The Witch of Weirton is where the next lesson begins

The Witch of Weirton continues Ludwig von Mises’ Six Lessons, this time hitting hard on Lesson2: Socialism. This may be the most important book.

The Witch of Thornvale just wrapped, and if you thought Eirwyn Starweaver escaped Malcor’s world clean, you haven’t been paying attention.

She shattered binding stones, helped break open cages, watched captives run through mud and smoke while Drake Ridgeback stood beside her with busted ribs, a smart mouth, and just enough economic sense to make tyrants develop migraines. Cinderglen survived because people chose to act, trade, bargain, risk, build, and cooperate without waiting for a king, committee, or planner to bless them.

That was Lesson I: Capitalism

Real capitalism, too. Not the mutant state-corporate garbage critics keep describing when they think they’re dunking on free markets. Cinderglen wasn’t some perfect village full of pure-hearted saints who discovered cooperation because they all suddenly loved each other. They argued over rooms, food, iron, blankets, payment, records, risk, and who owed what once the blood dried.

Good. That’s how real people operate when nobody owns them. But Book II is where things get nastier, because Eirwyn’s about to land in Drake’s world.

And she’s not landing in some glowing metropolis where modern life looks like progress with a soundtrack. She’s waking up in Weirton, West Virginia, a broken steel town with dead pavement, haunted storefronts, old mill ghosts, political nostalgia, and enough “renewal” language to make anyone with a working brain start checking for the nearest exit.

The next serial novel is called The Witch of Weirton, and it’s going straight through the paywall at The Rogue Scribe.

This time, Eirwyn is the outsider

She’s the one staring at cars, phones, traffic lights, grocery stores, asphalt, apartment leases, city meetings, political headlines, paperwork, police sirens, social media mobs, and people who carry glowing rectangles around like pocket-sized binding stones.

She comes from a world where coercion wears armor, burns villages, brands witches, and drags useful people into cages. Then she reaches Drake’s world and sees the same impulse wearing nicer clothes.

Malcor uses soldiers. Weirton’s returning political class uses hearings, boards, emergency rules, public-good slogans, price controls, redevelopment schemes, “community ownership,” and the kind of soft coercion that lets people feel moral while they tighten the leash.

That’s Lesson II: Socialism

And no, this won’t be some fake-balanced civics essay where a socialist mayor gives a nice speech, a libertarian gives a nice rebuttal, and everybody learns democracy is “beautiful” before heading home for coffee. I don’t write that kind of anesthesia. The Witch of Weirton is about a town wounded badly enough to believe a planner can heal it.

That’s the dangerous part. The mayor won’t be a cartoon villain cackling over a red flag in a basement. He’ll know exactly which wound to press, talk about restoring dignity, protecting tenants, helping workers, saving small businesses, stopping price gouging, ensuring seniors get their lawns mowed, enforcing building codes, bringing the city back, and making Weirton matter again (MWMA).

That’s how these people win: they know which buttons to push. They start by saying they want compassion, then they find a town with scars, point at the pain, and promise to organize the wound into something fair.

Eirwyn has seen this before

She saw what happened when Malcor called people useful, when usefulness became ownership, and fear made villages consider trading one person for the illusion of peace. So when Drake’s world tells her this new Weirton plan’s about fairness, public good, and protecting people from greed, she’s going to ask the questions modern people forgot how to ask:

• Who decides what rent should be?
• What food should cost?
• Which businesses deserve help and which ones deserve punishment?
• And which workers are essential, whose property is useful, which prices are immoral, which stores may reopen, who qualifies for aid, who counts, and who gets sacrificed to make the plan look compassionate?

That’s where this book’s going.

Drake understands the politics. Eirwyn sees the pattern.

Together, they’ll realize Malcor’s world and Drake’s world aren’t as different as they look. One uses cages, the other uses paperwork. Eirwyn’s world brands witches, and Drake’s makes people administratively disappear. One superpower drags useful bodies into wagons, and the other builds a planning board and calls the same impulse renewal when the “right people” are in charge.

If you read The Witch of Thornvale, you already saw the first half of the trap. You saw Cinderglen prove that free people don’t need a planner to prosper. They need room to act, trade, argue, risk, fail, repair, and build.

Now you’re going to see what happens when a town wounded by industrial collapse starts thinking a returning mayor can resurrect the dead through managing the living. You’re going to see Eirwyn trying to survive modern clothes, shoes she despises, phones she distrusts, grocery shelves she barely understands, and a world where people claim they’re free while asking permission from systems they can’t even see.

And yes, Drake is still Drake.

He’s still going to run his mouth, say what nobody in the room wants said, and look at a policy wrapped in moral perfume and call it a leash. And now he has Eirwyn beside him, watching his world with the kind of clarity only an outsider can bring.

Paid subscribers at The Rogue Scribe get it as it drops

That means every chapter of The Witch of Weirton, the ongoing deep dives behind the story, the political and economic bones underneath the fiction, the continuation of Drake and Eirwyn’s arc, and the full road from Mises’ first lesson into the second.

Free readers will still get pieces of the world. Paid subscribers get the work behind the wall.

And this next one raises the stakes because The Witch of Weirton is the point where the fantasy stops feeling distant. Malcor’s system was easy to hate because the chains were visible. Weirton’s system will be harder because the chains come wrapped in concern, nostalgia, and “for your own good” language.

That’s where fiction earns its teeth. Eirwyn escaped one system of control. Now she’s waking up inside another. And if you want to follow her into Weirton, you know where the gate is.