Chapter 118 Ashes & Spark [Part 1] [Witch]

Light’s boot connected with Alice before I could even react. She rolled across the floor like a doll thrown aside, curling into herself with a soft, broken cry.

“DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH HER!” I screamed, not with my voice, but through the air itself, a psychic burst so raw it shook the walls and shattered glass.

For a second, the lightning stopped.

Then my face slammed into the desk. Pain flared white-hot behind my eyes. My teeth scraped wood as his hand pressed harder, harder still, until the surface cracked under us.

“You should have known your place, you wretched witch,” he hissed. “When I tell you to do something, you do it. Do you hear me?”

He yanked my head up by the jaw, forcing me to look at him. The room pulsed with his power, sharp, violent, and wrong. I saw the madness burning in his eyes, that bright, holy blue that meant nothing but pain.

My mind raced. I waved a trembling hand, and Alice went still on the floor, asleep. At least she wouldn’t see this.

Tears blurred my vision. “Please… don’t do this,” I whispered. “Not in front of her.”

“Then you’ll learn to beg properly.”

What followed wasn’t pain in the ordinary sense. It was the kind that stripped away selfhood, that left you hollow enough to forget your name. When it was over, I wasn’t sure if I had passed out or simply stopped existing for a while.

“Wake her.”

My heart stopped as if he had reached inside my ribs and squeezed.

“Ning, please—” I said, voice useless and thin.

“Wake. Her.”

I forced myself to move, using my telepathy to rouse my daughter. My body felt like raw cloth, torn, dull, and incapable of strength. Paleman sat beside Alice, his presence a gray, breathing shadow. Light did not rush; he buttoned back his shirt with patience. I pulled at the shredded fabric that had once passed for my dress and tried to hide what had been done to me.

Alice opened her eyes slowly. Tears pooled in the corners like small, honest lamps. She blinked up at me, confusion and fear and that terrible, instinctive trust children had for the people who held them.

“Mama?”

“Everything is going to be okay, sweetheart,” Light said in the softest voice he could manage, an actor’s impression of comfort. The sound of it made my stomach turn.

“What… what are you doing?” I managed. My throat felt like sand.

Light walked forward, steps lazy and deliberate. He took her by the throat and looked at me as if we were negotiating over tea. “I’m feeling rather creative today,” he said, almost delighted. “We might suffer a butterfly effect, but I don’t mind tempting fate. I’ve come so far already, anyway… Witch, I want you to transfer your consciousness into her.”

My mouth went dry. “No! What the hell are you thinking, Ning?”

“Do it quickly,” he said, voice cold now. “Or I might just kill her. Chop, chop.” Sparks crawled along his forearm like restless insects. The light in the room brightened and dimmed with the tiny crackles of his amusement.

Alice whimpered. “Mama… it hurts…” Her small hand scrabbled at Paleman’s sleeve as if she could claw her way back to safety.

I swallowed bile. I forced a smile I didn’t feel and crouched so my face was near hers. “Alice,” I said, soft and steady, the way mothers speak when they want a child to master a fear. “It’s going to be fine. You’re going to be fine. You just have to trust Mama, okay?”

Light scoffed, the sound sharp and thin. “Oh, for fuck’s sake… You actually named her? I told you not to. Now you’ll suffer tenfold.” He looked at me as if I had committed a particularly tedious crime. “Choose, Witch. Do you want to live? Or would you like to die? Either way is acceptable to me. I still have this… er… Alice, to complete my plans.”

“Why are you tormenting us?” My voice broke in the middle. Rage burned under the fear like a coal-deep ache.

“Torment?” He laughed, small and cruel. “No. You’re mistaken. This is necessary. A sacrifice for greater power. When the end of the world comes, I must be strong enough to stop it. Call it foresight, call it responsibility. I understand why your petty mind can’t comprehend the scale, so I’ll make it simple.” He tightened his fingers on the child’s throat just enough for her chin to lift. “This girl will die if you don’t comply, and it is going to hurt.”

He let the last words hang like a guillotine blade. Then he stepped back and, with theatrical calm, held up his hand. “I’m going to count to ten.”

He began: “One.” The number echoed in the room, meaningless and absolute.

I felt the world narrow until the only things that existed were the tiny warm weight of my child, the blue burn of Ning’s eyes, and the small, obscene pulse of my own fear. My telepathy reached outward, frantically searching for allies in the web of minds I still controlled, but the threads were thin, frayed by everything he’d already done.

