I get to my feet, quickly donning my lightweight, overlapping armour plate. I bind my hair and take my sabres from the weapons rack by the door. They are kin-swords. Identical curved sabres made from steel and polished bone, the lengths of the blades etched with prayers and with wards. I have carried them since I was a girl. Since my father trained me in the way of the Marleyan sword-song. I don’t expect to need the blades. Not here. But it’s always a comfort to carry them.

I leave my chambers and go out into the cool, stone halls of the Fortress Meridia. The halls are empty. The lumens are on the night-cycle, burning low and starlight-pale. The seamless obsidian floor and walls swallow the light as surely as they swallow the sound of my footsteps. The place has the hush of holiness about it, like a tomb. Like a monument to silence. It was not always like this. When Sharvak claimed Meridia as his own, it was a place of purpose and activity. He kept scores of acolytes and sworn swords. Savants and mercenaries. He laid roots here, but that was Sharvak’s way. It is not mine. I prefer to range just as my father’s hunting birds did, returning to roost only when I must. Only when the sky grows too violent to stay aloft.

I walk swiftly through Meridia’s silent halls, going where I always go when I need to speak of my dreams. To my interrogator, and my dream-taker. Sofika. There was a time when she would have simply shared my chamber, but not now. Not after what happened on Hellebore. Now Sofika rests in a chamber of her own, five turns of the stair down from mine, in Meridia’s depths.

As I follow the stairway down, the light begins to change, turning to a soft, yellow glow. It looks like dawnrise, but it isn’t. It’s just the lumens cycling. There are no windows in the Fortress Meridia. Not a single skylight or embrasure. There is little point, with the fortress buried so deep in Terra’s eastern hive-sprawl. Meridia lies far beyond the bounds of the Outer Palace, in the overbearing and overpopulated district of Lamataya. It’s a working district. One of Terra’s multitude of tertiary Administratum hubs, where most people will never live to see the sky. I feel the weight of it bearing down on me as I head further down into the depths. It is a weight of ages, and of significance. When Sharvak first brought me to Meridia, I found it overwhelming. I was born on a world with mountains and gales and with sky enough to spare. That is why Sharvak set Meridia’s lumens to run cycles, to give me a night and a day and alleviate the sense that the Throneworld could crush me without collapsing. Just by merely being. It helps enough, and no more.

When I reach the door to Sofika’s chambers, I give my clearance by voice-print.