The air in the great hall felt… wrong.
Rows upon rows of desks filled the space, each one occupied by someone who had survived the nightmare of the forest. There were hundreds — maybe even thousands — of them, their heads barely visible above the neat lines of identical wooden tables.The desks were spaced precisely one meter apart, not too close, not too far, just enough to make the proximity feel suffocating. Avin's eyes darted around, tracing the rhythm of the arrangement — too organized, too intentional.
"Why are the spaces so small?" he thought. "Surely they have a way of making them farther apart. There's no way this is by accident."
His gaze drifted upward to the high platform at the front of the hall. There, seated behind a long obsidian table, was the silhouette of the examiner — the figure whose presence filled the room like a second gravity. Avin couldn't make out his face, not yet; the man sat half-hidden behind the desk, his head lowered as if reading something unseen.
