I have to know if I am right.

Thul grabs hold of my arm as I plunge into the Rift just as the eagle did. As we fall together through the livid scar, I catch glimpses of a dozen bloody moments in Thul’s past. I see him trading for dream-slaves. Killing to get what he wants. I see that cyber-mastiff of his worrying a rival to death while he watches, smiling. I see him discarding those dreamers too weak to remain in his choir, their minds addled by the drugs he feeds them.

But Thul’s bloody moments are not the only ones I see. Mine boil up through the darkness, too. The tortures I underwent while training at the schola progenium. Mind-tricks and interrogations and drug-induced numbness. My first purges with Sharvak. A dozen worlds, burning. I see assassinations and interrogations. Executions. I see Zoric and Yumia screaming as their minds are scrubbed of what they have witnessed in my service. The things that they have done.

Then comes Hellebore. I see the undercrofts. The Resonance. A hollow chamber built ages past by long-dead disciples of the Thorian dogma. Resurrectionists, like me. The chamber lies forgotten, buried deeply beneath Hellebore’s surface by war and by time. It is preserved perfectly, down to the aquila signs painted onto the stone in gold. I see the four of us enter the chamber together, expecting to find the Conduit, but instead finding a monster clad in cobalt and gold, wearing a serpent’s mask. I see him reshape the Resonance into a vastness of fractured glass. I see a gateway open wide overhead like an unblinking eye. A doorway to the abyss beyond. From it, devils descend in droves.

We were wrong, Sofika says, from beside me, her mountain-sky eyes filled with tears. This isn’t the place.

Then Sofika is torn away from me by the sorcerer. I go after her, just as I did then. I cut my way through the devils and the storm itself. But I can’t change it. The sorcerer turns his staff, and the storm strikes my dream-taker. Sofika screams, haloed by blood and lightning, and then she crashes to the ground, landing crumpled and still. Broken, like the multicoloured glass. I cut down the last of the devils and stagger to where she lies, falling to my knees beside her only for everything to stop. The storm, the screaming. The wind. Everything is frozen, save for me and the sorcerer. I look up, just as I did then to see him standing over me, clad in cobalt and gold. His serpent’s mask tilts downwards and he speaks in a voice like shifting sand. A voice that has haunted me since that day.

Not yet, he says, and he sounds as though he’s smiling.

But then the storm goes and the sorcerer with it and I am no longer falling through my own memories and mistakes. I am standing with Dagra Thul in a vast and vaulted hall, surrounded by thousands of crooked candles. Tiny lights. Statues line the walls on either side of me, all draped in heavy crimson cloth that stirs in the cold, stale air. Gilded bones set into the walls and floor catch the candlelight. No skulls, or longbones. Just countless skeletal hands, all making the sign of the aquila, like those painted in the Resonance on Hellebore. One statue stands alone in the middle of the chamber. It is hung with a crimson shroud, just like the others. A figure stands before it, perfectly still.