The Witch of Thornvale Chapter 10: Innovation
The Witch of Thornvale is a literary portal fantasy featuring two distinct characters. It allegorizes Ludwig von Mises’ Six Lessons.
If you’re looking for the underlying theme in The Witch of Thornvale more than anything else, you will find it in Chapter 10: Innovation. But if you’re starting this story from scratch, check out the contents below, featuring the previous nine chapters.
Witch of Thornvale Chapter 10: Innovation
The following morning, Drake and Eirwyn visited the market. One that, astonishingly, moved like a limp animal.
Drake, dressed in more traditional attire with long pants, boots made from dragon hide, a tunic, and a brown cloak, leaned against a post beside a crate of dried mushrooms. He crossed his arms, eyes tracing every slow exchange and trying to avoid the gazes of those passing by who threw the occasional suspicious look his way.
Three stalls across, a man lifted a bundle of smoked fish, waved it high, and shouted something toward a weaver half a field away. The weaver looked over and shrugged, then a child bolted from the shadows, legs pumping, her single braid bouncing as she sprinted toward the inn with a scrap of paper clutched in her fist.
Two elders argued near the dye booth. They talked over each other, hands gesturing like old trees in the wind. Drake watched the same woman walk past him for the third time in an hour, her arms full of herbs wrapped in cloth. Every time she passed, her frown deepened.
Behind her, someone kept demanding ashroot, only for each vendor to reply with an apologetic look on their face.
Slate runners—mostly kids the same age as the boy who spoke to Drake yesterday—dashed between stalls. They copied trade tallies, rubbed out others, and glanced between symbols like the world would break if they made a mistake. One nearly tripped over a goat, then vanished behind the water wheel.
Across the stream, a woman hoisted her skirt and marched uphill toward the far gardens Drake hadn’t noticed the previous day. Breathless, she locked her eyes on a pouch of herbs strung from a hook. By the time she reached it, she’d crossed a good half-mile of uneven path, burned a quarter hour, and passed four other vendors who sold the same thing.
Drake’s fingers twitched against his bicep. Part of him wanted to say something, but the part that told him to sit back and keep observing won out.
A boy called from across the ravine and another boy answered. They shouted back and forth, their voices loud, impatient, and unclear. Finally, both ran in opposite directions, each chasing a question the other hadn’t fully asked.
Drake stared at the chaos. Then at the transaction records stacked outside the inn. The owner who checked in Drake and Eirwyn yesterday and her son read the cracked slates. Worn chalk rolled nearby, three lines were marked where there should be two, and someone had drawn symbols that didn’t match. A slash that looked like a trade but could’ve been a name. The woman cursed under their breath, crossed out a mark, rewrote it, then paused, unsure.
Drake’s jaw clenched. “There’s a thousand ways to fix this,” he said in an undertone.
A shadow crossed the sun, then crouched beside him.
Eirwyn, wearing a less-battered blue cloak, the front of which, like her other one, ended at her thighs, balanced on her toes near the crate of mushrooms, her eyes scanning the same pattern of slates and scrambling children.
She plucked a stem from the crate, and rolled it between her fingers until the edges crumbled into flakes. “Did you say something?”
“Are you entertaining yourself?”
“That wasn’t what you said. I know that much.”
“Alright, fine. I said there’s a thousand ways to fix this.”
“Then fix it. Or stop complaining.”
Drake looked sideways at Eirwyn as she flicked the crumbled stem into the dirt. He crouched in the dust and dragged a finger through the soil.
The lines came in fast, clean angles, sharp pivots, and points connected in a triangle. Then another, then five more. He linked them with curves, stretched arcs between corners, and the picture grew, rippling outward. He drew concentric loops and spiraled intersections. It was a map—but not of roads.
“In my world,” he said, voice low but deliberate, “we have networks. Threads that carry information, and messages broken into pieces, fired across lines. Not top-down or orders. They’re pulses passed peer-to-peer.” He tapped the center of the design, where three triangles surrounded a fourth.
Eirwyn crouched beside him, looking puzzled. “What are you making?”
“It’s a node with a sender and a listener. As long as it can catch a signal and pass it along, the message lives.”
Eirwyn leaned closer, strands of her brown hair brushing his arm. Her knees pressed into the dirt without concern as she rested one hand on the edge of a broken crate; the other curled near her chin, fingers twitching like they wanted to move the shapes he’d drawn. “Messages?”
“Think of it like pigeons. Only faster. Like invisible birds. You give each one a scrap, send them out, and instead of flying all the way to one person, they fly part of the way. The next node picks it up, then the next. Until the whole thing reaches the target.”
Eirwyn pointed to the loops. “And those?”
“They’re echoes. A message can split and find multiple paths. If one fails, another picks it up. Like built-in resilience.”
Eirwyn shifted her weight, her eyes tracking the loops. Her gaze skimmed the grooves like they contained runes she’d forgotten how to read.
