The Witch of Thornvale Chapter 13: The Fracture
The Witch of Thornvale is a literary portal fantasy featuring two distinct characters. It allegorizes Ludwig von Mises’ Six Lessons.
If you haven’t read the first 12 chapters of The Witch of Thornvale, catch the entire backlist below. See how Drake Ridgeback navigates Eirwyn Starweaver’s world, and find out what led to their current predicament in Cinderglen, a hidden community outside King Malcor’s reach. Or, is it? Either way, Cinderglen may wind up as the “Birthplace of Liberty” in Eirwyn’s world if its people are drawn to the idea.
The Witch of Thornvale Chapter 13: The Fracture
The pulse came back, but it stuttered at random times.
Drake heard it before he saw it. A stagger in the rhythm, like a heartbeat trying to find its pace again. The nearest quartz flickered, dimmed, then flared brighter than before. Across the square, another answered, but a beat too late.
Then two more, but they faltered out of sync.
A child raised his slate as the quartz circle nearest to him pulsed and a voice echoed. “It’s back!”
Another voice cut across him. “No—wait—it’s messed up. Mine says—”
The words tangled, and Drake stepped forward, eyes locked on the network. “It’s fine. It just needed—”
A second pulse hit. It was stronger, but it too flickered and died.
A girl near the far post looked over and nodded, her eyes straining as if trying to make out what the voice coming from the quartz circle nearest to her said. “It confirmed the trade. His trade.”
A man she pointed at shook his head. “No, it didn’t. I’ve got nothing left to trade today.”
She turned, jabbing a finger toward the crystal. “It carried! I heard it myself!”
Another voice joined in as murmuring erupted around the square. “I heard it too!”
“It was nothing I traded,” the man snapped, storming over and snatching the slate out of the girl’s hand before she had a chance to record anything.
Drake’s jaw tightened, racking his brain for a reason behind this supposed mishap. “It’s timing. That’s all. You’re not reading it at the same—”
“Timing?” Another girl lifted her slate and examined it. “Timing doesn’t give me two answers, right?”
“Two answers—?”
Another short pulse flickered in and died as a disembodied voice drifted across the village. The network responded like it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.
Drake moved to the nearest post and crouched, his hand hovering over the quartz. The lines of light between the nodes shimmered. Some were steady, others were unstable, and a few lagged behind like a second thought. Their instability kept the center quartz from receiving a clear message.
“Stop talking over it,” he said. “You might be flooding the signal.”
The nearest boy looked up from his slate. “Flooding?”
“Too many inputs at once.” Drake turned to the next quartz circle near the girl before his eyes traveled back to the boy. “You’ve got to stagger it. One message at a time.”
He faced the square and raised his hands, his gaze lingering on the kids recording transactions that may or may not be correct. “Everyone stop. Just—pause for a second.”
A nearby girl with dark brown pigtails dropped her chalk and looked up. “My last one says she traded him two sacks of grain for coin.” She pointed toward a middle-aged man and the woman across the square.
The man scoffed. “I never agreed to that.”
“It confirmed! The signal.”
“Then why am I not carrying any grain?”
Murmuring again broke out, and the voices rose until they came close to shouting. Some older villagers stormed over to the kids, demanding they see if there were any false transactions.
Eirwyn stepped back and beside Drake, her gaze shifting from one signal to the next. Her fingers twitched at her side, as if it was a nervous tick.
The blacksmith stepped forward and folded his muscular arms, throwing Drake a hardened glare. “You build something faster than trust, and this is what you get.”
Drake kept his eyes glued to the same randomly-flickering quartz circle Eirwyn stared at. “You get speed and coordination. From there, you get—”
“Confusion,” the blacksmith cut in. “You get people owing for something they never bought.”
A low and agreeing murmur followed the blacksmith’s proclamation. The same elder who spoke before stepped out from the edge of the square. “You’ve introduced something this village cannot verify. Not yet.”
Drake snapped his gaze her way. “That’s why we fix it.”
“And while you fix it? What do we do with the damage?”
Someone slammed a slate into the ground so hard that it echoed. “You cheated me,” said a voice, its accusation cutting clean through the noise. A younger man stood near the center of the square, chest heaving as he pointed at another kid, who glued her eyes to the fallen slate. “You told me it confirmed.”
“It did!”
