Meina Gladstone contacts the Consul to inform him he has been selected for the final Shrike pilgrimage before the Ouster invasion begins.

Seven pilgrims gather aboard the treeship Yggdrasill and agree to share their personal stories during the long journey to the Time Tombs.

The Bikura take Father Duré into a labyrinth, where he encounters the Shrike and is bonded to a cruciform organism against his will.

Hoyt finds Father Duré staked to a tesla tree in agonizing resurrection cycles and removes the journal pouch, allowing Duré to finally die.

During a historical war simulation at military school, Kassad is saved by a mysterious beautiful woman and the two make love afterward.

Kassad and Moneta don special forcefields and join the Shrike, using time manipulation to slaughter a pursuing force of Ousters on Hyperion.

Making love with Moneta after the battle, Kassad has visions of entire worlds dying in war before Moneta partially transforms into the Shrike.

As the Shrike's attacks drive everyone else away, Silenus remains alone in the abandoned City of Poets, having finally rediscovered his muse.

Rachel Weintraub is found unconscious in the Sphinx Tomb on Hyperion after spending the night alone monitoring archaeological data.

Doctors determine Rachel has Merlin's disease, a mysterious condition that causes her to age in reverse and lose one day of memories daily.

The pilgrims discover blood splattered throughout Het Masteen's cabin during the Sea of Grass crossing, with his body nowhere to be found.

A cybrid who goes by Johnny and was created in the persona of poet John Keats hires Brawne Lamia to investigate his murder.

Lamia meets with Meina Gladstone, who explains TechnoCore's Ultimate Intelligence Project and its interest in the Time Tombs as an anomaly.

The Consul confesses he is the Ouster agent who killed three Ousters at the Time Tombs and activated a device to open them.

The pilgrims leave their possessions behind, join hands, and descend together into the valley toward the glowing, open Time Tombs.

The novel begins when Meina Gladstone, CEO of the Hegemony, selects seven pilgrims for a final journey to Hyperion's Time Tombs as an Ouster invasion looms. Aboard the treeship Yggdrasill, the pilgrims agree to share their stories, each revealing a deep and often traumatic connection to Hyperion and the terrifying Shrike. Father Duré's cruciform ordeal, Kassad's time-manipulated massacre alongside Moneta, and Silenus's discovery of his muse in the Shrike's violence all point to the planet's strange hold on people. Sol Weintraub carries his infant daughter Rachel, cursed with Merlin's disease after a mysterious encounter in the Sphinx Tomb, while detective Brawne Lamia carries the consciousness of a murdered Keats cybrid inside her head. The Consul's stunning confession — that he personally triggered the opening of the Time Tombs — upends the group's trust and reveals the true stakes of the pilgrimage. Despite everything, the pilgrims join hands and walk together into the unknown valley of the glowing Tombs.

The most critical events driving humanity's final Shrike pilgrimage.

Father Duré discovers an ancient basilica carved into the cliffs of Hyperion, believing it evidence of Christianity predating humanity's exodus from Old Earth.

After Duré's death, the Bikura take Hoyt to the labyrinth and attach both Duré's cruciform and a new one to his own body.

When Hoyt falls gravely ill aboard the Yggdrasill, the Consul refuses painkillers until the priest admits he carries two cruciform organisms.

Kassad awakens on a medical ship bound for Hyperion and barely escapes in an Ouster pod as enemy forces attack the vessel.

Although the time-manipulated battle feels like a violation of the New Bushido code, Kassad surrenders fully to bloodlust as the fighting continues.

Silenus suffers a stroke during cryogenic fugue and arrives on Heaven's Gate destitute and nearly wordless, forced to labor in slop canals.

Sad King Billy visits Silenus in the abandoned City of Poets and tries to destroy the Hyperion Cantos manuscript, at which point the Shrike appears.

Sol and Sarai Weintraub both independently experience recurring dreams of a red-lit cavern where a voice commands them to sacrifice Rachel.

Sol visits the Church of the Shrike on Lusus seeking help for Rachel but is coldly refused and barred from all Shrike temples.

While visiting her sister on another planet, Sarai Weintraub is killed in an accident, leaving Sol to raise infant Rachel alone.

Lamia investigates Johnny's recent movements and discovers he met with a Templar and later departed with a man wearing a braided queue.

Lamia pursues the man with the queue through farcaster portals across multiple worlds until he disintegrates in an electrical surge, exposing him as a cybrid.

