No cost is too great.

‘Show me.’

Dagra Thul performs the rites quickly with shaking hands, lighting the circle of ten candles and scattering sanctified water around us from a golden ewer before sitting down again amongst the silks. He takes the heavy pendant from around his neck and presses it to a matching hollow at the centre point of the dais. He is not crying any more, but his face is pale and creased with concern. He glances once more at his choir beneath the glass. Takes a deep breath.

‘We begin,’ Thul says, and he turns the pendant. There is a hiss and a rush like that of wasted lungs as psychotropic drugs are pumped down from the golden vessels around the room’s edge to the psykers below. The temperature drops like a stone as the dreamers begin to dream. As what they are seeing begins to wash upwards through the conductive crystal inlays in the dais.

‘The eagle,’ Thul says. ‘Show us the eagle, ablaze.’

The choir begins to sing, then. To scream. The Reverie washes away like blood in the rain to be replaced by the otherworld of the dreamscape. While my body sits cross-legged on the silks in Thul’s Reverie, my mind inhabits the dream. I find myself standing in a vast darkness where hundreds of thousands of tiny lights surround me, flickering like candles. I can barely register them because of what waits before me. A livid coil of hateful unlight that splits the darkness from edge to endless edge. A false horizon.

‘The Great Rift,’ I say, tasting iron.

‘Yes,’ says Dagra Thul, from beside me. Despite his unwillingness to show me the dream, he is smiling now, in the idiot way of an addict feeding their craving. Blood trickles slowly from his nose. Screams surround us, echoing into the distance.

The Rift pulses. It seems to grow larger. Or closer. Or both. I feel it as heat on my skin, and inside my mind. The pressure is immense.

‘Where is the eagle?’

Thul is still smiling that idiot smile. ‘Wait,’ he says. ‘Just wait.’

The Rift pulses again, growing larger. My nose starts bleeding, too.

‘Thul,’ I say in warning.

He shudders beside me and I cannot tell if it is in pleasure or pain. ‘She approaches,’ he says.

And then I hear it, cutting through the screams. The cry is clear and pure, almost songlike. I look up as the eagle soars overhead, shedding feathers of fire. It flies straight towards the Rift, as unerring as one of Yumia’s darts.

‘No,’ I say, because the eagle will surely be consumed.

‘Watch,’ Thul says, his voice slurring.

The eagle strikes the Rift, and there is a flare of light. For a moment, I am blind, but when I blink my eyes clear I see. The eagle did not strike the Rift. It cut through it into the darkness beyond.

Follow the eagle, Ahri, echoes my father’s voice.

I do not hesitate. I run through the dreamscape with Thul at my heels, shouting at me to stop. To turn back. I don’t. I can’t. I have to know what waits beyond the Rift.