I do not honour his words with an answer save to raise my sword and plunge it through his chest hard enough that I feel the point of the blade hit stone. The sorcerer coughs a welter of black blood that scatters over his face and his throat. He looks up at me, the light in his golden eye fading. Then he draws a guttering breath and smiles.

‘Are you ready?’ he asks, and his eye rolls back.

Warpfire explodes from the sorcerer’s body, throwing me backwards through the air. I land on my side on the dais, the question ringing in my ears. I am burning all over again, my armour and skin smouldering. Pain radiates from my chest and arms and legs. From the bones that must be broken there. I hear my Sisters shouting my name as they come running to aid me. See through lidded eyes as the sorcerer reshapes himself with a splintering of bones and armour, becoming a monster. A devil. He rears upright, growing vast and jagged, my sword still buried in his chest.

Stand, Evangeline.

It is not Adelynn’s voice that echoes inside my mind this time, but my own. I roll onto my hands and knees as a pair of tattered, feathered wings unfold from the sorcerer’s back. As he pulls my sword from his chest and snaps it, throwing the pieces to the ground.

Stand. Evangeline!

I scream, and push myself to bended knee. I force myself to stand on splintered bones. To draw the shortblade at my waist. The last of my weapons. I stare the sorcerer down, though my soul is recoiling and my eyes are streaming.

I force myself to sing.

‘O God-Emperor, who is strength. I devote this life to you.’

Around me, my Sisters roar a cheer. They echo my words in battle-worn voices, even as the sorcerer snaps his wings and lunges towards us.

Qi-Oh runs and leaps, drawing her snarling chainsword across the sorcerer’s changed form. The churning teeth gouge his armour and his crystalline flesh, showering Qi-Oh in sparks and fragments and silver ichor. The sorcerer snatches her from the air, his clawed hand closing around her chest. As the sorcerer tightens his grip, cracking Qi-Oh’s armour, she meets my eyes with her own. One crimson. One hazel. Both full of devotion.

‘O God-Emperor, who is grace,’ she sings, still looking at me. ‘I devote this life to you.’