[Complete] Ch 6.1 Release that Witch... and Wizard?! (Patreon)

Release that Witch…

and Wizard?!

Disclaimer: All characters here are at least 18. Hogwarts starts later, so by the time Harry arrives, he’s 19. Cheng Yen (陈嫣) was in her mid-20s before waking up in the 21-year-old body of Garcia Wimbledon. Witches gain their first awakening upon adulthood, at 18 years of age.

Story Starts

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Chapter 6.1 -

The Witch's Cooperation

Association

Nightingale stepped off the broom as Harry lowered them into the clearing she had pointed out—a shallow depression between two ridges, shielded from the worst of the mountain wind by a shelf of granite that jutted overhead like a broken jaw.

Harry swung his leg over and set the broom against a large boulder, propping it at an angle so the bristles didn't touch the frozen earth. He turned back to her, hands in his coat pockets, green eyes bright against the grey morning.

"Are you sure you don't want me to come? Wouldn't it be easier if I come as proof?"

Nightingale shook her head. "Some of the sisters have had... bad experiences with men. If they see you first, they'll spook. Half of them will vanish into the caves before I get a word out."

Harry's jaw tightened, but he didn't argue.

"I'll soften them up," she said. "Explain things. Once everyone's calmed down and heard the whole of it, I'll call for you." She adjusted the pack on her shoulder—cement samples, wall sketches, Garcia's sealed letter, the supplies. Heavy enough to remind her this was real. "There'll be resistance. Doubt. I know that. But I need to do this part alone."

"Right then."

He drew his wand and flicked it in a lazy arc. The rocky ground smoothed itself flat across a wide circle. A second flick and a canvas tent erected itself, pegs driving into earth with soft thuds. A third, and dead branches dragged themselves from the treeline into a neat pile at the clearing's centre, where they caught fire without spark or tinder—just a quiet whump of orange flame that settled into a steady crackle.

Nightingale turned to go, then looked back over her shoulder. "I'll see you tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest."

"Good luck." Harry raised his wand once more.

A shiver passed through her—brief, involuntary—before warmth bloomed across her skin, spreading from her chest outward to her fingertips and the soles of her boots. The cold simply ceased to exist.

"Renewed the warming charm," he said. "The old one was wearing thin. Altitude eats through them faster than I'd like."

She nodded her thanks, turned, and walked into the mountains.

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The path narrowed within minutes. What had been a rough track between boulders became a ledge barely as wide as her shoulders, pressed against a stone cliff face that rose sheer into grey cloud. On the opposite side, three metres distant, another wall of rock climbed just as steeply. Between them—nothing. A ravine that dropped into darkness so complete it swallowed sound. She could not see the bottom. She had never been able to see the bottom.

Nightingale kept her left hand against the cliff and her feet close to the wall. Each step deliberate. Each breath measured.

When she looked up, the sky was a silver thread—a crack of pale light caught between the two cliff faces, thin as a knife's edge. Noon, and yet the gap might as well have been underground. Even with the torch she'd brought, the light barely reached two metres ahead. The path stretched on and on, a corridor carved by some force that cared nothing for human convenience.

The one mercy was the wind. Or rather, its absence. Outside, the mountain gales would have ripped the torch from her hand and sent her stumbling. Here, between the cliffs, the air sat still and faintly warm. Snowflakes occasionally drifted down from the crack overhead, dissolving into vapour before they touched the ground. Heat rose from the abyss—subtle, mineral-scented, carrying the faint stink of sulphur. The temperature in the gap bore no relation to the frozen world outside.

She was glad of Harry's warming charm. The flight had been brutal, the wind cutting through everything, and she had felt the spell fraying at the edges during the final ascent. His recasting had been well-timed. Without it, she would not have dared the Impassable Mountain Range alone. Not in winter. Not with snow already falling on Border Town behind them.

She pressed on.

The feeling came as it always did—somewhere past the second bend, where the path dipped slightly and the torchlight caught nothing but empty air on the opposite cliff face. A sensation of being watched. Not heard. Not seen. Watched. Something in the dark, patient and vast, taking note of her passage the way a cat takes note of a mouse crossing an open floor.

Nightingale lifted the torch higher. Across the gap, the flickering light caught shapes in the rock—shadows that resolved, briefly, into openings. Caves. Dozens of them, pocking the opposite cliff at irregular intervals, their mouths ranging from narrow slits to gaping holes wide enough to drive a cart through. The light could not penetrate more than a few feet into any of them. Beyond that threshold, absolute dark.

On her own cliff face, at the same elevations, corresponding hollows gaped. She had noticed them on her first passage through here, months ago. Wendy had told her not to look too closely.

