“That’s what they say,” Achamian replies, savouring his smoke. “That the Dreams are a goad to action, a call to arms. That by suffering the First Apocalypse over and over, we had no choice but to war against the possibility of the Second.”

“You think otherwise?”

A shadow falls across his face. “I think that your adoptive father, our glorious, all-conquering Aspect-Emperor, is right.” The hatred is plain in his voice.

“Kellhus?” she asks.

An old man shrug—an ancient gesture hung on failing bones. “He says it himself, Every life is a cipher …” Another deep inhalation. “A riddle.”

“And you think Seswatha’s life is such.”

“I know it is.”

And then the Wizard tells her. About the First Holy War. About his forbidden love for her mother. About how he was prepared to gamble the very World for the sanctuary of her arms. There is a candour to his telling, a vulnerability that makes it all the more compelling. He speaks plaintively, lapsing time and again into the injured tone of someone convinced others do not believe them wronged. And he speaks slyly, like a drunk who thinks he confides terrible secrets …

Even though Mimara has heard this story many times, she finds herself listening with an almost childish attentiveness, a willingness to be moved, even hurt, by the words of another. He has no idea, she realizes, that this story has become song and scripture in the world beyond his lonely tower. Everyone knows he loved her mother. Everyone knows that she chose the Aspect-Emperor and that Achamian subsequently fled into the wilderness …

The only secret is that he still lives.

With these thoughts her wonder quickly evaporates into embarrassment. He seems overmatched, tragically so, wrestling with words so much larger than himself. It becomes cruel to listen as she does, pretending not to know what she knows so well.

“She was your morning,” she ventures.

He stops. For a heartbeat his eyes seem to lose something of their focus, then he glares at her with a kind of compressed fury. He turns to tap his pipe against a stone jutting from the matted leaves.

“My what?”

“Your morning,” Mimara repeats hesitantly. “My mother. She used to tell me that … that she was your morning.”

He holds the bowl to the firelight for inspection. “I no longer fear the night,” he says with an absent intensity. “I no longer dream as Mandate Schoolmen dream.” When he looks up, there is something at once flat and decisive in his eyes. The memory of an old and assured resolution.

“I no longer pray for the morning.”