Thick, freezing mud sucked at Eyesight's bare ankles, pulling at her heels with every desperate stride as if the soaked earth itself had sprouted the invisible hands of starving demons to drag her under.
Sheets of black rain fell in heavy, relentless curtains from the night sky, lashing the sixteen-year-old girl's cheeks with the violence of a thousand ice needles as she bolted blindly through the tangled undergrowth of the forest. Behind her back, the horizon above her hometown was stained a sickly, terrifying orange.
Dozens of pitch-soaked torches were tearing through the mist of the wheat fields at the edge of the woods, marking the path of the enraged mob hunting her down.
The furious, bloodthirsty barking of hunting hounds echoed through the wet trees, mingling with the maddened shouts of the villagers—men and women who, less than three days ago, had smiled at her across wooden counters and bought fresh loaves of bread from the exact same street bakery she visited every morning.
They are coming. They are going to burn me alive.
The single thought echoed inside Eyesight's skull, paralyzing her lungs and making her heart hammer so fast and hard that it felt ready to tear straight through her ribs.
Half-blinded by the rain pouring into her eyes and the wet strands of pale pink hair plastered across her forehead, her right foot caught underneath a thick, protruding oak root hidden in the mire, pitching her forward until she slammed face-first into a puddle of filthy water.
The warm, metallic taste of blood flooded her mouth as her teeth bit deep into her lower lip on impact, yet the physical sting was nothing compared to the suffocating agony of betrayal tearing at her soul.
Gasping for air, Eyesight scrambled on her bruised hands and knees across the soaked ground, trying to wedge her small frame behind the wide, moss-covered trunk of a centuries-old tree backed against a steep, rocky ravine.
There was nowhere left to run.
Curling up into a tight ball with her arms wrapped around her bleeding knees, she squeezed her eyes shut as fragments of a peaceful life flashed behind her eyelids. In her childhood, her memories had been filled with the crackle of a warm hearth fire, the savory smell of mutton stew bubbling in an iron pot, and the proud, gentle smiles of her parents, who had always treated their only daughter as the greatest treasure of their humble lives.
All of that warmth had been reduced to cold ashes the exact second her power awakened.
It had been such an innocent, harmless magic—merely allowing her to share the sight of another person for a few meters around her—yet a snooping neighbor had spotted the strange gleam in her pupils and run straight to the ruthless parish priest of the Church of Hermes.
The sentence had been handed down on the spot: witchcraft. A death warrant pronounced without a trial, without a drop of mercy, and without a single word allowed in her defense.
Crunch. Snap.
Heavy boots trampled the dry, dead branches around her hiding place, pinning her against the wet rock wall of the ravine.
Eyesight hugged her knees tighter against her chest as the orange glare of pine torches pushed back the merciful shadows of the trees, illuminating a ring of familiar faces twisted beyond recognition by religious fanaticism.
Yet what made Eyesight's world crumble into dust wasn't the sharp iron pitchforks or the rusted harvesting scythes raised in the hands of the peasants.
It was the tall, imposing figure of the man leading the hunt at the very front of the pack—the man holding the brightest torch high above his head while staring down at her in the mud with a disgust so profound it seemed to corrode the rain between them.
It was her own father.
— "Father... please, it's me!" — Eyesight pleaded, her voice breaking into a pathetic, childlike cry as she reached one trembling, mud-streaked hand out toward the man who had once taught her how to walk.
Her father's face didn't show a single flicker of remorse, paternal affection, or hesitation; his eyes were hollow of love and overflowing with the fanatical hatred injected into his mind by the Church's doctrine.
— "You are not my daughter," — the man spat, dropping each word like pure venom as he raised a heavy iron pitchfork in both hands and aimed the sharp tines straight at the girl's chest. — "You are a monster. A servant of the devil that stole my little girl's face."
Stepping forward into the puddle, he drove the pitchfork downward with terrifying speed, the cold steel tearing through the rainy air straight toward Eyesight's heart.
Paralyzed by terror, she squeezed her eyelids shut and braced her ribs for the final, bloody agony—when a distant, ethereal voice that didn't belong to the forest echoed through the mist:
— "Eyesight..."
The voice seemed to rise from beneath the earth itself, muffled by the rain yet repeating her name with growing urgency.
— "Eyesight... wake up!"
The iron points of the pitchfork were a single millimeter away from piercing the skin over her breastbone when a sharp cry shattered the nightmare into a thousand pieces:
— "EYESIGHT!"
The young witch snapped her eyes wide open, sucking a violent, ragged breath of freezing air into her lungs as cold sweat poured down her forehead and her chest rose and fell in frantic gasps.
