A wave of darkness sweeps over me. For a moment I can feel the bony bodies to either side of me in the bed, and they're warm and flesh-covered, almost as if they were breathing a moment ago. The tomb-dust stink is the yeasty smell of bodies from which the life departed only seconds hence. But the really weird thing is that I feel light, and dry, and unspeakably thirsty, a mere shell of my former self. The lines on the canopy overhead are glowing like a gash in the rotten fabric of reality, and I seem to be rising towards it. It's death magic, pure and simple. I can summon the feeders out of night, I can open the way for them to crawl into the empty vessels all around me, buried in the wall niches outside this temple and the holes in the ground above its ceiling, but only if I use myself as a sacrifice, thinning the wall and letting them feed on my mind. The reason cultists prize virgins as human sacrifices is nothing to do with sex and everything to do with innocence. Iris probably thought the morphine would fog me enough to lie back and gurgle at the pretty lights. Or that the training—to never, ever attempt magic in one's own head—would hold. Or perhaps it simply didn't occur to her that I'd take the Samson option. But be that as it may—

Is that what I look like?

I'm looking down on my body from above. I'm a real sight, hog-tied between two irregular mounds in the bedding, gagged, my head split open and bleeding where Jonquil knocked a handful of butterfly sutures loose, my right arm leaking into a messy stain on one pillow. Eyes are closed. I'm floating. Iris is singing and I can understand the harmonies now, I can hear her as she tries to summon something that isn't there.

"Beloved and forsaken! Eater of Souls! Lover of Death! Mother of nightmares! We who are gathered to observe your rite remember you and recall you by name! Come now to this vessel we prepare—"

I've got company up here. I can feel them gather in the darkness, blind curiosity thrusting them close, like sharks butting up against the legs of a swimmer stranded in the middle of an ocean. They're class three abominations. I have summoned them to feed on the rips and gashes of my memory that I dribble in the water of Lethe. I'm not alone up here: and they sense me. Soon one of them will taste me, take a bite of my soul and find that my memories are richly textured and deep. And then I'll begin to lose stuff. I push at them, trying to shove them towards the empty vessels that I have primed, but they aren't having it; I'm far more interesting than any century-dead bag of bones.