Release that Witch

Roland glanced at the crowd behind him, who were still mouthing prayers in panic. He quickly reached into the cell, grabbed the pendant, and with a little tug the necklace’s chain snapped and then crashed down broken, the move startled even Anna.

“Come on.” Roland whispered.

Are you in the end a liar, some type of alchemist, or are you a real witch? If you now take out bottles and jars and start compounding acids, I will be disappointed, Roland thought.

Roland then heard a crackling sound, which was the noise of the thermal expansion of water vapor. Thanks to a dramatic rise in temperature, the water on the ground beneath them had changed to steam.

Roland saw a blazing flame rising directly from Anna’s foot, and then the ground where she stood was burning up. The torches behind them exploded simultaneously, as if they received pure oxygen, in a burst of brilliant light. For a short time, the whole cell was as if it was in daylight, and all this was accompanied by the onlookers’ terrified screams.

When the witch moved forward, the flames surrounding her moved with her. As she came to the edge of her cell, the dozens of iron bars that made up the wall became pillars of fire.

Roland was forced to retreat, the heated air was biting his skin, making him feel pain. In just a few breaths of time, he had escaped from a late autumn summer, no, this was a different kind of heat, this was solely generated by this high-temperature flame and not a full ambient summer heat. One side of his body was facing the flame’s heat, and on the opposite side Roland felt a chill. He could even feel cold sweat trickling down his back.

…She really does not fear fire. Roland thought.

Roland remembered the words of the Assistant Minister. Only now could he really understand the meaning of that sentence.

She is the flame herself, and how could someone fear oneself?

Soon, the iron bars turned from crimson to a light yellow, and they began to melt. This meant that they have been heated to more than fifteen hundred degrees celsius, and achieving this in a condition without any insulating measures, which was far beyond the imagination of Roland. Like others, he had stepped away from the cell, firmly attaching himself to the wall farthest away from the cell.

If he had not done this, the heat the molten iron produced was enough to kill him even without direct contact, but it was also enough to clothes to combust, such as Anna’s, her prisoner’s smock had burnt to ashes and her body was now surrounded by a raging fire.

Roland didn’t know how long it lasted, but in the end, the flame completely faded.

The torches were quietly burning on the section of the wall next to them, it seemed like nothing had ever happened. But Anna’s burned clothes, the hot air, and the prison bars which looked like as if it was burned by the devil’s minions, all this, told everyone that this wasn’t an illusion.

In addition to Roland, only the Knight Commander was still standing. The others had collapsed to the ground, the warden was so scared that his pants smelled of urine. Anna was now standing naked outside the cell, her arm shackles were gone. She did not block the view at her naked body, her hands were hanging naturally at her side and her eyes which were blue like the sea were restored to the tranquility from before.

“Now I have satisfied your curiosity, Sir,” she said, “Will you kill me now?”

“No,” Roland stepped forward and wrapped his coat around her and said with a tone as mild as possible, “Miss Anna, I want to hire you.”

Chapter 5 Reasons

“Second Law of Thermodynamics: Heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other changes, or it is impossible to convert heat from a single source into useful work without causing other effects, in an irreversible or spontaneous change from one equilibrium state to another the entropy always increases.”

Roland carefully copied this law onto paper, writing in the language of this world. At first glance, the text resembled a moving earthworm. He really did not understand how the locals could learn so many varied and complicated characters.

If you asked him which of the numerous physical laws would be the one to cause most people to feel depressed, Roland would choose the second law of thermodynamics. It tells everyone that this world’s heat will always pass from high to low, replacing the disorder into order, increasing the entropy. Eventually, everything will end in nothingness and the universe will become deathly silent.