So I do what I always do when I am lost. I take a deep breath, knit my hands in my lap and bow my head to pray. My eyes flicker closed. The sound of the ship recedes. Everything recedes.

And then I feel the cold wind against my scars.

I open my eyes to find myself alone in a vast and edgeless darkness. In my hands I hold a single slender candle topped with a yellow, wending flame that flickers as the cold air pulls at it. The cold air pulls at me, too, despite my armour and my vestments. I take a deep breath, smelling candle smoke and cold stone. Dying flowers. I look around, but the candle flame only offers enough light to see the stone of the floor by. It is grey and old and set in place with mortar that has blackened with age. Inlaid into each stone is the God-Emperor’s aquila, wings spread as if it is about to fly. That is when I recognise this for what it is. A dream. The dream. The one I used to have as a child, before the convents and before Adelynn.

The dream that showed me my purpose.

I start walking through the darkness, following the path laid out by the aquila-stones and shielding the candle from the cold air with my hand, just as I would all of those years ago. I know that I only have to walk as far as the iron gates. That it takes ninety-nine stones to reach them. So I keep walking, and I keep the candle lit and I count my steps until I find myself looking at the iron gates. They bear the same design they always have. The iron likeness of Saint Katherine, with her burning heart in her hands.

I reach out and push against the gate as I would when I dreamed the dream before. I expect to wake, as I always did back then, but I don’t. Instead, the gate swings open and I step into the chamber beyond it. This space is vast too. Dark, just as the path to reach it was. But the darkness here recoils as I pass through it, rolling away like battlefield smoke to reveal a pedestal in the centre of the room. One that is draped with a crimson cloth, a glimmering object resting amongst the folds of the fabric.

The Shield of Saint Katherine.

My scars burn as I approach the pedestal and the shield. The surface of it is gilded. Reflective. It throws my image back at me. My uncertainty.

‘Are you ready?’

I did not see her appear. All at once Adelynn is just there, standing before me on the opposite side of the pedestal. She looks just as she did on the Last of Days, her armour scorched and battered and her scarred face blackened with blood.