Problems with time.

Chapter One.

An Unsettled Witch.

Calizone, Witch of the Dark Forest, was unsettled. It didn’t happen often, and when it did, she paid attention.

She stood at her cottage window, looking down the moss‑covered path that led to the main road. Everything appeared as it should be. The Gate was secure again, watched by the four families she had restored to their duty. They no longer flinched at her name, provided they remembered exactly what their job was.

King Syldan was behaving himself. After a few sharp lessons, he had learned that cooperation with her was considerably safer than the alternative. The townspeople were back in their homes after Magalan’s reign of idiocy. Even the business with the unfortunate man who had been draining the world’s magic was resolved. That affair had revealed that the Travellers, the women, at least, possessed a quiet magic of their own. One of them had even become her friend. She still wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened.

The Wraiths were safe in their caverns, wrapped in those heavy cloaks that smothered magic. One of the cloaks hung in her kitchen, looking like a sulking thundercloud.

The Dragons were on their islands, the Demon in the south was minding his own business, and the Ice Queen in the north was frozen and content. Calizone had visited the Dragon Queen more than once, leaving her two caskets: Azaz’s remains in one, and a jewel capable of turning the world to dust in the other. Both were safer there than anywhere else.

No rival witches remained. The Charmers and Hedge Witches stuck to their salves and poultices. She allowed that. She had made it very clear that anyone attempting higher magic would regret it. No one had been foolish enough to test her.

Everything was as it should be.

And yet she felt… wrong. Not in any dramatic way. Just a persistent itch at the back of her mind.

She looked out at the forest. Oaks, ferns, moss. Her herb garden was neat as ever: lavender, thyme, wolfsbane. Nothing out of place.

Still wrong.

A faint breeze moved through the trees, but it carried no scent. No damp earth, no crushed fern, no hint of pine resin. The forest always smelled of something. Calizone frowned and inhaled again. Still nothing. As though the air had forgotten what it was meant to be.

“This is ridiculous,” she muttered.

She prowled around her kitchen, picking things up and putting them down again. Restlessness did not suit her. She flicked her fingers, intending to light the small lantern on the shelf. The flame appeared, but half a heartbeat late, as though the spark had paused to think about it. Calizone stared at the lantern. Magic did not hesitate. Not hers.

With a sigh, she stepped outside.

Her black horse grazed in the paddock, flicking his tail at flies. She leaned on the fence and watched him.

“Perhaps a ride,” she thought. Then dismissed it. “No point riding simply to avoid pacing.”

She turned back toward the cottage.

The rooks exploded out of the canopy behind her, a black storm of wings and noise. A rook landed on the fence post beside her, feathers ruffled, head tilted. It stared at the path with the fixed intensity of a creature listening to something she could not hear. When she reached out to stroke its wing, it hopped away, not in fear, but in irritation, as if she had interrupted its examination of something only it could see.

Calizone spun, magic rising instantly. She expected a messenger, a fool, or a beast.

The path was empty.

The rooks circled and screamed at nothing.

Calizone narrowed her eyes. Her rooks did not make mistakes.

She cast the simple revealing spell. Nothing. No shimmer, no outline, no startled traveller suddenly exposed.

She cast it again, sharper. Still nothing.

The rooks screamed at bare earth.

She stepped closer. Ordinary soil. Ordinary weeds. Ordinary gravel.

Which meant it wasn’t ordinary at all.

She cast a deeper spell. A faint, unpleasant shimmer rose from the ground, not a person, not a creature, just a greasy distortion, like heat off stone.

Magic had been here. Thick, unfamiliar magic. She pressed her palm to the soil. It felt cool, but not in the way earth should. More like the coolness of stone that had never seen sunlight. A wrongness that didn’t belong to heat or cold, but to distance itself, stretched, thinned, and snapped back into place. Impossible. In her forest, nothing unfamiliar happened without her knowing.

The rooks settled, muttering like old men who had seen something they didn’t care to describe.

A footstep sounded behind her.

She turned sharply.

A herald stood at the edge of her garden, dust on his cloak, his horse behind him, Syldan’s crest on his shoulder.

Her rooks had not made a sound.

The rooks were never silent. They announced foxes, travellers, falling leaves, and the occasional foolish squirrel. For them to miss a full‑grown man and a horse was not merely unusual, it had never happened before. Calizone felt the itch at the back of her mind sharpen into a point.

“You should not be able to walk into my garden unannounced,” she said.

The herald swallowed. “My lady… I didn’t walk. I was simply… here.”

“Here?” she said. “Explain.”

He tried. He failed. He remembered the palace courtyard, tightening his saddle‑strap, and then standing on her grass.

Calizone checked the horse. Cool flanks. No sweat. No dust.

“Well,” she said, “you’re here now. Give me the message before whatever brought you decides to take you back.”

He handed her the parchment with the air of a man offering a lit firework.

The rooks gave a single, belated caw, as though embarrassed.

Calizone broke the seal.

Syldan wanted her at the palace. Extraordinary matters. Unusual. Not trivial. He wanted her counsel.

She tapped the parchment against her chin. She never went running to Syldan the moment he called. She was the Witch of the Dark Forest. He was a king. There were rules.

But the herald’s arrival had not followed any rules.

“Still,” she murmured, “that was no ordinary journey.”

She slipped the letter into her cloak.

“Unusual matters at the Palace,” she said. “And unusual matters here.”

She looked at the patch of ground. Nothing remained. Which was suspicious in itself.

“Ride or witchcraft?” she asked herself. She considered the shimmer again. It had left no trace, no residue, no signature. Whoever, or whatever, had bent distance to deposit the herald here had done so cleanly. Too cleanly. Magic always left ripples, like a stone cast into a pond. This had left none.

Her horse pricked his ears.

Teleportation was quick, but if distance itself was misbehaving, she had no intention of risking being dropped into a wall.

“If something is meddling with time and distance,” she said, “I’ll meet it on my own terms.”

“Ride,” she decided.

Her horse whickered approvingly.

She saddled him, mounted, and looked once more at the patch of ground.

“Time and distance,” she said. “Let’s see what else is being interfered with.”

She set off down the track.