Charred black flakes of parchment drifted lazily up toward the stalactites, carrying the last remnants of Prince Roland's steam engine blueprint into the dark roof of the cavern.
Down on the stone floor, nobody breathed.
The air inside the underground hall had grown suffocatingly thick, heavy with the smell of woodsmoke, unwashed wool, cold sweat, and the metallic tang of imminent bloodshed. Aside from the soft pop of pine knots burning inside the central brazier and the dry rustle of Cara's dark robes, the sixty witches gathered in the semicircle stood as still as grave markers.
Slowly, Cara turned her head away from the flames and fixed her sunken, shadow-ringed eyes back on the wooden pillar.
— "My patience has reached its end, Veronica," — Cara said, her raspy voice dropping into an icy calm that sent a shiver down the spines of the youngest girls in the front row. — "What I am about to offer you is my final mercy."
Without taking her eyes off her prisoner, the founder of the Witch Cooperation Association reached down into the heart of the roaring brazier.
Wrapping her leather-gloved fingers around the handle of a three-foot iron fire poker that had been resting deep among the coals, she pulled the heavy rod slowly out of the grate.
The bottom six inches of the iron bar had been heated past dull red into a blinding, incandescent orange-white. Waves of scorching heat shimmered visibly in the damp cave air around the metal tip, casting harsh, dancing shadows across the tattooed vipers coiled along Cara's cheek.
Step by slow step, Cara walked toward the stake.
— "If you swallow that rotten aristocratic pride of yours right now," — Cara spoke, twirling the heavy iron poker casually in her hand so a shower of bright sparks scattered across the gravel at her boots, — "if you drop your head, beg your sisters for forgiveness, and confess before this entire hall that the Fourth Prince poisoned your weak mind with lies... then I will spare your life."
She stopped two paces in front of Nightingale, raising the glowing bar until the white-hot tip hovered directly between them.
— "I will merely press this iron across your arm to leave a permanent mark on your skin," — Cara continued, her tone sounding like a strict mother explaining a household rule. — "A necessary lesson, so that you never again forget what happens to witches who crawl back to our sworn enemies."
Then the faint smile vanished from Cara's lips, and her eyes narrowed into slits of pure venom.
— "However, if you insist on clinging to this stubborn delusion," — Cara whispered, leaning in until her voice was a low, lethal hiss, — "I will drive this boiling iron straight through your traitorous ribs and pin your corpse to the fire pit. You will burn down to the bone while your sisters watch, and your blackened ribs will stay right here in the center of this hall to remind everyone of the price of betrayal."
Cara took one final half-step forward and shoved the glowing tip of the poker straight toward Nightingale's face.
She stopped the metal less than three inches from the bridge of Nightingale's nose.
The blistering radiation rolling off the white-hot iron hit Nightingale's skin like a slap from a furnace door. Within two seconds, the cold sweat on her forehead evaporated completely, her lips cracked from the dry heat, and the very tips of her blond eyelashes began to curl and singe.
— "Do not waste my kindness, girl," — Cara murmured behind the blinding orange glow. — "Speak. What is your choice?"
Pinned tightly against the rough timber post with the cold weight of the God's Stone of Retaliation pressing against her collarbone, Nightingale stared straight at the incandescent iron bar reflected in her blue pupils.
Five years ago—back when she was still the terrified, broken noble girl named Veronica who shivered in filthy capital alleys after her family cast her out—the sight of that glowing iron would have shattered her mind on the spot. Back then, she would have screamed, wept, and said whatever lie her torturer wanted to hear just to make the pain stop.
Yet that helpless girl had died in the gutter a long time ago.
And over the past three weeks inside Border Town, something even stronger than an assassin's cold indifference had taken root inside her chest.
She had seen a seventeen-year-old girl wake up on her eighteenth birthday smiling in the sunlight without shedding a single drop of blood. She had seen thirteen-year-old Nana laughing at a dining table while drawing little stick-figure cartoons, and she had listened to a prince talk about a future where witches walked under the open sky with their heads held high.
To spit on that truth now—to tellFeather, Twig, and the other terrified girls in this dark cave that Border Town was a lie just to save her own skin—would mean condemning every single one of them to die in the snow.
Nightingale didn't say a single word.
She didn't beg, she didn't flinch away from the heat, and she didn't lower her chin by a fraction of an inch.
Instead, she drew a slow, steady breath into her lungs and firmly closed her eyes, bracing her soul for the searing agony of the iron piercing her chest.
Strangely enough, in the quiet darkness behind her closed eyelids, she didn't feel panic.
Instead of Cara's twisted face or the dark walls of the cave, a single, vivid image rose clearly in her mind: William.
