The earth trembled.
At first, it was a faint vibration, like the ground taking a slow breath. Then, without warning, the entire world began to shake violently.Avin stumbled, catching himself on Sylas’s arm while Eira swore under her breath. Around them, other survivors — dozens of them — cried out in confusion as the forest itself began to twist and bend.
"What the hell is going on?!" Eira shouted over the noise.
No one answered. No one could.
The soil beneath their feet rippled — literally moved — as though it were liquid. The terrain began to morph, trees sinking into the ground, their roots swallowed whole by the shifting land. The hard, rocky earth softened into rolling waves of soil that smoothed themselves out into patches of erald green.One by one, the remnants of the battlefield vanished — the broken trees, the blood, the ash, even the sll of death — all replaced by fresh grass that glistened with dew.
It was like the world itself had turned a page.
Avin’s balance broke as another wave rolled beneath him. He fell, the ground montarily rising and lowering like a calm ocean tide. When the motion finally stopped, he looked up — and froze.
The world was different.
The towering trees were gone. The heavy clouds had disappeared.Above him stretched a vast blue sky, so clear it almost hurt to look at — unmarred by a single wisp of gray. The sunlight that bathed the field was soft and golden, warm enough to feel peaceful, but bright enough to sting the eyes of those who had lived through hours of darkness and death.
Around him, people began to murmur.
"What happened?""Where are we?""Wasn’t this... wasn’t this the forest?"
Their confusion turned to awe. For the first ti since the exam began, there was beauty — but Avin couldn’t shake the unease gnawing at him. His instincts scread that sothing about this tranquility wasn’t natural.
And then, without warning, everyone went silent.
Not because they were told to — not even because they wanted to. It was sothing else, sothing primal. The air itself demanded stillness.
Standing in the center of the field was her — the woman who had guided them into the nightmare that was the survival test.Serenya.
No one had seen her arrive. One mont the field was empty, the next, she was there — standing tall, elegant, and terrifyingly composed, the faintest smile on her lips. Her presence carried weight. It pressed on the chest like a mory of fear.
She clapped her hands once.The sound was impossibly loud, echoing across the endless field as though the air itself obeyed her command.
"Well," she began, her voice smooth and regal, yet carrying a quiet amusent, "congratulations, survivors. You’ve made it out of the Challenge."
The silence deepened. No one dared move.
"You all have successfully endured twelve hours in the field," she continued, her smile widening. "And for that, you are now qualified to proceed to the written examination."
Avin blinked. Twelve hours?
He whispered the words under his breath. "Twelve... hours?"
That couldn’t be right. His mind reeled. The pain, the fear, the blood, the monsters — everything he had gone through — it had felt like days. Weeks even.He rembered the endless chase, the abyss scorpions, the millipede, the serpent, the poison, her. It wasn’t possible that all of it had fit into twelve hours.
His stomach twisted. "Those were the longest twelve hours of my life..."
Serenya’s voice cut through his thoughts."The written exam will now begin," she said, clasping her hands behind her back. "Each of you will receive questions tailored specifically to your own knowledge, your culture, your upbringing, and your... ntal aptitude. That ans cheating," she smiled thinly, "is useless."
A few nervous laughs rippled through the crowd but died quickly under her gaze.
Avin exhaled slowly. A test now?His head was still spinning, his body weak, and now they wanted him to think?
"Damn..." he muttered. "You follow everywhere I go, huh?"
He blinked.
And the world changed.
There was no sound, no transition — only the briefest flicker of light — and suddenly he was no longer standing in a field.
He was sitting.
A wooden desk beneath his hands. A quill-shaped pen between his fingers. Paper stretched out before him, blank and expectant. The air slled faintly of parchnt and ink — dry, old, and suffocating.Avin looked up, his heart skipping a beat.
Hundreds of others sat in neat rows around him, all wearing the sa expression of shock and disbelief. The light was dimr here, filtered through high windows carved into walls of white marble. The entire room was circular, rising upward like a do, with a raised platform standing at its heart.
And on that platform, watching them all with an unreadable expression, sat a figure.
Avin couldn’t tell if they were male or female. The air around them shimred faintly, bending the light like heat over a desert road. Their face was hidden beneath a porcelain mask — smooth, expressionless, and marked only by a single vertical line where the mouth should be.
A voice, soft but commanding, filled the hall."Begin."
Avin’s fingers tightened around his pen.
He looked down at his paper — words had already appeared, black ink curling into sentences before his eyes. Questions he didn’t recognize, symbols he didn’t understand. Each one seed to test not knowledge, but identity — who he was, what he feared, what he rembered.
His pulse quickened.He glanced sideways — Sylas sat a few seats away, brows furrowed in focus. Farther beyond, Eira chewed the end of her pen, clearly agitated.
And then, between two rows ahead, his gaze caught a flicker of red hair.He froze.
That sa red hair.That sa stillness.
Her — the woman from the lake.
Avin’s body tensed. He tried to call out, to move, to do sothing—but before he could, the air shimred again. The desk beneath his hands pulsed once, and the light of the room dimd until only his paper remained visible.
He blinked.
The world shifted again.
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