Witch of Thornvale Chapter 23: Morning After Another World

The Witch of Thornvale is a literary portal fantasy featuring two distinct characters. It allegorizes Ludwig von Mises’ Six Lessons.

If you’re just joining the misadventure and you missed Acts I, II, plus ALL of Act III, catch them below:

They’ll take some time, but they’re worth the read so you can see how Drake Ridgeback and Eirwyn Starweaver ended up in this ordeal. Once you’re caught up, read THE FINAL CHAPTER below that awesome banner and get yourself a 50% discount while you’re at it if you’re into anti-Woke fiction by using the promo code VAULTVIP50 at the checkout.

The Witch of Thornvale Chapter 23

Dawn found Cinderglen alive.

The inn looked like someone tried to fit three villages in one building and forgot to ask the walls for permission. Captives slept on floors, benches, blankets, and one table the innkeeper declared unusable for meals until everyone stopped bleeding on it.

A child from Millcross curled against his father near the hearth, both of them too exhausted to cry anymore. The hunter Malcor’s men took sat by the window with one swollen eye and a cup of broth he held like a grudge.

The blacksmith had his shoulder wrapped and his temper untouched, which meant he survived in the most annoying way possible.

Outside, the quartz circle glowed faintly.

The covered wagon’s broken pieces hadn’t followed them back from the creek bend, but the light that cracked it left something behind. The beacons pulsed slower now, as if Cinderglen itself needed sleep.

Drake sat on the inn steps with one arm wrapped around his still-throbbing ribs. Every breath reminded him that a castor throwing him into the mud wasn’t one of those character-building experiences he needed to repeat. His clothes were still streaked with creek water, dirt, and someone else’s blood. Maybe his own too.

The village argued around him.

A woman complained that her spare blankets went missing. The innkeeper told her they hadn’t gone missing; they were under captives who didn’t want to die cold, and if she wanted them back this second she could explain her position to the wounded boy near the hearth.

Two men argued over food stores. One insisted rescued captives needed first portions. The other said Cinderglen’s children had to eat too. A third offered dried apples in exchange for help patching his roof before the next rain. The tanner wanted three people to help clean straps. The farmer wanted the blacksmith to honor the cart axle bargain before the end of the week.

Eirwyn stepped out of the inn behind him, lighter blue cloak pulled tight around her shoulders. She was barefoot, as always, but moved like each stone took personal offense at her feet.

“You should be laying down,” Drake said.

“You should stop saying that to people while looking like you lost an argument with a wagon.”

“I won my argument with the wagon.”

“The wagon broke your ribs.”

“The castor broke my ribs.”

She sat beside him, slower than she probably wanted him to notice, and locked her hand in his.

For a while, they watched Cinderglen be terrible and beautiful in equal measure.

A woman handed the innkeeper two loaves and reminded her that she expected one back in credit once trade resumed. The innkeeper told her she’d write it down if the boy ever stopped falling asleep over the tablet. The boy, sitting inside near the window, lifted one hand without opening his eyes.

Drake smiled.

“They’re still arguing,” Eirwyn said.

“Good.”

She looked at him.

Drake tightened his grip around her hand. “People argue when they still own something. Malcor’s people don’t argue. They obey, scheme, or wait for permission to breathe.”

Eirwyn watched the square. “You think this worked?”

“I think it worked enough.”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s the best version that exists.”

The nearest quartz beacon flickered. A few villagers glanced over, then returned to arguing about whether water buckets near the central circle counted as shared supplies or owed labor.

Drake gestured toward them. “Nobody designed all of that, or stood on a barrel and ruled it into being.”

Eirwyn’s eyes softened. “And that’s good?”

“That’s alive.”

She looked down at their interlocked hands.

Drake knew that look now. He hated that he knew it, because knowing someone’s guilt meant caring enough to recognize the shape it took before it spoke. “You’re thinking about going to the creek bend.”

“We did go.”

“You know what I mean.”

The fingers on Eirwyn’s free hand tightened around the edge of her cloak. “Some of them stayed behind.”

“Some got out.”

“Some stayed.”

“Yes.”

“If I had gone when they first demanded me—”

“No.”

“You don’t know.”

“Yes, I do.”

She turned on him, frustration flashing through the exhaustion. “You can’t keep saying that like it settles everything.”

“I can when you’re repeating Malcor’s argument for him.”

Eirwyn’s face closed for half a second, then cracked at the edges. “I heard them in the cages.”

“I know.”

“I saw that boy’s face and the woman in blue. I felt those stones. Drake, if I walked in sooner, maybe—”

“Maybe he takes you, keeps the captives, and sends another demand by breakfast.”

She looked away.

“Compassion wasn’t the flaw.”

Her eyes shifted back.