The caves reminded her of the mine on North Slope—the stories the miners told, about tunnels that branched in directions no one had dug, about shafts that opened onto caverns too vast for torchlight to fill. She'd overheard Iron Axe whilst in the Mist—he had spoken of the demons' underground den, of byroads stretching in all directions, supposedly carved by monsters.

North Slope was only one corner of the Impassable Mountain Range. Were these caves connected to those tunnels?

The thought made her skin crawl beneath the warmth of Harry's charm. West of the Range lay the Barbarian Land—uninhabited, or so they were told. Who could have bored these passages through hundreds of miles of mountain stone, distances that rivalled the gaps between kingdoms? No human hands. No human tools.

Perhaps nothing human at all.

She killed the thought and focused on her feet. One step. Another. The torch flame steady in the windless air.

The path split.

One branch angled upward, following the cliff face in a gradual climb. The other drove straight down into the dark, its stone smooth and worn, disappearing around a curve that the torchlight could not follow.

At the junction, the sensation of being watched sharpened. Not one pair of eyes. Countless. As if every cave mouth on both cliff faces had something crouched inside it, leaning forward, breath held. Her mouth went dry. Her scalp prickled. The fine hairs on her arms stood rigid beneath her sleeves.

Nightingale gritted her teeth, opened the Mist, and hurried upward.

The world shifted. Colour drained; edges blurred; the stone beneath her feet became a suggestion rather than a solid thing. In the Mist, she moved faster, surer, her steps guided by instincts the physical world could not provide. The watching sensation fell away behind her, dissolving as though whatever lurked in the depths could not follow her here.

She climbed.

The temperature dropped as she gained altitude, the warmth of the abyss fading, replaced by clean, biting cold that the warming charm held at bay. The silver thread overhead widened—a hand's width, then an arm's length. More light filtered down. After half an hour of steady climbing, a cave mouth appeared on her right, its entrance set slightly above the path, requiring a short scramble over loose scree.

Faint firelight flickered deep within.

The hideout of the Witch Cooperation Association.

Nightingale stepped out of the Mist and was discovered immediately.

A wall of black gas erupted across the cave entrance—dense, opaque, rippling like smoke caught in a gale. Nightingale held still, hands raised, torch extended. The gas hung for a heartbeat, then collapsed inward and vanished as if it had never existed.

From the darkness beyond, a voice rang out—young, relieved, pitched high with surprise.

"You're back!"

The guard stepped into the torchlight. Nightingale's gaze dropped to the girl's arms before she could stop herself. Two strips of white cloth, wound tight around her upper left arm.

Her mood had leapt at the sound of that voice. Now it sank.

"Two more sisters..."

The guard's smile faltered. A pause. Then, carefully: "Airy and Abby. Five days ago. They didn't—they didn't make it to adulthood." She forced the smile back into place. It sat badly on her face, like a mask cut for someone else. "It happens, doesn't it? Don't... don't say anything about it. Go to the camp. Wendy's been talking about you for ages."

Airy and Abby. Twins. Born to an affluent family in Fallen Dragon Ridge, daughters of a merchant who traded in dyed wool. Nightingale remembered the day she'd found them—huddled in a cellar beneath their father's warehouse, terrified, their awakening still fresh enough that neither could control the sparks that leapt from their fingers when they were startled.

She had taken them from that cellar. Promised them safety. Promised them a future.

They had ended their lives in this deep mountain, in the dark, surrounded by strangers, far from the warm beds and cooked meals and family that—for all its dangers—had at least been theirs.

Would they have been better off if I'd left them?

The question had no good answer. It never did. She had asked it after every white cloth, and it never got easier.

But at the thought of Wendy, warmth stirred beneath the grief. Wendy, who had found Nightingale when she was still Veronica—frightened, used, discarded. Wendy, who had shown her that she was not a tool. Not a weapon. Not a thing to be pointed at enemies and then locked away when the fighting was done.

She wanted to tell Wendy first. Before anyone else. She wanted to say the words out loud to someone who would understand what they meant.

We don't have to hide any more.

Some people are willing to accept us.

And we might—we might be able to survive the Day of Awakening.

She moved deeper into the cave.

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The camp was a wide chamber set back from the entrance, its ceiling high enough to lose in shadow, its floor worn smooth by years of habitation. Fires burned in stone-ringed pits, their smoke drawn upward through cracks in the rock that served as natural chimneys. Bedrolls lined the walls. Drying racks held strips of cured meat. A pot hung over the nearest fire, and beside it, a familiar figure squatted, stirring.

Nightingale could not hold it in.