The pouring rain, the muddy forest, and the murderous mob were gone.
In their place rose the damp, rough limestone walls of the sleeping alcove deep inside the mountain cavern, and instead of her father's hate-filled glare, a friend's worried face was leaning close over her straw bed.
Kneeling beside the pallet with both hands resting gently on Eyesight's trembling shoulders was Library.
At seventeen years old, the tall blonde girl possessed a sharp, perceptive, and grounded gaze shaped by her upbringing in a modest merchant family in the bustling trade streets of Eagle City. Library was a natural scholar whose fascinating magic allowed her to transfer any written word, number, or drawing from one sheet of parchment onto a blank page instantly with the simple touch of her fingers.
She had discovered that gift by accident while helping her father copy and falsify storehouse inventories to survive heavy guild taxes—until the Church's informers began sniffing around the trail of her uncanny ledger books, forcing her to flee into the filthy back alleys with nothing except the clothes on her back. It was Scroll herself who had found the merchant's daughter shivering in an abandoned ghetto warehouse, marveled at her skill with parchment, welcomed her into the Association, and given her the affectionate nickname Library.
— "You were screaming in your sleep again," — Library murmured in a soft, soothing voice, reaching down to pick up a leather canteen filled with cold snowmelt and holding it out so her friend could calm her nerves.
It was just the dream... the same cursed nightmare as always, Eyesight thought, rubbing her sweat-drenched face with her palm and forcing her ragged breathing back into a normal rhythm.
Taking the canteen with both hands, she gulped down a long swallow of icy water, letting the sharp chill anchor her mind firmly back in the present.
As she lowered the canteen, however, Eyesight noticed the unmistakable vibration of dozens of hurried footsteps echoing from the dark stone corridor outside their alcove—an abnormal level of commotion for that pitch-black hour before dawn.
— "Thank you, Library," — Eyesight said, her voice still slightly hoarse as she glanced toward the doorway. — "What is going on out there? Why is everyone awake?"
Library's calm brow creased into a tight frown as she adjusted her worn wool cloak over her shoulders and cast an apprehensive look toward the outer passage.
— "Mentor Cara just finished a closed meeting with Scroll, Wendy, and the senior combatants in the rear tent," — Library replied quietly, her voice dropping low. — "Right after the tent flap opened, Catherine and Windseeker came marching through the quarters waking everyone up. Cara ordered every single witch in the Association to gather in the main cave immediately."
— "Even the non-combatants?" — Eyesight asked, swinging her legs off the damp straw and pulling on her worn winter boots.
— "Everyone," — Library nodded grimly. — "I don't know what they decided in that tent, yet the mood out in the hall is unbearable. All the older fighters already have their weapons and travel packs strapped on, and Red Pepper looked like she was ready to set the walls on fire."
Just as the two girls stood up and fastened their cloaks, light, hesitant footsteps pattered across the gravel outside, and a tiny figure stopped timidly at the entrance of their small sleeping quarter.
Standing in the dim doorway, nervously clasping her small, frost-reddened hands against her chest as her large, innocent eyes swept the alcove, was Sun.
At barely thirteen years old, with soft golden curls and a sweet, gentle smile that contrasted painfully with the harshness of the world hunting them, Sun was by far the youngest and shyest girl in the entire Association—possessing a warmth so pure it frequently disarmed even Catherine's worst moods.
Her magic was tiny and wonderfully peculiar: Sun could make any small object held between her fingers spin on its own central axis at a blistering speed.
Although such a power had zero use on a battlefield, in the freezing daily misery of the mountain camp, that little spinning trick had become vital. By spinning dry wooden twigs against pieces of old straw and grooved rock at high speed, Sun generated instant friction sparks that lit the camp's cooking fires in seconds—an essential chore that allowed her older sister Red Pepper to conserve every drop of her valuable thermal magic strictly for fighting off demonic beasts.
— "Are... are you two ready yet?" — Sun whispered, her trembling little voice betraying how terrified the youngest girls were of Cara's temper since the raid four nights ago. — "Catherine said Mentor Cara won't tolerate anyone being late..."
Looking at the frightened thirteen-year-old shivering in the draft, Eyesight forced a warm, reassuring smile onto her face, walked over, and rested a gentle hand on Sun's narrow shoulder.
— "We're heading out right now, Sun. Don't worry, the three of us will stick right together," — Eyesight promised softly.
