Written Exam

The echo of footsteps filled the vaulted chamber as the students filed in. The air smelled faintly of parchment and candlewax, a silence falling as rows of students settled at the long wooden tables. Inkpots glistened beneath the lantern light, quills neatly arranged upon crisp sheets of paper. The far wall stretched upward into shelves upon shelves of tomes.

This was surely the Academy’s library, laid open to them for the first time.

For a brief, foolish moment, Haruki allowed himself to relax. Written exams he could handle. He used to do it back in high school all the time. Sure, he could use a few seconds getting used to holding a pen – or in this case, a quill – once more. Sitting in front of a computer all day was probably not good for anybody. Either way, this must surely be better than fighting elemental monsters.

At the front of the hall, Elder Oric stepped forward as his fellow Elders also filled the room, his booming voice carrying easily to the back rows.

“You will have thirty minutes. There is only one question. No more, no less. The library is at your disposal, and you may ask the Deacons to help fetch whatever material you need, but outside assistance is not permitted. We Elders will be checking for similarities between your works as well. So please, stay true. This is not merely a test of memory. We seek clarity, thought, and discernment.”

The words rippled across the room, and Haruki felt his shoulders loosen. Thirty minutes for one question? He could manage that. Maybe it would be something straightforward. He knew nothing of Sunpeak. But maybe if it was some kind of trivia about this world’s geography or history, it would be manageable.

Then his eyes dropped to the paper before him.

“Explain how the communicatio idiomatum expresses the convergence of natures within the incarnated material Spoken.”

Haruki’s face went blank. His mouth moved soundlessly before words finally escaped in a whisper.

“The what-of-the-what of the who now?”

All around him, the silence instantly broke like thunder. Chairs scraped against the stone floor as students lunged for the library, scattering in every direction. Already, voices were rising in hushed urgency:

“Sir, can you get me the Codex on Idioms Volume 3, please?”

“Let’s check the Dialogue on Essences and Natures. Should be somewhere around here.”

“One copy of the Keshic Commentary on Divine Bodily Institutes, if you please.”

These might as well have been alien gibberish to Haruki.

He remained frozen in his seat. His quill hovered uselessly above the page. He glanced at the words again, half hoping they might rearrange themselves into something human.

But nothing moved. Not the pages, nor his mind.

He decided that sitting around would not help him. So he too tried for the books, wandering between the towering shelves of the academy’s library, running his fingers along spines thick with dust and weighty titles. Every book he pulled down seemed to wage war on his patience. Dense blocks of script about principles and metaphysics, the kind of words that felt more like riddles than explanations.

One book was titled – ‘Treatise on Incarnative Manifestation and Echoic Ontology.’ He tried a page. And immediately the sentences twisted and curled until his eyes blurred, paragraphs looping back on themselves like snakes eating their own tails. Too dense. Too slow. Whatever wisdom the scholars had hidden there, it was locked away behind walls of terminology thicker than stone.

He was about to give up when something caught his eye on a lower shelf. A thin volume bound in worn leather, its edges softened by countless hands. Its plainness stood out against the ornate bindings and polished covers around it. He pulled it free, brushing dust from the faded title: The Life of the Spoken.

“That’s a children’s book, brother,” one of the other students laughed at him as they glanced by.

“Leave him. We have work to do.”

They went off to their desks, leaving Haruki here to read the script inside. It was much simpler, almost lyrical, as though meant to be recited rather than dissected.

“The Spoken is the Voice, and the Voice is the Spoken. And the Voice and the Spoken are one. Yet they are not alone. For the Breath proceeds also – not created, not lesser, but from the Voice and of the Spoken, ever with them.”

Haruki stared at the passage, his lips moving silently as he read it again and again. He rubbed his temples, feeling the first stirrings of a headache.

“They’re... three?” he muttered under his breath. “But also... one? That doesn’t even…”

He cut himself off, exhaling sharply. His thoughts chased themselves in circles, no less tangled than the treatise he abandoned mere moments ago. Yet something about these words clung to him, unsettling in their simplicity, like a melody he couldn’t shake.

And then, without warning, the edges of the page seemed to blur. His vision shifted, the ink swimming into light. The library dissolved around him as something far greater pulled him in.

Another vision?

Must be so.

This one was much blurrier than before. As if the atmosphere was actively working to obscure his eyesight. All bleeding into a dark expanse that stretched without horizon. A garden of black thorns rose out of the void, cruel and tangled, their barbs gleaming faintly beneath a sky that held no stars, no moon, no dawn.

Only night eternal.

