She covered her face with her hand as she walked, her eyes closed tight. She could feel the shudder of the dreamfire, as if the earth were reshaping around them. The sand should have abraded her bare feet, but instead it smoothed beneath her footsteps to a slickness like glass. She wished she could open her eyes and take the sight of it in, but she was afraid the storm wouldn’t be as kind to her vision. She took small breaths, too, to protect her lungs.

There was song in the air. The prayers of the mystics. The cries of the daiva. Mehr shivered and went still. The dreamfire was falling. The storm was here.

For a second her eyes snapped open. She looked at Amun, suddenly panicked. She couldn’t do this. She was afraid. She couldn’t.

But it was too late. Mehr saw the dreamfire shower down over Amun’s form, saw his steady, blackened gaze, the trust in his eyes.

The light swallowed him whole.

The storm Mehr had experienced in Jah Irinah had been nothing like this. Jeweled light consumed her body, as it had in Jah Irinah. But the way this storm cloaked her—swallowing her flesh, turning her body to pure flame—terrified her, made her body instinctively flinch from the promise of agony. But there was no agony. Instead she felt a crushing pressure, battering her from all sides, stealing through her blood.

This was the power of the Gods’ dreams, in the very place where they slept and dreamed. This was the power Mehr was expected to turn to his will.

Right now, that task felt utterly impossible. She crumpled to her knees. Amun. She needed Amun. But there was too much light, too much for her to even see the mystics she knew stood all about her. She needed him, but she couldn’t speak, couldn’t reach out.

She sucked in breath after desperate breath, not caring about the sand any longer. She pressed her hands into fists. The cut throbbed.

Slowly, slowly, a calmness welled up inside her.

She didn’t need Amun. Not for this. He’d already taught her what she needed to know. It was up to her now to find the strength to stand up and perform the rite. It was up to her to survive.

She stood up, held the fragments of that calm close, and stopped letting the power crush the strength out of her. Instead she let the power pour in.

Amrithi danced with dreamfire, Mehr knew, because it was as close to the divine as any mortal could come. Falling into the immortal place inside herself, Mehr realized in her last moment of clarity that she was committing an act forbidden to mortals for good reason.