Chapter 1 | Part 5

The platform was already emptying around him.

Drusniel stood frozen while bodies moved past—successful candidates toward one door, failures toward another. His legs wouldn’t move. His mind kept reaching for that void, probing the absence like a tongue finding a missing tooth.

“Failed candidates, clear the platform.” The ancient mage didn’t look up from her slate. “You’re blocking the line.”

Annariel’s voice cut through the ringing in Drusniel’s ears. “No—something’s wrong. We—”

He caught himself. Swallowed the rest. We practiced. We both felt it. This shouldn’t have happened. But saying that would damn them both. Attempting the trials without blessing was heresy. Admitting they’d trained in secret would make failure look like mercy.

“The trial does not repeat.” A younger mage stepped between Annariel and Drusniel, arms folded. His boredom was absolute. “Move along.”

“But he—”

“Passed candidates, this way.” The mage gestured toward a door Drusniel hadn’t noticed before, dark wood carved with Venemora’s symbols, leading deeper into the mountain. “Your training begins immediately. No outside contact for the duration.”

No contact. Months of isolation. Drusniel had known this, had accepted it as the price of success. He’d never imagined watching Annariel walk through that door without him.

“Failed candidates.” The ancient mage finally looked up. Her eyes passed over Drusniel without interest. “Exit through the shame hall. Your families will be notified.”

The shame hall. Drusniel had heard stories. A long corridor lined with the names of every candidate who had failed the trials since the city’s founding. Thousands of names carved into obsidian walls. A permanent record of inadequacy.

His name would join them now.

Annariel broke free of the mage’s attention and crossed to Drusniel in three quick steps. His hand found Drusniel’s arm, grip desperate.

“It worked,” he whispered, voice cracking. “You felt it. I know you felt it—I saw your face when you reached. You had it, Drus. Something took—”

“Candidates.” The younger mage’s voice hardened. “Separate. Now.”

Annariel’s fingers dug in harder. His eyes searched Drusniel’s face, frantic, as if he could find the answer there. As if staring long enough would undo whatever had gone wrong.

“I’ll find you,” Annariel said. The words came fast, tumbling. “After training. However long it takes. This isn’t—” His voice cracked. He tried again. “We’ll figure out what happened. I promise.”

The promise sounded fragile. Like he was trying to convince himself as much as Drusniel.

The mage’s hand closed on Annariel’s shoulder. Pulled.

Drusniel watched his best friend stumble backward. Watched the distance grow between them—three feet, five, ten. Annariel’s mouth kept moving. Forming words Drusniel couldn’t hear over the roar of blood in his ears.

I’ll find you.

The dark door opened. Other successful candidates filed through, their faces bright with triumph, with relief, with futures unfolding before them. Annariel looked back once.

His expression said everything his mouth couldn’t: This wasn’t supposed to happen.

The door closed.

Drusniel stood alone on the obsidian floor. His eyes searched for a crack, a vein, anything—but the stone here was polished mirror-smooth. Nothing to follow. Nothing to hold.

The fungi overhead pulsed their sickly light. The ancient mage called another name. Candidates shuffled past him like he’d already become invisible.

“Failed candidates.” A different attendant, this one younger, appeared at Drusniel’s elbow. Not a mage—just a servant, tasked with escorting the unworthy. “This way.”

Drusniel’s feet moved. He didn’t tell them to. They simply carried him toward the corridor the attendant indicated—a narrow passage lit by fewer fungi, the walls pressing close.

The shame hall.

Names covered every surface. Carved deep into black stone, filling every available space from floor to ceiling. Some were centuries old, their letters worn smooth by time. Others looked fresh. Thousands of drow who had reached for Venemora and found nothing.

Drusniel walked between them. His footsteps echoed.

Maybe Annariel had always been stronger. Maybe their practice had worked for him and not for Drusniel because—

No. That wasn’t it. Drusniel had felt the blessing approach. He hadn’t imagined it. And Annariel’s face had confirmed it: You had it. Something took—

His thumb tapped against his fingers. One, two, three, four—

He caught himself. Stopped. The walls here were covered in names, not imperfections he could trace. Nothing to anchor him.

The shame hall ended in a small chamber where gray-robed clerks waited with ledgers. One of them looked up as Drusniel approached.

“Name?”

“Drusniel. House Thel’varin.”

The clerk wrote something down. Didn’t look up again. “Your family has been notified. Wait here.”

Drusniel sat on a cold stone bench. Other failed candidates sat nearby—a girl who wouldn’t stop crying, a boy staring at his hands like they’d betrayed him, an older drow with the hollow eyes of someone who’d already known this would happen.

None of them looked at each other. None of them spoke.

Drusniel closed his eyes.

He could still feel the shape of that absence. The void where Venemora’s blessing should have lived. It hadn’t felt like failure. Failure was reaching and finding nothing.

This was reaching and having something taken.

I’ll find you, Annariel had said.

Drusniel held onto the words. They were a fixed point in a room that had lost its geometry.

End of Chapter 1.5 —> 1.6: The Trial: Shadows in the Hall