Taking Sun between them—the tall, composed blonde Library on the left, the sharp-eyed, pink-haired Eyesight on the right, and the tiny thirteen-year-old tucked safely in the middle holding their sleeves—the three girls stepped out of their alcove and followed the dark stone tunnel toward the heart of the hideout.
The main cavern was a colossal hall of rough, jagged limestone whose giant stalactites hung down from the shadowed ceiling like the sharp fangs of a stone lion.
That morning, the stale air inside the hall smelled heavily of damp woodsmoke, boiled medicinal herbs, and the thick, suffocating tension radiating off the fifty-seven witches crowded around the central fire pit.
Down near the front of the crowd, the eight senior witches who had just walked out of the Nightly Scrutiny stood in a rigid, divided line. Wendy's face was pale and streaked with dried tears as she stared at the gravel at her boots; beside her, Scroll stood like a carved statue of bitter resignation, while Red Pepper kept her arms crossed tightly over her bear coat, her jaw clenched so hard her teeth creaked. Across from them, Catherine and Windseeker stood watching the crowd with cold, predatory eyes, while Violetta and Fringe waited silently near the side wall with their full winter gear already packed.
And at the very back of the cavern, elevated five feet above the floor on a natural platform of black basalt rock, Mentor Cara waited in silence.
Half of her pale, tattooed face was covered by blood-stained linen bandages from the concussion she had suffered four nights earlier, and in the dead quiet of the hall, her heavy, raspy breathing echoed from the stone walls as every breath pulled at her cracked ribs. Even wounded, however, her sunken golden-green eyes radiated an unshakeable, fanatical dominance that demanded absolute submission.
As Eyesight, Library, and Sun slipped into place beside Selena and Cherry in the middle of the crowd, Cara slowly raised her right hand.
Every fearful whisper in the cavern died on the spot.
— "Sisters. The winter blizzards have cornered us relentlessly," — Cara's voice cut through the stillness, hoarse, grating, and heavy with rehearsed gravity. — "I have summoned all of you out of your beds before dawn because the survival of our Association hangs by a single thread, and our food supplies have reached a critical threshold."
Standing near the side of the platform, Cecilia Selda kept her face completely blank as she listened to the blatant lie she had just deciphered inside the tent—a lie carefully constructed behind the scenes to justify the purge that was about to fall on the hall.
— "Beyond the hunger knocking at our door, we have lost four precious days that we could not afford to lose," — Cara continued, her cold gaze sweeping across the shivering ranks. — "The cowardly ambush launched by Nightingale and that mortal intruder left me unconscious for four full days. Four crucial days of delay on our sacred journey to the Holy Mountain."
At the mention of the intruder from four nights ago, a visible shiver ran through the crowd; the memory of a magicless man shattering a God's Stone in his bare fist and swatting their all-powerful Mentor across the hall still haunted every girl in the room.
— "Outside this gorge, the storms of the Months of Demons have worsened, and marching north with our entire contingent through waist-deep snow has become a death sentence by starvation," — Cara declared, adjusting the thick bear pelts over her bandaged shoulders as she prepared to deliver the coup de grâce. — "Therefore, for the sake of the majority's survival and the preservation of our future, I have made a non-negotiable decision. At dawn, a group will be separated from our column."
A wave of shock rippled through the cavern like a spark dropped into a powder keg. While the veteran combatants maintained stiff, silent postures, the younger non-combatant witches gasped and shrank against one another.
Reaching into the front of her dark vest, Cara pulled out a crumpled scrap of parchment and held it toward the torchlight.
— "Eight of you will be sent south to Border Town at first light," — Cara announced, reading the names off the paper with the icy detachment of an executioner reading a sentence at the block. — "Mystery Moon. Cherry. Ellen. Eyesight. Soraya Zoen. Library. Feather. And Selena."
The eight names bounced off the high stone walls, falling upon the shoulders of their owners like iron chains.
For two seconds, the silence in the hall was absolute—broken immediately afterward by an explosion of desperate cries, muffled sobs, and sheer, unadulterated terror.
Beside Eyesight, Mystery Moon—a timid girl with dark violet-blue hair and delicate hands—let her arms drop limp at her sides, her mismatched eyes wide in catatonic shock. Next to her, Ellen clapped both hands over her face and began to sob openly, while quiet Soraya Zoen stumbled two steps backward, trembling from head to toe.
— "No! Please, Mentor, don't do this!" — Selena's voice tore through the smoky air, raw with primal despair as tears washed the hearth soot down her thin cheeks. — "Don't send us away from our sisters! We can eat less! I'll hunt mice and rats in the crevices of the rocks, I swear I'll make myself useful!"