She pictured his crooked, infuriatingly confident grin, the broad shoulders that had shielded her from the mountain wind for three straight days, and the unshakable warmth of his calloused hand holding hers inside the monochrome fog of the Mist. He had left the safety of his castle and marched right into this freezing hell solely because she had asked him to come.
I'm sorry I broke my promise and made you wait out in the cold, William, Nightingale thought, a strange, quiet peace settling over her racing heart. At least I didn't lie to them.
Before Cara's muscles could tense to drive the poker forward, a sharp, ringing cry cut straight across the silent cavern:
— "Enough! Stop this right now!"
Cara's wrist froze a hair's breadth from Nightingale's cheek.
Startled by the sudden shout, Nightingale snapped her eyes open.
Through the shimmering red haze of the hot iron, she saw Wendy step briskly out of the front row of the crowd, brushing past two startled combat witches as she marched straight into the open space beside the brazier.
Wendy's gentle face was pale and drawn with deep sorrow, yet her green eyes didn't waver as she planted her feet three paces from the founder.
Raising her left arm into the firelight, Wendy pointed her fingers squarely at the two strips of unbleached linen tied around her sleeve—and then shifted her finger to point at the identical white bands wrapped around Cara's own dark cuff.
— "Mentor, look at your sleeve! Look at the white cloth we are still wearing on our arms tonight!" — Wendy said, her voice tight with emotion yet ringing clear enough to reach every corner of the hall. — "We tied these bands less than four days ago for Airy and Abby! Every single sister in this cave has already cried enough tears over cruel, senseless deaths to last ten lifetimes. We have buried too many of our own in the snow! Do you truly intend, with your own hands, to add Nightingale's name to our list of mourning before we even take off the bands for the twins?"
For two seconds, Cara simply blinked, caught completely off balance by open defiance coming from her most loyal, mild-mannered lieutenant.
Then the shock on the Mentor's tattooed face twisted into purple-veined outrage.
— "What did you just say to me?!" — Cara spat, yanking the glowing poker back an inch as she glared at Wendy with blind fury. — "Even you, Wendy?! Have you lost your senses too?! Have you let this noble traitor's fairy tales rot your head?! Wake up! Every word she spoke about that prince and his town is a trap meant to destroy us!"
— "I... I don't know whether her story about that town is true or false," — Wendy answered honestly, shaking her head slowly as her shoulders sagged under the crushing weight of tearing her family apart.
She turned her head to look at Nightingale tied helplessly to the pillar, her eyes filled with aching conflict before she looked back at Cara.
— "I won't lie to you, Mentor. I have no intention of abandoning our camp or following Nightingale down to Border Town," — Wendy said, her voice steady and solemn. — "My place is right here, looking after the younger girls and helping our sisters reach the Holy Mountain. Even so... there is one thing Nightingale said earlier that is the undeniable truth."
Wendy straightened her back, her soft voice hardening into quiet iron.
— "We formed the Witch Cooperation Association to be a family of sisters, Mentor—not a prison of slaves," — Wendy declared. — "If we are free women, then every witch under this roof must have the right to choose her own path without having a red-hot iron held to her heart."
Before Cara could snarl a reply, Wendy pivoted sharply on her heel, turning her back on the founder to face the sixty witches huddled around the fire pits.
— "Listen to me, everyone!" — Wendy called out, sweeping her gaze from left to right across the crowd. — "Speak plainly right now, without fear! Does a single one of you wish to pack your things tonight and follow Nightingale down the mountain to Border Town?"
A heavy, graveyard silence dropped over the hall.
Tied to the stake, Nightingale held her breath, her blue eyes darting desperately from face to face across the semicircle.
She looked at Feather, whose eighteenth birthday was only two weeks away; she looked at little Twig and Sun; she looked at Smoke, who had cried on her shoulder in the tunnel an hour ago.
Nobody moved.
Not a single hand went up.
Under the suffocating pressure of Cara's glare and the glowing iron poker still smoking in the Mentor's fist, Feather bit her lip and stared down at her torn boots. Twig shrank back behind Sun's shoulder, hugging her arms tight around her ribs, while the older witches looked away toward the damp rock walls.
Between their terror of the outside world and their sheer dread of Cara's vipers, not one girl dared utter a syllable.
Turning back around to face Cara, Wendy spread her hands in a gesture of calm appeal.
— "You see, Mentor?" — Wendy said gently, trying to defuse the bomb in the center of the room. — "Not a single sister is leaving with her. Our flock is whole, and our march to the Holy Mountain hasn't been harmed in the slightest. Since Nightingale is returning to the mortal world completely alone, she poses no threat to our mission. I cannot—and will not—stand by and watch you murder the sister who scouted for us for years in cold blood."
Against the wooden post, Nightingale felt the immediate threat of the glowing iron pull back from her face, yet a wave of bitter, hollow sadness hit her chest harder than a physical blow.
