The Scar’s magic amplifies everything: sound, light, memory. Max tells Nura he does not want to fight and she accuses him of throwing her love back at her. He pleads with her to choose a different path but she refuses, insisting war is inevitable. When he names Tisaanah, Nura’s warmth vanishes. She dissolves into shadow and the fight begins. Both hold back at first but Max answers her knives and shadow with flame. Nura’s fear magic drags him into visions of Kira’s death. They slam into opposing rock walls and close again.

Nura forces Max’s mind through memories of the worst of Sarlazai until memory and present blur. He cuts her shoulder, but she ends up on top, using a shared childhood memory as a weapon. He urges her to yield; she refuses. He notices a crushed glass bottle in her hand just before her power surges into something far more dangerous. Feeling seconds from death, Max opens his second eyelids, understanding he may unleash forces he cannot control.

The Scar erupts with crimson light. Relief flickers, then the air shifts. An inaudible vibrating pressure rolls through the ravine. The Syrizen’s veins around their eye-socket scars go black. Before Tisaanah can descend, Ariadnea’s spear flares to life and she lunges straight at Sammerin.

Max’s power smashes Nura into the rock wall. Before he can reach a conclusion, something older and vaster than his will takes hold, a presence that has been waiting for an opportunity. It drags him under. Too late, Max understands that his deepest magic created an entryway for something other to step through him. A whisper curls through his mind as darkness closes in.

The possessed Syrizen attack. Tisaanah kills Anserra and steals her magic by pressing her cut palm to the wound, then uses it to cut down the rest, including Ariadnea. She sends Sammerin to the surface with Ishqa’s feathers, with instructions to burn them if she does not return, and asks him to warn the refugees to flee. Sammerin tells her creating is harder than destroying, and always worth it. She runs down into the Scar alone.

The magical presence is not Reshaye but something older, dragging Max into a plane beneath the physical world. It identifies itself as the blood of a stolen people. Max realizes it is the Fey king, and that Nura’s imprisonment of the Fey has created the war she was trying to prevent. He tries to reason with the king, who is unmoved. When Tisaanah appears in the deep plane, the king’s desire becomes ravenous. Distracted, Max loses his grip. The king forces his way through Max’s barriers. Tisaanah emerges from the flames, but Max’s body is no longer his own.

Tisaanah realizes the Syrizen are trying to capture, not kill her. She finds Max motionless among the flames, his eyes empty and black-veined, something inside him. The king speaks through Max, telling her he has been looking for her. Reshaye stirs, screaming to be released and the king calls her Aefe. The name tears something open. Max’s hands crack Tisaanah’s skull against the wall as the king reaches into her mind. She perceives both Max’s face and the king’s true form—copper-haired, moss-green eyes, pointed ears—and all the magic threads binding them. The king tells Reshaye it was never dead and Reshaye whispers it has no home. The king begins to rip Reshaye from her mind.

Max watches helplessly as the king stretches Tisaanah’s power so thin it will kill her. Ishqa appears, addressing the king as Caduan and urging him to stop. The king refuses to abandon his people or Aefe. The confrontation creates a fractional opening and the king rips Reshaye from Tisaanah’s mind, exhausting all of them. Max seizes the moment, presses his bleeding palm to Tisaanah’s, and tells her to take his magic and sever the connection with the king. She refuses through tears. As the king gathers himself again, Tisaanah whispers that the man got the parrot to match the coat, mouths that she loves Max, and opens a route in the magic. Max gives her everything until nothing remains.

With Max’s magic flooding through her, Tisaanah severs every corrupted thread the king has planted—the largest wound within Max himself—and yanks the passage closed just as the presence lunges. In the last second she glimpses a woman’s face: pointed ears, tan skin, violet eyes. Max’s memories rain down like shattered glass.

Ishqa lifts Tisaanah away, unable to carry them both, and urges Max to reach the surface. Max makes it three paces before collapsing. Nura appears, bleeding and angry, and disarms him as the ravine collapses around them. She tells him he should have killed her when he had the chance. The walls fall. In broken flashes of consciousness, Max pieces together his sentencing—for 72 murders, high treason, the Sarlazai war crimes—and his condemnation to Ilyzath. At the prison’s doors, his memories return to haunt him. He thinks of Tisaanah, that she will keep fighting, and all he wanted was to give her a world where she could rest. He tells Nura she has made a massive mistake, then walks through the doors of his own will.

Aefe awakens in a fine bedchamber, her mind cavernous and empty. A copper-crowned man with moss-green eyes sits beside her, someone she knows from another life. He leads her to a mirror where she sees a Fey woman with tan skin, red hair, and violet eyes and feels an inexplicable ache of recognition. He introduces himself as Caduan and leads her to a balcony overlooking Ela’Dar—a vast unified Fey city built into a mountainside above the sea. He explains he united the fractured houses and vows that humans will not take another Fey life. Aefe demands why no one came for her before and Caduan explains he did not know she was alive until shifts in the magic led him to her. She tells him the person he is looking for in her may no longer exist. He says he is glad to have her here regardless. When his hand covers hers, she does not pull away.

Max drifts through Ilyzath in fragments: Reality is dim but dreams are sharp. Between broken flashes of Nura hunting Tisaanah and his own sentencing, he dreams of a girl with mismatched eyes whispering for him to come back. His memory finally whole, he tells Nura she has made a massive mistake and walks into Ilyzath of his own will. The prison welcomes him home and the doors close.

Tisaanah wakes on a beach in Threll, a month having passed. Sammerin tells her Nura has sentenced Max to imprisonment in Ilyzath and their attempts to reach him have failed. Nura hunted everyone connected to Tisaanah and the Fey have allied with the Threllian Lords. They barely escaped. Tisaanah runs into the surf until she falls to her knees, demanding to know how Sammerin could have left Max behind. He holds her as she breaks down and promises they will find a way to rescue him. She looks out across the ocean between her and Max, thinking of him trapped in the place that preys most on his mind, and lets her grief become rage.

Three weeks after her coronation, Nura cannot sleep. The Scar’s collapse killed most of the Syrizen and dozens of civilians. She sits alone in the moonlit throne room and tells herself she did the right thing, without conviction. She takes out the Morrigan’s Ice necklace from Max and squeezes it until the crystal slices her palm. The shards fall to the floor. She has power now but, sitting alone in the dark with the last remnants of her old life broken at her feet, she does not feel powerful. She feels nothing.