(3rd Person POV)
Arthur could tell at a glance that Ilseveire was being driven by something far above her.
The signs were everywhere. Apollonia and Sylwen kept talking softly between themselves, eyes drifting toward the screen, completely unbothered — as if the air around them hadn't gone heavy, as if the woman two seats from his wife wasn't radiating a presence that should have made every person in this room flinch on instinct.
They couldn't feel it. Whoever was inside Ilseveire had made sure of that.
Then he heard Firfel speak.
"Who I am doesn't matter. What matters is that you — a deity — lowered yourself to crawl through a mortal girl's body and into another woman's soul. Doesn't that belittle your standing?"
Arthur felt the response before he saw it.
The thing inside Ilseveire moved. Not visibly. The princess's body sat still, hands folded. But on the layer beneath the body, something began to unfurl. A deity's personal space, claimed from the world itself.
«Divine Domain.»
That explained the rest. Why the bond had gone dark.
Breaching another deity's domain was the kind of move that ended quietly or didn't end at all. He could force his way through, but only by tearing open something this world wasn't equipped to ignore. The Origin would feel it. He had been careful for too long to undo all of that now.
So he would not let the domain finish forming.
He twisted the ring again.
Time Manipulation. Not backward this time. Stopped.
The world locked between one breath and the next. Sound dropped out. A speck of dust hung in the air beside Sylwen's ear, unmoving. The credits on the screen behind him froze mid-roll.
Five minutes. That was the ceiling the ring could hold a frozen world at, and not a breath longer.
He flashed across the row and was standing in front of Ilseveire before the air she had displaced finished settling.
Her eyes were open. Frozen, but open. And what looked out from behind them now had nothing in common with the twenty-seven-year-old princess. Detached. Cold. A weight that only a deity's gaze carried.
He read the signature easily enough.
'Night. The Goddess of Night, then.'
"Interesting." His voice was quiet in the still air. "So this girl isn't just favored by her. She's the vessel. The goddess can ride her whenever she wants."
He filed it away.
Then something at the edge of his awareness made him stop.
He turned.
Firfel was sitting where she had been a moment ago, frozen mid-word, lips parted around whatever she had been about to say next. But the power coming off her had changed.
Two distinct currents, woven through her like braided thread.
His eyes widened a fraction.
'No way. Double Authority? Art and Fate?'
It was rare for a deity to carry two Authorities — Kaiser and Keanu had told him as much. The two of them had looked at him like an oddball when they learned he carried three under one banner: Entertainment, Invention, and Money.
If Firfel now carried two, the conversation would not be a small one when those two found out.
Later. He set it aside.
He turned back to Ilseveire and opened his palm. A blade formed against it. Slender, pale, traced with silver lines that did not catch the frozen light. The «Astral Sword.»
A piece he had bought from the Divine Shop. Useless against flesh. Devastating against anything that lived behind it.
He stepped close, raised it, and cut.
The blade passed through Ilseveire's chest without disturbing the fabric of her dress. The princess herself did not move.
There was no blood, no break in her skin. But the other thing inside her — the cord binding the Goddess of Night to her vessel — parted cleanly at the seam.
Ilseveire was fine.
The goddess was not.
A shriek tore through the stopped world.
"Who dares?! Show yourself, coward! You cut at a goddess from the shadows, and then you hide?! I will drag this soul of yours across every plane until I have it pinned!"
Arthur went still.
The voice was not coming from Ilseveire's mouth. Her mouth was still frozen. It was coming from somewhere beneath the moment itself.
And it was moving. Something was moving inside the stopped world.
'She shouldn't be able to do that.'
He stared at the place the sound had come from, «Astral Sword» still in his hand, breath caught somewhere between caution and curiosity.
'Did the cut sting badly enough to drag her out of the freeze... or did slicing the cord itself put her outside the rules?'
The severed soul of the Goddess pulled itself into shape in front of Arthur. Not a woman. A black, shifting thing with no fixed form, growling low in its throat, fury rolling off it in waves.
The theatre went dark. So did the city beyond it.
If time had not been stopped, the streets of Eisen would have erupted into panic the moment the lights cut out. But everything outside this five-minute window stood still — and Arthur, untouched by the dark, watched the shapeless thing with the same calm he had carried into the room.
The Goddess noticed.
The growl cut off. The shape stilled. Arthur could feel her senses sweeping the frozen air, finding nothing moving in it but herself and the man standing in front of her.
"Time... is stopped?" The voice came out cracked and uncertain for the first time. "How — who are you? No mortal should be able to do this. No deity of this world should either. What are you?"
