I reach the end of the corridor and stop. Before me is a set of adamantine doors clad with heavy panels made of carved wood. The design is cracked and flaking, breaking up the figures sculpted there. Thin, willowy men and women in long robes, with their faces upturned to the stars above them. Navigators. I put my hand to the rough surface of the wood, feeling the thrumming of the ship travel up into my hand. It is irregular and stuttering, almost as if the Vow is a living thing. A dying thing. This close, I realise that I can hear something else, too. Something nearly drowned out by the sounds of the ship. I lean in slowly, and put my ear to the wall and I hear it truly, then. A chorus of whispered voices.

Death is coming.

I step back from the door and draw my main-hand sabre from the scabbard at my hip as another shudder shakes the Vow. There is more creaking and a clicking, and then a bubbling hiss as one of the seals in the wall to my left splits and black, tarry liquid pushes its way through. It starts to spill down the face of the wall. It stinks of death and decay and where it hits the floor, it puddles thickly.

I go to press my free hand against the breach to stop it, but more seals split and burst, and more darkness spills into the corridor, flowing down the walls and forming puddles around my feet. Around my legs. I try to fight my way free of it, but the liquid clings tightly, holding me in place. I shout for Zoric. For Yumia. But the darkness swallows my words whole and then it shifts and boils and takes the shape of a figure that rears to loom over me, swollen and oil-slick and blank as an unfinished statue. I react in a heartbeat, driving my sword straight through the figure of darkness. But it doesn’t split, or slough away. My sword does, until I am left empty-handed with the dark liquid creeping up around my waist. My chest. The weight of all that liquid makes my bones creak and flex, just like the Vow.

‘I am not afraid,’ I snarl at the figure.

You should be, it says. Death is coming.

And then it starts to scream in a thousand voices, as the darkness climbs higher and higher until it fills my mouth and nose and ears. My eyes. Until it drowns me entirely.

Until I wake with a desperate, deep breath.

The chamber I find myself in is wrought in black iron and old plaster and lit by a thousand tiny lights that burn half-heartedly around me, flickering and shuddering in time with the Unbroken Vow’s engines. The dream fades away quickly, but the screams don’t. It’s not a thousand voices I hear now, though. Just one.

Sofika.