Tavi staggered inside. Though outside the storm still raged behind him, within the Memorium, those sounds came only as something very distant and wholly irrelevant. The vast scream of the storm was broken here to near silence. Here in the dome there was only the slight ripple of water, the crackle of flame, and the sleepy chirp of a bird.

The interior of the dome was made not of marble, but of crystal, the walls of it rising high and smooth to the ceiling twenty feet above. Once, the scale and grandeur of the place had instilled in Tavi a sense of awe. Now, he saw it differently. He knew the scale and difficulty of furycraft it had taken to raise this place from the ground, and his awe was based not upon the beauty or richness of the structure but upon the elegance of the crafting that had created it.

Light came from the seven fires that burned without apparent fuel around the outside of the room, simulated flames that were far more difficult to create than the steady glow of any furylamp. That irregular, warm light rose through the crystal, bending, refracting, splitting into rainbows that swirled and danced with a slow grace and beauty within the crystal walls—crystal that would have long since cracked and fractured had it been wrought with anything less than perfection of furycraft.

The floor in the center of the dome was covered by a pool of water, perfectly still and as smooth as Amaranth glass. All around the pool grew rich foliage, bushes, grass, flowers, even small trees, still arranged as neatly as though kept by a gardener—though Tavi hadn’t seen the place since he was fifteen. The woodcrafting needed to establish such a self-tending garden was astonishing. Gaius Sextus, it seemed, had known more about the growth of living things than Tavi did, despite the differences in their backgrounds.

Between each of the fires around the walls stood seven silent suits of armor, complete with scarlet capes, the traditional-style bronze shields, and the ivory-handled swords of Septimus’s singulares. The armor stood mute and empty upon nearly formless figures of dark stone, eternally vigilant, the slits in their helmets focused upon their charge. Two of the suits were missing weapons—Tavi and Amara had taken them for protection on that night so long ago.

At the center of the pool rose a block of black basalt. Upon the block lay a pale shape, a statue of the purest white marble, and Tavi stared at the representation of his father. Septimus’s eyes were closed, as though sleeping, and he lay with his hands folded upon his breast, the hilt of his sword beneath them. He wore a rich cloak that draped down over one shoulder, and beneath that was the worked breastplate of a somewhat ostentatious Legion officer rather than the standard-issue lorica Tavi had on.