(3rd Person POV)
The incident with the Six of Diamonds didn't linger long in anyone's mind. When Leonard heard about it, he immediately started apologising on their behalf, which was when Arthur remembered that they had, until recently, been Leonard's party.
"Don't apologise," Arthur told him. "You're not part of that trashy party anymore."
"Right," Leonard said, and sighed.
"Focus on the theatre. We're opening soon and we're expecting a few hundred people for the first showing of Wizard of Oz. Make sure everything is ready."
Leonard nodded and got to work.
As for the Six of Diamonds, Arthur gave their likely retaliation a passing thought, waited for something to come of it, and when nothing did, forgot about it entirely.
---
The day of the opening arrived.
The eastern district was busier than it had any right to be. Word had done its job — the flyer, the bold claims, the three weeks of silence that had supposedly signalled a theatre dying on its feet — all of it had turned into a kind of morbid curiosity that pulled people out of their homes and into the streets. The flow of foot traffic was thick enough that the carriages for hire were moving slower than usual, backed up along the eastern road.
"More people than I've seen here in years."
"That old man's tactic worked on everyone, I'll give him that. Half the city's shown up just to watch him fail."
"Ha. If it goes badly enough, there'll be a riot. Could be a profitable evening one way or another."
Not everyone was there to enjoy the failure. A few were genuinely curious.
"What do you think it actually is? Did Lykan hire an archmage to make it flashier than usual?"
"An archmage? In this city? You know what they charge."
"A famous performer then? A singer?"
"Maybe. I suppose we'll find out."
Seven hundred tickets sold quickly. The queue moved steadily through the doors and into the theatre, seats filling in rows.
Then a luxurious carriage rolled to a stop outside and people turned to look.
"Is that — is that Master Delly? The Western Theatre?"
"What's he doing here?"
"Came to watch Lykan humiliate himself, I'd wager."
"Probably counting the minutes until he can make an offer on the rubble."
Master Delly descended from his carriage with the assistance of his butler, adjusting his hat and sweeping his cape behind him as he took in the crowd with a slow, appraising look.
"A great many people seem to have taken the bait, Master," the butler observed.
"Let them." Master Delly sniffed, tapping his cane against the cobblestones. "Numbers mean nothing. I am here to see what that fool has actually put together, and I already know the answer." He strode toward the entrance without further comment.
Inside, he found his seat and settled in, scanning the filling rows around him with an expression that suggested he found the whole thing faintly beneath him.
Thirty minutes passed. He was already restless.
"When is this going to start?" he muttered. "How long does it take to raise a curtain?"
"Patience, Master," the butler said.
"Master Delly."
He turned at the voice. Lykan was making his way along the row toward him, smiling with an ease that Delly found immediately irritating.
"Lykan." He let out a short laugh. "I didn't think you'd have the nerve to show your face here tonight. Tell me — what exactly possessed you to put those claims on a flyer? Did you lose a bet?"
"You read it carefully, I see," Lykan said pleasantly, taking the seat beside him.
"Hard to miss. Half the city was talking about it." Delly waved a hand. "It is pointless, Lykan. Whatever you have prepared tonight, this theatre is finished. You know it as well as I do."
"He-he." Lykan tilted his head. "And what if I told you it isn't my trick to begin with?"
Delly's eyes sharpened. "What are you implying?"
"Simply that this theatre," Lykan said, with a small, satisfied smile, "is no longer mine."
The silence was immediate. Even the butler, who maintained composure through most things, looked up from his folded hands.
"What did you just say?" Delly asked.
Before Lykan could answer, a figure stepped out onto the stage.
The murmur in the room dropped away.
"Ladies and gentlemen." Arthur's voice carried easily through the house. He spread his hands and offered the audience a theatrical bow. "My name is Arthur Pendragon, and I am the owner of the Eastern Theatre and founder of the Hellfire Company. On behalf of everyone involved in making this evening possible, I welcome you — and I sincerely hope that what you are about to see will be unlike anything you have experienced before."
He straightened, smiled once more at the house, and stepped back.
The crowd shifted with murmurs. Lykan? Gone? A new owner? When did that happen?
Then the lamps went out.
All of them. At once. The entire theatre dropped into complete darkness, the kind so total that a person couldn't see their own hand.
"What — why is it dark?"
"Did something break?"
"I can't see anything — what is happening?"
"Did we pay good silver for a dark room?"
"Someone light a candle!!!"
The confusion rippled through every row, voices layering over each other, a few nervous laughs, the creak of seats as people shifted. Nobody had been warned. Nobody knew whether to be alarmed or patient.
Before anyone could summon so much as a spark to light the room, something happened that stopped them entirely.
A beam of light cut through the darkness from the rear of the house, and the white screen at the back of the stage blazed to life.
