As a child I would walk the halls of our household for hours at night, ­carrying a lantern with me to keep the shadows at bay. My father would often find me in the spire tower with the hunting birds he kept because I found their keening calls a comfort. From there you could see the dawnrise over Marleya’s mountain peaks. He would sit down on the floor beside me, though his wartime wounds pained him, and ask the same question, every time.

What troubles you, my daughter?

I would tell my father of my dreams and the devils in them, and he would listen while the birds keened above us, turning their wings. When I finished speaking he would rest his hand on my head and smile, and say the same few words.

They are just dreams, Ahri, and nothing more.

For a long time, I believed him. I stopped walking the halls and paying visits to the spire tower, and when one night I dreamed of winged creatures who came to speak death in my father’s ear, I didn’t tell him; I just took comfort in those words of his.

They are just dreams, Ahri, and nothing more.

But they were not just dreams. They rarely are.

My father collapsed and died the following day when flying his hunting birds from the spire tower. When I found him, his birds had settled all around him, keening and turning their wings. The physician and the priest who came after said that my father’s heart had failed him. They blamed his wartime wounds and the drinks he would take in the evenings, when he missed the war and missed my mother. They even blamed the responsibility of governorship, but none of those things were to blame. Not really.

I was, because I did not heed my dreams. Because I kept them to myself.

Since then I have always spoken of my dreams. At the schola progenium I spoke of them to the drill-abbots, and when I was selected by Inquisitor Faral Sharvak of the Ordo Hereticus for service as his acolyte, I shared them with him. Sharvak taught me how to find the meaning in my dreams and together we prevented uprisings and toppled cults. We spared lives and damned others, all in the God-Emperor’s name. In the end, I dreamt of Sharvak’s death just as I had my father’s, only this time his death came by blades, not wings. This time I made sure to heed the dream. When I told him, it made him smile.

Well, isn’t that a fine thing, Ahri, he said.

Sharvak was well into his two hundredth year, then, and the sort of tired that serving the ordos makes you if you do it for long enough. He made me swear that I would allow his death to happen. I couldn’t deny him that, not the master who had taught me how to read my dreams. So when those blades came for him only days later, I did not intervene. I allowed it to happen. I remember the moment with absolute clarity. As Sharvak died, he had that same tired smile on his face.