"Wendy, I'm back!"

Wendy startled. The ladle clattered against the rim of the pot. She raised her head, and the firelight caught her face—mature, kind, framed by reddish-brown hair that fell straight and heavy to her waist. Thirty years old but unwrinkled, as though the mountain cold had preserved her. Her eyes crinkled as the smile spread.

"Veronica. Welcome home."

"How many times have I told you," Nightingale said, shaking her head, but she was smiling too hard to sell the irritation. "I'm not that cowardly little girl any more. I'm a powerful witch. Veronica ceased to exist."

Wendy set the ladle down and straightened. She was taller than Nightingale remembered—or perhaps Nightingale had simply been away long enough to forget.

"Your history still belongs to you," Wendy said, her voice soft and even. "Ridding yourself of the nightmares doesn't mean cutting the threads that tie you to who you were." She tilted her head. "But it's your name. If Nightingale is who you want to be, then Nightingale you are. I've been waiting for you. It must have been a hard journey."

"It was." Nightingale stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Wendy. Held tight. Let herself be held. The warmth was different from Harry's charm—deeper, older, rooted in years of shared suffering. "Thank you."

They stood like that for a long moment. Then Wendy pulled back, hands on Nightingale's shoulders, studying her face.

"What happened to the girl? You couldn't save her?"

Nightingale grabbed Wendy's arm. The words tumbled out before she could arrange them. "She didn't need saving. Wendy, listen—she's alive. Anna's alive, and free, and working. There's a princess—Garcia Wimbledon, fourth princess of Graycastle—who stopped the execution. She's taken Anna in. And there's a wizard—a male witch, Wendy, a man with magic—called Harry, and he has a theory about why we suffer the demonic bite, and it makes sense, and—"

"Slow down." Wendy's grip tightened on her shoulders. "Start from the beginning."

So Nightingale did. She told Wendy about sneaking into Border Town. About the dungeon, and Garcia's coat draped over Anna's shoulders, and Harry Potter shackled behind God's Stone with fire in his green eyes. About the night Garcia made her offer—I plan on dragging this reality into the industrial age, kicking and screaming if I must, and I want you all at my side to make it happen. About the wall rising along the Redwater River, and the strange grey powder called cement that set hard as stone overnight, and the little creatures called house-elves who shifted four times more rock than any human gang. About Anna standing in the kiln, her flames precise and controlled, melting iron for engine parts. About Nana Pine, a healer, mending broken bones with a touch.

And then she told Wendy about Harry's theory.

"He can see magic," Nightingale said. "Not like me—not the flow of it, not the colour. He sees the structure. And he looked at me, and at Anna, and at Nana, and he said our demonic bite isn't a test. It isn't divine punishment. It's overload." She leaned closer. "Think of it like a well that fills and fills and fills. If you draw water regularly, the well stays manageable. But if you cap it—if you never use your power—the pressure builds. And when the Day of Awakening comes, it all surges at once, and it breaks you."

Wendy's face was very still.

"He used me as an example," Nightingale continued. "I use my abilities every day—the Mist, the truth-sight, the magic-sight. My demonic bites have never been that bad. Uncomfortable, yes. Painful, yes. But survivable. Compare that to Tia. Her ability—moving the baby of a pregnant animal into another womb—how often does she use it? Once a year? Twice? And her demonic bites are agony. Every single time."

Wendy said nothing for several seconds. Then, carefully: "Did he really say that?"

"He did. And on the flight here, he went further. He said if we emptied our reserves just before the Day of Awakening—used our magic until there was nothing left to surge—we might get through it with barely any pain at all."

Nightingale stopped. Wendy's expression had not changed. The stillness was not wonder. It was suspicion.

She doesn't believe me.

The realisation stung, but she pushed past it. She told Wendy the rest—Garcia's offer of a home, of free and open magic practice, of wages and dignity and a place in society. A life where witches were valued for what they could do, not hunted for what they were.

Wendy listened. Her face stayed guarded.

'It's not her fault,' Nightingale thought. One witness wasn't enough. Not after what they had all been through—the Eastern Region, the long march west, the betrayals and sales and discards that had hardened every woman in this cave into something wary and sharp-edged. Trust was not a thing you could hand someone. It had to be built, brick by brick, and Nightingale had arrived with nothing but words and a pack full of grey powder.

She took a different approach.

"Wendy, you know my derivative skill. Besides seeing the flow of magic, it lets me tell when someone is lying." She held Wendy's gaze, steady and serious. "I asked Garcia why she risked so much for the sake of witches. She said—and these were her exact words—'I hope all witches will have freedom.' I watched the magic in her as she spoke."

