave," — Nightingale said clearly, refusing to let her voice shake. — "I was already inside Border Town. I already had a warm room, clean clothes, and the Prince's protection. I could have stayed by the fireplace all winter and forgotten this mountain ever existed."
In the second row, several witches blinked, the simple logic of that statement cutting right through Cara's rant.
— "Every single step I took back up those icy cliffs was for all of you," — Nightingale continued, locking her blue eyes onto Feather and the other unawakened girls. — "I came back because I watched Airy and Abby's friends tie mourning bands around their sleeves today, knowing those two girls didn't have to die! My only wish is that not a single sister in this room has to choke on her own blood when she turns eighteen, or dig through frozen dirt like an animal just to find a rotten root to eat!"
She shifted her gaze to the flat rock table beside the fire pit, where Cara had tossed the rolled sheet of parchment confiscated from her tunic while she was unconscious.
— "You call my words a trap because you haven't seen what Prince Roland is building with your own eyes," — Nightingale said, nodding toward the scroll. — "Open that drawing on the table! That isn't a royal warrant or a magic spell. It's a machine called a steam engine, built from physical laws and shaped by Anna's fire!"
Nightingale leaned forward as far as the coarse hemp ropes would allow.
— "That machine runs on coal and boiling water without ever getting tired!" — she explained earnestly. — "In Border Town, it pumps water out of flooded mines, turns heavy iron wheels, and does the crushing labor of a hundred men! The Prince doesn't want witches as slaves or court dancers—he wants our powers to help build a city where machines do the heavy work and where every witch is respected as an irreplaceable citizen!"
For a brief moment, a look of genuine curiosity flickered across a dozen faces around the hall, including Diana Argus near the back pillar and a young blonde girl with short hair named Lightning standing near the side wall.
Seeing the attention of the camp drift back toward the scroll, Cara's face twisted into a mask of ugly derision.
Stepping over to the stone slab, the Mentor snatched up the rolled parchment and yanked it open with a violent snap that nearly tore the paper in half, waving it high above her head for the room to see.
— "Is this the grand miracle that bought your soul, Veronica?! This piece of scribbled trash?!" — Cara sneered, shaking the technical blueprint in the orange light. — "Even if I don't waste my time reading the crooked lines of mortal blacksmiths, who in their right mind would believe such an insult to our intelligence?! You expect us to believe that a pile of dead, cold iron can wake up and work on its own without magic or horses, as if a blacksmith hammered a living soul into a pot of boiling water?!"
Cara looked out across the sisters with a mocking laugh.
— "Do you really take your sisters for a pack of drooling toddlers who will follow you into a cage for a bedtime story about living iron?!"
— "Wait—don't tear that! If you let Scroll or anyone who knows arithmetic look at the measurements—" — Nightingale started sharply.
Cara didn't give anyone the chance to look.
Without another word, the Mentor took two long strides over to the roaring iron brazier in the center of the cavern and flung the rolled parchment straight into the heart of the red-hot coals.
— "NO!!" — Nightingale's voice tore out of her throat in a raw, desperate scream as she lunged forward against the ropes, the coarse hemp cutting into her collarbones.
Dry paper caught fire instantly.
Before Nightingale's wide, horrified eyes, the pale sheet of parchment—the drawing Roland had stayed up past midnight drafting by candlelight, the physical proof of a world where witches didn't have to starve in the dark—curled inward as hungry orange flames devoured the charcoal lines.
Within three seconds, the blueprint shriveled into black flakes, crumbling into nothing more than gray ash that floated up toward the cavern roof on the hot draft.
Looking at those drifting sparks, Nightingale felt a cold, leaden weight drop into the bottom of her stomach.
There was no reasoning with Cara. You couldn't show proof to someone who burned the evidence before opening her eyes.
Two hundred yards away, out at the jagged mouth of the mountain gorge, the world was a howling wall of white.
Crouched low behind a cluster of ice-crusted boulders just inside the shadow of the cliff fissure, William had both arms wrapped tightly across his chest, his chin tucked down into the thick wool collar of his coat to hoard every scrap of body heat he had left.
Out here on the exposed face of the peak, the night wind didn't just blow; it shrieked through the narrow canyon like a pack of banshees, driving sleet and razor-sharp ice crystals horizontally across the rock. Every breath William let out through his nose turned into a thick puff of white vapor that was ripped to shreds by the gale before it even cleared his lips.
Even with his Stamina sitting at 10 and his Strength boosted to a superhuman 16, sitting motionless on frozen granite for this long was a slow form of torture.
The mountain cold crept steadily through the soles of his leather boots and seeped between the seams of his coat, making his knee joints ache and stiffening the muscles across his back.
Scritch-scritch.
William rubbed his gloved palms together slowly to keep the blood moving in his fingers, his dark eyes never leaving the pitch-black throat of the tunnel ten paces to his left.
Why the hell is she taking so long?
The question beat against the inside of his skull in time with his pulse.
Unlike Arthur, William didn't have a Swiss watch strapped to his wrist, and up here under solid clouds and blowing snow, there was no moon or stars to mark the hour. Once darkness fell in a freezing blizzard, time lost all meaning.
Had Nightingale walked into that tunnel thirty minutes ago? An hour? Two hours?
Every passing minute felt stretched out on a rack, his heart thumping against his ribs with a tight, restless rhythm that had nothing to do with physical exertion.
Think it through, William told himself, blinking away a crust of frost that had formed along his eyelashes. Veronica isn't an amateur. She's the deadliest scout in Graycastle. Inside the Mist World, she can walk through solid walls and read a person's intentions just by looking at their chest.
The plan they had agreed on at the ledge had been simple: slip in unseen, find Wendy by the campfire, tell her about Border Town, and come back out to bring him in once the camp was calm.
