For the longest time, what I most wanted in this world was for the dream to stop coming to me. I understood so little of it, only that it was cold, and terribly disturbing, and that it spoke of things that cannot be safely shared in this time. And so I could turn to no one, forced to bear the dream in silence, night after night.

At first, it was the ice that stayed with me most after my waking. Not only the cold, but the texture of the ice, the slickness of blood overlaying it, the smell of it. There is no ice on Paticon, and I have never set foot off this world and yet there it was in my dream, so very detailed and real that I could not help but credit it as true ice, a world of ice, far from here.

As time passed, I became more and more fascinated with the mind and body I inhabited in the dream. With HER. The Unspeakable. The last Oracle, her last words.

"He lives..."

From the time I turned thirteen, these words ate at me, night and day. The Prince, the Heir, was alive, and no one knew it but me. Or so I imagined, at that young age.

But why did I care? Paticon is far from the homeworld and the Imperator's touch was light there. I had no quarrel with the current regime. I had been born into it. That the Prince might be alive should not have mattered to me.

But it did.

One night, when I was fifteen, the dream came brighter, fiercer, more real than ever before, and I had a crystal moment, a blinding flash of knowledge.

I cared, because she was me, I was her. All that she was: her sorrow, her crime, her penance, her power, her mission, all were mine. Because we were one and the same, I knew what I knew because I lived it, died it, was alive again now to serve him as I ought to have done then.

The King's life would one day be in my hands again and this time I must not fail him.

I wear tint-lenses now, to hide the ice-white mark of the Seeing in my eyes, and I keep a packed bag under my bed always. Some night, very soon now, the visions will show him to me, and I will find him, and worlds will bow down before him.