[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 36 — 10:00 AM
[Location]: The Crown of Ovelia · Folded Space · Spirit Sea Venue
The Grand Masters draw ceremony was, in keeping with Witch tradition, a banquet.
This was not a concession to social pleasantries. It was a statent of intent. Any organization that scheduled its tournant brackets in a conference room simply lacked ambition.
The venue was the Crown of Ovelia.
An entire floating island suspended three thousand ters above the surface. Viewed from altitude, the island's bedrock had been carved into a colossal ring, and nine massive spectral cat tails woven from condensed black mana arced inward from the rim, eting overhead like the ribs of a gothic vault.
An enormous, sky-blotting crown, every sight line pointing toward the sa architectural thesis: This space belongs to Ovelia. Questions may be directed to the Crown.
The Royal Rosas airship breached the folded-space barrier.
The White City vanished. In its place: a world that had no interest in standard geographic logic.
The "sky" was not a sky. It was an inverted ceiling of massive mineral veins, glittering with raw geodes and crystals that caught the light of the sea below. The ground was dense with cold-toned fluorescent flora, spectral and unbothered.
At the center of this space lay the Spirit Sea, a vast expanse of deep blue-green bioluminescence. Above the water floated crystalline flowers that refracted light into small prismatic explosions, and translucent leaves drifted through the air like feathers shed from sothing enormous and invisible.
Then the sea breeze swept through.
The mont the wind touched the surface, the ocean answered.
Countless translucent, fiery-red sea flowers erupted from the depths, rocketing upward with the force of an underwater volcanic burst. They detonated into the blue-lit sky in a blaze of crimson and orange, painting over the cool spectral palette in a single, violent stroke.
For half a minute, the entire folded space looked like it was on fire.
Then the wind died. The red flowers settled. The deep blue reclaid the sky.
Hathaway, gripping the railing, forgot to breathe.
Rhode was already leaning against the hull with her sunglasses pushed up, explaining this the way soone explains a place they've brought people to before.
"Every folded space maintains its own laws," she said, in the practiced cadence of soone who genuinely found the subject worth explaining. "Unique ecology, geological constants, ambient mana conditions—they generate entirely specialized species.
"At the bottom of the Spirit Sea, there is a single massive flower made of high-purity ice crystal. When the sea breeze carries mana, the crystal absorbs it, converts it to thermal energy and mass, and—" She clicked her fingers. "Bang. Volcano. Red flowers."
"Have you been down there?" Hathaway asked.
"No. Too deep." Rhode brushed her wind-whipped silver hair back with one hand. "The water pressure and mana density at the bottom would compress an Arch-Witch into paste. I make a point of not becoming paste."
Then how do you know what's—
"But other Witches have," Rhode preempted her, without breaking stride. "When we find a folded space, we go up or we go down. We have a cultural commitnt to flirting with disaster.
"Dr. Rorschach was the first to reach the bottom—she proved the ice-crystal flower exists, and that an uncatalogued pod of Legendary Sea Dragons lives down there alongside it." A brief pause. "Unfortunately, the mont she laid eyes on them, her shields started failing under the pressure and she triggered an ergency teleport back to shore. Two more seconds and she would have owned the naming rights to that Sea Dragon variant."
"That," Hathaway said, "is genuinely enviable."
She ant it. A massive flower on the seabed, converting mana into crimson eruptions. Legendary Sea Dragons coexisting with it in the dark. A researcher who found all of this and was imdiately forced to leave.
This world has incredible production values.
The draw itself was hosted in an enormous open-air courtyard on the eastern edge of the island.
The decor hit her occupational nerve the mont she stepped through the gate.
Every surface was an artifact of the Anser Empire. Marble statues twenty ters tall. Bronze relief walls carved with warti epics. An archway assembled from the bones of sothing that had once been enormous and deeply confident about the future.
The Anser Elves had been a militant, hyper-aggressive species, and their art made absolutely no effort to disguise this. Imposing, monuntal, dedicated to a single thesis: look how powerful the Anser Empire once was.
Once. Before the Witches decided to eradicate them and redecorate with the remains.