"And?"

"No deviation. No tremor. She meant it."

Wendy frowned. "If she does what she says, the Church will target her. Granting that the princess hasn't realised what it means to protect witches—"

"She knows exactly what it means."

"—then you've known no better than her what the Church will bring down on both your heads."

Nightingale allowed herself a small smile. "At first, I had almost the same reaction. Word for word. And when I asked her, 'Can you really do that?', do you know what she said?"

She paused, letting the silence build. Wendy waited.

"She said, 'You'll never know the answer if you don't try.'"

"She wasn't lying?"

"She wasn't lying."

"That sounds..." Wendy trailed off. Her voice had softened. Not convinced—not yet—but the hard edge of suspicion had dulled. She could not think of a reason that Nightingale, her oldest friend, the girl she had pulled from the wreckage of a noble family, would fabricate this.

"Incredible," Nightingale finished for her. "I know. I wouldn't have believed it either, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes and confirmed it with my own power." She reached out and took Wendy's hand. "In the two months I spent with Garcia, she barely lied. About anything. She's sharp, and she's calculating, and she doesn't do things out of pure charity—she wants the witches' abilities for her plans. But the protection is real. The offer is real."

Wendy squeezed her hand back.

"I want to share the news with everyone tonight," Nightingale said, "when they're all back at camp. And I need you to help me persuade them."

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Night fell. The witches returned.

They came in twos and threes, stamping snow from their boots, pulling scarves from their faces. Some had been gathering firewood from the sparse trees that clung to the higher slopes. Others had been checking snare lines or hauling water from the underground stream that trickled through a side passage. All of them bore the marks of a life lived at the edge—thin faces, calloused hands, eyes that went sharp and wary at any unexpected sound.

They saw Nightingale and crowded around her, voices overlapping.

"You made it!"

"We thought the snow had caught you—"

"Did you find the girl? The one from Border Town?"

"What took you so long?"

The white bandages on their arms pressed against her as they hugged her. She counted them involuntarily. More than when she had left. The weight of it settled in her chest. She answered a few questions—yes, she was fine; no, the journey hadn't been too bad; yes, she'd eaten—and then raised both hands, palms out.

Silence spread. Twenty-odd faces looked at her in the firelight. Young faces, most of them. Some barely past childhood. All of them carrying scars that didn't show on the skin.

She told them everything.

She started with her arrival in Border Town—the dungeon, the darkness, the two prisoners chained behind God's Stone. Garcia's unexpected intervention. Harry's magic, so different from their own, wielded through a wand of wood and core. Anna's survival, her flames tamed to useful precision. Nana's healing gift. The wall, rising in weeks where it should have taken months. The cement. The house-elves, small as children and strong as ten men. The explosive black powder that could make an ordinary person the equal of a knight.

She unpacked the samples Garcia had sent—chunks of set cement, sketches of the wall's layout, a sealed letter in Garcia's own hand. She passed them around. The witches turned the cement over in their fingers, tapped it against the stone floor, held it near the fire to examine its colour.

When she reached Harry's theory about the demonic bite, the chamber went very quiet.

She explained it carefully—the analogy of the well, the comparison between her own manageable pain and Tia's annual agony, the correlation between usage and severity. She watched their faces as she spoke. Hope flickered in some eyes—tentative, fragile, afraid of itself. Others held back, arms crossed, mouths tight. They had been burned too many times to reach for something that might not be there.

She was explaining Garcia's offer of permanent sanctuary when the crowd shifted.

Bodies moved aside. A path opened from the rear of the chamber to the fire where Nightingale stood. Through the gap walked a woman with green hair cropped close to her skull, the left side of her face marked with a serpentine tattoo that coiled from jawline to temple. Cara. Founder of the Witch Cooperation Association. Snake Witch. Mentor.

Her dark eyes caught the firelight and held it without warmth.

Nightingale bowed her head. "Hello, my respected mentor."

"I've heard your stories." Cara's voice was hoarse, hollow, as though it rose from somewhere deeper than her throat. "And you mean to tell us that everything we've done is wrong."

"No, mentor, they aren't just stories. I mean—"

"Enough." Cara's hand cut the air. "I don't know what adventure you've been on, weaving these tales. A highborn lady who pities poor witches?" Her lip curled. "A male witch? It's as silly as pitying a frog." She turned away from Nightingale and spread her arms wide, addressing the gathered witches. "Sisters, don't forget what the common people have done to you!"

"He is real," Nightingale said. "We flew here on a cleaning instrument—a broomstick—"

Cara spoke over her as though she hadn't opened her mouth.