She understood exactly what Wendy had just done.
Wendy had stepped in front of the iron to save her life—yet at the exact same time, Wendy had shown her hand. Even her dearest friend, the woman who had pulled her out of the gutter and knew Nightingale couldn't be fooled by mortal lies, still thought Border Town was a dangerous delusion. That was why Wendy had stayed quiet earlier during the speech; she didn't want any of the younger girls risking their lives on a prince's promise either.
Still, by standing up to Cara's face, Wendy had cracked the wall of absolute terror freezing the room.
Almost immediately, a low, uneasy murmur rippled through the middle rows of the semicircle.
— "Wendy is right..." — a quiet voice whispered from behind a stalagmite near the left fire. — "If Nightingale wants to go back to the towns by herself without forcing anyone else, why do we have to burn her?"
Near the edge of the circle, a tall, poised woman with aristocratic features wrapped in a patched fur cloak—Cecilia Selda, the former second daughter of Count Valencia—took a hesitant half-step forward, her hands clasped tightly together.
— "The Church of Hermes and the cruelty of the eighteenth birthday have already stolen enough of our sisters to fill a river with tears," — Cecilia said, her voice trembling slightly yet carrying clearly through the hall. — "Respected Mentor, I beg you to reconsider. Nightingale bled for this camp. There is no need for such a cruel execution—please, take the stone off her neck and let her go."
— "Yes, Mentor, please spare her..." — two more voices echoed timidly from the back.
Watching her silent, obedient subjects suddenly find their voices to defend a heretic right in front of her face snapped the very last thread of Cara's rotting sanity.
The blood rushed into the Mentor's pale face until the black viper tattoos on her cheek seemed to writhe. The veins in her scrawny neck bulged like knotted cords, and foam flecks gathered at the corners of her mouth.
Whipping the glowing iron poker upward, Cara didn't point it at Nightingale anymore—she swung the white-hot bar in a vicious arc toward Wendy, Cecilia, and the crowd!
— "SHUT YOUR MOUTHS, ALL OF YOU! YOU UNGRATEFUL, BRAINLESS IDIOTS!" — Cara shrieked at the top of her lungs, her voice cracking into a ragged, ear-splitting screech that bounced off the rock ceiling and echoed straight down the outer entrance tunnel. — "HAVE YOU ALL GONE BLIND?! IF I LET THIS TRAITOR WALK OUT OF THAT TUNNEL UNPUNISHED TONIGHT, WHAT DO YOU THINK WILL HAPPEN WHE—"
Cara never finished the sentence.
Two hundred yards away at the mouth of the gorge, that shrill, unmistakable scream of murderous rage cut straight through the howling mountain wind and hit William's ears.
Out by the cliff fissure, every ounce of agonizing doubt, political calculation, and hesitation that had kept William crouched in the snow vanished in a single microsecond.
Veronica is in danger. Screw the politics.
If the butterfly effect was going to wreck the timeline anyway, then he was going to hit this cave like a category-five hurricane.
Pop! Pop! Pop!
Deep inside the cavern hall, the air at the mouth of the dark entrance tunnel didn't just stir—it tore open with a deafening sonic crack, like a heavy bullwhip snapped inside a cathedral.
Before the echo of Cara's scream had even died against the stalactites, a dark, human-shaped blur rocketed out of the tunnel shadows at terrifying speed.
William didn't walk, and he didn't jog. Chaining his spatial Teleportation straight into a full-power sprint driven by Speed 11 and Agility 9, he crossed the thirty paces between the tunnel mouth and the central brazier in less than a single heartbeat—moving so fast that to the untrained eyes of the witches, he looked like a dark cannonball tearing through the smoke.
Cara had her back completely turned to the entrance, her arm still raised as she screamed at Wendy and Cecilia.
She didn't even have time to register the rush of displaced wind behind her cloak before William was right on top of her.
In the final fraction of a millisecond before impact, William's combat brain made a cold, surgical adjustment.
He had Strength 16 coursing through his muscles—enough raw kinetic force to shatter iron-bossed shields and cave in the breastbone of a charging hybrid bear. If he struck an unarmored woman in the back of the spine at full speed, he wouldn't just knock her down; he would snap her backbone in two and kill her on the spot.
Doing that in front of Wendy would make him an unforgivable butcher.
pulling back seventy percent of his lethal force at the last instant, William tucked his chin, planted his boots, and drove his broad right shoulder and both open palms squarely into the center of Cara's upper back like a battering ram.
WHAM!
The impact sounded like a heavy oak door being kicked off its hinges.
— "Guh—!"
Every cubic inch of air was blasted straight out of Cara's lungs in a dry, wheezing gasp.