“Then why is it not here?” He kicked the slate across the square. “Why does this say I still owe?”
“That’s what she told me!” The girl shook an accusatory finger at an older woman.
“That thing now has me in debt. The slate shows I owe for something that I spent my hard-earned money on.”
There it was, and Drake felt it before anyone said it again. The shift from confusion to blame.
Eirwyn threw a helpless look at Drake, but her voice stayed low. “This isn’t just failing.”
Drake shook his head. “It’s early. That’s all. They’re using it faster than it can—”
“Drake, someone is going to get hurt over this.”
“They’re arguing over grain.” His eyes lingered to the new dagger she kept tucked inside her cloak. “Not blades.”
“Not yet.”
Another series of pulses hit a quartz circle before their gleam faded and died.
A boy near the outer post frowned down at his slate. “It didn’t even answer this time. I didn’t hear nothing.” He tapped the quartz with his chalk and a faint flicker answered before it too went out. “It’s not answering,” he said, louder this time.
Drake turned, and the line between two nodes flickered, went dim, then snapped.
Silence rippled through the nearest cluster. Not the whole square, but enough to tell Drake that most people here began rethinking his invention.
Eirwyn’s eyes lifted past the network, the village square, the posts, and into the tree line. “Where is he? The vector?”
Drake didn’t have to ask who she meant. The man vanished amidst the commotion. Almost as though the vector planned for this to happen from the beginning. He came, watched, learned, and left. A chill slid through the back of Drake’s neck from realization of what kind of damage this man could do.
“He saw the full cycle,” Drake muttered. “And its problems.”
Eirwyn’s hand moved to her side and just beneath the cloak. Part of her brand emerged and emitted a sharp pulse. She inhaled through her teeth and winced.
“Eirwyn?”
Her gaze stayed fixed on the trees as she strained her face. She concentrated on something that wasn’t there, or so Drake thought.
“They felt that,” she whispered.
Drake frowned. “Felt what?”
“The signal. They’re close, Drake.” She fought against doubling over as her brand pulsed again. “They’re not just close to here. I can feel them.”
Across the square, a node went dark and didn’t flicker again. Then a second, then a third.
“No,” Drake said under his breath. “No, no, no—” He moved back to the center of the network, crouching again, his hands hovering as if he could hold it together by will alone. “It’s cascading. Something overloaded the loop. Listen.” He leaned in as multiple faint, echoing voices jumbled. “It’s trying to reconcile inputs that don’t—”
“They’re tracking it,” Eirwyn cut in, massaging her side as she crouched next to him. “He’s got another witch nearby. A conscripted one. A castor. It’s not a coincidence that this didn’t start breaking down until that vector arrived. The timing is almost too good—ow!”
Drake froze. Part of him wanted to help Eirwyn, who he could tell held back tears of pain and she fought tooth and nail against losing it in front of these still-murmuring people. But a distant rustling drifted through the trees.
A pulse answered from somewhere within the forest and the nearest quartz flared before it once again dimmed. Another child dropped his slate. Though he, like the others, probably thought it dimmed because of a failure in the village.
“It’s not ours.” Drake eased himself upward and guided Eirwyn—still clutching her rib cage—to her feet.
Every instinct he had pulled in two directions at once. Fix it and block Malcor’s witch’s and vector’s influence or shut it down.
Around them, the village fractured. Some stepped back from the posts, and others moved closer, desperate to get one last signal through and praying it’d be correct.
The blacksmith reached down and yanked the quartz crystal free and pointed it Drake as if it was a weapon. “That’s enough. We’re shutting it down. End of story.”
“You don’t get to decide that!” someone shouted.
“We decide before it decides for us.”
Another distant pulse. Closer this time.
Eirwyn spotted it and stepped in front of Drake, doing everything in her power to stand upright. She bent her knees slightly and stood with her bare feet shoulder-width apart, her cloak shifting with the movement, the blue catching what little light remained.
Her hand glowed with a controlled, focused beam.
Drake swallowed, his mind racing through everything at once. The design, flow, and outside interference causing the failure.
Eirwyn squeezed his arm with her free hand and pulled him close enough that he couldn’t ignore her.
Her voice dropped to a razor edge, so sharp that nobody would know how much pain she was in. “You need to decide right now—do we shut it down, or run?”
Dive into Chapter 14 and see how this confrontation plays out
