(3rd Person POV)

Meanwhile, back at the Eastern Theatre, Arthur had arranged the earnings on the table.

Coins filled every inch of the surface — coppers, silvers, and a generous scattering of gold — piled high enough that the stack cast a shadow. It was the accumulated take from just over a week of showings.

Lykan stared at it. Leonard stared at it. Neither of them said anything for a long moment.

"This..." Lykan’s voice came out smaller than he intended. "This is what the theatre earned in just one week?"

"We made enough that most people couldn’t match it in an entire lifetime." Leonard shook his head slowly, like a man who had heard the number but still couldn’t quite put it in his body.

Arthur just smiled. Beside him, Firfel, Apollonia, and Sylwen wore the quiet, amused expressions of people watching a reaction they had already predicted.

’If they knew how much Arthur was actually worth back home, I don’t know if they’d be able to stand up,’ the three of them thought, more or less at the same time.

Arthur let Lykan and Leonard have their moment with it, then led them out of the room.

"So then," he said, falling into step beside Lykan with an easy smile. "I’d say I’ve made good on my promise. The theatre is thriving again — more than thriving. Does that mean it’s fully mine now?"

Lykan went quiet. The numbers were impossible to argue with. By any honest measure, the theatre had not just recovered — it had surpassed anything it had managed in its better years.

But a faint color rose in the old man’s face and he made a noncommittal sound, muttering something about there still being roughly a month left in the agreement.

Arthur chuckled and didn’t press it. He understood perfectly well what was happening. Admitting the terms had been met meant handing the theatre over, and Lykan wasn’t quite ready to stop being co-owner — even in name only. The old man wanted to hold onto the title a little longer. That was fine. Arthur could afford patience.

The conversation was interrupted by one of the staff, who approached with a look that said the matter was not a small one.

Over the past several days, the theatre had been filling to capacity at every showing — but the ticket revenue wasn’t reflecting it. The numbers didn’t line up. Seats full, income short.

Arthur’s expression didn’t shift much, but his brows drew together. "Leonard. Look into it."

"On it."

Leonard didn’t take long. When he came back, he’d already traced the shape of it: people were showing up with tickets they’d bought off strangers — cheap, no questions asked, no reason to doubt them until now. Whether those strangers were producing the counterfeits themselves or moving them for someone else, he hadn’t yet confirmed.

"Find out who’s running it," Arthur said.

Leonard nodded and went.

Arthur wasn’t particularly unsettled. It was a minor irritation — the kind of thing that came with building something that other people wanted a piece of. What mattered was that Hellfire was taking hold in this world, putting down roots exactly as it was meant to.

Whoever had decided to get in the way of that would find out soon enough that it wasn’t a wise decision.

---

The «Magicless District» was exactly what it sounded like — a corner of Eisen City where the magicless were shunted away and forgotten. Life there was hard in the specific way that comes from being considered less than human by everyone around you, from nobles down to common laborers who had nothing but their magic to feel superior about.

The housing was pitiful. The people living in it were more so, ground down by years of being looked through rather than looked at.

Many had turned to petty theft, shady work, anything that kept bread on the table — not out of character, but out of necessity. Survival had a way of narrowing a person’s options until crime stopped looking like a choice and started looking like the only door still open.

It had always been this way. Everyone in the district knew it would keep being this way.

And then, from nowhere, something strange began to move through the cramped streets and sagging doorways of that forgotten place.

Hope.

Not the desperate, white-knuckled kind that people clung to in their worst moments — but something that felt almost defiant. The idea that belief in oneself was enough. That a person without magic was not automatically a person without worth.

The source of it was a film. One they hadn’t even seen.

They couldn’t afford tickets. That gap hadn’t changed. But word traveled freely enough, and the story of the Wizard of Oz had reached the Magicless District the same way everything else did — through overheard conversations, through the mouths of people passing through, through the particular speed at which news moves when it touches something raw.

What caught them wasn’t the spectacle. It was the protagonist.

A magicless girl. Carried to another world, dropped into the middle of something far bigger than herself, with no power anyone recognized as real — and the city’s commoners and nobles had paid silver to watch her and come back talking about her like she mattered.

That alone was enough to crack something open in people who had been told their whole lives that they didn’t.

Not everyone felt it that way.

"Who in their right mind believes this fairytale garbage?" one man spat, his voice carrying the particular bitterness of someone who had hoped before and paid for it. "We’re magicless. We’ve always been magicless. No story changes that."