Hathaway walked through the main entrance, flanked by two marble pillars carved with war elephants. If she had to describe the aesthetic in a single word, it was Roman. A Ro that had been conquered, preserved exactly as it fell, and repurposed as a garden ornant by its destroyers.
The stage was set at the far end of the courtyard. Senior Association officials were calibrating the draw arrays, and the top competing teams from across the districts had already clustered into their respective groupings, generating the kind of ambient mana pressure that made the air feel fractionally too heavy to breathe without noticing.
Hathaway swept her gaze across the venue. Ran threat assessnts. Prioritized survival.
Her eye snagged on a group near the northeastern corner.
Every team in this courtyard was dangerous. This group was a different kind of dangerous. They wore bespoke three-piece suits, razor-sharp lines—and they wore them with the broad-shouldered ease of retired cartel bosses who had simply decided to attend a party.
She recognized the woman at the center.
The pipe. The tailored midnight-blue suit. The calm, entirely undramatic eyes of soone who had spent forty years pushing the bleeding edge of the known universe, slaughtered enough to get bored, and was now on a very long vacation.
I can hear the weight of a single drop of Mithril at fifty ters.
A strawberry hard candy on the way out, for the nerves.
Nordenheim's representative team. [Relentless].
Her shoulders dropped a fraction, the specific kind that had nothing to do with fatigue.
Her gaze moved on.
The next thing she registered was a flash of pure icy blue.
The [Eye of Eternal Frost]. That group wore Marenia's colors: [Salt Shepherds].
And then she saw who was standing at the front of the Marenian delegation.
Hathaway's entire nervous system perford a brief, involuntary financial shutdown.
Mada Vosh.
Her internal threat assessnt module bypassed combat trics entirely and displayed a single, flashing alert:
ERROR. THREAT LEVEL: BANKRUPTCY.
She averted her gaze with the desperate urgency of a debtor rounding a corner.
It landed, much more safely, on Famia Schüder.
The Second Seat of the High Council. Captain of [Steam Saints]. Hathaway's current best option for "stare at sothing that won't cost money."
Her brain bypassed the threat assessnt entirely and pulled up a different file: a trading card Victoria had slapped down two months ago. [The Black Emperor].
The ga board's holographic chibi projection had criminally under-represented the sheer "Girl Crush" nace of reality.
Famia sported a sharp, ssy black wolf-cut, the tips glowing with a dangerous violet haze—not dye, but raw mana physically bleeding out from a body that refused to contain it.
As Hathaway watched, Famia raised a crystal glass to her mouth and took a slow sip. Her lips were naturally upturned at the corners, locking her resting expression into a flawless, enigmatic smile. It made her look as though she were permanently harboring so dark, romantic secret behind those deep crimson eyes.
When she lowered the glass, the motion caught the courtyard light. To her left, a representative from a neighboring delegation lost her train of thought mid-sentence, staring openly. Two Witches nearby had stopped talking entirely, pretending to admire an Anser marble statue while their eyes kept drifting back to the violet haze at Famia's neck.
In Hathaway's previous world, this woman would have caused mass casualties among certain fan demographics.
Standing beside her was a woman radiating the energy of a very large, very happy golden retriever. Alisha, the biographer. She was technically present as a mber of [The Laureates], but treating Famia as her permanent plus-one appeared to take precedence.
A widely circulated piece of gossip perfectly encapsulated what working with Famia looked like. At a banquet once, Alisha had half-jokingly asked: "Famia, who's more beautiful— or Alice?"
A textbook trap. Lethal social geotry. Answering either na lit a fuse.
Famia had looked at Alisha with complete, earnest sincerity and delivered an objective evaluation: "Based on facial morphology and bone structure proportions, Alice aligns more closely with the Golden Ratio."
Alisha's face had turned the color of a thunderhead. The diplomatic incident was already loading.
Then Famia tilted her head and added, in exactly the sa tone: "However, your fashion sense is vastly superior to hers. The hat you are wearing today—the one with the iris embroidery—is genuinely beautiful."
Alisha had been fully, instantly restored to radiant good humor.
A woman who navigates a social minefield by stepping on the mine and surviving via weaponized sincerity, Hathaway thought. Respect.
Then the ambient mana pressure in the courtyard shifted.
