The Trial should have been an illusion: darkness staged as lesson, fear arranged to be survived.

The door closed.

The last candle died.

But the spell was not the intended one.

The darkness that closed the chamber was real.

The shadows did not roar. They measured.

They found the places where devotion had grown tired of ceremony, where resentment hid behind discipline, where a young cleric wanted the world more than another perfect rite.

One doubt after another they wrapped them around her limbs and began to pull, not with rage, but with patience :

her fall was inevitable.

Madeleine tried prayer.

The memorized words came, then thinned, then faded.

The darkness offered nothing grand.

Only the simplest mercy: surrender and become quiet.

For a heartbeat she understood the appeal.

Then she found it.

No argument, n

o certainty,

just a thin steadiness that refused to sign its name to the void.

A spark of light that did not rescue her, only kept her from giving in.

The shadows tightened,

The chamber leaned closer...

The pull did not vanish,

but it stopped being absolute.

In the dark, Madeleine realized that this Trial, the Trial of Darkness, had already given its verdict.

Not that she was pure.

Only that she was not theirs.