Even if the cavern was deeper than it looked from the outside, a quiet conversation with her best friend shouldn't have taken this long.
Yet the tunnel remained dead silent.
William leaned the back of his head against the icy boulder, his jaw clenching as he thought about the one blind spot in Nightingale's armor.
When it came to noblemen, Church priests, or town guards, Veronica was as cold and calculating as a wolf. When it came to the witches inside that cave, however, her heart was wide open.
Back on Earth, William had lost count of how many movies, stage plays, or anime episodes he had watched where characters walked into a dangerous room and stood around for twenty minutes trading emotional speeches about friendship, memories, and ideals—completely ignoring the fact that the enemy was using every second of their conversation to load a gun behind their backs.
To Nightingale, those women weren't cult members; they were the sisters she had bled and starved for over the past five years.
Did she let her feelings get the better of her? William wondered, a sour knot of dread twisting in his gut.
Before they had climbed the final ridge that morning, he had grabbed her by both shoulders and given her the exact same warning Arthur had drilled into them back at the castle: Cara isn't a kind grandmother anymore, Veronica. Four hundred years of Church hunting and years of starving in the snow have turned this camp into a doomsday cult. Anyone who tells a cult leader that her promised land is a lie isn't going to get a polite debate—she's going to get a knife in the back.
Nightingale had nodded and promised to be careful, yet William had seen that stubborn, hopeful light in her blue eyes. Deep down, she had truly believed that once she told everyone Anna had survived the eighteenth birthday without pain, the whole camp—Cara included—would see reason and rejoice.
What if she stepped out of the Mist in front of the whole camp instead of just talking to Wendy?
Worse... what if Cara had a God's Stone hidden under her robes?
The instant that possibility crossed William's mind, the blood in his veins felt colder than the snowdrifts around his boots.
Without her Mist World, Nightingale was one slender woman in light leather armor surrounded by sixty witches—half of whom could throw fire, summon poison snakes, or turn stone to mud with a wave of their hands.
William's right hand dropped instinctively to the heavy iron-reinforced weapon resting against his hip, his fingers curling around the frozen grip until the leather creaked.
Every fighting instinct in his body roared at him to stand up and attack right now.
He didn't care how many witches were inside that cave. With his Strength at 16, his Speed at 11, and three charges of instantaneous Teleportation ready in his chest, he could cover the two hundred yards of tunnel in ten seconds flat, smash through anyone standing near Veronica like a bowling ball through pins, grab her over his shoulder, and vanish back into the storm before the rest of the camp even figured out which way to aim their spells.
His boots dug into the gravel. His quads tensed, lifting his weight two inches off the frozen rock.
Then, he froze.
Like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head, the brutal political reality of why they were on this mountain yanked him back down into a crouch.
Hold on. Think, you idiot! William cursed himself silently, his teeth grinding together as his muscles trembled with suppressed adrenaline. This isn't the granary tunnel! Those aren't Duke Ryan's mercenaries in there!
If he charged into that cavern right now, kicked down the door, and started breaking bones to drag Nightingale out, what would happen to the bigger picture?
Prince Roland and Arthur didn't just need Nightingale back alive; Border Town's entire industrial future depended on recruiting the witches inside that mountain. They needed Wendy's wind to run the workshops and river barges, Leaf's forest magic, Scroll's memory to teach the townsfolk, and Lightning's speed to scout the skies against Duke Ryan's army.
And they needed those women to walk into Border Town of their own free will.
If sixty terrified teenage girls who had been brainwashed into thinking all mortal men were sadistic monsters suddenly saw a six-foot-tall man burst out of the shadows and beat their sisters into the dirt with superhuman violence... it would be all over.
He would prove every single word of Cara's paranoid sermons right on the spot.
Even the moderate girls who might have wanted to leave would think Nightingale was a traitor who had brought a nobleman's executioner to slaughter them. Not a single witch in that cave would ever trust Roland Wimbledon again.
And what if nothing has gone wrong yet? another voice whispered inside William's head, paralyzing him even further.
Think about it! If someone told you that everything you believed for five years was a lie, and that a royal prince wanted to pay you gold coins, would you pack your bags in five minutes?
No. You would ask a hundred questions. You would argue, cry, demand proof, and debate it around the campfire for hours.
What if Nightingale was sitting safely beside Wendy right this second, patiently winning over half the camp one argument at a time—and then William came crashing through the tunnel like a rabid bear because he got impatient waiting in the snow?
He remembered the bitter shouting match he had had with Arthur in the third-floor corridor before leaving, and how Arthur was always obsessing over "timeline butterfly effects".
If I barge in now while she's winning them over, my impatience destroys the alliance and dooms every girl in that cave to freeze or get eaten by demons later this winter, William thought, a bead of cold sweat rolling down his temple despite the sub-zero gale. Yet if I sit out here on my hands like a coward while Cara is hurting her inside... Veronica could die ten yards down that hall waiting for me to keep my promise.
He leaned forward past the edge of the shelter rock, straining his ears against the pitch-black mouth of the fissure.
Nothing.
No shout for help. No crackle of combat magic. Only the endless, deafening roar of the mountain blizzard tearing across the gorge.
William sucked a lungful of freezing air into his chest until his ribs burned, his left hand clamping onto the jagged ice of the cliff wall so hard his knuckles turned white inside his glove.
Jump in and risk ruining the future of every witch on the mountain—or stay put and risk letting the woman he cared about face a madwoman alone in the dark.
Crouched on the razor's edge between the blinding white storm and the black throat of the cave, the strongest fighter in Graycastle found himself completely frozen by the weight of a choice where either step could cost everything.