"There is no doubt that the common people—the incompetents—have targeted us with blades and whips in the name of gods. Without the God's Stone of Retaliation, they have no authority to oppress us. It is the deities who granted us power. Not the evils. It should be us who work on behalf of the deities, not the Church." Her voice rose. The echoes of it bounced off the cave ceiling and returned, layered, multiplied. "It should be us—the sisters of the Witch Cooperation Association! Holy Mountain, told of in the old books, refers to the quarters of deities."

Nightingale stared. She had known Cara was eccentric. Obsessive, even—fixated on the search for Holy Mountain to the exclusion of nearly all else. But this was something beyond obsession. This was doctrine. Cara wasn't searching any more. She was preaching.

And the faces around the fire... they weren't arguing. Some were nodding. Others wore the blank, receptive look of people who had heard this before, in private, in whispers, and had already been won over.

How long has she been saying these things? How long have I been away?

"We've found the clue to the opening," Cara continued. Her dark eyes swept the chamber. "The same as what we read in the old books. All we must do is wait. In twenty days, when the blood moon rises, a gate will emerge from underground. Through it, we shall reach our final realm."

She turned back to Nightingale. The firelight made the serpentine tattoo writhe.

"The common people have deceived you, child. We have lived inside a great fraud since the day we were born. What we suffer during the Day of Adulthood is the test given by deities. Those who are determined and resilient will obtain the true power. The weak..." She let the word hang. "The weak were never meant to pass. And the Church? Just a gang of common people who want to claim the deities' name. Sooner or later, every last one of them will burn."

The suffering is a test. The ones who don't survive are simply... worthless.

It was exactly what the Church preached. Exactly. Cara had taken the Church's logic, inverted the labels—witches for priests, deities for God—and produced something identical in every way that mattered. The strong deserved power. The weak deserved death. And anyone who questioned it was a heretic.

Airy and Abby's white cloths burned in Nightingale's memory. Five days dead. Didn't make it to adulthood.

According to Cara, they were simply not determined enough.

Nightingale's throat tightened with something that was not grief.

"What about Harry?" she said. Her voice cut through the chamber's reverent silence. "If you just met him—if you saw what he can do—"

"And you, child." Cara's tone shifted—softer, patient, almost gentle. She was correcting a wayward student, not threatening an enemy. It was worse. "There's still time for you to stop this. The fact that you led an outsider here—" A pause, deliberate as a held breath. "We shall deal with him tomorrow."

The words landed like a slap.

Deal with him.

"I'll forgive your ignorance and your fault," Cara said, "if you put aside these stories. We will take you back as one of us. Together, we shall find peace in Holy Mountain."

Nightingale looked around the chamber. Twenty-odd faces. Some averted their eyes. Others watched her with something that might have been pity. Even Wendy—

Wendy sat near the far wall, hands folded in her lap. Her face was unreadable. She did not speak.

Nobody is going to stand up.

The realisation was a cold thing, colder than the mountain air outside Harry's charm. All these women. All these years of shared suffering, of running, of burying sisters in shallow mountain graves. And not one of them would challenge this.

It was not cowardice. It was exhaustion. They had been running so long that the promise of a final destination—Holy Mountain, the deities' quarter, the end of the road—was more precious than truth. Cara offered certainty. Nightingale offered a princess none of them had met, in a town none of them had seen, protected by magic none of them understood.

She understood. She hated it, but she understood.

"In that case," Nightingale said, and her voice was steady, though her chest ached, "I'll take those who are willing to go. And I wish good luck to those who decide to stay."

She turned to leave.

The sting came from below. Sharp, quick, precise—a needle driven into the meat of her calf. She looked down.

A snake. Small, black-scaled, its body banded with stripes that glowed faint blue in the firelight. It had its jaws locked around her flesh, fangs buried deep. Venom. She could feel it already—a spreading numbness that climbed her leg, ate through her thigh, reached her hip.

The Snake of Magic. Cara's signature weapon. Silent. Invisible in shadow. Lethal if she chose, paralysing if she didn't.

She didn't choose lethal, some distant part of Nightingale's mind noted. She wants me alive. She wants me compliant.

The paralysis hit her core. Her legs buckled. She tried to open the Mist—reached for it with every fibre of will she possessed—but the venom was faster. Her fingers went slack. The torch fell from her hand and rolled across the stone, guttering.

Her lips moved. She struggled to form words—Harry's name, a warning, something—but her tongue was lead and her jaw locked and the darkness poured in from the edges of her vision like ink spilled into water.

The last thing she saw, before the black swallowed everything, was Wendy's face across the fire.

Her expression had changed.

Then nothing.

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End

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