“Next,” a voice called from the front of the line. The girl ahead of Elara shot her one last resentful glare before turning and shuffling forward.
Elara committed her face to memory, but didn't spare her any more attention than that. As the other candidates moved, she could finally see what was happening at the far end of the corridor.
Two people sat behind a table. A few objects were arranged in front of them, though she couldn't make out exactly what they were from this distance.
The line moved fairly quickly. After a while, only five or six girls remained ahead of her, while three or four more had joined behind her.
Their clothes resembled the uniform she was wearing, suggesting they had also been pulled from the servants' quarters to fill out the missing quotas.
Elara studied one of them, but before she could figure out if she recognized her from the fourth floor, a raised voice echoed from the table.
“Magic aptitude is garbage, mental strength is even worse… Who even let her take this trial?”
The examiner conducting the test looked like a young adult. Her dark cherry hair cascaded down to her shoulder blades, contrasting sharply with her very pale face.
She sat slouched in her chair, but the way she glared at the plump girl standing before her made Elara reflexively straighten her back, even though the scrutiny wasn't aimed at her.
The candidate squinted and offered a hasty smile. She reached out, pressing a small object into the examiner's hand.
“My aptitude isn't particularly high, but I was hoping you might show me a little leniency.”
Elara glanced at the others, expecting at least some reaction to such a blatant bribe, but no one said a word. The apprentice behind the table accepted the gift, inspected it, and quirked the corner of her lips without losing any of her prior coldness.
“One magic crystal? Is this how you made it this far?” she asked, rolling it between her fingers. “Do you honestly think every sorceress can be bought?”
The girl's smile froze. Her hand retreated to her chest, as if she had only just realized she had extended it far too hastily.
“That’s not what I meant, Madam…”
She didn't get to finish. The examiner made a flicking motion with her thumb, shooting something in her direction. From Elara's spot, it was hard to tell if the tiny projectile hit her cheek or slipped into her open mouth, but the effect was so instantaneous that the girl involuntarily held her breath.
The candidate's body seized up, then began to cave in and lose its shape, melting like a wax figure placed too close to a fire.
A moment later, nothing remained in front of the table but a motionless mass. Elara stared at it, unable to reconcile the gruesome sight with the fact that she had just heard the standing girl's voice seconds ago.
The woman sitting next to the examiner clicked her tongue in annoyance and pulled her foot back.
“Disgusting. You could have just sent her back to the servants.”
A chill crept under Elara's clothes. She had just come from the servants herself, and the difference between her and the dead candidate might be far smaller than she wanted to believe.
At that exact moment, the book by her left shoulder stirred. It darted in front of her eyes and flipped open to a page that almost immediately began filling with text.
May 25th, Year 314 of the Lunar Calendar.
You finally managed to slip into the ranks of the apprentice candidates, but you forgot how you ended up in the servants' quarters in the first place.
You already failed the magic aptitude test once before. Do you really think that after a few years in the same body, the necessary potential would suddenly manifest?
It was so incredibly funny that you couldn't stop laughing, even when you started running out of air.
Ultimately, you died of laughter.
Elara shuffled forward with the line, barely noticing that the girl in front of her had taken another step.
She heard nervous whispers behind her, but the words didn't string together into anything coherent. Her entire focus was consumed by that final sentence.
For days, she had been trying to piece together someone else's memories, but she had evidently failed to recover the exact fragment that should have mattered to her the most.
The previous Elara hadn't ended up among the maids by accident. Retaking the exact same trial would only remind the examiners of her previous failure.
So they let me come here, even though this body had already proven useless once before… Great…
She looked at her left hand hidden inside her sleeve, but the sight of the bones offered no comfort. She could use them to scare her roommates, and the mere mention of the experiment had forced the supervisor to tread carefully. But magic apprentices weren't likely to consider a skeletal hand a good enough reason to let her bypass the rules.
That left Vespara. Her name had already been enough to steer one conversation in a favorable direction. But before Elara could string together the right sentence, a new entry appeared in the book.
You failed the magic aptitude test. When it came to light that you belonged to the servants, Sylvara halted the trial and decided to kill you.
At the last second, you invoked Vespara's name, silencing Sylvara and allowing you to proceed to the other two tests.
You were accepted as a novice apprentice, and that very same night, you happily turned into a pile of bones.
At least your left hand stopped standing out from the rest of your body.
Elara clamped her lips shut. For a split second, she had the urge to slam the book shut, even though she knew perfectly well she couldn't even touch the cover.
Bringing up Vespara was enough to survive the trial itself, but clearly, it wasn't enough to make it to the next morning. And she had no idea who or what would lead to that grisly end.
It doesn't even say why… Damn book.
The line shifted again, forcing her closer to the table. Elara felt the time she had to think slipping away with every step. She didn't believe she could just turn around and walk away after what she had just witnessed, especially if her presence was already highly questionable.
Instead of staring at the book again, she fixed her gaze on the items used for the testing, desperately searching for anything that would let her alter the sequence of the upcoming events.
Every candidate moved through the trial from the left side of the table to the right. It started with a black crystal ball that had to be pressed against the forehead.
Upon contact, its interior would light up to varying degrees. The clearer it became, the higher the examiner graded their magic aptitude.
Elara eyed the sphere with growing dread, because this was the exact object that would set her down the path of her next lethal warning.
In the middle sat a wooden doll of a little girl, carved with such intricate detail that the tiny folds of her clothes and the contours of her fingers were clearly visible.
In place of eyes, however, there were two dark hollows. They looked entirely alien on the otherwise meticulously finished face. The candidates were required to stare into them until the examiner permitted them to look away.
