Rewrite That Witch
CH1027 · Rewrite

Chapter 1027: An Absurd Viewing Experience (Part I)

Row 3, No. 10. Victor had taken that seat with mild curiosity, prepared to be entertained.

Two hours later, he was not sure he was the same person.

It had started with the sky — that vertiginous open-air drop that even knowing was false couldn’t make his body accept. When the scene had shifted, he’d been pathetically grateful to find himself moving through it with him, rather than plunging through it. The camera — the eye of the thing, whatever it was — descended. Mountains resolved into valleys. Valleys into roads. Roads into a city’s rooftops.

The hall could not stay quiet. It never quite had been — a few startled breaths, a short cry from someone near the back, then the collective exhale as people realized they were still in their seats and not actually falling. But as the images opened into the bustling marketplace and then the sweeping interior of the palace, all restraint gave way.

Gasps. Interjections. Someone in the second row saying what is that in a half-whispered hiss that carried through the room. Victor found he was not above this; he simply processed it slightly faster than some and reached the muted, awed silence slightly ahead of others.

When the princess first appeared, they exclaimed.

When she turned fourteen and the wolf-change began, someone yelped.

When the foreign prince arrived, the atmosphere acquired a suspended, braced quality — everyone watching what would happen.

When the princess lost control and the palace shuddered around her, the hall erupted.

Victor had spent years in rooms with audiences. He knew what genuine reaction looked like, distinct from the performed appreciation one gave at cultural events attended for social positioning. This was the genuine kind — not polished, not dignified. The merchant beside him grabbed his neighbor’s arm at the palace sequence. The City Hall official in the front row was covering his mouth with both hands.

Even the theater professionals, in their cluster near the side — the ones who’d had heavy irony on their faces at the rules announcement — had abandoned their composure entirely.

None of us could help it, Victor thought. The scale of the thing overwhelmed the mechanisms of self-regulation. One’s body simply responded before one had a chance to decide whether to let it.

He nearly stood up, at one point, when the princess — having transformed fully into the wolf — leapt and the trajectory of the jump brought her enormous, luminous form directly overhead. Every hair rose. His hands went white on the armrests. He was this close to bolting.

Then the song began.

It arrived as the wolf-princess cleared the palace and bounded outward, away — into the open white landscape, alone. It was not the kind of song that announced itself. It simply started, and within a few bars it had dissolved something: the alarm, the urge to run, the tightened chest. What replaced it was less comfortable but more interesting — a compound thing, sorrow and relief layered together, bitterness alongside a particular kind of pride.

He felt his eyes fill.

Strange. He’d been through enough to have built some armor against sentiment. But the music wasn’t performing sentiment at him — it was simply accurate. Who had not been misunderstood? Who had not borne something they hadn’t deserved, and held it quietly because there was no right way to object? Most people chose silence and stayed. She had left. He had left once, too — from a native town, from one life into another, for reasons he’d never fully explained to anyone.

The applause that broke out was not a theater-going crowd’s careful appreciation. It was the sound of people releasing something.

Victor had already formed his judgment. Roland Wimbledon had not exaggerated.

An art beyond the times.

For once, that was not empty advertising.

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