The noise that came out of the audience was not quite a scream and not quite a gasp. It was something in between, pulled out of several hundred people at the same moment.
"Wh — what is that!?"
"Is that magic!? Who is casting that!?"
"Something's on the wall — there's something on the wall—"
"I see it, I see it, what is it—"
"Don't touch me, I can't see you, what is happening—"
Master Delly had gripped the armrest of his seat. Beside him, his butler had straightened to full attention, all pretence of composure quietly abandoned.
'This is not a play,' Delly thought. 'Whatever this is, it is not a play.'
The image settled, and the room fell into a stunned, unsteady hush.
A village. Rolling fields. A dirt road cutting between modest houses, chickens pecking at the ground, washing strung between posts. Every detail rendered with a sharpness and depth that made no sense — and then it moved. A breeze crossed the field and the grass bent with it. A door swung open in the distance. A small dog trotted across the road and disappeared behind a fence.
The sound came with it. Wind. Birdsong. The creak of the door.
"Is this..." someone said slowly, "some kind of magic mirror? Is it showing us another world?"
"That's not a mirror, there's no frame—"
"It's moving. It's moving on its own—"
"Is someone controlling this? Where is the mage?"
"I can't feel any mana — can you feel mana?"
"None. Nothing."
The questions kept coming, tripping over each other, but they were quietening now. Not because answers had arrived, but because the screen wouldn't stop, and it was very difficult to talk and watch at the same time.
A young girl stepped into frame. Plain clothes, bare feet, a small basket over her arm. She walked the dirt road with easy familiarity, the dog falling into step beside her.
The title had told them her name. Dorothy.
A magicless girl. Living in a magicless village.
The mood in the room shifted in a way that was almost audible.
"A magicless girl?" someone muttered.
"Are you serious? We paid silver for this?"
A few people near the back made their feelings known more plainly, throwing comments at the screen as though Dorothy might hear them and feel suitably embarrassed. The laughter that followed was the kind meant to reassure the people laughing that they were still above whatever they were watching.
But they stayed in their seats.
Because the thing on the wall was still unlike anything they had ever seen, and something in their eyes refused to stop watching it regardless of what their mouths were saying.
The village played out around Dorothy — the quiet rhythms of it, the smallness of it, the particular texture of a life built without magic. The water carried by hand. The fields turned without a single spell. People working hard for things that any mage could manage before breakfast.
Here and there, in the quieter seats, a thought settled without being invited.
'Is this what it's like? For the ones below us — is this genuinely what their days look like?'
Nobody said it out loud.
Then the sky changed.
It happened at the edges first. The colour draining out of the horizon, the clouds thickening and beginning to rotate. The wind picked up on screen and the sound of it filled the theatre — a low, building roar that vibrated somewhere behind the chest.
People sat forward.
A magic tornado.
Anyone who had lived long enough in this world knew what that colour meant — the deep, churning violet that stained the funnel from base to crown, nothing like the grey-brown of an ordinary storm.
A regular tornado could be dispersed by any sufficiently powerful mage with a single, well-placed working. A magic tornado was a different category of disaster entirely. They did not respond to magic.
They did not negotiate.
They consumed everything in their path and moved on, and the colour was the only warning you ever got.
Arthur had done his research. He had not simply transplanted the story wholesale — he had looked at this world, understood what it feared, and made his choices accordingly. A violet magic tornado meant something to these people in a way that a plain storm never could. They didn't need to be told it was dangerous. The colour told them everything, and the reaction told him the calculation had been correct.
Several people recognised it immediately. The deep violet funnel. That colour. There was no mistaking it.
"That's a magic tornado — a real one!"
"Run, girl! Run!"
"It's going to come through the wall — cover yourself!"
People shrank back in their seats, arms raised, a few burying their faces. The roar of it filled the theatre and made the instinct very hard to argue with.
Then nothing came. The tornado churned and roared on the screen and stayed exactly where it was.
Slowly, arms lowered. People looked up. Felt faintly ridiculous.
"...It's not coming out," a man said, breathing hard.
"I knew that," said the woman next to him.
"You had your coat over your head."
"I was cold."
They settled back, still tense, the fear now redirected entirely onto the girl on the screen — a magicless girl with no way to stop it and nowhere near enough time to run.
Dorothy ran anyway. It didn't matter. The violet funnel swept across the farmstead and took the house with it, took Dorothy with it, and the screen went black.
Several people turned away or pressed their hands over their eyes, not quite willing to watch.
When they looked again, the darkness had become colour. Not the worn, dusty palette of the village — something else entirely. Vivid, impossible, overwhelming. Flowers in shades that had no business existing. A sky polished to an almost painful blue. Strange shapes drifting at the edges of the frame.
The theatre was absolutely silent.