Shipman Merin Aspic sneaks away from his assigned isle to attend a masquerade festival on Maui-Covenant, where he meets a young woman named Siri.

Merin opens Siri's tomb after her funeral and finds her recorded message revealing their son Alón was murdered by Council police.

Shortly after the Maui-Covenant farcaster opens, Merin detonates a planted bomb on the portal, sacrificing his life to begin Siri's Rebellion.

While the frame story of the pilgrimage unfolds, each pilgrim's tale contains pivotal secondary moments that illuminate why they were chosen and what they are carrying into the Tombs. Hoyt's hidden truth about his two cruciform organisms, Kassad's near-death escape from an attacked medical ship, and Silenus's punishing early years on Heaven's Gate all build the foundation of each character's journey. Sol Weintraub's futile quest for a cure — including his cold ejection from the Church of the Shrike and the devastating loss of his wife Sarai — underscores the personal cost of Hyperion's mysteries. Brawne Lamia's detective work unraveling a conspiracy of disappearing cybrids takes her through multiple worlds and farcaster portals, exposing the TechnoCore's hidden hand in the pilgrimage. The Consul's backstory reaches its tragic climax through his grandfather Merin Aspic's doomed love affair with Siri on Maui-Covenant, ending with a rebellion sparked by a bomb. Together these events reveal that the pilgrimage was set in motion by grief, betrayal, and manipulation stretching back generations.

The crucial backstory moments behind each pilgrim's connection to Hyperion.

Sent to Hyperion as punishment for falsifying evidence, Father Duré decides to rehabilitate himself by conducting ethnographic research on the Bikura people.

Duré witnesses a dead Bikura member physically rebuilt by the cruciform and realizes the device creates only dull, soulless copies of the living.

To prevent the cruciform's false immortality from corrupting the Church, Father Duré stakes himself to a tesla tree in endless death and resurrection.

Moneta tells Kassad her name and reveals that their encounters exist in reversed time, with his future meetings being events already in her past.

Horrified by visions of interstellar war and Moneta's transformation into the Shrike, Kassad abandons his military career and joins antiwar movements.

A local manager's wife rescues Silenus's scattered manuscript pages and sends them to a publisher, where they are released as The Dying Earth.

After his serious Cantos poetry fails commercially and leaves him in debt, Silenus writes a series of popular but artistically hollow sequel novels.

Unable to write on Hyperion and losing his sense of purpose, Silenus has himself bioengineered into a satyr and surrenders to hedonism.

Tormented by the recordings of all she has lost to Merlin's disease, Rachel asks her parents to stop the daily reminders and let her simply live.

In his final dream before the pilgrimage, Sol Weintraub refuses the voice's demand for sacrifice and declares the time of divine obedience is over.

While Lamia sleeps, Johnny secretly installs a Schrön loop neural shunt in her head to make her an unknowing carrier for his entire consciousness.

During the assault near the Shrike Temple, Johnny is killed but succeeds in downloading his entire datasphere of information into Lamia's neural implant.

Recovering among chanting Shrike priests after the attack, Lamia reads Keats's poetry in the archives and realizes she is pregnant with Johnny's child.

The Consul's wife and young son are killed during the Ouster attack on Bressia, setting him on a path of vengeance against both empires.

Confronted and accused of treachery by the other pilgrims at Chronos Keep, the Consul is ultimately absolved as a pawn of larger forces.

Beneath the main events of each tale lies a series of deeply personal turning points and discoveries that shaped who each pilgrim became. Father Duré's choice to stake himself to a tesla tree rather than let the cruciform corrupt the Church reveals a man transformed by faith and horror in equal measure, while his earlier realization that the Bikura's immortality destroys the soul haunts everything that follows. Kassad's discovery that time runs backward near the Tombs, combined with his harrowing visions of interstellar war, drives him to abandon everything he built as a soldier. Silenus's artistic failures and eventual creative rebirth through suffering mirror the Keatisan theme that truth can only be found through pain, and his hollow commercial novels stand as the low point before his darkest inspiration. Sol's refusal to submit to divine commands marks the culmination of his philosophical reckoning with faith, sacrifice, and what it means to be a parent. Lamia's journey ends with two forms of life growing inside her — a child and a dead man's entire consciousness — while the Consul, exposed and judged by the group at Chronos Keep, finally finds release from a lifetime of calculated vengeance.