Once a year the priory enters the Vigil.

Shutters are sealed, the rooms get filled with silence, corridors and halls are surrendered to night.

Only a few sanctioned candles burn as proof of their creed : "a small light that endures the darkest of nights".

Madeleine believed in that core.

What wore her down were the rites that circled the same promises without ever touching the world outside the walls.

Lucan, her dear and only friend, used to laugh at her restlessness and call it “life.”

He was there by circumstance more than doctrine, a warm presence where the priory was strict, the sort of friend who made even rites and vows feel human.

She wanted action, not rehearsal. She wanted "life".

However, inside the priory, that impatience looked like pride.

During the Vigil, one of her unlit candles flared to life.

It should have stayed dark until dawn.

Instead a thin flame rose ... and voices echoed with suspicion.

Prioress Alwen chose discipline over questions and announced a trial: Madeleine was to be tested.

A controlled illusion meant to prove her allegiance without harm.

But someone twisted it.

In the sealed chamber, the darkness was not theater anymore.

It pulled like a tide with hands.

Madeleine survived because what she carried was not performance: her inner spark of faith, despite her own doubts, that night became real.

She survived the spell, but to the priory, the disaster looked like her fault.

So Alwen cast her out to wander.

"Go into the world, see your truth, prove your faith, but return only with certainty."

Madeleine left with questions, frustration and disbelief.

She walks now from shrine to ruin, lighting small flames in places that have forgotten dawn, listening for what faith sounds like without a choir around it.

One day she will return to the Priory, but what she may find there (or whom she will not find anymore) will be her real, dark trial.