‘Dragon,’ I murmured, marvelling as ever at her astonishing beauty.

It was no more than a whisper but she looked up, her lips curving into a smile. I felt a stab of sorrow, for though she had once regarded me as a beloved older sister, it was long since she had looked on me with anything but fear and mistrust. A breeze lifted her red-gold hair and moved over the surface of the water, sending ripples out beyond the edges of the pool.

This is a dream, I thought.

I tried to wake but a forest clearing wove itself into a living cage about me, the breeze that fanned my cheeks pungent with the scent of pine needles. A figure appeared before me suspended above the ground, emanating pallid lavender light. Human-shaped but scaled like a fish or a lizard, its eyes were a queer cloudy white, its hair insubstantial as mist.

‘Guildmistress, help us.’

I drew in a breath of astonishment, for the voice of the spirit-form was that of the empath Angina. ‘What do you want of me?’

‘The black sword,’ he answered. ‘You must use it to save Miky.’

‘I am dreaming,’ I told him and willed myself to ascend until I was floating above the clouds through which the pale eldritch dreamtrails wound. I had taken on my winged spirit-form, though I had not wrought the change. A vague sense of unease nudged at me, but I continued to rise until the dreamtrails were barely visible. I had never thought it possible to go higher than them.

The world blurred to misty swathes of colour that bled into one another in a rhythm that mesmerised my senses. I felt myself relaxing and blurring like the colours about me.

Then a shadow fell over me.

Once, in madness, Dragon had taken on the spirit-form of her dreadful namesake to attack me on the dreamtrails, and the memory made me instinctively dive for safety. I flung back a probe to discover what hunted me but could find no mind to engage, there was only a vast gaping darkness full of brutish thrashing power. I tried to retract my probe, but a deadly lethargy flowed along it from the darkness to sap my will.

My descent slowed as darkness grew and thickened about me. Terror fluttered in my throat, frantic as a bird trapped in a chimney, but I could not summon the will to quicken my fall.

‘To wake is the only escape,’ a voice whispered urgently into my ear.

‘I can’t make myself go down!’ I cried. ‘Help me!’