Well, does she want to see the pharaoh? Or does she need some time, that'd be perfectly all right.

"I - want to see the Pharaoh."

So they take her to him. 

It's up two flights of stairs and through some beautiful fountains and gardens and past dozens of other women, barely dressed, beautiful, smiling. The temperature inside the Dome is much cooler than outside but none of them seem to mind.

She's not thinking very much but most of the thoughts she does have are about how she wants to die.

She watches her feet. The dress is dripping blood on them.

They enter the room he's in. The attendants drop to the floor.

She drops, too.

She is so terrified that she feels like even her terror itself is on the verge of exhausting itself.

She did not actually figure out who it was.

Please not Vaughan. Please not Vaughan. Please not Vaughan -

" - Aria?"

- it's not Vaughan.

She spends a second trying to keep herself from either crying or manically laughing. 

She looks up.

"Cure Serious Wounds. What happened - you incompetent bastards, you hover around constantly and she walks in here bleeding to death -"

" - I'm not hurt," she says, though the words stick in her throat for a moment. "I need - can I talk to you - "

"Everybody out."

They hurriedly leave.

She's still kneeling.

She breathes. Clutches pieces of her bloody dress in her fists.

" - sorry - "

"For what?"

" - for - everything, right now for being a mess, I - do you remember what I told you about the Fade."

"The afterlife your god sends people to?"

"The - our spirits go there when we die, yes, but also when we dream, and when we wake up we come back. But - sometimes, if a powerful hostile actor is involved, you can get stuck there, unable to wake up until you get rid of whatever's holding you."

"Okay..."

" - you're dreaming. This isn't really happening. I'm here, and you're here, and Fazil and Mahdi and Draconis are being held somewhere, but - you're not in Osirion, you're not really the Pharaoh, your brother's alive."

" - I know it's maybe kind of hard to accept but your servants did let me come in here wearing this, so - "

"Well, they're very stupid.

It's not - is there some way to tell -"

"I don't - you could talk to Fazil and Mahdi, they're - somewhere, the guards wouldn't let them up to see you, it - it's adding elements of my nightmares to yours, I don't know why, but - the guard captain downstairs is the man who murdered my husband, I don't know how you'd tell that but he's obviously not Osirian - "

"I could force him to speak the truth. With cleric spells. That I have because I am pharaoh - are you going to say none of them actually work -"

"Mahdi's been able to cast some spells, but they were his spells from before, and he's been losing them on and off, I don't - I don't think you can trust them - "

"Guards!"