Saela finds Meryn packing and asks to stay in Astreona to learn about her Siphon heritage. Recognizing this as the safest choice, Meryn agrees, and they share a tearful goodbye. In the courtyard garden, Meryn privately demands that Fredrich be a devoted parent to Saela. Fredrich promises and then asks her to protect Ruby, explaining that his bond with Ruby is the deepest love he has known. Meryn believes him and agrees. Saela returns Meryn’s Tear necklace and gives her their mother’s journals to bring along.

Lucien and Elias arrive at the stables in impractical, flamboyant clothing. Anassa refuses to carry Lucien, so he rides with Venna while Elias pairs with Noemi. After a final embrace with Saela, the group leaves.

After two days of hard riding, they reach Bloomfang, a lush coastal city where Meryn sees the ocean for the first time. At the harbor, Lucien reveals their vessel: a fast, elegantly painted ship large enough for the wolves. Once aboard, Meryn is struck by severe seasickness while Lucien taunts her from the helm. The group practices sign language during the voyage. As they near their destination, Meryn’s sickness abruptly vanishes, replaced by instinctive alertness. A motionless wall of fog appears, and through breaks in it, the tower is visible, with pack symbols clear on its face.

As the ship enters the fog, hidden rocks breach the surface ahead. Lucien wrenches the wheel; the hull scrapes across stone before righting itself. Anassa is thrown into the railing, and Lucien drops anchor because the surrounding water is too rocky for safe sailing.

Anassa proposes swimming to shore. Meryn has never swum, and the water is freezing, but the group outvotes her. Lucien and Elias stay with the ship.

In the water, waves batter Meryn. The crossing becomes critical when Noemi is thrown from her direwolf, Ephyse, and pulled under. Stark and Cratos race to intervene and haul Noemi free—she’s unconscious and bleeding but alive.

The party struggles ashore. Meryn shows signs of hypothermia, but when Anassa licks her, magical warmth spreads through her body and dries her clothes. The same happens to everyone. They conclude that the island tests visitors and rewards those who pass.

While climbing toward the tower, Meryn sees the stonework shift at the edge of her vision and feels deep, pressing danger. They reach a massive stone door engraved with a poem about the four direwolf packs. It opens at Meryn’s touch, revealing a spiral staircase descending into cold blue light.

The staircase leads to a landing with a Kryptos-marked circular door. When it activates, everyone’s powers and mental bonds are severed except Venna’s. The door opens as Venna and her wolf, Skaia, approach.

Venna tests the dark chamber by tossing in a button, which sharp stone shards instantly destroy. The room punishes sound. The group must move silently using sign language, with Venna and Skaia leading. When the light fails completely, Venna uses a new technique—pushing shadows outward to pull in ambient light—to guide them through jagged rocks, low stalactites, and a crawl tunnel. They emerge with their powers restored.

The next door bears the Daemos symbol and burns red. It opens for Stark but seals the group inside once all enter. Red fire spreads across the walls, carving symbols of hands in various positions, and then the walls begin closing in, making the group realize that they have to choose one symbol. They try to find the answer by solving an inscribed riddle: “Strength is fire, and loyalty light” (446). Noemi suggests that this is referring to chained hands, but Venna argues that the chain implies compulsion. Near collapse, Stark fixes his gaze on Meryn. She understands: True loyalty is freely given. Rejecting a hand clenching a crown, she presses a symbol of an open palm offering a crown upward. The walls retreat, the far door opens, and the group continues to a Phylax-marked door.

Beyond the Phylax door, a ledge overlooks a lightless chasm crossed by a narrow stone bridge. When Ephyse steps onto it, the bridge cracks. Noemi realizes that she must use shield magic to reinforce it. She succeeds for herself and then strains under the weight of Stark and Cratos. Over Stark’s objections, Meryn insists that Venna cross before her. Noemi falters midway through Venna’s crossing, and the bridge tilts, but she forces another surge of power, allowing Venna and Skaia to leap clear. Meryn crosses last, while Noemi uses her final reserves to hold the bridge.

The final chamber contains only a stone altar with a dagger. An inscription demands that a Strategos make a complete blood sacrifice or let everyone perish. Noxious gas pours from the floor. Venna offers herself (since she’s the twin of a Strategos, Izabel), but Meryn furiously refuses, saying it would dishonor Izabel’s memory. Accepting that the body in her vision was always her own, Meryn gives Stark final instructions—retrieve the Tear, protect Saela, and destroy Killian—and drives the dagger into her chest.

From Stark’s perspective, the chapter opens immediately after Meryn’s sacrifice. He moves too late and catches Meryn as she collapses. The room tilts with the sensation of falling upward and then rights itself. The dagger vanishes, but blood pours from Meryn’s wound. Stark knows with certainty that she’s dead: Her skin is colorless, and her eyes are open and fixed. Cratos drops beside Anassa, who collapsed when Meryn died, and howls. Stark rejects Noemi’s attempt to comfort him, lies beside Meryn in her spreading blood, and does not move.