Even with William holding back most of his power, the sheer momentum of a two-hundred-pound superhuman fighter colliding with her back lifted the founder of the Witch Cooperation Association clean off her boots.
The glowing iron poker flew out of her limp fingers, spinning through the air to clatter harmlessly against the stones ten yards away in a shower of sparks.
Cara herself was launched forward like a rag doll thrown from a catapult. She sailed clear over the edge of the central fire pit, flew fifteen feet across the open gap, and slammed hard into the rough gravel floor near the far rock wall, rolling three times in a tangled heap of dark green hair and dusty robes before groaning and going limp.
For half a heartbeat, sixty witches stood frozen in absolute, brain-locked stupor.
William didn't waste a single millisecond looking at Cara.
Before Cara's body had even stopped rolling against the far wall, William pivoted sharply on his heel and lunged straight to the wooden pillar where Nightingale was bound.
He didn't reach for his belt knife to saw through the thick hemp ropes. Cutting six loops of shipping line would take three or four seconds—and three seconds in a room full of sixty panicked witches was an eternity.
His dark eyes locked directly onto the cloudy, six-sided amulet hanging against the front of Nightingale's tunic.
Shooting his right hand forward like a striking piston, William bypassed the ropes entirely and closed his calloused fingers directly around the God's Stone of Retaliation.
The moment his skin touched the Church artifact, a cold, dead weight pulsed against his palm—the oppressive natural field that had terrified witches for four hundred years.
William didn't care about Church legends.
Clenching his jaw, he poured every single ounce of his Strength 16 straight into his right grip and squeezed.
The tendons in his wrist and forearm stood out like steel cables, his knuckles popping audibly under the monstrous crushing pressure.
CRACK—SHATTER!
A sharp report—like a thick glass goblet being smashed flat beneath a blacksmith's sledgehammer—rang out across the silent cavern.
Right inside William's bare fist, the indestructible stone of the Church of Hermes fractured, spider-webbed, and exploded into dozens of dull white shards and sparkling dust that rained down over Nightingale's boots like dirty snow.
The exact millisecond the amulet shattered, the invisible iron dam locking Nightingale's chest broke wide open.
Whoosh!
Nightingale gasped aloud as her Magical Power roared back into her veins like a tidal wave of warm, living fire. In the span of half a heartbeat, the cold emptiness vanished, her dulled senses snapped back to razor-sharp clarity, and the familiar pulse of the Mist surged to her fingertips.
Around the hall, the stunned paralysis finally broke.
— "MENTOR!!" — Windseeker and Catherine screamed in unison, their faces pale with horror as they bolted toward Cara's crumpled figure against the far wall, convinced the intruder had just killed their leader.
At the same time, half a dozen combat witches in the front row reacted on pure survival instinct. Hands flew up, Magical Power flared violently in the dim air, and invisible wind blades, stone spikes, and tendrils of choking smoke began to gather toward William's back.
If those spells launched in this cramped hall, someone was going to die.
Nightingale didn't need a knife to cut her ropes anymore.
With her magic restored, three-dimensional hemp fibers and wooden posts meant nothing to her. The instant she felt the hostile magic rising behind William, she opened her core domain.
Shhhk.
The orange firelight, the rough brown stone, and the terrified faces of the witches vanished behind a sudden, sweeping veil of black-and-white geometric lines.
Inside the Mist World, the tight hemp ropes binding Nightingale's chest and wrists immediately lost all physical substance, turning into harmless wisps of gray smoke that slipped right through her sleeves as she stepped forward off the pillar.
Lunging out, she locked both hands firmly around William's thick forearm.
— "Move! Now!" — Nightingale hissed.
Before a single wind blade could cross the space by the brazier—before Cara could push herself up off the gravel floor, and before Wendy could even process who the man standing by the stake was—Nightingale yanked William straight into her monochrome realm.
To the sixty witches staring at the center of the cavern, the tall man in the snow-dusted coat and the prisoner tied to the post simply dissolved into thin air right before their eyes.
All that remained beside the crackling brazier were the empty coils of rope dangling loosely from the wooden pillar and the crushed white dust of the God's Stone glittering on the dirt floor.
Inside the silent, black-and-white labyrinth of the Mist World, sound from the real cavern dropped away into a distant, underwater echo.
Nightingale didn't look back once.
Her lungs burned, her calf still throbbed faintly where the viper had bitten her, and her heart was hammering against her ribs at two hundred beats a minute—both from how close she had just come to having a red-hot iron driven through her face, and from the sheer, overwhelming rush of seeing William burst out of that tunnel for her.
Keeping her fingers clamped tight around William's wrist so the spatial distortion wouldn't separate them, she pulled him straight through the solid granite corner of the cavern wall as if it were made of fog, sprinting flat-out up the dark mountain tunnel toward the storm outside.