Sightwitch (The Witchlands 0.5)

I ran.

I don’t know how I mustered such speed after so much exhaustion. After losing the one thing I’d wanted: my family. Yet somehow, by the grace of Sirmaya, I ran faster than I ever had before.

The world around me misted into a streaming haze. Ice rocketed toward me, sentient and grabbing. I ducked, I dove, I twisted and turned. I hopped, I stumbled, I ran, ran, ran.

“I don’t want to sleep!” I tried to holler between bounding steps. “I want to heal you! I’ll find another way—no sleeping!”

The ice did not listen. The tremor did not stop.

I reached the bottom floor, where the Rook screeched and flapped at what little remained of the exit. If I’d thought it tight before, it was nothing compared to now. I wasn’t sure I could even fit in there, much less squeeze all the way through.

The Rook squawked a warning.

I dove sideways. Half a beat later, ice smashed to the ground. A huge column of it shattered outward, and as each shard hit the ground, it reached for me.

No. No. No. What little power I possessed was a drop of water compared to the other Sisters. Thousands of them slept in this mountain, from the thousands of years we’d been protecting Sirmaya. With my mind, my drive—I would heal the Goddess from the outside.

I would not succumb to the sleeping.

I hit the exit and flung myself inside. Cold wrought the air from my lungs, and ice razored into my chest, my legs. Shrinking! This space was shrinking! And the ice would not let go. Over and under, it crowded in, trying to hold me down.

“Release me!” I shoved sideways. Harder. Harder. Blood streaked the blue behind, but I couldn’t stop. The Rook had squirmed ahead, and since he was still moving, there had to be a way out.

Time stretched into a strange, incongruous thing measured in grunts and cracks and endless straining. Until finally I was there—I could see a sliver of darkness that could only be Paladins’ Hall.

As if sensing how near I was to escape, the ice closed in all the harder. A shackle sliced around my left wrist. Then another around my ankle.

I tugged, I fought, I screamed, “I don’t want to sleep! I am going to heal you! Let me go!”

Still, the ice ignored me. It pulsed outward, a vise to clamp off my breath, to smash in my skull.

Still, I battled and reached. Blood and tears mingled in my mouth. There was the hall—right there. I was so close, so close.

I reached it.

Even now as I write this, I do not know how. The ice moved enough for me to free my wrist and ankle, then I toppled headfirst through the doorway.

But I wasn’t safe yet, for the ice was not stopping at the door. It was thrumming outward, trying to claim me even as the door’s halves swung in.

Please shut, please shut.

The door did not shut, and in a stone-trembling roar, the ice burst out. It was coming for me.

I scrabbled around, my mind a clash of rules and fruitless prayers. Rule 35: Stay calm, for panic serves no one.

Please, Sleeper, help me. Please, please.

Rule 13: Never leave a fire untended.

“Enough,” I hissed at myself. “Focus, focus.” What were my options? I was alone on the ledge with the Rook nowhere to be seen—nor Captain. I hadn’t thought he would be here, but I’d hoped.

How else was I going to leave this platform? Even without the ice, I needed a way off.

Fighting to ignore the approaching ice—so loud, so loud—I scuttled to the edge of the stone and stared down.

A galaxy of stars met my eyes.

We had flown right over it, and I’d never seen.

As I stared at the stars—not true stars, but spirit swifts swirling and dancing amid nine lights placed in perfect coordination—I realized that the answer stared up at me.

I laughed then. The sound burbled out, a pot boiling over in my belly.

For it was right there. The answer to the Nine Star Puzzle was right there and had been all along.

Suddenly, I knew what Tanzi had been saying all these years. Think beyond, Ryber. Think beyond.

She meant beyond the framework of stars. I had always assumed that I had to keep my chalk inside the slate, but it wasn’t true—nothing in the instructions ever said I had to.



I tore out my map, and there, right under my nose, was my second answer: the way off this ledge. It was even scribbled on the paper.

Palladin’s Hall, 38.



It’s what all these numbers on the map were. Rules. But I’d been so trapped inside the framework, I hadn’t thought to think beyond.

Tanzi had recognized that the stars, the Rules—none of it was real. It was only what we chose them to be.

I stuffed the map into Eridysi’s diary, no time to fold it. The ice was at my heels, and I had to go. Now.

I threw a final glance down. If I was wrong, then it was a long way to fall—a very long way to fall.

But I wasn’t wrong.

This was my true path. One without structure, without Sight or guarantee or anyone at my side to help me forge ahead. Yet I knew what mattered most, and I would do whatever it took to get there.

Just as I had found the Supplicant’s Sorrow all alone as a child, I would find a way to heal the Goddess. And when Sirmaya was healed, when her sleep was calm and there was no more risk that this world would end, then I would return for my Sisters. I would return for Tanzi.

And with that purpose held tight in my mind, I stepped off the ledge.



I did not fall to my death. The bridge had been there all along, even if I could not see it. What is life except perception?

This was how Tanzi had lived. While I’d been hiding behind my walls and rules, she had tasted freedom.

I walked and walked, the bridge ever descending while starry spirit swifts glimmered closer with each step.

The doorway that Captain had taken hazed into focus. First a glowing wave of blue. Then the archway. Rubble. Jungle vines.

And finally the Rook, waiting for me on the floor.

When at last my feet stepped onto visible stone once more, my lungs whooshed an exhale of such force that I doubled over. Then I laughed again, the same delight singing through me that I had felt above the invisible bridge.

My jubilance was short-lived, though, for as I drew myself up, I found the Rook chittering his beak. He skipped forward, backward, side to side.

He wanted me to go through the door.

I wiped at my face and fixed my gaze on the jungle fanning ahead. Sweat, blood, a salty line of tears—all of it smeared onto my sleeve, but I hardly noticed. My thoughts were on the Rook.

He had guided me and saved me every inch of the way. He’d saved Captain too.

“It’s him, isn’t it?” I asked, trudging a step closer to the door. “He’s a Paladin?”

The Rook’s head bobbed. He clacked his beak.

“And he’s important.”

Another clack, and this time the Rook ruffled his feathers. “Hurry,” he was saying. “No time.”