Eyesight felt her hands go numb at her sides as the weight of hearing her own name called slammed into her chest, while right beside her, tall, rational Library lost all the strength in her legs and collapsed straight onto her knees on the stone floor, unable to bear the sudden sentence of exile as little Sun clung to her neck crying hysterically.
— "It's a slaughterhouse out there in those woods!" — Cherry screamed, her rough voice thick with outrage and terror as she pointed a shaking finger toward the pitch-black exit tunnel. — "And even if we reach that town, the humans won't give us shelter! They'll tie us in ropes and sell us to the Church's pyres! You told us yourself four nights ago that Nightingale's story about the Prince was a lie!"
Up near the front, seventeen-year-old Feather—the frailest girl among the chosen eight—ran stumbling toward the base of the black rock platform, dropping onto her knees and clasping her hands together in a desperate plea.
— "Let us stay, Mentor Cara... I beg you," — Feather wept, her thin frame shaking violently as the early symptoms of her approaching eighteenth birthday gnawed at her marrow. — "We will freeze to death in the drifts or be devoured by demonic beasts if we leave the Association's protection!"
Chaos threatened to swallow the hall whole as the eight condemned girls begged for mercy while the remaining witches looked on in anguished silence—trapped between pity for their younger sisters and paralyzing dread of Cara's vipers.
Standing rigid beside kneeling Library, Eyesight squeezed her friend's cold hand until her knuckles turned white, her sharp mind cutting straight through Cara's speech to the ugly core underneath.
She is throwing away the weakest pieces, Eyesight thought, a wave of bitter nausea rising in her throat as she looked at the eight girls crying around her. Not a single fighter was called. When Cara looks at us, she doesn't see sisters at all—she only sees useless burdens eating her grain.
Up on the basalt ledge, watching the revolt unfold while her fractured ribs throbbed like hot iron with every breath, Cara's thin patience snapped.
Her golden-green eyes blazed bloodshot with fury, and she lunged half a step forward to the lip of the rock, roaring at the top of her lungs:
— "SILENCE!!"
Amplified by the cavernous acoustics of the stone hall and the psychological terror she had wielded over them for years, Cara's roar hit the crowd like a physical slap.
The pleas died in the girls' throats instantly; even the quiet sobs of little Lydia and Sun in the middle rows were swallowed dry as the wounded leader stood panting over them.
Then, remembering the exact psychological buffer Cecilia had proposed inside the tent twenty minutes earlier, Cara forced her twisted features back under control and looked down at the eight kneeling girls with cold contempt.
— "None of you are marching out into the snow alone to die, you ignorant fools!" — Cara spat. — "Do I look like a monster who throws her own daughters to the wolves?! Violetta and Fringe—two of the six strongest, most experienced vanguard combatants in this entire camp—are marching with you!"
Dozens of heads in the hall whipped toward the dark corner near the side wall.
Standing wrapped in her thick white wolf-fur mantle, Violetta maintained an icy, unblinking posture of pure discipline, while beside her, Fringe offered the terrified girls a tiny, measured smile of reassurance that looked like a lifeline in the dark.
— "Violetta and Fringe will escort you in complete safety through the Hidden Forest, guiding your steps all the way to the foot of the mountain where the road leads into human territory," — Cara declared, raising her bandaged chin to adopt an almost prophetic posture as she sealed the grand manipulation. — "Do not look upon this dawn as a banishment, my children. Look upon it as a direct order for the survival of our kind."
Crossing her arms carefully over her bound chest, the Serpent Witch let the final lie slip from her cracked lips with frightening naturalness:
— "This vanguard mission I am entrusting to the eight of you in the south is just as vital to the preservation of our Association as our own march to the Holy Mountain in the north."
Just as Cecilia had predicted in the tent, the sheer scale of that lie acted as a devastating psychological blow.
By dressing up a cold-blooded expulsion as a "sacred vanguard mission" and placing Violetta's and Fringe's shields at their backs, Cara stripped the eight chosen girls of any rallying cry for revolt, turning their raw panic into bitter, inescapable resignation.
Deep down in their hearts, Eyesight, Library, and Cherry still knew they were being discarded into the storm. Yet crushed beneath the weight of Cara's unquestionable authority and the silence of the hall, the resistance of the eight girls crumbled; one by one, they lowered their heads toward the stones, accepting the sentence that had been passed upon them.
A heavy, funeral silence settled over the cavern as the decree was finalized.
The Witch Cooperation Association had just been torn in two—and the true agony of that split would arrive in less than an hour, when the sun rose over the snowfields outside.