In the shadow realm’s darkness, Meryn hears Stark’s voice and realizes that she’s alive. She pulls herself out of the realm and wakes up in Stark’s arms, her wound healed but her clothes soaked in blood. Stark is shocked.

The group has been transported to a chamber at the top of the tower. A grieving, angry Venna confronts Meryn for her reckless act. Meryn defends herself, saying that there was no time to consult anyone and that none of them would have allowed the sacrifice.

Unable to find the Tear on the dirty floor, Meryn collapses in despair and begins crying. Each tear dissolves her blood, gradually revealing an intricate mosaic. A central section opens to reveal an opal Goddess Tear exactly where her foresight showed it. Meryn wraps cloth around her fingers, lifts it without touching it directly, and says it’s time to leave.

The descent is uneventful. On the shore, the mist has cleared, and the rocks are passable. The ship is intact except for a long scrape. Noemi bluntly tells Lucien that Meryn died; Meryn holds up the Tear as proof of success. As they swim back, Meryn senses Lucien calculating that she now holds three Tears to his two.

On deck, Venna suggests sailing to Blumenfall to support their forces, but Lucien refuses. Stark accuses him of delaying to weaken Nocturna, and he and Lucien nearly fight until Venna asks them to back down. Lucien argues that they need to wait since Killian is still too dangerous to face directly. Meryn threatens to take his Tears and fight alone; he refuses and insists that they return to Astreona to gather his army, after the marriage with Meryn. Meryn furiously rejects his proposal.

In her anger, Meryn accidentally grips the new Tear with her bare skin. Magic erupts from her palm, crosses the water, and strikes the tower with a resonant chime. The barren island instantly becomes lush. The Tear holds the power of creation.

Meryn maps this to her coronation rites, connecting each anointing gesture to the power of a Tear: amplified rule, persuasion, creation, and protection. The final undiscovered Tear must hold destruction, and Killian cannot reach it first.

That night, Stark enters Meryn’s cabin and lies beside her, claiming that he must guard herself against Killian’s influence in the dream realm. He refuses to discuss the tower. As Meryn falls asleep against him, she silently communicates her feelings to him.

Before sunrise, Meryn wakes lying on top of an aroused Stark. He deliberately draws her close as his eyes open and invites her to connect with him mentally. Through their bond, Meryn discovers that he has been standoffish with her because of heartbreak, not anger. Stark shows her the memory of him cradling her dead body—his terror and certainty that he had failed her—followed by the overwhelming relief at seeing her alive. Meryn reassures him that another person’s choices are never his failure. They reconcile through an intensely intimate encounter, remaining mentally linked so that each experiences the other’s physical and emotional sensations.

The next morning, Meryn approaches Lucien on deck and finds him uncharacteristically blank-faced. They agree that the final Tear must be found but have no leads. Meryn notes that her Tear necklace has never triggered a vision, and Lucien says that his hasn’t either. Swapping them produces nothing. She proposes wearing both at once, theorizing that they function as halves of a whole. Standing close, they loop both chains around their combined necks and enter a shared vision.

Meryn sees a radiant, golden-skinned, pregnant woman watching over a human infant beside a dark-haired, otherworldly man. The man tells the woman that she can’t remain with their daughter, who is destined to rule humans and link his wolves to them. The woman weeps; her tears crystallize into an opal, which she places on the baby for protection. The man calls her Lumina and entrusts the infant to a Bonded woman.

Returning from the vision, Meryn recognizes Lumina from her mother’s journals and recurring dreams. She realizes that the baby was the first Sturmfrost queen, making Meryn a goddess’s descendant.

They then touch the creation Tear and enter a second vision inside the newly built tower. Lumina confronts the same man, calling him Nocturn, and accuses him of weakening her. He counters that her selflessness caused the damage and declares that she belongs to him alone before dissolving into shadows. Another Tear forms from her grief. Meryn recognizes Nocturn’s voice as the one haunting her dreams and the shadow realm. She realizes that the altar riddle’s “Nocturn’s children” referred to his literal bloodline, not Nocturna.

Back in reality, Meryn finds the names Lumina, Nocturn, and Astreon repeatedly written together in her mother’s journals, often joined by a line. She realizes that what people thought of as her mother’s “madness” was actually Nathalia recounting history: Lumina, Nocturn, and Astreon were real figures, connected in inexplicable ways. Lucien confirms that he saw a god named Astreon—apparently his ancestor—in his first vision. Meryn finds a detailed portrait of Lumina in the journals, and Stark identifies it as the statue of the Faceless Goddess in Linsfall. The final Tear is in Linsfall.