In the midst of that barren ground knelt a man. Haruki did not know him. He could not quite make out his face either, for the figure’s head was bowed low. Yet even in silence the weight of his grief was unbearable. Not the trembling of fear, nor the weak shudder of tears, but a sorrow so vast and crushing that the earth itself seemed to split beneath his knees, fissures radiating outward like wounds.

The vision fractured, jagged flashes cutting across his sight.

Now he saw whips lashing – flesh torn open from barbed steel.

Now he saw water crashing over his face – that man hanging from a rope.

Now he saw soldiers – they held his hands down against coal until skin seared off.

Finally…

A stone table.

That stone table.

Cold old.

Above, behold.

The spear drove clean through his chest, piercing heart and bone, and the sound echoed Echoes.

The infinite Echoes of the Spoken.

The Spoken roar of pain, releasing his spirit.

Haruki’s stomach twisted, but before he could cry out the vision shattered again. The table was empty. No broken body lay there, no blood smeared across the stone. Only folded white cloths, neat and untouched, as though prepared…

Prewritten.

Haruki gasped, the library rushing back in a wave. His quill clattered faintly against the desk where his hand had fallen slack. He blinked, heart hammering in his chest. He did not understand what he had just witnessed, nor why it had seized him in the midst of this exam. But he forced a long breath through his nose, steadied his shaking hand, and pushed himself forward. Whatever it meant, there was still a question to answer, and he would have to write.

And so…

He wrote on.

His brain became blank – but his hands moved.

The final toll of the bell marked the end. Quills stilled, parchment shuffled, and a low murmur rippled through the chamber. Elder Oric rose once more, followed by his peers. And his voice carried with its usual jolly, congratulatory weight.

“The written examinations are now concluded. We Elders shall deliberate upon your answers and, after prayer and consideration, the results will be revealed tomorrow evening. Until then, you are dismissed. Rest well, my friends.”

A collective exhale swept the hall, some students leaned back with relief. Others clutched their work as if afraid to let go. The scrape of benches and the shuffle of boots echoed as the candidates sorted themselves out into the cool twilight beyond the library doors.

Haruki lingered near the exit, still half-dazed, his mind tugging in a dozen directions at once. But before he could sink too far into his thoughts, a familiar hand tapped his shoulder.

“Come on,” Kiera said, her silver hair catching the lantern light as she smiled tiredly. “Let’s head back to the dorms. It’s nice that they’re willing to provide us one whole day with these rooms. I intend to enjoy them. Might as well.”

Haruki nodded, then asked:

“So how did you do? What on earth did the question even mean?”

She gave a dramatic groan, throwing her hands up.

“You know, both of us might be doomed all things considered. Absolutely, irreversibly doomed. I am so not the book-smart girl. I just… grabbed whatever looked important and wrote down the biggest words I could find.”

“Gee, if you of all people are toast, then what does that make me?”

She grinned, lightly punching his arm.

“Let’s not think about it anymore. Out of sight, out of mind.”

“Yeah… I’ll try. But after what I saw in that exam room… I don’t know if I can.”

Kiera raised an eyebrow.

“What did you see?”

Haruki hesitated:

“Well – you see…”

The exam chamber was quieter now. Long after the students had left, the lanterns burned low, their glow falling across rows of parchment stacked upon the table. Elder Oric sat with his broad hands resting on one sheet in particular, his expression unusually somber. Deacon Loto stood beside him, peering down with sharp eyes that dared not miss a word.

Together they read in silence. Haruki’s test paper read as such:

“The Spoken did not become lesser by becoming flesh. Nor did He diminish the Voice by entering matter. He revealed that matter could bear the divine – not by force, but by willing surrender. His pain was real. His flesh was real. And yet, what passed through that pain was not weakness, but convergence: Spirit and sinew, the eternal wrapped in wounds, the Voice given lungs. In this, the convergence is not contradiction, but communion.”

Oric’s brow furrowed. These were definitely not the words of some Earthling who had no clue what Sunpeak was. Nor did these words look like those of an actual learned scholar. The phrasing was too raw, too immediate, as though it had poured straight from some hidden vein.

Then his eyes caught the next line, scrawled more hastily than the rest:

“I don’t know what I’m writing. What is this? I can’t stop.”

The Elder leaned back in his chair, lips tightening into a thought.

“He may not even be aware,” Oric murmured. “There’s… no way.”

Deacon Loto’s gaze sharpened.

“Sir?”

“I… it seems to me at least – that my doubt is dwindling by the minute.”

Finally, Oric turned to the very bottom of the page, where the handwriting grew steadier, almost plain. A single sentence, lacking ornament or strange fervor, but more revealing than all the rest.

“I have tried to live. Maybe I want to keep trying.”