Arthur lifted the «Astral Sword» and rolled his shoulder.
"Someone you should've thought twice about before laying a finger on my wife."
He moved.
Xylia tried to meet him. Her power flared — and stuttered. The law of time held her where she stood, dragged her movements half a beat behind her will. She got one strike off. It missed.
The «Astral Sword» did the rest.
Her soul came apart in pieces. Dozens of them. They hung in the dark air like shards of black glass, still trembling with her fury.
She was a Goddess. This was only a fragment of her — her true self, wherever it sat, was untouched. She gathered what awareness she had left in the broken pieces and threw it at him before they scattered.
"You think this ends here? This is a sliver of me, nothing more. You've made an enemy of the Goddess of Night — and the moment I find out who you are, I'll make sure you regret ever raising a blade against me."
Arthur did not raise his voice.
"Do your worst. I'll be waiting."
The shards burst.
The darkness lifted. The city beyond the theatre returned to itself, lights humming back on as if they had never gone out at all.
Arthur stood in the quiet a moment longer, then glanced at the ring.
Three minutes used. Two left.
"More trouble than I expected." He let out a slow breath. "Without this ring, that Goddess would have been a real problem. Her power was crawling under the weight of stopped time, and I still barely had room to work."
He let time resume.
The theatre snapped back to motion. Firfel was already rising from her seat, divine power braced around her — and then she stopped, blinking at the slumped figure two seats over.
Ilseveire had fainted.
"Arthur?"
He was already beside her. He caught Ilseveire gently and settled her back against the chair.
"What just happened?" Firfel's voice was low. "I felt it — the Goddess inside her was about to open her Divine Domain. I'm certain of it."
"She was." Arthur kept his hand on Ilseveire's shoulder a moment longer, checking her, then drew back. "Lucky for both of you, I got in the way."
"When?" Firfel was searching his face. "A second ago you weren't here. And now you are."
"I stopped time."
"You — stopped time?"
"Long story." He gave her a small smile, then tilted his head. "More importantly. Two Authorities?"
Firfel's expression shifted, something between wonder and disbelief catching up with her.
"Yes. Now that you mention it — somewhere in all of that, I became a local deity of this world. Art and Fate."
"There it is." Arthur's smile widened a fraction. "That actually works in our favor. Now that you belong to this world, you can use your power within reason without the Origin reacting to you the way it would to me."
Firfel nodded slowly. Behind her, the illusion Xylia had hung over them frayed at the edges and unraveled — no power left to hold it together.
A small sound came from the row behind.
Apollonia and Sylwen had turned in their seats. Both of them were staring at the unconscious princess. Then at Arthur. Then at each other.
The questions were already forming on their faces.
---
Setting aside the hidden drama between Firfel, Ilseveire, the Goddess of Night, and Arthur — the film was a runaway success.
By the next morning, Leon: The Professional was the only thing Eisen City could talk about.
What made it spread so fast wasn't only the film itself. It was the jump.
The first film anyone in this city had ever seen was The Wizard of Oz. A children's fairy tale. Bright colors, friendly songs, a girl walking home with her dog. The whole of Eisen had taken it as the safe, harmless shape of what these "moving pictures" were supposed to be.
Then the second film came along, and it was this.
An assassin and a twelve-year-old girl. Crooked mage officials. Blood. A man dying in a hallway for the sake of a child who lived. Adults walking out of the theatre in silence and then arguing about it at every café in the city for the rest of the night.
People couldn't stop talking about how far the leap had been. From a yellow brick road to a grim hitman wiping away his last tear.
The merchants compared it to one tavern serving milk one day and aged wine the next — and the city had drunk every drop. Some of the older nobles muttered that it was too dark, too violent, that no children's storyteller should have made a thing like this. But even they were the ones bringing it up in conversation, which only proved how deep the film had cut.
Then came the morning news on the TV.
The newscaster, in the polite tone that always followed a sensitive headline, announced that the First Princess of the Crown, Ilseveire Nordsturn, had fainted in the VIP section at the close of the film. Overcome, the report said. Moved beyond what her constitution could bear by the weight of the ending.
It was a cover-up. A clean, well-stitched one. And the city ate it like fresh bread.
Half of Eisen was worried for the princess by lunch. The other half had already used her fainting as proof that the film truly was that powerful — even the First Princess couldn't sit through it without breaking. By the evening, ticket sales for the second showing had doubled.
The princess herself was resting at the manor Lord Oswin had reserved for her stay in the city.
She had not woken.
