Once again, I opened my eyes in another world, unfettered by pain, injury, or the bulk of my powered armor. The sky was white as blank paper, featureless and empty. Beneath my feet, sky poured down into the ground without any discernible boundary to separate the two. "If I'm dead," I said to no one in particular, "then the afterlife is really boring." Then it hit me, for real this time. My friend, Barbas, had killed me- or at least he had managed a fair approximation of killing me. Maybe these were my last moments, and my imagination, grown fat on the overstimulation of artificially constructed dreams, was trying to create a place for me to escape to in death. If that was the case, I thought, my imagination could really do a lot better.

The bland white of the world around me shifted subtly, and for the first time since I had opened my eyes in that place, I could see the horizon, a place where the sky seemed just a little bluer, the ground just a little greener. It was hard to tell since a soft white light seemed to suffuse the whole world, but I thought I could see something bright out there on the horizon, too bright to look at directly. From the center of that light, I could just barely make out the distant shape of a person walking briskly towards me. I fixed my gaze on that distant approaching figure, afraid that if I blinked, she would be gone, and I would be alone here again. I frowned. Why did I think the silhouette out there was female? She was too far for me even to make out the general details of her figure, but I knew she was, and I couldn't have told why.

I could do little but wait for her to approach. So I waited, staring out to the horizon and watching the little figure get closer and closer, one step at a time. Details slowly came into resolution. Her hair was white like Barbas' had been, though hers was long enough for her silky platinum braid to sweep past her hips every time she moved. Her features were broad and strange, and she looked as if someone had taken a cat's skull and roughly shaped it to resemble a human's. She looked like she might have been Volistad's more feral cousin, though she didn't wear the collection of furs and shawls that seemed to be the standard fashion for the Erin-Vulur. Instead, her clothing was styled more like something I might have seen back on Earth, in the Pan-American Dominion. She wore a close-fitting jumpsuit which emphasized her willowy, slender frame, and over it, she wore something that might have been a half-cape, or a shoulder cloak. All of her clothing was as white as her hair and was made of material I couldn't identify. It seemed as soft and delicate as satin, yet it was thick as leather and despite being white, it drew in the strange directionless light around it. The result was beautiful and frightening, intriguing and terrible. She walked like a crystalline angel of death, surrounded by her penumbra as the light was devoured around her. Before I knew it, she stood before me, close enough that I could see the subtle flecks of cobalt ringed deep within her abyssal eyes. "Who are you," I asked, and I realized that I wasn't afraid. I had died, and whatever happened to me here, it couldn't possibly be worse than the agony in which I had met my end.

The pale angel didn't answer, her bird's eyes just flicked about and took inscrutable observations of my face, my body, and probably things that even I didn't know. It was then that I realized I was naked, and in much the same state I had been when I had died. My skin was hard and strangely shiny. As I held up a hand to stare at it, I could see that my fingertips had turned blue. I looked down, and to my horror, I was smeared with blood, in much the same state as I must have been when Barbas had killed me. I couldn't feel any of the pain that being ripped out of my suit must have caused me, but I could see the ruin that had been visited on my skin, and it turned my stomach upside down. I felt a cold breeze against my bald scalp, and at that moment, I realized that I would never feel the weight of my hair on my head ever again. I had been bald since I joined the Former program, made surgically hairless to make the hermetic sealing process uncomplicated. Only Barbas' dream state had brought back those familiar curly black tresses, and he was gone. He had been taken from me.

The pale-haired woman seemed to be listening to the thoughts cross my mind, because it wasn't until my eyes rose back up to meet hers that she spoke. Her voice was a low, silken purr, carrying unspecified promises of passion. Or perhaps that tone was the threat of violence. Or it was both. "I am Ravanur." She rolled the ‘r' in Ravanur so that the name began with a contented purr. "You have come to my world, little monkey-girl, and your coming has very nearly destroyed everything I died to protect."

"I didn't destroy anything! I was barely even here before this shitty little moon of yours started trying to kill me!" I took a step forward and got right up in the dead god's face. "I came here to make this place a home for over a hundred-thousand people. Now that I'm gone, they are going to get here, and they are going to die, and your people did this.”

Ravanur didn’t even blink at my anger. Instead, she reached up one slender ice-white hand and ran her fingertips down my face. I flinched away, and she didn’t move her hand to follow me. “Monkey-child, you’re not dead. And this is about something bigger than you, your hundred-thousand doomed souls, or my people. This is not a moon. It is not a home.”

