Rewrite That Witch
CH1214 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1214: The Second Magic Movie

Two days later, Victor went to the theatre.

The premiere of The Dust of History was scheduled for three in the afternoon. He arrived half an hour early and still found the hall already packed. The theatre had grown substantially since his last visit — new screening rooms, a courtyard, a proper waiting area with benches and potted trees. A year ago this had been a converted warehouse with a curtain for a door.

The audience moved in clusters, trading names and titles.

“Are you Mr. Gammon from the Chamber of Commerce of Crescent Moon Bay? I’ve been hoping to meet you.”

“Likewise. I didn’t expect to find a man of your standing from the Kingdom of Dawn here.”

“Is that Kajen’s troupe over there? I wonder if he’s come in person.”

“Do let me know if you can arrange an introduction.”

“Of course.”

Victor had expected this. The premiere was a filtering mechanism as much as an entertainment. Everyone who could afford fifty gold royals for a seat had already demonstrated something about themselves, and they all understood that fact simultaneously, which made conversation feel less like cold outreach and more like a reunion between people who had not yet met.

“Aren’t you Mr. Victor? I heard you’d moved on from jewelry.”

“Still in it, but conditions aren’t favorable at the moment.”

“Your blankets are what I really wanted to discuss. Guest satisfaction at my hotel went up after I switched to your products. I’d like to order a hundred more.”

“Glad to hear it. Let’s talk after the film.”

“Agreed.”

Tinkle stood at his shoulder, listening. When the other man moved off, she tugged Victor’s sleeve. “Sir — are these people here for the movie or to conduct business? Some of them don’t seem to know you at all. How do you know they’re not frauds?”

“They’re not,” Victor said. He kept his voice low, patient. “This kind of thing is normal among entrepreneurs. Get used to it.” Only serious businessmen attended a premiere at this price. And the premiere itself — an experience you couldn’t sell, hold, or display, that vanished the moment the credits ended — was precisely the point. It told you more about a man’s financial health than any jewel he was wearing, because it was money spent on nothing but the act of being present.

Then someone bumped into him.

“Ah — sorry,” Victor said, and turned.

A woman. Pale, almost to the point of appearing unwell. She might have been striking under different circumstances — the features were there — but all of it was buried under a flatness that read less like calm than like exhaustion so deep it had become structural. She stood in the animated hall like a door left open on a cold day, the gap between her expression and the crowd’s noise almost audible.

She gave him a single indifferent glance and drifted away.

“Strange,” Victor murmured.

“Sir, the film is about to start.” Tinkle tugged his hand. “Come on.”

He let her lead him in.

“What happened?” Joe asked Farrina quietly.

“Someone bumped into me.” She kept walking. “You said you’d bring me. I’m here. Let’s go in.”

“Right, yes,” Joe said, his hand hovering near hers for a moment before he withdrew it. “Stay close to me. Whatever happens in there.”

Farrina said nothing. Coming was the most she could offer.

Nearly six months in Neverwinter, and the ancient witch — the one who claimed four hundred years of life — had not lied to her. Farrina’s body had mended itself in the slow, uneven way of deep damage: the whip scars and the brand marks had not faded, but she could walk unassisted again, and the daily pain had retreated to something she could carry without noticing. She had nothing to complain about, if she were honest. Other captors would have given her much less.

But the trial she had been bracing for never came. She had not been brought before the King of Graycastle. Just dozens of questioners, one after another, their faces patient and their eyes sharp. She had lied to them deliberately, once, hoping to provoke a reaction. They had looked at her with quiet derision and moved on.

After her release, Joe had bought her a house. Joe, who had no business ever joining the church in the first place, had found work at the Administrative Office within a week and slipped into Neverwinter life as easily as a stone dropped into water. He belonged here, she supposed. She did not.

