I have always had dark dreams.
As a child I would walk the halls of our household for hours at night, carrying a lantern with me to keep the shadows at bay. My father would often find me in the spire tower with the hunting birds he kept because I found their keening calls a comfort. From there you could see the dawnrise over Marleya’s mountain peaks. He would sit down on the floor beside me, though his wartime wounds pained him, and ask the same question, every time.
What troubles you, my daughter?
I would tell my father of my dreams and the devils in them, and he would listen while the birds keened above us, turning their wings. When I finished speaking he would rest his hand on my head and smile, and say the same few words.
They are just dreams, Ahri, and nothing more.
For a long time, I believed him. I stopped walking the halls and paying visits to the spire tower, and when one night I dreamed of winged creatures who came to speak death in my father’s ear, I didn’t tell him; I just took comfort in those words of his.
They are just dreams, Ahri, and nothing more.
But they were not just dreams. They rarely are.
My father collapsed and died the following day when flying his hunting birds from the spire tower. When I found him, his birds had settled all around him, keening and turning their wings. The physician and the priest who came after said that my father’s heart had failed him. They blamed his wartime wounds and the drinks he would take in the evenings, when he missed the war and missed my mother. They even blamed the responsibility of governorship, but none of those things were to blame. Not really.
I was, because I did not heed my dreams. Because I kept them to myself.
Since then I have always spoken of my dreams. At the schola progenium I spoke of them to the drill-abbots, and when I was selected by Inquisitor Faral Sharvak of the Ordo Hereticus for service as his acolyte, I shared them with him. Sharvak taught me how to find the meaning in my dreams and together we prevented uprisings and toppled cults. We spared lives and damned others, all in the God-Emperor’s name. In the end, I dreamt of Sharvak’s death just as I had my father’s, only this time his death came by blades, not wings. This time I made sure to heed the dream. When I told him, it made him smile.
Well, isn’t that a fine thing, Ahri, he said.
Sharvak was well into his two hundredth year, then, and the sort of tired that serving the ordos makes you if you do it for long enough. He made me swear that I would allow his death to happen. I couldn’t deny him that, not the master who had taught me how to read my dreams. So when those blades came for him only days later, I did not intervene. I allowed it to happen. I remember the moment with absolute clarity. As Sharvak died, he had that same tired smile on his face.
Since then I have earned my own rosette and my own acolytes, and I have followed my dark dreams wherever they might take me. Since the opening of the Rift it has become a trial to watch them unfold. I have scratched at my face and my throat in my sleep. I have shouted myself hoarse. Shouted my retinue awake. But not this time. This time, when I wake to the grey darkness of my chambers, I am smiling.
I get up from the carved wooden chair I fell asleep in and start looking for the words that will prove it. My desk is covered in rolled scrolls and star charts and books and binders, as is the floor around it. As is almost every surface in my chambers, save for the cot in the corner, which I haven’t slept in for weeks. It’s a bad habit, keeping everything in such disarray. I haven’t always been this way. This much of a mess.
I go through the texts on my desk at speed. Lifting them and turning them and dislodging stacks of parchment in my search for those words. Every book and scroll and scrap of paper here is ancient, and immensely valuable. Almost certainly unique. But none of them are what I’m looking for. I step over and around the stacks of books and scrolls on the floor, too, moving and disturbing each of them in turn until finally I find it.
‘There you are,’ I say to the book in my hand.
It is small and slim and bound in battered old leather. It has no title. No author. There is no imprint or printer’s mark. It is hand-bound, and handwritten, and just holding it brings back the smell of mountain air, and cold, old stone. It brings back my father’s voice.
What troubles you, my daughter?
I open my father’s journals, and flip through to the last pages. To the verses I remember so clearly from my childhood. I trace my finger along the old words written in faded blue ink. My hand shakes as I do it, just a little. I reach the end of the page and realise that I am holding my breath. I let it go, slowly. Close the book slower. I want to believe that this is it. But I can’t. Not yet. I have been fooled before.
I reach up to my collar and pull the pendant I wear from beneath my indigo tunic. It is something else that once belonged to my father. A skull wearing a ten-pointed halo. I roll the pendant in my hand, feeling the weight and the texture of the Marleyan smokestone. The way it warms to my hands. Every tiny toolmark and imperfection. Then I curl my fingers around the pendant and squeeze it tightly. So tightly that the spiked halo pierces my skin.
