THE MITHRAEUM, THE SEAT of the First Reborn! The Sanctuary of the Emperor of the Nine Houses, the bolthole of God—the removing place of hallowed bones, and the ossuary of the steadfast! A space station hidden forty billion light-years from the ever-burning light of Dominicus, lit by thanergetic starlight, set in the midst of the circumstellar disc, an ancient jewel within so much dead gravel.

Your new homestead was perched in the middle of an asteroid field, made up of concentric rings, like a jeweller’s toy. It consisted of habitation quarters—a doughnut ring of them on the outer edge—an inner ring of preparation rooms, a couple of laboratories, a reading room that was bigger than Drearburh, and a storage lazaret where the foodstuffs were held frozen in time, unperishable. The other Lyctors complained that there was a strange aftertaste to thousand-year-old food kept necromantically pure, but you couldn’t taste it. There was also a water-replenishment plant and incidental rooms. The chapel, and God’s rooms, were at the centre. Everything else was for the dead. Arrayed were the bones of the dead and the bodies of the dead and the mummified heads of the dead, and the retrieved flesh-and-skeleton arms of the dead, preserved immediately after they had been blown off the bodies of the previously living, and the ashes of the dead and the hair of the dead and the fingernails of the dead, and the folded skins of the dead and the eyes of the dead, jarred in long and exquisite crystal containers filled with aldehydes. A Lyctor sitting on the outside of the rocky ring that haloed the Mithraeum would not think it hidden: they would see it as a screaming beacon of thanergy—a burning gyre of death—letters writ large in space, HERE IS THE GRAVEYARD AND WE ARE THE GRAVES.

Your first months of Lyctorhood passed in an echoing, vaulted set of sterile rooms specially allotted to you. They were neutrally coloured in whites and greys and blacks, scrupulously clean, and relatively empty of bones. Unlike Ianthe’s, they had never been used. They had been intended for a Lyctor who had never slept between their sheets, or hung their clothes in the closets, or bathed their face in the water-pump sink. To you, who had lived and breathed the aged dust of family members past, and worn their clothes and used their things, to get an unused set of rooms was new and enticing. You folded your clothes into drawers that had never seen clothes and kept the few small items in your bureau neat and organised, finding some measure of satisfaction in returning each night to such a place. You had never become content, and you were still helpless, but you might take chilly gratification in the small things.