Editor's Note
The rise of light brought trials. The tongues that test devotion would press hardest against the brightest flame. The tale that follows records one such trial in terrible detail. It is fragmentary; the instruments and places are named in whispers. What remains is the heart of the story.
Chapter V — The Tortured Saint
There was one beloved of Chayim whose heart shone brighter than most—Elior, a child of the third generation of Saints, blessed at twelve summers when the techniques were refined but the trials had grown more severe than ever before. Old enough to understand devotion, young enough for his faith to burn with pure flame, he had been gentle and present from his earliest years—he healed, guided, and bore burdens without complaint. Mortals called him wise beyond his years; Saints called him luminous.
The Shadows noticed.
The other Animas, bound by the Divine Decree they themselves had sworn to uphold, could only watch and grieve. For this was the test that would define whether light could endure against the deepest darkness.
They came first as night whispers: "You are weak… you cannot protect them." He awoke with knots of fear, but Chayim's spark steadied him.
Then the Shadows struck in full. They seized him under cover of night and dragged him into a chamber of instruments no mortal should behold. The walls hummed with malice, carved with symbols that hurt to perceive.
What followed were seven years of torment beyond description—cruelties too terrible to name, violations of body and spirit that would have broken any lesser soul. In the deepest dark, when the pain became a language he alone understood, Elior would close his eyes and remember the feel of sun-warmed stone beneath his bare feet at age eleven, the day Chayim's light had first filled him. He held to that single memory as a man in a storm holds to a lone, rooted tree. The Shadows sought to unmake not just his flesh but his very essence, to prove that even the purest light could be extinguished. They whispered constantly of surrender, of the peace that would come if he would only yield, only accept the darkness they offered.
Through it all, Elior held fast to a single truth: the God who had chosen him would not abandon him. Even when his voice grew too hoarse to pray aloud, his heart continued its silent litany of faith. Even when pain became his only constant companion, he refused to let bitterness take root.
"My soul remains mine," he would whisper in the darkest hours. "My light remains His."
Finally, after seven long years, the Shadows offered their ultimate temptation: "Yield now, and this will end. Become one with us, and no device, no pain can touch you again. You have suffered enough—surely your God does not require more."
Elior, broken in body but unbroken in spirit, found strength he did not know he possessed. He rose as best he could, voice thin but steady: "No. I would rather die than become what I despise. My God chose me for this moment, and I choose Him still. My soul remains mine, even if my flesh must be broken."
The Shadows recoiled. They had expected years of agony to bend him. Since he had chosen death over corruption, they granted death as his reward.
When Elior—most beloved of Chayim, most cherished among all Saints—died after seven years of faithful endurance, something in Chayim shattered. Her grief was a tidal force, vast and inconsolable. She did not weep; she turned cold, her flowing light hardening into a resolve as terrible as it was absolute. She went before the Conclave of Animas, a council led by Chotam, the Guardian of Seals, for his word was unbreaking and his impartiality, unquestioned.
"They have broken the vessel of innocence," Chayim declared, her voice the sound of a river freezing over. "The world has allowed this. It must be cleansed. Let the waters rise." Her grief had forged a temporary, terrible alliance between the Balance she represented and the Faction of Truth.
Emet, the Revealer of Witness, stood firm with his faction. "This is collective punishment," his voice cut with clarity. "It is a truth that the guilty walk free, but it is also truth that the innocent will suffer. This is not justice; it is vengeance."
Anani, the voice of Mystery, countered him. "We cannot see the paths this will open. But to do nothing is also a choice. The mystery of renewal often requires the terror of the unknown." His faction stood with him, Ruach fearing the stillness such a flood would bring, and Matani mourning the abundance it would destroy.
The vote was deadlocked. The Faction of Truth and a grief-maddened Chayim versus the Faction of Mystery. All eyes turned to Yoni, the final pillar of Balance. She wept, torn between Emet's harsh truth and Anani's fearful mystery. The peace she cherished was being torn apart from within.
"I cannot bear this," Yoni whispered. "I cannot choose a path that promises only suffering. I abstain. I will not be part of this."
Her abstention broke the deadlock. With Balance withdrawn, the temporary alliance of Truth and Chayim's grief held the majority.
The Flood was decreed.
The grief of a mother, weaponized by divine decree, was made manifest. For seven long years after his passing—matching exactly the duration of his torment—storms would not cease. But this was no ordinary deluge: each drop of rain carried both the echo of Elior's suffering and the weight of Chayim's boundless, sanctioned sorrow. Those touched by these waters felt, for the briefest moment, a fragment of that pain—not enough to destroy, but enough to remember, enough to understand what their world's callousness had cost.
Elior's refusal—death over yielding, faith over corruption—etched itself into the very fabric of creation. It was a wound and a beacon: a terrible lesson that defiance in the face of ultimate darkness could cost everything and yet keep the soul whole. And the Flood became a testament to a more terrible truth: that even divine love, when broken, could vote for its own terrible justice.