I open my hand again and look at the ten tiny points of blood welling up in my palm. It’s a test. The method by which I can prove that I’m awake, and this isn’t just a continuation of my dream. In my dreams, the points of the pendant never make me bleed. Knowing I’m awake is only the first test, though. Knowing I’m right is much more crucial. For that, I need a second opinion.
I get to my feet, quickly donning my lightweight, overlapping armour plate. I bind my hair and take my sabres from the weapons rack by the door. They are kin-swords. Identical curved sabres made from steel and polished bone, the lengths of the blades etched with prayers and with wards. I have carried them since I was a girl. Since my father trained me in the way of the Marleyan sword-song. I don’t expect to need the blades. Not here. But it’s always a comfort to carry them.
I leave my chambers and go out into the cool, stone halls of the Fortress Meridia. The halls are empty. The lumens are on the night-cycle, burning low and starlight-pale. The seamless obsidian floor and walls swallow the light as surely as they swallow the sound of my footsteps. The place has the hush of holiness about it, like a tomb. Like a monument to silence. It was not always like this. When Sharvak claimed Meridia as his own, it was a place of purpose and activity. He kept scores of acolytes and sworn swords. Savants and mercenaries. He laid roots here, but that was Sharvak’s way. It is not mine. I prefer to range just as my father’s hunting birds did, returning to roost only when I must. Only when the sky grows too violent to stay aloft.
I walk swiftly through Meridia’s silent halls, going where I always go when I need to speak of my dreams. To my interrogator, and my dream-taker. Sofika. There was a time when she would have simply shared my chamber, but not now. Not after what happened on Hellebore. Now Sofika rests in a chamber of her own, five turns of the stair down from mine, in Meridia’s depths.
As I follow the stairway down, the light begins to change, turning to a soft, yellow glow. It looks like dawnrise, but it isn’t. It’s just the lumens cycling. There are no windows in the Fortress Meridia. Not a single skylight or embrasure. There is little point, with the fortress buried so deep in Terra’s eastern hive-sprawl. Meridia lies far beyond the bounds of the Outer Palace, in the overbearing and overpopulated district of Lamataya. It’s a working district. One of Terra’s multitude of tertiary Administratum hubs, where most people will never live to see the sky. I feel the weight of it bearing down on me as I head further down into the depths. It is a weight of ages, and of significance. When Sharvak first brought me to Meridia, I found it overwhelming. I was born on a world with mountains and gales and with sky enough to spare. That is why Sharvak set Meridia’s lumens to run cycles, to give me a night and a day and alleviate the sense that the Throneworld could crush me without collapsing. Just by merely being. It helps enough, and no more.
When I reach the door to Sofika’s chambers, I give my clearance by voice-print.
‘Ahri Ravara,’ I say. ‘Clearance code, nightsky.’
The cogitator churns and ticks over, and then the lumen flicks from red to green and the heavy door slides open. The room inside is circular, with the same obsidian walls and floor as the rest of Meridia. In here, though, it is not dawnrise. It is a permanent nightscape, with hundreds of tiny string-lumens hanging in loops and whorls against the black stone like stars against the void. Sofika stirs as I cross the room and take the same seat I always take. A simple wooden stool. I lace my hands in my lap.
‘It looks like a good evening, Sofika,’ I say.
‘It is,’ she replies absently. ‘With such bright stars.’
I look up at her then. At my confessor, and my dream-taker. My loyal interrogator of fifteen years’ service. My Sofika.
Or what remains of her.
Sofika Vorros is held upright, connected by tubes and braces and cables to the support system built around her. Her legs are gone, as is most of her body below the abdomen. A set of bellows breathes for her, and machines pump a constant supply of blood and fluids around what remains of her body. Sofika’s robes hang from her, and her cheeks have lost their colour. Her fair hair has thinned and fallen out in clumps, and there is a distance in her eyes, that fogs the mountain-sky blue of them. One thing hasn’t changed, though. She still smiles at the sight of me.
‘More dreams?’ Sofika asks.
‘Aren’t there always,’ I reply.
She nods. The movement is diminished by her connection to the machine that has kept her from dying since Hellebore, months ago.
‘Let me see,’ Sofika says, and she reaches out and puts both of her thin, cold hands on my face.