Not dramatically. Not with any announcent. Just a quiet, definitive change in the quality of the air: the particular atmospheric adjustnt that happens when two very large, very calm predators enter a room and have no reason to perform about it.
Two Witches. Standing near Famia's cluster, but not of it.
The first possessed the kind of imposing vertical presence that imdiately disrupted the eyeline of the crowd. She stood a full head taller than the courtyard's average, forcing anyone engaged in conversation with her to angle their chin upward.
She had hair the color of cold steel, black with grey undertones, the specific shade of a surface that had existed under pressure for a very long ti. Her eyes were gold: the gold of sothing burning with sustained, contained violence, the pupils lit like molten tal held at temperature.
Three pairs of massive dragon horns swept backward from her head. Behind her, a pair of wings moved with the quiet, absolute elegance of high-grade black satin. A long, slender tail rested along the marble floor with the patience of sothing that had never needed to hurry.
Serpent Dragon, Hathaway categorized. Specific breed unknown. Threat level: do not investigate.
The second Witch wore a robe that combined a modern tech-aesthetic in blue, white, and pink with a pure black form-fitting suit beneath.
The palette said contemporary precision and the waist-length, radiant blonde hair said classical aristocracy, and sohow, against all reasonable expectation, the two had reached a détente. She rested one hand on an elegant sword-cane.
She possessed a pair of massive, sweeping horns. The wings were broad and dramatic, connected to the tail, the trailing edges made of a highly elastic mbrane, smooth and folded like the pleats of a high-end evening gown.
Hathaway stared. Could not identify the species.
Those horns and wing architecture read as Pri Dragon. But the aerodynamic profile is deeply aquatic. A Tidal Dragon?
No. Tidal Dragons have functional fins. They fly low over the oceans to trawl for krakens. They don't sport horns like that, and their wings certainly don't look like bespoke ocean-couture.
She turned quietly to Tasia.
Tasia looked at the blonde Witch. Went silent for exactly the duration it takes to decide whether honesty serves any useful purpose in a given situation.
Then: "She is an [Ancient Ray Witch]."
The pause that followed was doing significant structural work. It communicated, in the register of soone who has rehearsed this answer until it no longer caused visible distress: ...That is the official position. I will be maintaining it.
A Ray is a cartilaginous fish. That entity over there is not a fish. That is a Pri Dragon raid boss cosplaying as marine biology.
Before she could articulate this biological discrepancy, Bella materialized at her shoulder.
"Behold." Bella dropped into her theatrical register with the ease of returning ho. "The Ancient Ray Witch. A lineage whose origins descend into the abyssal depths before the sundering of the first sky—"
Here followed approximately forty seconds of an extraordinarily well-constructed alternative phylogeny, delivered without a single crack of doubt. Bella had clearly invested real creative effort in this. She had almost certainly drafted a title for the woman.
"—Therefore, they are the harbingers of the storm. Not of the Pri Dragon lineage, but having independently evolved a parallel architecture of power in the abyss below."
The speech concluded. Hathaway wasn't sure what to make of it.
Nino, reviewing sothing on her datapad, drifted one sentence into the conversation without looking up.
"There is exactly one docunt on record regarding Ancient Ray Witches. Published in 1847. Author anonymous. The phrasing has an 89% match with several of Lady Phet's existing public speeches."
Nino took a sip of coffee.
Hathaway looked at Bella, who had found a kindred spirit. Then she looked at Phet—leaning on her sword-cane, bathed in the reflected light of the Spirit Sea, completely untroubled by any of this.
She defined her own species, wrote the docuntation under a false na, and made the world accept it.
This is a considerably more advanced version of what Bella is trying to do with . The server admins canonized it decades ago.
Phet's eyes weren't scanning the crowd. They were already fixed on the figure standing slightly ahead of her: the quiet, settled attention of soone who always knows exactly where to look.
Hathaway followed that line of sight.
And saw her.
The Seventh Seat of the High Council. Camilla. The Philosopher-King.
Hortania: the Sky Island Nation, ho to more varieties of Dragon Witch than the Inner Sea had nas for. The royal lineage—Camilla's lineage—were the [Fae-Fox Dragons]: exquisite, exceptional, and deeply beautiful in the way that produced strong opinions.