Her knights had not taken it well. The captain had stormed into Arthur's reception room within the hour, hand on the hilt of his sword, demanding answers, demanding accountability, demanding to know exactly what kind of film the Hellfire founder had paraded their princess into. Arthur had let him shout himself out. There was nothing the man could pin on him that would hold, and they both knew it.
In the end, the knights had to swallow the same explanation the rest of the city was being fed — that the ending had simply struck her too hard.
So they redirected their fury at the only target left to them: the film itself, and specifically the corrupt mage official in the story, Stanfield.
The squires were sent into the city with new orders. Watch the mage officials. Mark any of them whose conduct looked even half as dirty as the man on the screen. If the captain could not punish the film, he could at least empty his anger into something productive.
Before any of that could escalate further, the princess woke up the next day.
Her eyes opened slowly, lids heavy. The maid stationed beside her bed nearly jumped out of her chair.
"Pr — Princess! You're awake!"
Ilseveire did not answer. She lay still, staring at the canopy above her, taking stock of herself.
Something was missing.
The constant low hum at the back of her mind — the cool, sovereign weight that had sat there for as long as she could remember, the quiet certainty that she stood above the people around her — was gone.
The feeling that had always told her, without needing to think about it, that she was different from the rest of the world.
'What... what happened?'
She turned her attention inward and reached for the thread she had always reached for in moments of doubt — the small piece of the Goddess of Night that had lived inside her since the day her mother had brought her to the temple as a child.
There was nothing there.
She sat up so fast the maid actually stepped back.
"Where is the Fragment?!"
"P — Princess?!" The maid looked at her with wide, frightened eyes.
Ilseveire's hand tightened on the sheets. "The Fragment!"
She pressed a hand to her temple and forced herself to think. The last thing she could remember clearly was the end of the film. The credits. Firfel turning toward her. Her own intent — to push, to pry, to use Night Whisper while the elven woman's guard was down. And then —
The Goddess had taken over.
She remembered the sensation of being moved from the inside, her own consciousness pushed gently to the side like a child being guided behind a parent. After that, nothing. A long, blank dark.
She drew a breath. Slow.
'If the Fragment isn't here anymore... and the Goddess was the one in control when I lost consciousness...'
Her stomach turned cold.
The Fragment had been the part of her that gave her composure, distance, the chill her people mistook for grace. With it gone, she could feel every emotion in her body landing without a filter — and the one landing hardest was dread.
'Did she succeed? Is Firfel — '
The door opened.
"You can stop worrying. The Goddess of Night isn't going to be a problem for you anymore."
Ilseveire's head snapped up.
Arthur stood just inside the room, the door closing softly behind him. He had walked in as if her knights weren't standing at every entrance to this manor.
She straightened on the bed. Her voice came out cautious, half a step from cold. "How did you get past my knights? What is the meaning of this?"
"You don't need to brace yourself." Arthur stepped further in. "I already know what you are to the Goddess of Night. I know she tried to take my wife last night."
"W — wait." Ilseveire's eyes narrowed. "You knew?"
"Yes." He held her gaze. "And I cut down the Fragment before she could do anything to Firfel. I thought you'd want to hear that from me directly."
Ilseveire's lips parted. She forgot, for a second, to look composed.
Her gaze flicked sideways. The maid.
"You don't have to worry about her either." Arthur's tone hadn't changed. "Time's stopped for her right now."
Ilseveire's first thought was the worst one. He killed her.
But the maid was still there. Standing. Frozen mid-step, a hand half-raised toward the bedside table, mouth open around a word she would never finish.
A small wisp of steam from the tea on the side table hung in the air like a brushstroke that had forgotten how to move.
Ilseveire's gaze flew to the window.
The street outside was the same. A merchant's cart caught mid-roll. A bird suspended above the rooftops with both wings spread. The leaves of the courtyard tree held mid-flutter.
Nothing moved. Anywhere.
"What is this?!"
Arthur let her look.
He had spent the night practicing, in truth. The fragment of the Goddess of Night had been able to move inside his earlier time stop — and that had unsettled him enough to sit with the ring afterward, testing the bounds of what it would and would not freeze. He understood it better now.
"At this moment, in the entire world," Arthur said quietly, "the only two people moving are you and me."
Her breath caught.
Even the Goddess of Night, with all her authority, could not stop time across a region — let alone an entire world. And this man in front of her, who carried himself like a foreign merchant with a touch of arrogance, was doing it without raising a hand.
The blood left her face.
"You..." Her voice came out thinner than she meant it to. "Just who the hell are you?"