The connection is instant, and strong. Sofika’s gifts were the only part of her not to suffer on Hellebore. Instead, they grow stronger with every passing day. With every moment that Sofika spends in the machine. Her power washes over me like a storm surge, and it feels as though I have lost my balance. Like floating and sinking, all at once. The chamber and the false nightscape and Sofika’s machine bleed away, and the world upends and inverts. I taste iron and ice, and cannot help but blink reflexively.
When I open my eyes again, it is to another vaulted hallway. Not Meridia. This one is lit by flickering candles. Hundreds of them. Thousands, perhaps. The floor and the walls are made from a pale, veined stone, the pieces crazed together like pottery shards. The sound of a storm echoes through the hallway, sending a bitter wind to pull insistently at the candle flames, and at the light of the lantern in my hand.
‘This place…’ Sofika says.
I glance at her. As always, Sofika is whole again in the dreamscape. She is clad in lightweight, flexible armour like mine, her pale hair bound with a series of gold cuffs. She carries not a sword, but a bladed polearm that she leans on like a staff. Her body is rounded and well-muscled and her blue eyes are pin-sharp and keen. It is how she looks when I remember her. How she looked on the day that she should have died.
‘This is Marleya,’ she says. ‘The governor’s palace.’
I nod. ‘Home,’ I say.
We set off down the hallway together, Sofika murmuring softly beside me as she takes in every part of the dreamscape. Often in dreams the shape of a place is different and distorted, but not here. Save for the candles, this fragment of my home is exactly as I remember it, right down to the smell. Candle smoke and rain and cold air, and beneath that the earthy tang of whisperpines. Every hanging drape is where it should be. Every book and roll of parchment posted into the niches in the walls.
‘I have spent so many years inside your dreams,’ Sofika says. ‘Never once have I seen this place.’
‘Because I have not dreamt of it since I left it,’ I say. ‘Not for forty years.’
I raise the lantern a little higher. The wind tugs at the flame, trying its best to blow it out, but the light perseveres.
‘Here,’ I say, and I point to the stairway leading off and upwards. The bare stone steps are smoothed by the passing of feet over generations. If I listen carefully, I can hear the keening cries of birds echoing down from above.
‘Ahri,’ Sofika says, because she knows of the spire tower, and what it means. She knows almost everything about me, for better or worse.
I shake my head, and start up the steps. They are steep and narrow and curl around and around in a spiral. The keening of birds grows louder and louder until the stairs give way to the roost at the top of the spire tower. The floor is littered with feathers and flakes of straw that turn in the wind coming through the large, glassless windows. Several hunting birds sit with their claws hooked around their resting posts, crying into the storm. I don’t look at them. Neither does Sofika. We are both looking at the two figures standing with their backs to us, gazing out over the mountains and the terrible storm that crowns them.
The first is tall, with broad shoulders that suggest a strength he once had. He is clad in robes of regal blue and leans his weight on a gilded wooden cane, easing the pressure on his old wounds. The other is just a child, barefoot and clad in nightclothes with a lantern in her hand. She looks strangely fragile with her long, dark hair catching in the wind just as the flame inside the lantern does. Sofika follows me as I move to stand beside them at the open window.
‘You need not carry the lantern much longer,’ my father says, to my younger self.
Just like the hallway and the stairs and the spire tower, his voice is exactly as I remember it, even if his words are not. His profile is, too. His steep, dark brows and the broken step of his nose. His deep, old scars. It is almost too exact for a dream. I rest my hands on the worn stone sill of the window, feeling the cold stone under my hands. The mountain air on my face is colder still, and flecked with rain.
‘Why?’ the younger me asks.
My father nods out towards the distant mountain range. I can see the tiny shape of a single bird approaching through the storm. I shouldn’t be able to see it, because it is still dark, but the bird bears its own light like the lantern in my hand does. Its feathers burn brightly against the violet thunderheads and pre-dawn shadows. It sheds them with every beat of its wings, leaving a glittering trail in its wake.
‘She is returning to the spire,’ he says. ‘Dawnrise will follow soon after.’
‘How do you know?’ the younger me asks. ‘What if dawnrise never comes, and the night stays in its place?’
My father smiles and looks at the younger me with patience.
‘Dawnrise will come,’ he says. ‘It is inevitable. For there to be such a thing as night, there must be a day, after all. You just have to wait.’