The doll's movements evidently corresponded to the candidate's mental strength. After every attempt, a brief evaluation was given, and the woman sitting next to the examiner recorded the score.
The final test required taking a brush dipped in ink and drawing a circle on a blank sheet of parchment.
The color of the stroke would change on its own after a moment, revealing the individual's elemental affinity - though Elara hadn't yet figured out how the different hues were interpreted.
She carefully watched the next two candidates, who, much like the dead girl, handed the examiner something in addition to their test results. This time, the bribes were accepted without any lethal reactions, and both girls were allowed to proceed. The earlier high-and-mighty speech about buying a sorceress suddenly sounded even more hypocritical and repulsive.
But that wasn't what grabbed Elara's attention the most. It was the state of the girls after they finished the tests. Both had turned pale, moved sluggishly, and looked utterly drained. One of them even had to grip the edge of the table for a moment just to steady herself before walking away.
Elara looked at the wooden doll again, then at the brush, and finally at the black sphere, formulating a cautious, still-shaky plan in her mind.
Since the individual tests drain them so much, maybe I don't have to start with the one I’m guaranteed to fail… I just need to make her let me take the others first.
She didn't know if the idea would actually work, but the book hadn't displayed a new ending. She decided to treat its silence as a green light to take the risk. It wasn't as if she had any safe alternatives to choose from anyway.
When she finally stepped up to the table, the examiner looked at her face and let out a short laugh, leaning back comfortably in her chair.
Elara felt her heart slam against her ribs. There was something far more personal in that gaze than the detached impatience she had shown the other candidates.
But she couldn't pull up a single memory that would help her recognize the woman, so she simply bowed her head, not even trying to hide her fear.
Does she know me?
Or was seeing the maid’s uniform enough?
“Begin,” the apprentice ordered, waving a lazy hand toward the crystal ball.
Elara extended her right arm, but instead of reaching to the left, she grabbed the brush resting on the opposite side. Before the examiner could protest, she leaned over the parchment and drew a circle. It was slightly wobbly and uneven, but completely closed. She immediately set the tool down.
The ink stroke remained black at first. Elara waited, holding her breath, bracing herself for a reprimand or a flick of the thumb like the one that had just ended the previous candidate's life.
The apprentice narrowed her eyes in displeasure, but she glanced down at the parchment and held her tongue for the moment.
A moment later, different colors began bleeding into the circle, fracturing the solid black line into uneven segments. The longest stretch, barely the length of a pinky finger, retained its original color. The rest exploded into a chaotic mixture of red, green, blue, gold, white, and a myriad of other shades that seemed to follow no logical order whatsoever.
“A bit greedy, aren't we?” the examiner mocked, inspecting the results.
Elara kept her eyes lowered. She wasn't about to explain that she had absolutely no control over what the circle looked like. Choosing the right response felt infinitely less important right now than securing the chance to reach for the next test item.
“Darkness,” the apprentice announced, turning to the woman beside her. “The rest is such a scrambled mess I can't even tell what the secondary affinity is. Neris, just write down whatever.”
Neris nodded and leaned over the ledger. Elara managed to catch a glimpse - right next to 'Darkness', she wrote 'Light'.
The examiner glanced at the entry and laughed, genuinely amused this time.
“Darkness and Light? Two conflicting elements? You really took my 'whatever' literally.”
Neris didn't answer. She merely set down her writing tool, leaving the record exactly as it was.
Elara watched them out of the corner of her eye, increasingly certain that the futa sitting across from her was the Sylvara mentioned in the book's warning. However, she had zero desire to test that theory by asking.
She waited until the laughter died down, then seized the moment - before anyone could direct her back to the crystal ball - and reached for the wooden doll.
Up close, the empty eye sockets looked even darker, as if the lamplight simply couldn't penetrate their depths. Elara focused on them, waiting to spot the first twitch of the tiny wooden arms. Instead, she heard a soft whisper right next to her ear.
“Help me… help me… help me…”
The voice repeated the exact same words, rapid and blurred. When she tried to listen more closely, new voices emerged, overlapping so tightly that it was hard to tell a full plea apart from a fragmented sentence.
She couldn't tell if the sound was coming from the doll or echoing directly inside her head. With every passing second, it became harder and harder to remember the table or the girls standing in line behind her.
“Help me… kill me… help… kill me…”
The meaning shifted with each repetition. Elara felt a mounting wave of vertigo, as if she had been staring down from a great height for far too long.
She tightened her grip on the wood and let the whispers wash over her, even as some rational part of her mind screamed at her to look away.
“That’s enough,” the examiner said, but her voice reached Elara from far away, drowned out by the overlapping pleas.
Elara didn't move. She remained fixated on the dark hollows. The surrounding corridor gradually lost all significance. She vaguely remembered her plan to use the exhaustion from the test, but right now, it was getting harder to separate her own intentions from whatever was dragging her deeper into the abyss.
“I said that’s enough! Do you want to kill yourself?!”
The sharp shout cut through the whispers, making Elara flinch and jerk her head up. Just before she tore her eyes away from the doll, she noticed its tiny wooden hands were raised in the air. Then, she saw the examiner standing behind the table, her face twisted in anger.
Elara parted her lips, but instead of forming a reply, she was hit by another crushing wave of vertigo. The light blurred before her eyes.
Her eyelids fluttered briefly, showing the whites of her eyes. When her knees could no longer support her weight, she collapsed in front of the table, losing consciousness before Sylvara had the chance to speak again.