The candle flames within their glass sconces gutter and dim as Sir Kresslack begins a slow, measured pace across the rugs, the warmth of the library retreating with each step.

"There are summons you receive in your life that carry no warmth to them. Lord Kemnast's was one. But warmth was never what that summons was about."

Frost creeps along the edges of the stone floor at the margins of the rugs.

"We had been reaching, in the years prior. Not blindly, with intention. Turning back towards our origins, our lineage, the bones of what the Guild of Knights was built upon. The dead noticed. They always do."

Faint outlines flicker in the dimming candlelight near the shelves, armoured shapes, motionless, watching.

"We assembled in the barracks of Osterrych Citadel. Cold. Still. The kind of silence that doesn't let you forget what it is, the quiet of the long dead, and of something older than that. A place that has not changed because it has never needed to."

The spectral shapes hold their stillness.

"Kemnast looked across us. No preamble. No warm welcome. His is not a figure given to either. He told us plainly that a custodian of his order, an Elite Death Knight, had walked among us for some time, watching, testing us in character and quality against a standard none of us had been told existed. Because the standard was never meant to be told. It was meant to be lived."

"The standard was never meant to be told. It was meant to be lived."

His breath misting faintly in the cold, Kresslack stops his pacing.

"Five tests. Three passed. Two failed."

A long pause settles over the room.

"He did not dwell on the failures, and neither will I. A knight who has never failed has never been tested hard enough. What mattered was the tally, and what the tally said about who we had been, quietly, when no one we knew was watching."

His gaze drifts towards a tapestry of knightly lineage.

"He named us adequate."

He resumes after a moment, voice rougher.

"I know how that sounds. But you stand in that place, in that cold, with the first knight looking through you, a being who has watched over his order since before most of what we know existed, and adequate is not a small word. It means the line holds. It means what came before us is not being squandered."

"Adequate is not a small word. It means the line holds."

The cold deepens.

"He cast one arm across the barracks. Those marks in the floor, where they stood their vigil, for longer than any of us can reckon, in the dark, without ceremony, without relief. They built what we have been reaching back towards. And Kemnast had seen us reaching."

One of the spectral shapes near the shelves shifts, almost imperceptibly, into a stance of vigil.

"And so he said, 'As we stood vigil in this place, so too will you.' Not as ceremony. Not as reward. But as recognition, that what we had been striving towards was the right thing, and that the dead who built it were willing to say so."

The candle flames steady themselves, warmth slowly returning to the room as the spectral shapes grow still.

"More of Chivalry opened to us then. The Vigil. Pressed into us the way cold presses into stone, quietly, and completely. He dismissed us. The assembly ended, and we dispersed back to the land of the living."

With another long look at the tapestry, Kresslack speaks his final words to the assembled.

"That tapestry tells you where we came from. Kemnast's summons told us whether we were still worthy of it. The Vigil is not an award. It is a debt, owed to every knight rendered there, who kept watch in that dark long before any of us drew breath. We would do well to remember what that means, and what it asks of us."

"The Vigil is not an award. It is a debt."