"Dream all you want," said another. "What’s waiting on the other side of that dream is the same suffering. The same death. Believing in yourself doesn’t fill an empty stomach."

They weren’t wrong about the suffering. Nobody in the district would argue that point.

But not everyone in the district let the cynicism win.

There were those who clung to the hope like it was the only warm thing they’d touched in years — gripping it in both hands, refusing to let go no matter how many voices said it was foolish. The young ones especially. They hadn’t yet been ground down to the place where hope felt more dangerous than having nothing.

And none of them held on tighter than Elira.

She was a small girl with worn-through clothes and a face that had learned to read people fast — the kind of face that comes from spending too many years figuring out who was dangerous and who wasn’t. Her mother was sick. Her brother was five years old and still believed things would be alright because Elira told him so. She intended to keep it that way.

She had never seen the Wizard of Oz. She couldn’t afford to. But she had sharp ears and a habit of drifting through the wealthier districts when she needed coin, and she had stitched the story together from scraps — overheard conversations outside taverns, a merchant’s offhand retelling, the way people’s faces changed when they talked about the ending.

She’d filled in the rest herself.

At night, when her brother curled up beside her and asked for a story, she gave him this one.

"There was a girl named Dorothy," she’d say, keeping her voice low. "She had no magic. Not even a little. But a great tornado swept her up and carried her away to another world — a world full of wonder and danger and things no one had ever seen. She was scared, and she was small, and everyone around her had power she didn’t. But she kept going anyway."

"And at the end, a kind witch looked her in the eye and told her the truth. The magic was never something Dorothy was missing. It was inside her the whole time. It had always been there. She only had to believe it."

Her brother always fell asleep before she finished. That was alright. She wasn’t only telling it for him.

’One day,’ she’d think, in the quiet after. ’One day I’ll earn enough to take all three of us — me, him, and Mum — to that theatre. To sit in those seats and see it properly. Together.’

It was a small dream. But it was hers, and she hadn’t had one before. She’d never been able to afford one. There was only today, and tomorrow, and the bread that needed to be on the table for both.

Now she had something to move toward. And it turned out that changed the weight of every single day.

She was still a thief. That hadn’t changed — there was no version of her life where it could, not yet. Then one day, a gang found her and made her an offer.

Fake tickets. The Eastern District. Sell them cheap, pocket the difference.

But the pay was real, and her mother needed medicine, and her brother needed food. So she pushed the guilt down to wherever she kept everything else she couldn’t afford to feel, and took the job.

’Sorry, Dorothy,’ she thought, ’I don’t think you’d do something like this.’

...

A few days later, she was working a corner in the Eastern District, doing her best to look like she belonged there.

"Psst — hey. You there." She fell into step just beside a passing commoner and lowered her voice. "Wizard of Oz tickets, right here. Five coppers each. Can’t find them cheaper anywhere in the city."

The real price was five silver. She knew that. The gap was the whole point.

The commoner slowed. Looked at her. Then looked at the ticket she was holding out.

"Five coppers," she said again, keeping her voice steady. "Going fast."

The man didn’t reach for the ticket. But he didn’t walk away either. He glanced around at the busy street, then back at her. "Somewhere quieter," he said simply. "Let’s talk over there."

Elira hesitated for half a second — but a potential sale was a potential sale. She followed him into the narrow gap between two buildings, away from the foot traffic.

The moment they were out of the crowd, the man turned to face her. His expression was calm. The expression of someone who already knew how this conversation was going to go.

"I’m not here for the tickets," he said. "I’m here for you."

Elira went very still. "...What?"

"Relax." His voice was easy. "I’m not going to hurt you. I just need you to come with me and explain a few things to my master."

His master.

She’d been selling fake tickets to the Eastern Theatre for days now — and this man had tracked her down for it. It wasn’t hard to figure out. He had to be one of the theatre people.

Her eyes cut toward the street —

She ran.

He caught her before she’d cleared two steps, his grip firm but not rough.

"Let go of me — let go—!"

Then his hand moved to the top of her head. Not to grab. Just a light, easy ruffle, like someone who wasn’t in a hurry about any of this.

"Easy," he said quietly. "I know where you’re from. The Magicless District." His voice didn’t carry any judgment in it, which was somehow worse than if it had — she didn’t know what to do with kindness right now. "My master knows it too, and he’s not the type you think he is. You won’t be hurt. I promise you that."

Elira stopped struggling. Her heart was still hammering. She looked up at him properly for the first time.

He had a calm face. Not unkind.

"My name is Leonard," he said. "What’s yours?"