“Wanting to stop pain isn’t the problem. Letting monsters set the terms of your compassion’s the problem. Malcor wanted you to believe the captives suffered because you refused. They suffered because he put them in cages. He doesn’t get to stab someone and hand you the knife.”

The inn door creaked behind them. The wounded man from Millcross stood there with his son pressed against his side. He looked like standing upright cost more than he owned. “My son wanted to thank you.”

The boy stared at Eirwyn first, then Drake.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Eirwyn’s eyes brightened, but she nodded. “You were brave.”

The boy shook his head. “I was scared.”

“Those can be the same.”

He seemed to consider that, then gave one tiny nod. The wounded man guided him back inside.

Eirwyn wiped her cheek quickly, as if she could make the tear retroactively illegal, and Drake pretended not to see.

Then the central quartz crystal pulsed, and every conversation in the square died.

Drake stood too fast. Pain tore through his ribs, but the world around him already bent.

The inn stretched. The beacons pulled into thin lines of blue-white light, and the morning sky twisted above Cinderglen as if someone seized the world.

Eirwyn grabbed his arm. “Drake?”

That same horrible sweep hit him, like invisible hands hooked under his ribs and dragged him backward through the space between breaths. His feet left the ground. Cinderglen smeared into color. The innkeeper’s voice stretched into a sound too long to be a word.

For one wild second, Drake thought Malcor found one last trick.

He reached for Eirwyn. Her fingers again locked around his. The quartz light exploded, and Cinderglen disappeared.

Drake hit hard floor.

Pain shot through his ribs and turned the world white at the edges. He rolled onto his side, coughing, one hand pressed to his chest.

Something beeped. Somewhere, glass creaked in a frame, and the air smelled wrong, like stale smoke, plastic, and dust.

Drake opened his eyes.

The shop. He was back in the shop, but it looked different from what he remembered. It had no trace of any magical artifacts, but it instead resembled a dollar store. It was like this place took on different forms.

Morning light leaked through the front windows, catching broken glass, overturned displays, scattered signs, and shelves that looked like they survived a riot from giving up on dignity. The street outside sat quiet in the dead aftermath of a world that could wreck itself before breakfast and call it civic engagement.

Eirwyn gasped.

She was on the floor beside him, her long brown hair tangled over one shoulder. Eyes wide enough to swallow the ceiling lights, shelves, glass door, hanging signs, boxed products, fluorescent panels, checkout counter, and every other piece of modern life that looked like sorcery without having the decency to admit it.

She scrambled backward until she hit a shelf. “What is this place?”

Drake tried to sit up. “My world.”

Eirwyn stared at the ceiling lights. “The stars are trapped.”

“No. Those are lights.”

“They hum.”

“They’re annoying.”

She turned toward the glass door and froze at the sight of cars moving beyond the cracked window. “Those carriages have no horses.”

“Also annoying.”

Her breathing quickened. “The road is stone.”

“Asphalt.”

“What is asphalt?”

“Complicated.”

“What is that?” She pointed at a refrigerator case.

“Also complicated.”

Her eyes narrowed on a promotional sign plastered to the fridge’s glass. “What is Pittsburgh?”

Drake blinked. “Why are you asking about Pittsburgh?”

His phone buzzed.

The sound cut through the abandoned shop like a tiny insect with terrible timing.

He ripped the phone out with a hand that suddenly felt numb. The screen flickered twice, then came alive like it’d been waiting for him to cross back into range of reality.

Notifications, missed calls, news headlines, a battery warning, and sports updates he couldn’t have cared about less if someone paid him.

Then one headline locked his eyes.

Pittsburgh’s Democratic Socialist mayor begins first wave of economic reforms: rent caps, city-backed grocery program, fare-free transit fight, wage mandates, and emergency anti-price-gouging orders take effect this week.

Another alert followed.

Mayor’s office calls plan “public ownership for public good” as business groups warn of shortages, lawsuits, and closures.

Drake stared at the screen, where the olive-skinned and bearded mayor who couldn’t have been any older than him stared back: Saad Oman. The man who thought there was never a problem too large for government to fix.

Eirwyn slowly approached, looking at the phone screen as if it might bite. “That’s what that thing does?”

“Yep.” The phone buzzed again, and Drake’s mouth went dry, following another report on Oman’s comments regarding the previous night’s riot. “Actually. I think it might be worse.”

Eirwyn’s eyes widened. “What’s worse?”

“It’s complicated.”

“You keep saying that.”

“Because everything here is.”

She looked toward the broken shop window, where a bus hissed to a stop down the street. A few people walked past with coffee cups, backpacks, phones, earbuds, and faces that suggested they had no idea a barefoot witch from another world just arrived beside a snack display.

