I hate the sound of my own name. I hate the whisper of their robes and clothes, and the gentle trailing of fingertips along my armour plates. My scars burn constantly, and my heart even more so. It feels perversely like the Contemplation to me. Pressed in on all sides, and surrounded by whispers. The pressure of it makes me want to scream. To lash out. But I cannot, because Qi-Oh was right. They are all here because of me. So I do not scream. I do not push them away, or turn my back. I stand. I endure. I suffer their devotion until the vox buzzes in my ear and I finally have cause to slip its grasp. As I move, the crowd parts before me, that whisper still following me.

Evangeline. Evangeline.

‘Evangeline.’ Elivia speaks my name too, her voice undercut by static. ‘I need you to come to the Navigation quarter immediately.’

‘Of course,’ I say. ‘For what cause?’

I hear Elivia breathe over the link.

‘The Navigator is dying,’ she says. ‘And she is asking for you.’

It is not just cold in the Chamber of Sail, now. It is frozen. Entombed in ice. It patterns every surface. The deck. The walls. The shuttered viewport and the Navigation throne.

It patterns Lady Tornella Oraylis, too, turning her skin and her blood-spattered cerise robes to silver. The priests attending to the Navigator take their leave as I make my way up the steps towards the foot of her throne. Oraylis is so still that for a moment I think I must be too late. That the God-Emperor has already seen fit to take her. But then the Navigator stirs, cracking the frost on her robes. She smiles, though she cannot see me.

‘Evangeline,’ she says, her voice hoarse. ‘You came.’

I kneel in front of the throne.

‘You called for me,’ I say.

‘He will come for me soon,’ she murmurs, and I notice the thin, dark trails of blood running from her ears. The fitful rise and fall of her chest. ‘But I had to speak with you. To tell you.’

I frown. ‘Tell me what?’

Oraylis moves, then, though she should not be capable of it. She leans forward in the throne and puts her thin, cold hands on my face, her spread fingers making a second set of wings.

‘The darkness here is absolute,’ she says urgently. ‘The beacon too dim to see. And yet I found the way. I knew exactly where to place my feet, though I could not see the path.’

Her hands are trembling, now. So cold they make my scars burn.

‘I do not understand,’ I tell her. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

‘That I found a path through the abyss and beyond it,’ Oraylis says. ‘That it shouldn’t have been possible, but it was.’

My scars burn more fiercely. ‘Like a miracle?’ I ask her.