Secrets & Treasons

Sixth Movement: The Pact | Pearl

In the observation post, Langlord II had to raise his voice to silence Rion's whining. Just in time to watch the fourth candidate make their entrance.

They walked in hesitantly, looking back as if they were searching for an answer to a question they had just been asked. Their gait was graceful, like a dancer. For the candidate was another woman.

She walked cautiously to the center of the room, dreading at every moment the triggering of traps. She was not particularly tall, nor short in fact. But, if she was of average height, she was very far from normality by her beauty. Her hair, one of an extreme blondness, framed her soft oval face, which illuminated eyes of pure green water. Her hair fell on her shoulders in heavy natural curls and ended far away, in the hollow of her lower back.

The light fell by degrees in the room, as the observers had now become accustomed. If the observers were used to the test protocols by now, this was not the case for the candidate, and the progressing darkness had surprised her. Startled, she was looking all around, probably wondering from where the danger would be coming.

The atmosphere in the room changed abruptly: the air became both cooler and more unbreathable. There was a glow, someone had lit a candle. Oh, not a nice big white candle, no, a kind of old stunted candle made up of scraps. It must have been pilfered during a light change on a big candlestick, after some event in a beautiful house. And those few unfortunate centimeters of candlelight illuminated a tiny room whose entire furnishings would not have been worth the smallest solis. Along one windowless wall was a single bed. The rest of the room served as a kitchen, a common room and a bedroom for the nurse. It was dimly lit by the only window in the house, through which came the hesitant, dim light of a winter month.

Above a chipped and probably century-old washbasin, a female figure had her back turned to the sick woman who was moaning in bed. She was crying. Holding back as much as possible the sighs and cries of distress that wanted to come out of her bosom, she could not control the tiny tremor in her shoulders. But she knew that the patient would not see her: she hardly opened her eyes since the light made her suffer so much. Only her hearing could have betrayed her, the old woman still had good hearing despite her age and especially despite the illness that had been eating away at her for too long.

Hearing the call of the old lady, the figure froze for a fraction of a ray, then turned around, a smile lighting up her beautiful face, wonderfully highlighted by her beautiful blonde hair. She looked like the candidate's twin!

She crossed the room with a step that was meant to be cheerful - passing at the same time through the candidate's body as an immaterial spirit would have done - and knelt at the foot of the bed of the patient, taking her hand in hers, and leant towards her, whispering sweet words in her ear.

The effect of this scene of life on the candidate was frightening. At first frozen in an attitude of incomprehension and daze, her face tightened with pain as heavy tears streamed down her cheeks. She masked her mouth with her clenched hands to hold back the cry of anguish that was forming. She stepped back, her eyes unable to detach themselves from this vision, unable to leave the old woman's face, with a skin tone so fragile that it had become transparent, diaphanous, to the point that it revealed veins and muscles.

She backed up like a sleepwalker, hitting a chair, then the dining table, without the other people in the room reacting to the noises caused. Once blocked against the wall, with her back to the door, she found the strength to tear herself away from this vision and turned around, opening with force the door which gave on the outside.

Outside, the air was neither fresh nor invigorating. It was frigid, but she welcomed it, seeming to breathe freely again. With her hand on her chest as her heart ached, she walked quickly to put as much distance as possible between herself and... this house, which had been hers in the not-so-distant past. She was glad to have escaped the rest of the vision, because she knew only too well how it would end, she knew it because she had already lived it. The drama of illness and decrepitude, and the raw brutality of loss, been there, done that. It had destroyed her and led her on the path that ended there, here, to be tested by the Eternals.