(3rd Person POV)
Ilseveire's eyes were still fixed on the screen.
At some point — she couldn't say exactly when — she had stopped glancing at Firfel. The practiced sideways looks, the measured observations, the quiet calculations running behind her composure. All of it had gone still.
She had forgotten.
The scene where Mathilda turned around in the corridor — the stolen bread under her arm, the smokeleaf still burning between her lips, her voice flat and thin as she muttered something about forgetting at the store — had lodged itself in Ilseveire's chest like a splinter and refused to come loose.
'What is this?'
She knew what death looked like. She had seen executions carried out at court before she was old enough to understand what they meant. She had walked battlefields during border inspections, stepped over bodies that hadn't been cleared yet, and felt nothing beyond mild discomfort.
'I've witnessed far worse in person. So why does watching it on a screen make me feel like this?'
Her chest ached. Not from the deaths alone — though those had been brutal enough — but from the shape of what came after. A girl standing outside her own door, close enough to hear the last of it, choosing to turn around and knock on the door of a man who killed people for a living.
Because there was no one else.
That was what made it unbearable. Not the violence. The loneliness.
Ilseveire wasn't the only one affected.
Across the theatre, the mood had shifted so completely it barely resembled the same room. The commoners in the lower seats sat in stunned silence, many of them leaning forward, hands gripping armrests or pressed flat against their thighs. A few women had tears on their cheeks. A man near the aisle kept rubbing his face with his palm, trying to be subtle about it and failing.
The noble section was no better.
Ellen had given up pretending. Tears ran freely down her face, and she made no effort to hide them. She had never been the kind of noble who saw vulnerability as weakness — and this film had reached something in her that rank and composure couldn't shield. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and kept watching.
Friedrich, on the other hand, hadn't moved.
His arms were still folded. His chin was still raised. But his jaw was clenched so tightly the muscle in his cheek twitched, and his breathing had gone shallow and controlled — the breathing of a man forcing himself not to react.
'As much as I hate to admit it, this damn film is effective.' His teeth pressed together hard enough to ache. 'That Stansfield — I want to reach through that screen and break his neck myself.'
He wasn't alone. The nobles in his circle wore the same rigid expressions — lips pressed thin, eyes hard, each one of them fighting the same losing battle against the story that was doing exactly what Arthur had designed it to do.
None of them would admit it afterward. But in this moment, every last one of them was invested.
After the door closed behind Mathilda, the theatre braced itself. The audience expected what came next to be quiet — a broken girl curling up in a corner, trembling, shutting down. A child swallowed by grief and terror, too small to do anything but endure it.
That wasn't what happened.
Mathilda sat on Leon's floor for a long time, knees drawn to her chest, staring at the wall. Leon stood across the room, watching her without speaking, the glass of milk in his hand untouched.
Then she looked up at him. Her eyes were red, her face still streaked with tears — but the expression underneath wasn't fear.
It was something harder than that. Colder.
"Teach me," she said.
Leon didn't answer.
"Teach me what you do." Her voice cracked on the last word, but she didn't look away. "I want to learn. I want to be able to do what you do."
The audience understood immediately what she was asking. A few of them wished they hadn't.
Leon set the milk down. He looked at her the way a man looks at something he knows will cost him everything and can't bring himself to refuse.
He didn't say yes. He didn't say no.
But later that night, when Mathilda was asleep on the floor with his coat draped over her, the camera found him sitting in his chair, staring at the ceiling.
His hand rested on the blade beside him. And for the first time in the film, the silence around Leon didn't feel like discipline.
It felt like defeat.
With that, Leon made his choice.
He saw the look in her eyes — not grief, not desperation, but something sharper. The kind of resolve that didn't ask for permission. Mathilda wanted revenge, and she would chase it with or without him.
The only question was whether she'd survive the attempt.
He started teaching her.
What followed was something the audience hadn't expected to care about — and couldn't look away from.
The training began cold. Professional. Leon showed her how to hold a blade properly, how to move through a room without making sound, how to read the exits before she sat down anywhere.
Mathilda absorbed all of it with a focus that made her age easy to forget. She didn't complain. She didn't hesitate. When she failed, she got up and did it again without being told.
Then, slowly, the edges softened.
Leon started buying her food instead of letting her steal it. Mathilda stopped sleeping on the floor and took the bed — and Leon let her, without discussion, settling into the chair like it had always been his. She began folding his coat in the mornings. He began waiting for her before eating.
Neither of them called it what it was. Leon still referred to her as "the kid." Mathilda still called him by his name, never anything warmer. But the camera saw what they wouldn't say — the way he checked the lock twice before sleeping, the way she sat closer to him each night, the way his hand hovered near her shoulder when they walked and never quite landed.
Father and daughter. Built not from blood, but from the quiet repetition of two people choosing each other, day after day, without ever admitting that's what they were doing.
The audience had walked into this theatre looking down on the magicless girl. Even the commoners — people who had never set foot in the Magicless District and never intended to — had carried a passive contempt for the people who lived there.
No magic. No prospects. Not worth the thought.
Forty minutes of watching Mathilda had dismantled that.
She was magicless, yes. But she worked harder than anyone her age had a right to. She was braver than half the adventurers the audience had heard stories about. She had lost everything in a single evening and hadn't broken — she had sharpened.
It was easy to like her. Maybe too easy. Maybe the nobles sneering from the upper seats an hour ago had something to do with it. The commoners had felt that contempt on their own skin tonight, and now they were watching a girl at the very bottom of the world endure something worse.
'If being looked down on by one rung above us felt that bad — what must it be like where she is?'
They were all human. That was the thing none of them could escape.
Some were born with magic, some with wealth, some with neither. But underneath all of it — the spells, the titles, the coin — they were the same species, separated by nothing more than the lottery of birth.
Mathilda hadn't chosen to be magicless. She hadn't chosen the district. She hadn't chosen any of it.
She had simply been dealt a bad hand and played it anyway.