[The flames leaped into the study. The remaining manuscript pages caught sparks and fluttered through the rapidly heating air. Charlie lunged toward the sea of fire, trying to salvage more of his drafts, but the departing soldiers shoved him to the ground. He never rose again, whether because he could not or would not.]
[The blazing fire scorched every inch of land. The red-eyed Puppet stood silently amid the flames, watching its creator with vacant eyes, as though it had never possessed life.]
[Charlie (staring at the Puppet): Ah, in the end, only you are left with me. No audience, no performance—I have nothing left. (sighs) I once imagined holding a Grand Performance as my finale when the curtain fell on my life. Could this fire be the stage the gods have given me?]
[The Puppet said nothing. As the flames burned it, the crackling of splitting firewood rang out.]
[Charlie (groaning in agony): We cannot gain attention together; we can only march toward destruction together. What a pitiful tragedy—a tragedy where the protagonist dies and the villain triumphs...]
[A playwright who wrote tragedies ended his life in tragedy. This was not beauty, but an even greater tragedy.]
The Scarlet Theater was swallowed by roaring flames, and playwright Charlie died alongside his life's work.
Fortunately, he had thrown a box of manuscripts out the window beforehand, and they had not burned with the theater.
Charlie, burned alive, harbored deep resentment. He became a ghost, drifting through the theater's remains and his scattered manuscripts.
He hoped, he yearned, he stubbornly waited for those who came after to read them.
He thought that, a thousand years from now, even if only one person found the plays he had written, carefully collected and organized them, performed them, understood them, and came to love