"Then what in the hell is it?”

“This is a prison, monkey-child.” Ravanur smiled, and her fangs gleamed in the false light of the dream. Much like it had been for Volistad, the expression was not one of mirth. Rather, it conveyed a distinct and unmistakable threat. “And I am its warden.”

“And… the thing that took Barbas. Was that one of your prisoners?”

Ravanur curled her lip. “The thing that took your whispering spirit away from you was the littlest of my inmates. The littlest and the least. And yet it is still enough to bring this whole place to ruin.” Her expression turned grim. “The blight it unleashes will sweep over all life in this arm of the galaxy. And because your spirit was taken, they will first find their way to your home.”

“Earth is not my home. Not anymore, and not for a long time.”

Ravanur shrugged. "Even so. It is the place of your birth and the heart of your people. And it will be destroyed, and all within consumed in the same doom that has already made barren so much of the universe." She gave me an Erin-Vulur smile with her eyes. "Of course, of more immediate concern might be your own fate in all this."

I scoffed. “I’m dead, or hadn’t you noticed all this?” I gestured to my frozen, tattered body, and the blood smeared across my skin. “It’s already over. I’m not sure why you even bothered to see me.”

Ravanur laughed out loud, producing the same sort of coughing jaguar's roar that I had heard so many days before from Volistad. "Monkey child, I told you that you are not dead."

I raised one hairless brow. “I seem pretty dead from where I’m standing.” I frowned. “And aren’t you?”

Ravanur nodded simply. “I am quite dead. It was necessary for the sealing of this prison. The dead are eternal. Ageless. Beyond mortality and the corruption it implies.” She pointed at me. “But you are not dead. Not yet. You still have a chance to change all of this, if you are willing to sacrifice. You will live. Your home world will be safe. And you may even be able to shepherd the hundred-thousand you speak of, perhaps show them how to make a life in this place. The people of this world are thin on the ground now. You could save the Erin-Vulur from the slow death that creeps towards them.”

“Considering how hard they tried to kill me, I feel somewhat less than motivated by that,” I said sardonically. I frowned. “Though you are one of their gods. And you said I have almost destroyed all of this.” It hit me, all at once. Though I had thought that that time was past, fear flooded my veins like cold fire. I looked up at Ravanur’s face with my heart in my throat. “It was you, wasn’t it? You told them to kill me.” I took a step back, terror rising in me. The Erin-Vulur revered her as a god, though she seemed to be something else, something more than a simple tribal deity. I didn’t know what she was capable of, but if the rest of my time on Chalice had taught me anything, it was that I should always assume the worst. “Why haven’t you killed me now? I know you can do it, dead or not dead.”

Ravanur showed all of her teeth in a snarl, a rumble rising in her throat. It was a sound that no human could make, and though I had seen both Volistad and the enraged Stormcaller growl like that, it still surprised me every time. She lunged forward, fast as an eye blink, and seized me by the throat, lifting me up off the ground with as much effort as I might use to snatch up a rag doll. Though this was a dream, and I had thought myself dead, the pressure on my throat was incredible. I struggled against her impossible grip, but I might as well have tried to bend iron bars with my hands. "I did not try to kill you, monkey-child. It has been some time since my people heard my voice as they once did, and I can no longer compel them to do my bidding." Her fingers tightened, cutting off my air, and I fumbled uselessly at her wrist. "The Erinye do, however, know my words of ages past, and they did what they had long been taught. Most who come to this world are agents of the enemy, here to free those trapped within. If they had succeeded in slaying you, the danger would have been past." I struggled to get out a word, but all I could manage were weak gagging sounds. "But you survived, and now your spirit and his machine are under the control of the enemy! I should crush you for what you have brought to this place." Her fingers squeezed even harder, and my vision began to gray out around the edges. If I died here, in the dream, I could suffer massive hemorrhage in my brain. Even if Barbas hadn't quite managed to kill me, dying here would certainly finish what he had started. My struggles became feeble, and everything began to fade away.

Ravanur held me there for a moment longer, and darkness started to creep in from the corners of my vision. “I’m not going to kill you, monkey-girl. I’m going to do much, much worse.” She smiled again, with both her wide array of needle teeth and her canted abyssal eyes. “I’m going to make you like me. I’m going to turn you into a god.”