Rewrite That Witch
CH1029 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1029: A Person Back Home

Roland had foreseen the buzz. He hadn’t foreseen the faintings.

He’d watched the finished film himself, alone in the castle hall the night the crew wrapped, and even he — who had watched the sigil-recordings in the old Holy City at Hermes, who understood the mechanism, who had imagined this outcome across months of planning — had sat in silence afterward for a long while. The visual weight of an animated image was categorically different from a static one. The sigil recordings had been interesting, historically remarkable, occasionally moving. This was something else: a sustained deception the brain willingly entered and couldn’t fully leave. Even knowing it was false, you believed.

The general public, whose sole entertainment had previously been stage drama, would not have Roland’s foreknowledge to buffer them.

The success had been predictable. The incidents were not.

On the third and fifth screenings, two viewers required intervention: one who had panicked out of his seat during Echo’s opening song and barreled toward the exit, nearly trampling the people between him and the door; another who had lost consciousness mid-film and been carried out. Had Nana not been stationed there, the second case might have ended badly.

Both incidents had occurred during the same sequence: the bird’s-eye opening.

Roland mapped the problem. The wealthy premiere audiences were, by disposition, more accustomed to novelty and more capable of tolerating disorientation. When the discounted tickets opened to the general public in a week, the incidents would multiply. The format needed modifications.

The deck chairs were the first thing to go. Their lightness was an asset in a fire but a liability in a panic — easy to knock sideways, easy to stand on, easy to tip into a neighbor. He replaced them with iron benches fixed to the floor and added seat belts: if a viewer panicked and lurched forward, the belt would hold them in place long enough for a guard to respond. He also added age restrictions — no viewers over forty-five — and barred anyone with documented heart conditions or acrophobia.

He worked through all of this as new problems, each one solvable, each one simply requiring time and thought. The theater was a first. He had no inherited rules to follow.

The movie’s success pulled other problems behind it. Within a week, a dozen merchant applications had arrived at City Hall, all of them wanting franchise licenses — for the popcorn, most pressingly. Barov reported this with the expression he wore when he considered something inevitable.

Roland turned them all down.

Popcorn was not a defensible monopoly. The technology was trivial, the preservation difficult, and corn was not a major crop in Neverwinter — he had no real cost advantage. Anyone who wanted to copy it could. Better to keep it in-house as a theater feature than to license it and watch the margins evaporate across a dozen mediocre operations. Same reasoning applied to the french fries.

The milk bags were different. Those he could not have sold even if he’d wanted to; there were no excess supplies.

The bags — and their straws — were the first commercial application of rubber from the worm colonies in the Third Border City. After a year of careful adaptation and research, the ancient witches had made a key discovery: the rubber’s properties could be tuned. By adjusting the ratio of slime to worm-gall in the processing mixture, they could control flexibility and hardness across a useful range. The research agenda had clarified quickly after that — durability testing, corrosion resistance, what the material could and couldn’t be asked to do.

The milk bag and straw had emerged from that work as a proof of concept. But Roland had built them for logistics, not entertainment. Rubber containers were cheaper than glass or metal, lighter, and genuinely airtight when sealed correctly. For moving food and medical supplies at scale — and eventually for the war effort — the material was irreplaceable. The worm population had grown from a hundred to nearly a thousand over the past year, but that was still far short of what a military campaign would require. Every gram of processed rubber was spoken for before it was made.

The franchise requests would have to wait indefinitely.

Four days after the premiere, Edith returned to Neverwinter.

She brought Olivia with her.

Roland met them in the castle parlor. He’d seen Olivia once before, briefly, at distance. In the well-lit room he could read her properly now: soft features, a frame that had grown thin in ways that weren’t entirely from the journey, a posture that was deliberate — someone sitting upright by an act of will rather than ease. She kept her eyes on him without flinching, but beneath that steadiness was the particular quality of someone who had already prepared themselves for whatever came next.

She expects to be used, Roland thought. Or protected. She doesn’t know which, and she’s made herself ready for either.

A lot of nobles in this era would have confirmed her worst expectation. Roland was not in the habit of thinking of himself as unusually decent, but he was honest enough to recognize the gap.

He smiled. “Don’t worry. It’s considerably warmer here than Coldwind Ridge. No one will disturb you. You’ll grow to like the city.”

Olivia said, quietly: “Yes, Your Majesty.” She hesitated. Then lowered her head.

“Rest first. Someone will show you to your room.”

The guard led her out. Edith waited.

“That’s all?” she said, in the tone of someone who had expected a longer scene. “I thought you’d want to speak with her. Get acquainted.”

“You’ve covered everything already,” Roland said. “What’s there for me to add?” He paused. “How was the trip?”

“Smooth.” Edith’s voice was steady and professional again. “She made her decision quickly, for the child’s sake. The cleanup took slightly longer than expected — but those people won’t cause trouble again.”

“Good work,” Roland said. “The right choice, giving it to you.”

“I’m flattered.” A pause. “One more thing. On the way back, I received a message from the combat engineer unit. Azima found no trace of the ‘Glory of the Sun’ in the Eastern Region. She’s turned north.”

Roland frowned. North. If the mine was outside Graycastle’s borders, possibly on the other side of the Swirling Sea, the extraction problem became significantly more complicated. Not impossible — but complicated.

“Understood,” he said.

Edith dipped a curtsy and turned to go.

At the door, she stopped.

“Your Majesty,” she said, without turning all the way around. “You should sleep. Take care of yourself.”

“What?”

She looked back. “Because this world would be considerably less interesting without you in it.” Then she was gone.

Roland stood in the empty parlor for a moment, not quite sure what had just happened.

From behind the curtain came a familiar sound: Nightingale, finding her way back to visibility.

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