We are your duty and your destiny. It was foolish to talk to them. They weren’t alive. They had no more free will than termites gnawing their way through timber, but they would never relent until they overran her mind or she shut them away completely.

Isabelle closed her eyes and turned her attention inward to the breach. When her sister had planted her vitera in Isabelle’s brain, it had laid out the foundation for transforming her into a full-fledged Fenice. Isabelle had ripped the vitera out of her skull before the transformation was complete, but not before seed had been planted, and now the crop grew wild.

In a place she could only describe as the back of her mind there was a rift, a gash in her consciousness that was as real to her senses as any wound in her flesh. She could poke it and prod it, and push her mind’s eye through it into the everdream.

Here was the place where all of her ancestral memories lived. By all accounts it was supposed to be like a lucid dream, where she could meet her ancestors’ memories and experience their lives.

Instead, her ancestors reached for her through the fissure as if they were damned souls trying to breach the Ravenous Gate. She was put in mind of those old stories where a soul might escape Torment if only it could trick someone into taking its place.

She would not let them take her. This was her mind, not a hostel for hostile relatives. But she did have to check on the state of the breach. With the help of Gretl’s potion, the wound had been shrinking. Today’s hallucinations had not helped, and the edges had gone raw and ragged. She’d have to be very strict about taking her formula, but hopefully by the time the expedition was over, the breach would heal completely, and entomb the unquiet dead forever.

I cannot die as long as you live, said one voice in the center of the mob. You are my child, my seed. Everything you are you owe to me. Isabelle had no trouble guessing who that ancestor was, her most famous ancestor, Primus Maximus, whose boundless need for war and victory had launched the Kindly Crusade and led to the very disaster in which the flagship Conquest was lost. Everything about her ancestral chorus carried the taint of his madness.

Isabelle felt the drug taking hold, turning her thoughts to mush. She withdrew from from her inspection and opened her eyes to the outside world again. Tomorrow everything would be better. Tomorrow she would set sail.