“What is Pittsburgh?”

“A city.” Drake motioned out the window. “This city.”

“And why do you look like you just saw another binding stone?”

Drake looked at the headline one more time.

Rent caps. Public grocery program. Fare-free transit funding fight. Wage mandates. Price controls with nicer wording. Public ownership for public good. Everything that Oman was promising kept lighting up his screen.

Control dressed as compassion, and coercion sold as fairness. A system deciding what people should produce, charge, earn, own, and surrender because someone with power declared the plan moral.

If he and Eirwyn were going back to fight Malcor’s central planning, he needed to understand what he was up against. Not as a quote from some economics book, theory, or a debate with people who thought slogans counted as evidence.

As a living system here in his own world.

Drake locked the phone screen. “Because I think we did.”

Glowering, Eirwyn stood slowly, then looked down at her bare feet. “This ground is dead.”

“It’s a store floor.”

“It feels dead.”

“Modern life does that to people too.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“No, it usually doesn’t.”

A siren wailed somewhere outside. Eirwyn flinched so hard she nearly knocked over a rack of sunglasses.

“Relax,” Drake said. “That’s probably not for us.”

“Probably?”

“Welcome to my world.”

She stared at him.

He looked at her cloak, her feet, the dirt on her legs, the quartz glow still faintly pulsing beneath the cloth in her hand. Then he turned toward the front window. “You can’t go outside like that.”

Eirwyn’s face hardened. “Why?”

“People will stare.”

“Let them.”

“They’ll record you.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’ll trap your image in their glowing rectangles and send it to other glowing rectangles until strangers argue about you. And trust me, in this world, science would want an answer. I have no doubt they’d track you down, then poke, prod, and experiment on you like a lab rat.”

She swore. “I hate this world already.”

“Good instincts.”

“I’m not wearing shoes.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No.”

“Eirwyn.”

“Shoes cut me off from the earth.”

“The sidewalk already does that.”

“Then why add insult?”

“Because camouflage.” Drake lowered his voice. “This isn’t surrender. It’s hiding in plain sight. If you walk through town barefoot in a blue cloak in January, everyone notices. If you wear normal clothes, you get more choices.”

She pursed her lips. “Alright, fine.”

They found clothes in the wreckage of the shop’s small apparel section. Jeans that were a little too long. A plain dark top. A jacket. Socks. Shoes Eirwyn held like they had personally betrayed her bloodline before she put them on.

The second she stood, her face twisted. “The ground is gone.”

“It’s still there.”

“No. It is not.”

“We’ll get better shoes.”

“There are worse ones?”

“Many.”

She looked horrified.

Outside, morning had fully taken the street. Cars passed. Traffic lights changed from red to green. Power lines cut the sky into pieces. A man argued into a phone near the corner. A bus exhaled. Somewhere, a delivery truck backed up with a steady beep that made Eirwyn glare at it like she might duel it if given time.

She stopped on the sidewalk. Her eyes moved from cars to buildings to signs to wires to windows to the stream of people walking as if none of this was insane.

“No visible magic,” she whispered.

“No.”

“And yet everything moves.”

“Yeah.”

“What powers it?”

Drake led her to his car and pulled a key out of his shorts pocket. One he, after that misadventure, never lost. “The most beautiful modern marvel ever invented. Not that it doesn’t have a dark side when in the wrong hands.”

She stopped dead.

The car sat where he’d left it, which felt like the first impossible mercy of the morning. Somehow, he never even got a parking ticket.

Eirwyn pointed. “That’s yours?”

“Unfortunately.”

“It’s a carriage.”

“Kind of.”

She gave him a suspicious look.

He unlocked it, and the lights flashed.

Eirwyn jumped back. “It listens to you?”

“This one does.” Drake opened the passenger door. “But those new ones listen to State mandates more than any horse ever did.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“Nothing about cars is comforting if you think about them long enough.”

Arms folded across her chest, she climbed inside like she expected the seat to swallow her.

Drake got behind the wheel, showed Eirwyn how to put on a seatbelt which she struggled with for a few minutes, started the engine, and watched her grip the door handle as the car rumbled alive.

He pulled away from the curb.

Eirwyn stared through the window as the shop receded behind them. Her old world still clung to her in the tension of her shoulders, the way she tracked every moving object.

Drake’s phone buzzed again in the cupholder. Updates with reports from people certain they could plan a city better than millions of choices could build one.

The highway sign for Weirton, West Virginia appeared ahead.

Drake turned onto the ramp, ribs still aching, his hands tight on the wheel, Eirwyn silent beside him as the modern world opened in lanes of asphalt and morning light.

He looked at the road ahead, then at the city alerts piling up on his phone, and finally understood the next lesson would not wait for them to return to Malcor’s world.