(3rd Person POV)
The glamour of the red carpet faded behind them as the crowd filed into the Eastern Theatre. Ilseveire took her seat in the VIP section without ceremony, Firfel and the others already settled beside her.
The nobles who had angled for proximity on the carpet found themselves shut out — her knights had closed ranks the moment she sat down, and no amount of polite maneuvering could breach the gap.
The commoners filling the lower seats didn't notice. They didn't care. Their eyes were on the blank screen at the front, buzzing with the same restless anticipation that had gripped the city since the advertisement aired.
The nobles, however, were a different story.
"The lead is that Leonard fellow, isn't it?" Friedrich leaned toward the noble beside him, not bothering to lower his voice. "A commoner. Got kicked out of his own party — the Six of Diamonds, if I recall. Lucky bastard, honestly. They booted him right before they got caught up in all that misconduct. If anything, getting tossed saved him from sharing their punishment."
"And the girl." Another noble flicked his fingers toward the promotional flyer tucked into the armrest. "Not even a commoner with potential. Magicless. Completely worthless by any standard that matters."
"A washed-up nobody and a defective child." Friedrich exhaled through his nose. "This is what we dressed up for?"
"We dressed up for her." He tilted his chin toward the VIP section without looking. "If the princess weren't here, I'd have sent a servant in my place."
A few murmurs of agreement rippled through the noble seats.
None of them knew the full picture, of course. If the Six of Diamonds hadn't kicked Leonard out, they never would have spiraled far enough to accept the kind of desperate, bottom-of-the-barrel odd jobs that led them to target Arthur in the first place.
The very man they discarded was the only thing keeping that party from its own destruction — and they had handed him straight to Arthur's doorstep.
Meanwhile, the commoners in the lower seats heard every word. The disgust was palpable — dripping from the noble section like something foul.
A few jaws tightened. A woman in the third row glanced up with an expression that could have curdled milk. But no one spoke. No one ever did. They turned back to the screen and waited.
Then the theatre darkened.
A hush swept through the crowd — sudden, involuntary, the way silence falls when something large shifts in the dark.
The projector clicked to life, and light hit the screen.
A city appeared. Narrow streets choked with fog, lamplight catching on wet cobblestone. The camera pushed through an alley, past a row of closed doors, and settled on a man sitting alone at a table in a dim tavern.
His face was half-lit. A glass of milk sat untouched in front of him. Across from him, a heavyset man slid a photograph across the wood — a target's face, circled in red ink.
No words. Just the creak of the chair as the man in the round glasses picked up the photograph, studied it, and tucked it into his coat.
The next shot: rooftops. The man moved across them like smoke, silent and precise, a blade strapped to his back and no magic in his hands. Below, a guarded estate pulsed with protective wards. He bypassed every one of them — not with counterspells, but with patience, timing, and a killer's instinct that made magic feel like a crutch.
Most of the nobles watched with polite indifference. They had seen The Wizard of Oz. Moving pictures were no longer novel.
But Ilseveire was different.
She had already seen The Wizard of Oz. She knew what a film was, knew what that screen could do. And yet sitting here, watching a second one unfold, something stirred in her that the first viewing hadn't quite managed.
It was close to fascination.
The action on screen wasn't anything spectacular — a man sitting in a dim tavern, a photograph sliding across a table, a figure moving across rooftops in the dark.
None of it should have held her attention this firmly. But the music threaded beneath the images pulled everything taut, and the angle of the camera — the way it chose what to show and what to hide — turned simple moments into something compelling.
'Just the opening, and he's already built a story worth following. No exposition. No narration. Everything is shown, nothing explained, and somehow it all makes sense.'
She might not be a "filmmaker" — the new occupation that had been spreading through Eisen City like wildfire, despite the fact that no one besides Arthur had actually produced a film. Half the young men in the city seemed to fancy themselves future directors now, buying cameras from the Hellfire Store and talking about "vision" over drinks. None of them had made a thing.
Arthur, she could tell, operated on an entirely different level.
A few seats away, Friedrich and his circle snorted at something on screen — noses high, arms folded, performing their indifference for each other's benefit. Ilseveire didn't spare them a glance.
'Ignorants.'
She settled into her seat and watched. She was interested in Leon — in the quiet, deliberate way the man on screen moved through his world.
But more than that, she was interested in the magicless girl whose face had been on every flyer and advertisement. A child with no magic, cast as one of the two leads. She wanted to understand why Arthur had made that choice.
As the film pulled her deeper, her eyes stayed on the screen — but not entirely. Every few moments, her gaze drifted sideways. Brief. Practiced. The kind of glance that looked accidental if anyone happened to notice.
She was watching Firfel.
Her «True Appraisal» fed her a quiet stream of information. The silver-haired elf sat with her hands resting in her lap, eyes on the screen, expression soft. Relaxed. Unguarded in the way people only were when they forgot someone might be studying them.
The [Closeness Level] hovered at five percent. It had been five percent since the day Ilseveire first approached her, and it had not moved a single point since.
That alone was unusual. Ilseveire had befriended her, spoken warmly to her, shared meals with her — and the number hadn't budged. But five percent was five percent. It was enough to activate her other blessing — «Night Whisper» — and attempt to plant a suggestion deep enough to take root.
