The Trial came on the seventh day.
Not at dawn. Not at midnight. Not in any of the dramatic, cosmically appropriate moments that the previous Trials had chosen. The Trial of Truth arrived at two in the afternoon, while Arvella was reviewing supply manifests in the study with a half-eaten apple in one hand and a pencil behind her ear, and it arrived the way truth always does — without warning, without ceremony, and at the exact moment when the person it was meant for had stopped expecting it.
One moment she was reading Yara's crystal weapons inventory — 4,200 charged fragments, 890 arrowheads, 340 blade tips, 12 primary crystals at full resonance — and the next, the world fell away.
Not the dramatic, staircase-into-the-earth descent of the Trial of Sacrifice. Not the journey-to-the-door