She was petite. Even with her dragon horns, she stood slightly shorter than Hathaway, who was an entirely average 1.7 ters. Her hair was warm white, the white of first snow under direct sunlight: luminous, slightly soft, genuinely warm.
Her dragon tail had the silhouette of an arctic fox's tail, but the details were breathtaking. The hard scales carried a subtle, pale peach luster, and growing from the gaps between them was long, snow-white fur so soft it looked entirely boneless. The very tip of the tail faded naturally into a pale peach.
For a fraction of a second, her gaze crossed Hathaway's.
Her eyes were the pale, warm tone of a peach blossom petal held up to light.
Camilla radiated the serene, gentle quiet of a scholar. Flanked by the overwhelming oppression of her two Dragon Witch companions, she should have looked fragile—like a mascot being guarded by monsters.
But looking into those pale peach eyes, Hathaway understood the terrifying gravity of the word Greatness.
Witches were chaotic, amoral apex predators by biological default. A "moral Witch" was a structural oxymoron. Hathaway, who ran her own baseline of Earth decency like a background application in an operating system full of malware, understood exactly the computational load required to pull that off.
To navigate this ecosystem with a conscience was a persistent technical challenge. To rule a nation with one, openly and absolutely, was an act of magnificent insanity.
It made perfect sense why the Witch community's consensus on Camilla was simple and exasperated: Need morality? She has morality. Need ability? She has morality. Need wisdom? She has fucking morality!
A Legendary Dragon Witch who had built a rule system applied to everyone without exception, then executed it with the full bandwidth of a Grand Witch until her territory beca the Inner Sea's foremost sanctuary for criminals.
Not a design choice. A logical consequence. Her morality was not weakness. It was over-engineering.
She had solved the exploit problem by outsourcing. Two entirely amoral Legendary Dragon Witches—Phet and Vessar—applied the kind of attention that was neither ethical nor proportionate whenever anyone tried to leverage Camilla's principles into an opening.
The logic was clean: Who gave you the nerve to cross the beating heart of Hortania?!
Hathaway ntally linked the nas to the faces. Right. The Ancient Ray and the Serpent Dragon. A package deal.
Then she noticed where Camilla's gaze kept going.
Subtly. Repeatedly. With the careful discipline of soone who had been at this a while and still believed she was less visible than she was.
Toward Famia Schüder.
Hathaway noticed this because Vessar was currently directing the full, focused hostility of those burning gold eyes at the Second Seat. Not glancing. Not looking. Glaring, with the single-minded precision of soone who had made a decision and was waiting for an excuse.
Famia lowered her wine glass. She didn't square her shoulders or flare her mana in response. She simply turned her head and t Vessar's murderous glare.
Vessar's golden eyes burned brighter. A silent promise of violence.
Famia looked at her for one second. Two seconds. The natural, permanent smile on her lips didn't twitch.
Then she blinked, looked away, and reached out to pluck a stray piece of lint off Alisha's collar.
Then two figures separated from the periphery.
The one in front was tall. She had short, pale-gold hair and sharp, intensely aggressive crimson eyes that swept the courtyard with a cold, predatory calm. She wore a high-collared trench coat left casually open over her formal wear—a choice that made her compact, explosive build entirely her own problem and everyone else's awareness. She walked with the unbothered composure of soone whose ntal resistances had been ground to an absolute ceiling by years of relentless field testing.
Clinging to her arm was a second woman.
She wore an elegant, deep hood that completely obscured her face. Yet, even hidden, she was utterly restless. She leaned her entire weight against the tall blonde, her hands lightly and affectionately tracing the lapel of the trench coat with the unabashed, frivolous energy of a collector admiring an exclusive limited-edition piece.
The tall blonde absorbed this blatant boundary violation with terrifyingly practiced indifference. She accommodated the woman's weight, carrying her forward with the specific, world-weary patience of soone completely, hopelessly accustod to the absurdity.
They were walking straight toward Famia. Unhurried. Deliberate. One of them with chilling composure; the other, still hooded, with her face angled toward Famia in a way that suggested she had already made several decisions.
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