The problem was the odds. At five percent, forcing it carried a real risk of shattering Firfel's mind entirely. Not control. Damage. The kind that couldn't be undone.
'But if she truly drops her guard...' Ilseveire's gaze drifted back to the screen, then slid sideways again. 'If the film pulls a genuine emotional reaction from her — something unfiltered — the window opens. Her resistance would thin just enough.'
She filed the thought away and returned her attention to the screen. For now, the film came first. The opportunity, if it came, would announce itself.
On screen, the story shifted.
A narrow corridor in the Magicless District. A door opened, and a girl stepped out — small, thin, dark-eyed. She had a loaf of bread tucked under one arm, the crust already torn where she'd bitten into it on the walk home. A second loaf poked out of a cloth bag slung over her shoulder, along with what looked like a handful of bruised fruit.
None of it looked paid for.
She leaned against the wall outside her apartment, pulled a thin roll of dried smokeleaf from behind her ear, and lit it with a match. Smokeleaf — a cheap, bitter herb that grew wild outside the city walls — was common in the Magicless District.
Most people there picked it up young. Smoke curled up past her face as she chewed the bread and stared at nothing.
Mathilda.
The audience barely registered her. She was background — just another Magicless District kid with dirty clothes and stolen food, the kind of girl you walked past without a second thought. A few people in the lower seats recognized Elira through the costuming, but the moment didn't land with any weight. She was just there.
Leon passed her on the stairwell. His eyes flicked to the smokeleaf, then to the bread, then away. He said nothing. She said nothing. Two people sharing a hallway the way strangers do when neither one wants to be noticed.
The film moved on, and so did the audience's attention.
Minutes passed. The story followed Leon through another contract, another quiet kill, the rhythm of a man who had reduced his entire existence to routine. Mathilda appeared once more in the background — sitting on the same stairwell, smoking the same way, ignored by everyone including the camera. She was furniture.
Then the film changed.
Stansfield arrived.
The corrupt mage official moved through the Magicless District with the casual authority of a man who knew no one here could touch him. He had men with him — armed, sharp-eyed, the kind who didn't ask questions before following orders. They stopped outside a door.
Mathilda's door.
The audience didn't realize it at first. Not until the camera pulled back just far enough to show the same hallway, the same stairwell, the same cracked wall where the girl had been sitting with her cigarette.
Her father opened the door. The conversation was short. Stansfield wanted his confiscated mana cores back — the ones Mathilda's father had been skimming from the official's supply. The denial came too fast and too loud.
Stansfield smiled.
What followed was swift and brutal. The mage official didn't raise his voice. He barely raised his hand. A pulse of magic — clean, precise, almost casual — and Mathilda's father hit the far wall. Then her mother. Then her older brother, who had tried to run.
The audience went rigid.
"What — he just—"
"The whole family. Over mana cores. He butchered them over mana cores."
"That's a mage official. A man the kingdom put in power."
"The girl. Where's the girl?"
The camera cut. Mathilda was walking back from the market, a fresh smokeleaf between her lips, another stolen loaf under her arm. She turned the corner into her corridor and slowed.
Something was wrong. She could feel it before she saw it. The door to her apartment was ajar. Sounds came from inside — muffled, wrong, the kind of sounds that didn't belong in a home.
She took one more step. Through the crack in the door, she saw a boot. Then a smear of red on the floor that hadn't been there when she left.
Her face didn't change. That was what made it terrible. No scream, no gasp, no wide-eyed horror. Just a stillness that settled over her features like something shutting down — the look of a child who had already learned, long before this moment, that the world did not care whether she survived it.
She stopped walking.
Turned around.
"Oh — I forgot something at the store," she murmured to no one, her voice thin and flat, barely louder than the smoke curling off her lips.
She walked back the way she'd come. One step. Then another. Steady, deliberate, her pace just slow enough to look natural and just fast enough to betray the terror underneath.
Past the stairwell. Past the landing. All the way to the end of the corridor, where one last door stood closed.
Leon's door.
She knocked.
The theatre was dead silent. Not the comfortable silence of an audience waiting for the next scene — the suffocating silence of a room full of people holding their breath because they didn't know what else to do.
A woman in the lower seats pressed both hands over her mouth. A man beside her hadn't blinked in thirty seconds.
The door didn't open.
Mathilda knocked again. Harder. Her hand was shaking now — the composure cracking, the mask slipping, the child underneath finally showing through. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn't let them fall. Not yet.
Inside, the camera showed Leon standing behind the door, hand on the latch. His jaw was tight. His eyes were closed.
He knew. He had heard everything through the wall.
The audience could see the war on his face — every instinct telling him to keep the door shut, to stay invisible, to survive the way he always had. Opening that door meant noise. It meant exposure. It meant becoming something other than a ghost.
His hand tightened on the latch.
The knocking stopped. On the other side, Mathilda's forehead pressed against the wood. The tears came now, silent, streaming down her face as the last of her composure gave way. She didn't sob. She just stood there, small and shaking, with nowhere left to go.
Leon opened the door.
Someone in the audience let out a breath that sounded like it had been trapped in their chest for a full minute.
Mathilda looked up at him. He looked down at her. Neither of them said a word.
He stepped aside.
She walked in.
The door closed behind her.