When we dance with dreamfire, we dance with the Gods. So her mother had told her. She’d been right. But this was no Rite of Dreaming. This was not dancing with the dreams of Gods. This was being consumed by them.

Dreams roared through her. Her mind, so fragile and mortal, could make no sense of them.

She was human. She wasn’t meant for this. The dreams of Gods were too huge, too beautiful, simply too much. They were everything that lived and everything that died: a great, weaving circle, the cycles of creation and destruction that molded all things. They were a knife to the hand and a field of metal and blood. They were glass and flame, earth and water, the way birth feels and a blinding tightness akin to dying. They were creation. Creation, in its headiest, purest form. She wasn’t made for this. She was small, far too small to survive.

But Amun had survived this. Over and over again, he had survived. Other Amrithi—the man Gaur, with his missing finger, the nameless older woman who had taught Amun the Rite of the Bound—had done it before him.

And died, a voice said in Mehr’s head. They all died, in the end.

Not Amun. Not yet. And Mehr would not die either. She had to live to find a way to set them both free.

Mehr breathed. She breathed as Amun had taught her in all those long, painful lessons. She breathed until she felt as she had on the day he had held her in his arms, letting her soul tip free from her skin. She breathed and drifted deep into the heart of herself, deep beyond flesh and fear and the animal terror scrabbling at her animal bones. The dreams carried her along with them.

She breathed until she knew she would not drown.

Then she stood, and felt the calm well up in her and run through her blood and her bones. She felt the dreamfire coil around her, winding over and through her, raising her from the earth into the burning winds of the storm. She began to move.

The sigils, which had meant little to her during her training, suddenly seemed to leap into life. They skimmed her hands lightly, rippling off her fingers with their own heady power. They shifted the fire running through her mind and her blood, diverting the flow of those dreams, stemming them and turning them to the call of the mystics’ prayers on the wind. She felt those prayers waver through her own bones. Her scarred skin burned with the weight of the Maha’s presence. She was performing the Maha’s will. She was performing the Rite of the Bound.

It was a relief to know that she could do this. She kept on moving, kept breathing, maintaining the shape of the rite. She just had to make it through the storm.

Her hands suddenly faltered.