Episode Twenty-Five: "The Trial of the Three Signs — Part One: The Growing"

Queen Aura sends word — the girls have been doing the work of Apprentice Wardens and the time has come for the formal Trial of the Three Signs, which will recognise them as full junior Wardens of the Bright Gate. The Trial takes place in Luminos, in three parts. Part One is Scarlett's: a sealed garden where nothing has grown in six years — since the gate closed, since Dion left. She must wake it. She kneels. She puts her hands in the soil. She speaks to every seed, one at a time, calling them by their nature rather than their name — *the one that reaches, the one that stores light, the one that waits for rain* — and one by one they come. The garden erupts. Trees and flowers and ferns and fruits in a cascading wave of green. The crystal above the sealed garden blazes. Dion watches from the edge. He is very quiet. When Scarlett looks at him, his expression is the photograph-expression. The laughing one. She did this.