Drake extended the metaphor. “Now replace the pigeons with pulses that emit short bursts of sound. Not words or anything, but tones. Vibrations with an encoded meaning. Are you following?”
“A little.”
“If there’s a way in this world to connect them like this, then it’s problem solved.”
Her brow drew tight. “Magic can carry sound,” she said, her palm glowing. “But it drifts and loses shape unless someone or something’s controlling it. Wind scatters it, water muddies it, and even silence pulls it apart.”
Drake smirked. “If it rides the right carrier, we’re good. Like how you told the forest that you passed through it.”
“Yeah, you can say that. Is that where you got the idea?”
“Probably.” He reached into his cloak pocket and pulled out the cracked phone screen. He held it up between two fingers, then turned it sideways so the glass caught the sun.
Eirwyn narrowed her eyes.
“That screen once held every thought I’ve ever published. Every reader, reply, and basically my whole life. Now it’s useless. Even if I could turn it on, it’d still be useless because the carrier couldn’t emit a signal in this world.”
He tapped the earth again, beside the central triangle. “But what if your magic is the carrier? There’s a vibration there, and it can route from node to node, stabilized with mirrored marks and something like glyphs can shape them.”
Eirwyn dragged the edge of her cloak over her lap and brushed away a streak of pollen. “You’re talking about building a message path. Like one in your world, but with this world’s resources.”
He nodded. “I’m talking about building a network with magic.”
A gust of wind passed through the square as two nearby traders argued over squash and a child dropped a basket and ran to the stream.
Eirwyn cocked her head toward a nearby hillside, where quartz jutted in jagged seams, veins of fractured light wedged deep in the dirt. Some split the slope while others pulsed faintly, their veins alive with a dull glow that shimmered even without spellcraft. Sunlight peeking through the clouds caught on the edges, and the ridge burned gold, blue, and white.
She stood and waved Drake over. “I can shift magic into them. Quartz can retain its shape.”
Eirwyn pressed her palm to the largest shard and traced a shape. She tilted her head and closed her eyes, humming a low, single note across the surface. Light curled inside the crystal and it pulsated with even more frequency.
Drake knelt beside a smaller spike, his fingers brushing stray dry grass from its base.
“Touch it there.” She pointed to a notch chipped into the edge. “Then trace the containment glyph. Spiral in. Sharp corners, not curves.”
“I can do this too?”
“We all have magic in us. Witches like me are just born with more of it, but I’m on the run. I can’t stay here and tend to this network forever. If you do this, then they’ll know that they can, too.”
Drake nodded, and slid his fingers over the stone. It pulsed once beneath his skin. Nothing like what Eirwyn did, but still, he had something here.
He concentrated more, and the glyph came slow. His nail carved through loose dust—half a spiral, two cuts intersecting through a sharp point at the center. He moved with precision and kept his breathing steady, copying the exact shape Eirwyn drew. It felt like the moment just before a current jumps a wire.
“Now hum,” Eirwyn said, sidling beside him, her cloak brushing another batch of quartz. “Match what you hear.”
He paused, then leaned close. Something stirred beneath the crystal. It was like pressure shifting, like the moment between lightning and thunder.
Drake picked the lowest pitch in his chest and pushed it out slow. The crystal flickered. It was dim at first, then it grew steadier.
Eirwyn’s hand shot up. “Stop there. That’s the tone you need.”
He backed off half a breath, and the glow faded but didn’t vanish.
She drew the same symbol on three more and repeated the process. “Give me two more. That gives us seven, a number associated with magic.”
Drake drew three more spiky spiral shapes with his pointer finger.
“Now say something into it and see if it works.”
“Test. Hello. Return,” he said, voice low, speaking into the quartz.
Eirwyn tapped the center stone; one of the stones Drake drew. “This should be your main beacon and the other six should move power to it. Watch it.”
She stood and paced to the far side of the ridge where a narrow trail sloped into thicker woods.
Drake watched her vanish past the rock line. Only the top of her cloak showed, then a shimmer of blue against a dark trunk, then nothing.
Then the air shifted. A flash—a glint off something mirrored. Light snapped from the hill’s far edge, and bounced once off a polished shard propped against a split post hammered into the ground.
The glyph on Drake’s shard lit, then faded.
He stared at it, watching.
The stone cooled, then the wind picked up, brushing pine needles across the ground.
A beat passed, then a grin spread across Drake’s face as the glyph shimmered after another beam of light hit it, complete with a radiant hum that lasted a few seconds. “We’ve got a signal.”
Eirwyn stepped into view and jogged back over. “More than a signal. The message worked. Test. Hello. Return.”
“You heard them?”
“I did. It was faint, but there. If we create a second beacon, the message should come in clearer and this world will have something. Something it never would have had if I got stupid on the day we first met. Now let’s go show the rest of the villagers and see what they think of it.”
👉 Catch Chapter 11 now and see if the villagers take to Drake’s invention
This piece initially appeared on The Rogue Scribe.
