He holds out his hand, but I don’t reach for it. I reach for the pendant around my neck instead. It takes two tries to close my numb fingers around the iron halo. I squeeze it with the strength I have left to me and watch blood bubble over my fingers.

‘This isn’t real,’ I tell him, though the pendant says different.

‘Come now, Ahri,’ my father says, smiling. ‘You know better than anyone just how real dreams can be.’

I hesitate for a moment, but then I let go of the pendant and reach out to him. He takes hold of my hand and pulls me to my feet with ease, somehow stronger now than I ever remember him being in life. I realise that the whispers have stopped. That everything has stopped. The abominations are all frozen. Locked in place, like statues. Zoric and Yumia are frozen, too. They are downed, caught mid-struggle. Bloodied, but alive.

‘How?’ I ask.

My father doesn’t answer me. He merely nods towards the mess that remains of the last Navigator Awaiting. To the doorway yawning in its flesh. That is frozen, too. My father puts a blade in my hand. I look down at it. It is mine, though I didn’t see him pull it from the crystal creature. I curl my fingers around the hilt of it.

‘The killing cut,’ my father says.

I nod. Sway on my feet, and then I stagger forwards through the frozen storm of blood and glass. I run, though I’m still bleeding. Jump, though it dazzles my vision. I raise my sword and bring it down through the Navigator. Through the doorway. The moment that my prayer-etched sword touches it, time reasserts itself with a deafening boom. The Navigator screams so loudly that it knocks me backwards onto the decking. But it is done. Light blares out of the cut I made, and the doorway – and what remains of the Navigator – folds in on itself with a crunching of bone and a tearing of flesh until there is nothing left of either. All around me, the abominations splinter and come apart, turning to little more than glittering glass dust.

‘We don’t die here,’ I say absently, and I look up at my father.

He smiles as though he is proud, then he turns and walks away. ‘I will see you again soon,’ he says.

I open my mouth to answer him, but he has already disappeared. I heave myself back to my feet as Zoric and Yumia reach my side. Getting up should hurt, but it doesn’t, which probably means I’ve lost a good deal of blood.

‘Throne,’ Zoric says, between breaths. ‘You killed it.’

I look down at the blade in my hand, and nod.

‘I didn’t even see you move,’ he says.

‘You were caught in the spell,’ I tell him. ‘That’s why.’