“Two.” His voice was patient, like a man reading instructions aloud.

I tried to speak, to bargain, to trade something or anything. “Please,” I whispered. “I’ll be good. I’ll obey. I’ll do as you say. Don’t—”

He did not look at me. He continued to count.

“Three.”

My hands shook. I forced myself to kneel closer to Alice and pressed my forehead to hers. Her breath was uneven. She was so small. I could smell sugar and smoke and the faint metallic tang of the keep. I let my mind touch hers, a gentle brush… “Mama’s here, mama’s here, mama’s here—” over and over, like a lullaby that might stitch her back together.

“Four.”

I whispered whatever promises would keep her alive. I told him I would be a good servant. I promised to erase memories, to obey orders, to die when asked. I promised to put the Ten before myself. I promised to hand him the keys to my mind and my body and my soul. The promises slid from my mouth like oil, slippery and desperate.

“Five.”

He kept counting. I begged him silently in the only language I had left: the tremor of my thoughts, the raw pleadings of a mother stripped down to need. I felt the world condense into a single point of choice… his and mine.

“Six.”

I could barely see through the blur of tears. The air stank of ozone, of fear made tangible, sharp on the tongue. Light’s voice cut through it all, steady and detached.

“Seven.”

My hands shook as I reached toward Alice. She looked so small, her lips quivering, her wide eyes glistening in the low blue light of his sparks. My own power trembled beneath my skin like a frightened animal begging to flee.

“Eight.”

I drove my telepathy into her mind. The connection bloomed instantly, a tether of thought, emotion, memory, and soul. I felt her warmth, her confusion, her innocent love for me. Then my own grief bled through, pouring down the link like poison.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

It hurt. It hurt in ways I didn’t know pain could. As I began copying my consciousness into her, I felt the edges of my mind tear apart, stretching across that fragile bond. I was dividing myself… mother, daughter, witch, and vessel. The pain wasn’t physical; it was identity fracturing, the unbearable weight of love weaponized.

“...Nine.”

Alice whimpered. She didn’t understand, but she felt it from my fear, my agony, and my desperation… and it magnified her own until our shared terror became unbearable. The tether vibrated with our emotion, a feedback loop of anguish threatening to crush us both.

No. No, I couldn’t do this. I pulled away. I tore the link apart. My mind screamed as it snapped, my consciousness recoiling like a flame starved of air.

I staggered back, gasping. “I can’t! I can’t do it!”

Then, I felt arms around me. Not comforting, but restraining. Cold, unyielding. Paleman had appeared behind me, gray and featureless, but his body warped before my eyes, reshaping into Light’s form. His voice slid into my mind like a whisper of silk and static.

“You can do it. I believe in you. You’re my girl, right?”

My body froze. The voice wasn’t just in my ears. Instead, it was inside me, burrowing deep, echoing through every corner of my thoughts until I couldn’t tell where his mind ended and mine began.

I was pushed to the edge of will, of sanity, of existence itself. And in that instant, I realized this must have been what those I’d broken once felt like, the ones whose minds I’d bent until they fractured, whose thoughts I’d played with for amusement. The same helpless, sickening surrender.

“Ten.”

Light’s voice carried no anger. Just inevitability.

There was a sharp crack of electricity so bright, it swallowed everything. I didn’t even have time to scream before the room filled with the scent of burning flesh.

When my eyes finally refocused, the only thing left of Alice was a dark smear of ash, smoke curling upward like a ghost.

Time was up.

“And… she’s dead,” Light said, as casually as if he were reporting the weather. “That’s disappointing. I guess the prophecy isn’t infallible.”

“W-what prophecy?” I croaked, my voice like rust.

Something moved inside me then, not a thought I could name, but a pressure, a hollowing. I knew that feeling. It had come before: a nausea that gnawed at bone, a vacuum pulling at the edges of my mind. My limbs seemed to shift, shrink; the world pitched. I vomited bile and blood. My telepathy, my steady hand for a hundred years, thinned into a fragile thread. At the same time, other things opened… jagged, stuttering visions that weren’t mine and not wholly alien. They slid into me like whispers through a cracked door: faces, names, fragments of futures. Capes he wanted. Places to raid. Threads of causality he intended to tie.

When the dizziness passed, I found myself smaller. A child’s body; a child’s heart hammering in my ribs. Panic rose like bile.

“You pulled,” Light observed flatly. “And she lives.”