Chapter 119 Ashes & Spark [Part 2] [Witch]

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

I stared at the little girl propped by Paleman. She looked like Alice: the same black hair, the same startled eyes. Relief hit me in a hot animal way, until she warped. The child’s skin rippled; age fell on her like a tide. One breath, a child; the next, an adult, pronounced with wrinkles that had not existed a second before. Then collapse. I screamed Alice’s name, but the sound simply bled into the keep’s humming corridors.

Alice, my daughter, convulsed between lifetimes… newborn to elder, toddler to woman, looping at impossible speed. Sparks crawled over her until the skin smoked and shriveled. Each collapse birthed a new cry, a new flicker of mind: infant shrieks, toddler confusion, adult sobs, old-woman rasp. Time had become a cruelty, and she the instrument.

I lunged to Light. “What is the meaning of this? What did you do to her?” I demanded, throat raw.

He smiled the way calm people smile before a storm. “Your little Alice pulled,” he said. “That’s exactly what I’ve been waiting for. I’m trying to alter the nature of my birth, to increase my power. The prophet said it could be done if I could engineer a pull like this. I didn’t expect success on my first try, but this looks promising. Also,” he added, with an odd, clinical chuckle, “this should allow me to remove the weak link in my lineage.”

“Remove? Remove how?” I asked, hearing my voice as if from a distance.

“I intend to use her as a template,” he said plainly. “With the right procedure and the right grafts, I can shift my origin. It won’t be gentle, and she may die in the process. But hey, I’m gonna be eternal…”

“Let me fix it,” I said.

“And why would I trust you?”

“You can’t let her die! She’s going to be your mother, right!?”

“I am not interested in her as my mother… I only want her for her womb… If anything, the only thing of value to her was that she brought me back to life. She’s nothing to me. Once she gives birth to me, I am going to take over that baby, and then I’ll be perfect. Get out of my way. Paleman, call Dr. Sequence here, and we can probably accelerate this thing.”

“B-But she’ll die,” I cried to him, and tried to appeal to his sense of reason. “And if she dies, you won’t be able to try again… C-Can you travel back in time the same way you did the first time? Can you do it again?”

“Fine,” said Light. “Do what you can.”

I reached for Alice, my trembling hands cupped her face, her skin hot with the energy still flickering beneath it. Her eyes fluttered open for a second, and in that brief moment, I felt her.

Three minds. Three separate currents of consciousness, tangled like threads in a storm, one from a past already lived, one still anchored in the present, and one whispering from a future that hadn’t yet happened. The sheer pressure of it nearly broke my focus, but I held on. I had to hold on. There was something else in her, too, a piece of me. A faint psychic residue, a nascent echo I had left behind when the tether between us first formed. It was scared, but it was alive.

“Stay with me, baby,” I whispered, more thought than sound. “Just hold on a little longer…”

I drew on what strength I had left, weaving the threads of her fractured minds together, shaping them so they would not unravel. I guided my echo and anchored it in her future self, where she might grow safely, hidden from Light’s eyes.

My vision blurred from the strain. My telepathy flickered like a dying star as I reached deeper, shaping her identity, her memories, and the locks that would keep her hidden. I laid a final seed, a dormant set of memories that would bloom when she reached the right age, when the world might be ready for her truth.

“Sleep now,” I whispered. “Be reborn, Alice.”

Her form shimmered, the arcs of uncontrolled electricity around her fading into a warm, soft glow. Her body shrank, collapsing into itself until a small, crying infant lay on the cold metal table. The smell of ozone lingered.

It was done. She was safe, for now.

“Light, I’ve done what I could… Please—”

A spark lanced through me, searing white agony. My body locked, every muscle rigid. My throat caught in a half-scream as I was thrown backward. The world shattered into black and white flashes, and I felt myself falling through myself.

When I blinked again, the world had shrunk. My arms were tiny. My vision was blurry. No… No, no, no. I wasn’t in my body anymore. I was inside my daughter.

I felt the weight of the tiny lungs gasping, the helpless limbs twitching. My consciousness, the Witch’s mind, was trapped within the body of an infant.

Light’s shadow loomed above me.

“She really is putting up a fight,” he said, annoyed. “Which is becoming more and more tiresome.”

Paleman appeared beside him, his formless face flickering like gray smoke under the lab lights. His voice was a hollow vibration. “Do you want me to proceed?”

“Yes,” said Light. “You’ve developed the prerequisites to breach her telepathy, haven’t you?”

Paleman hesitated. “The potency of her powers will weaken… her memories may suffer.”

Light’s grin was razor-sharp. “That’s fine. As long as she can still handle her administrative duties.”

He said it like a cruel joke. I screamed through my infant mouth, the sound high and raw, not words, just terror.

