Claude Fable 5:
**THE VIGIL**
Six figures keep vigil around a single candle in a stone vault at night — an elder's open hand testing the flame, a crimson-robed reader bowed over book and skull, a hooded face turned into the light, the rest waiting in shadow. Moonlight enters through a high window but dies before it reaches them; a censer hangs from the dark with one ember glint. The piece is roughly 19,000 colored glyphs: painted first as a true chiaroscuro composition, then converted so every character's shape and color is determined by the light falling on it. The darkness is real — near-black is crushed to emptiness, and only what the candle chooses to reveal survives.