The younger me shakes her head. ‘But I am afraid,’ she says, with the sort of honesty that I have long since left behind. ‘It has been dark for so long.’
My father leans his cane against the tower wall and picks up the younger me, holding her up so that she can better see the sky beyond. I clearly see the pain in his face as he does it.
‘Follow the eagle ablaze, Ahri,’ he says, and points. ‘You will see. The light will not be far behind, and it will burn all of the shadows away.’
I do see it, then. A blinding golden light behind the eagle that fills the sky, edge to edge. It banishes the storm with ease. It makes my eyes well with tears. It is more than gold, really. More than light.
It is divine.
The light rolls onwards with the eagle at its heart until it is all I can see. Until I am surrounded by light and heat and an incredible warmth, not just on my skin, but my soul. Everything else starts to bleed away in the face of it. My father’s birds go first, then the spire tower and the mountains. The younger me disappears too, leaving Sofika and I standing with my father, bathed in that divine, golden light.
‘Follow the eagle, Ahri,’ my father says again, and this time I could swear that he is speaking to the now-me, and that he sees me just as clearly as I do him, but then the eagle vanishes and so does my father, and I am returned in a dizzying instant to the Fortress Meridia.
Sofika lets her hands fall from my face, slowly. They are so cold that it feels as though they leave prints.
‘You have not dreamed of anything but Hellebore for months,’ Sofika says, as blood runs slowly from her nose. ‘About the Resonance, and the Conduit. About the monster in the serpent’s mask.’
I can’t help but think of it as I get to my feet and pick up a knot of medicae cotton from a silvered tray. Of finally uncovering the ancient chamber buried beneath Hellebore’s surface, only to find a monster already waiting there, intent on using it for himself. An echo of the oldest war, clad in cobalt battleplate and a serpent’s mask. Sorcerer. Traitor.
Thousand Son.
Hate floods me like dawnrise floods the horizon. Edge to edge. Hate for the sorcerer, and what he did. What he took from me. But my hatred is not reserved for the heretic alone.
I hate myself, too, for failing to see it coming.
‘But now you dream of the dawnrise and of the light returning to burn away the shadows.’ Sofika says, oblivious to my anger. To my guilt. ‘It is just like before.’
I dab at her bleeding nose with the knot of cotton. Her blood is very dark, and half clotted already. I ignore it, as I have for weeks, just as I ignore Efrayl when the medicae tells me that the machine won’t keep Sofika alive forever. I put the wad of cotton down on the tray, Sofika’s blood sticking to my fingers.
‘I know,’ I say.
Sofika smiles. She looks at me the way she always has. The same way she looks at a starlit sky.
‘It all aligns,’ she says. ‘Darknesses are always accompanied by light. Cadia. The Rift. One who slumbers, arisen. Devils at the Throneworld’s gates. Scholars have spoken of it for almost a thousand years. The scrolls of Simir, and the Evangelis of Phrati. Your father’s journals. It is a sign, Ahri. I am sure of it.’
I want to smile too. I want to agree with her, but I can’t help looking down at her blood on my hands.
‘Like I was sure about Hellebore?’ I ask.
‘This is different,’ she says.
I shake my head. ‘You can’t know that.’
Sofika takes hold of my face so that I can’t help but look at her. Her pale eyes are bright and keen, like they are in my dreams.
‘I can,’ she says. ‘And I do.’
‘How?’ I ask.
She smiles again. ‘Because I believe,’ she says softly. ‘And I know that you do, too.’
I think of the divine light, filling the sky to the edges. Of the warmth, not just on my skin, but on my soul.
‘I do,’ I tell her. ‘I believe.’
‘Then it is time,’ she says softly.
I nod. ‘Time for the God-Emperor to return to us.’
A tear traces from Sofika’s eye and I dab that away too, with the pad of my thumb this time. I let my hand linger on her face, tracing the curve of her cheek to the line of her jaw.
‘I knew that I would live to see you find the Conduit,’ Sofika says, after a moment. ‘To see the Rebirth.’
I let my hand fall away from her face. ‘I swore it to you, didn’t I?’
Sofika smiles absently. ‘You did,’ she says. ‘And we do not break vows.’
I think about all of the things that I have seen and done and said. I have broken many things in my long lifetime, but never a vow, no matter how much it might pain me to keep it.
‘No,’ I say to Sofika. ‘We do not break vows.’