I could feel the pull again, my powers struggling against the constraints of a body too small, too fragile to contain them. “Don’t,” I wanted to say. “Don’t touch her… me…”

Paleman moved closer to the table. His long, gray fingers hovered over my, her, head, and I felt a ripple of psychic static before his fingertips pierced through my other skull. The body convulsed violently. Her eyes rolled back white. I could feel the connection splitting, and memories tearing free like pages ripped from a book.

Inside the infant's body, I screamed soundlessly, my mind flickering between both perspectives: the Witch on the table thrashing under Paleman’s violation, and the small infant watching, crying uncontrollably as her body remembered pain it had never lived.

“Good,” Light said, standing over us, his expression one of fascination. “Now she’ll be more compliant.”

The smell of burned flesh filled the sterile air.

Paleman withdrew his hand, and the older me went limp.

…

..

.

Years passed.

At the back of my daughter’s mind, I watched her grow.

I wasn’t really there, not in the physical sense, just a voice that whispered between her thoughts, lingering like a shadow she could never quite place. She didn’t know me, not really. Mrs. Mind had become someone else entirely, the same woman, the same soul, but rewritten. A puppet rebuilt by Light’s experiments and Paleman’s interference.

She looked like me, sounded like me, but she had no warmth for the child she once carried. No trace of tenderness in her when she looked upon Alice. Mrs. Mind called our daughter, Missive. A designation, not a name.

Missive was to serve as the Ten’s early warning system, a living sensor designed to detect approaching threats, psychic disturbances, or movements from rival factions. Mrs. Mind trained her with brutal efficiency to obey, analyze, and never ask questions.

And yet, Alice… my sweet, resilient Alice… she still dreamed.

She dreamed of the days when her mother would hold her, when someone would call her by her real name again. She dreamed of a warmth that no longer existed.

All the while, I stayed buried deep within her consciousness, watching through her eyes, and listening through her thoughts, guiding her gently, carefully, and waiting for the moment my plan would begin.

When she turned ten, the memories I had planted long ago began to stir. It started with whispers in her sleep and faint impressions of another life, another self. My words, softly remembered. “A name, a voice, a mother who once loved her.”

The pull between us became stronger, and I began to shape her thoughts not to control her, but to push her, to nurture that small, desperate desire to escape this place.

I gave her a vision of hope. A single image burned into her mind from the fragmented glimpses I had seen during my own pull, a man in a porcelain mask, standing amidst the corpses of gods and monsters alike. Blood. Smoke. The scent of ozone. And Light… impaled, broken, and dead.

The moment I saw it, I knew. That man, whoever he was, would become our salvation.

I made Alice search for him. I gave her the instinct to seek out killers, outcasts, and anomalies who might one day lead her toward that masked figure. Through her, I whispered in Mrs. Mind’s ear, nudging the remnants of my old telepathy buried within her subconscious.

When that wasn’t enough, I preyed on Light’s ego. He always believed he could shape destiny,  that every cape, every superhuman, existed only to fill his roster of perfect saviors. So I fed that delusion, little by little, until the idea became his own.

Recruit Eclipse, I told him… though the words were never spoken aloud. They surfaced through Mrs. Mind’s lips, her mind unaware of the manipulation.

And so we found him… the Monster of Markend, Eclipse, and with him, Nicholas Caldwell.

From that point on, history began to spiral exactly as it was meant to.

I waited, hidden still, watching as the pieces fell into place.

…

..

.

Now, in the present, I lie beside Eclipse in the small, sterile room that the SRC had assigned us. The lights hummed a faint blue, the kind of tone that made silence sound alive.

He didn’t sleep easily, and neither did I.

So I reached out with my mind and spun a thread of telepathy between us. It wasn’t just a dream I pulled him into, but a memory, raw and unfiltered, the story of what made me who I was. I let him see everything… Beacon, Ning, Alice, the birth of the Ten, and the long spiral of horror that followed. My shame. My crimes. My reasons.

The dream rippled like glass as he realized what was happening. He stood from the bed, climbing to the upper bunk, the light from the ceiling bending around his silhouette. I felt his anger ripple through the tether, sharp and searing.

He knew.

He knew this wasn’t just some telepathic trick. He knew this was my confession.

“You think I don’t see it?” he muttered, his voice distorted in the dream’s air. “You think I don’t feel you trying to make me understand you?”

I didn’t respond. There was no defense worth giving. People like him, like us, weren’t swayed by words. They needed something real. Something painful to truly move them. If I had to expose and bare my sins to give him purpose, to make him stronger, then so be it.

“I just wanted you to see where I came from,” I whispered. “Why I did what I did.”

He didn’t answer. But through the link, I felt his fury twist into something colder, not forgiveness, not yet, but comprehension. And that was enough.

The dream began to dissolve, edges unraveling into static. As it did, I caught a fleeting glimpse of Alice, older now, distant, standing at the edge of my mindscape. She smiled faintly, her image fading with the dream.

And then it was over.