“We can live in magma,” said Mercymorn, then pressed one elbow into the pilot’s deck and pressed her head into that elbow, and complained: “Now I’m doing it.”

“A Lyctor has a metaphorical sitting temperature of over a thousand degrees,” said the Emperor. He had gone to check the boxes again, and the clasps. Space rotated slowly past the windows, inordinately black and dizzying. “We have this incomparably done ward, exquisitely created by an expert who gave her heart’s blood for it—it may last for around a minute and a half. I’m hoping for upward of a minute forty, with work like that—and we’re on our own from there … No Lyctor has lasted longer than seven minutes in full physical submersion. And that was a titanic effort on the part of Cassiopeia the First, who was brilliant and sensible and careful—she thought she could bait physical portions of the Resurrection Beast into the current. She was right. It followed her.”

You said, “And?”

Mercy said lowly: “It turned out that being sensible and brilliant and careful doesn’t keep you from getting ripped to shreds by ten thousand feral ghosts.”

Harrow the Ninth - Act One, Chapter Six