Samantha: The Test She Was Never Asked to Take

Samantha: The Test She Was Never Asked to Take Samantha gets through the riddles. What makes her worth trusting is what she does after the riddles end. In Grimm Fairy Tales #48, “The Good Witch,” her journey begins with a promise that has apparently gone wrong. Sela has helped her escape, but the mirror that should have taken her home deposits her in a frozen wilderness. Samantha is alone, frightened, and nowhere near the ordinary life she expected to recover. Her first useful discovery is small. She needs light, and a glowing light appears in her hand. She has not arrived with a complete understanding of her abilities. She is finding out what she can do because the situation demands it. That is the pattern of her journey. A monstrous creature named Abadon threatens to feed her to his children unless she answers a riddle. Farther along, Tiamat, guardian of the Lake of Frozen Souls, presents another. A huge birdlike creature offers a third. Samantha keeps moving not because she can overpower every creature in her path, but because she can think her way through what they ask. The answers connect to her mother. Samantha remembers a childhood shaped by isolation, stories, and a necklace associated with other realms. Her mother kept her away from the outside world, and that relationship is not presented as uncomplicated or happy. Yet the knowledge Samantha carries from it becomes useful in a world she has never visited before. That gives the riddles a more personal function than simply proving she is clever. Things that once belonged to an enclosed childhood become tools for surviving outside it. She can recognize another perspective, connect a story to a problem, and question the assumptions built into a question. Then a creature attacks without offering her a question at all. The banderwolf charges, and Samantha responds with the wand Tiamat gave her. The attack leaves the creature down and badly hurt. Her immediate reaction is not triumph. She is surprised by what she has done, apologizes, and approaches it. She can hear its thoughts. She understands that it was hungry. Instead of treating that understanding as irrelevant because it attacked her first, she reaches toward it with a glowing hand. Shang appears and explains that hearing the creature is part of her gift. He says the banderwolf will be fine. More importantly, he tells Samantha that she showed mercy when none was asked for. That matters more to him than merely getting the answers right. It is the issue's strongest distinction between having power and being suited to use it. Samantha can defend herself. She can also stop defending herself when the immediate danger has passed. The wounded creature does not have to negotiate for compassion before she offers it. None of this means she has finished learning. The issue opens with Shang training her, and his lesson about keeping her guard up is deliberately rough. When she answers his blow with a magical counterattack, he is pleased. The capacity for force is not being removed from her character. It is being placed beside judgment. By the end, Sela tells Samantha that protecting Earth from the Darkhorde may fall to her if the others do not return. Meanwhile, Shang and Nissa discuss a truth about her father that Samantha still does not know. She is being trusted with an enormous responsibility before she has been trusted with the whole story of herself. That tension keeps the ending from being a simple graduation scene. Samantha has passed the tests, but the people testing her are still keeping secrets. Her most convincing qualification is the choice she made without knowing anyone was evaluating it: she saw an injured enemy, understood its hunger, and helped.