The longer she stayed, the more her certainties eroded. The witches were not the representation of evil she had been taught they were. Roland Wimbledon had not turned Neverwinter into a workshop of horrors — he had built something that made people’s lives demonstrably better. Every day she spent here was another stone removed from the wall she had constructed around her understanding of the world, and she still could not see what lay on the other side. The belief she had given half her life to, and the reality she woke up inside every morning. They would not resolve. Perhaps this was the trial. More brutal than any physical punishment she had endured, because it offered no clear outcome, no victory or defeat to file away and close.

She would have ended it months ago, except for Joe.

The two tickets from the Star Flower Troupe had arrived like a test she hadn’t asked for. Kajen Fels had made this film at King Roland’s request. Its purpose was obvious to her: expose the church, demolish its legacy, cement the Wimbledon family’s dominance. Pope Tucker Thor’s sacrifice and the deaths of countless Judgement Warriors would be reframed as tools, props, the raw material of a usurper’s morality play.

She did not want to watch it. She had come anyway.

Because Joe needed her to.

This was probably the last thing she could do for him.

The lights faded. Darkness settled over the hall like a hand pressing gently downward. And the movie began.

It opened on the Hermes Plateau three hundred years ago, when the New Holy City was still boulders and raw bluff. The camera fell from a great height: sheer cliff faces, a landscape bleached of color under heavy snowfall, the vast rupture of the Impassable Mountain Range unspooling below.

Even knowing it wasn’t real, even having watched magic movies before, the drop took Victor’s breath. The entire continent diminished beneath him, suddenly small and vulnerable, like a map brought to life only to demonstrate how much of it is empty.

Then the image settled. On the far side of the great fissure, church members were raising a city from nothing — hauling stone, working mortar, living in tents while the first walls rose — and the whole scene carried the heaviness of something long ago that nevertheless happened exactly this way.

Shortly after, the audience saw a chamber sunk below the plateau: the Prival Council, the most secretive organ of the church. A murmur moved through the hall. Victor felt it too — that specific thrill of the door opening on something you were not supposed to be allowed to see, the sensation that this was history the royal family had kept locked away and that someone had finally forced the lock.

The story that followed moved like one he recognized from a dozen other plays, at first: a witch who was heir to the current pope; a soldier, guardian of that same pope, who was also the son of a powerful and ambitious man. They overcame the usual initial hostility, the expected mistrust. They fell in love. Made promises to each other about the future — that when the pope named a successor, the two of them would undertake the incarnation ceremony for the God’s Punishment Army together and never be parted. The audience already knew, by then, what the ceremony would cost them. And still they made the promises.

Kajen Fels had built the love story slowly, without forcing it, the way a fire takes hold in cold wood — first imperceptibly, then undeniably. Tinkle wept when the couple made their vows. Victor did not, but he did not look away.

Then the wheel turned. The guardian’s father — a man whose appetite for power had been patient and long-prepared — framed the current pope and seized control. The witch, as heir-apparent, was the first obstacle he moved to remove. He sent his own son to kill her. The son refused.

A scheme years in the making. By the time the couple uncovered it, every exit was already sealed. They ran — toward Graycastle, toward the king at the foot of the plateau, carrying news of the coup. The father sent soldiers after them. Not to arrest them. To eliminate them entirely.

The film’s climax broke at the Coldwind Ridge.

A unit of the Judgement Army ran them down. The two stood at bay, and it seemed the only question was how long before it ended.

The tension drew out, and drew out further, past the point where Victor expected the resolution to arrive —

And then the guardian turned around and grabbed him.

Victor’s hands went cold.

“Please — help us!” The guardian’s face was inches from his own, the grip on his arm like iron, the breath of a man who had been running for his life. “Please, I beg you!”

Something happened to Victor’s throat. Words refused to form.

“There! Get them!”

“Anyone who stands with the traitors dies with them!” The soldiers’ voices poured in from every direction, and then there was an arrow, and it grazed his cheek —

He felt the sting.

His hand moved to his face without his permission. He looked at his fingers.

A smear of red.

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