A week and a half after Samkiel’s capture, Dianna interrogates Nismera’s soldiers near River Bend with Reggie and Miska. A soldier confirms the prisoner caravan vanished through a portal three days prior. Dianna’s control breaks: She kills the soldier, then hunts down a fisher who witnessed the scene. In town, she spots a hooded figure she believes is Kaden, chases him into a dead-end alley, and loses him. She admits to Reggie that she has been seeing shadows and dreaming of a man with orange eyes. Suddenly, a massive winged toruk lands in the street. As a creature of Kaden, Dianna carries the blood of Ro’Vikiin and she can understand the creature’s language. The toruk delivers a note from Samkiel: He is alive and being moved to a mountain stronghold called Flagerun. Dianna sends Reggie and Miska ahead on the toruk and prepares to travel at nightfall.

Imogen is fully mind-controlled, trapped conscious inside her own body. Orc general Nivene has brought her to a room where soldiers plan to pay Jiraiya, a member of a faction of rebel gods called The Order, for access to her. Before any assault begins, a minotaur kills a soldier by rupturing his blood vessels, then shifts its form to reveal Isaiah in disguise. Isaiah kills Nivene and the other soldiers and executes Jiraiya, stating that he considers Imogen his property. Back in his quarters, Kaden questions the killings, but Isaiah dismisses his concerns and reassigns Imogen to his own unit, ordering his companion, Veruka, to clean her up and outfit her in new armor.

Three days after his argument with Camilla, Vincent sends Hilma away and apologizes to Camilla for his behavior and his remarks about Kaden. Camilla blurts out that her involvement with Kaden is purely a ruse. Vincent visibly relaxes. He takes her to the highest rooftop of the palace—his private refuge—explaining he visits it to escape the weight of being seen as a traitor. When she asks what he truly wants, he tells her he cannot have it. He explains he sought her out on the remains of Rashearim because her presence makes him feel calm. She pushes for friendship, and he grudgingly agrees. They eat, talk freely, and as he drops her back at the workshop, she asks if they can return tomorrow. He nods.

Cameron tracks Dianna to River Bend where a vendor confirms a fire-handed woman recently passed through the city. He traces the trail to a dead-end alley with a burned mark on the wall. A laundress confirms Dianna left on a scaled beast while a man and child departed on a toruk. When the laundress pricks her finger, Cameron’s hunger overpowers him, and he feeds on her until she dies. When Kaden checks in via a communication stone, Cameron lies and says he’s found nothing. Kaden orders him to keep searching and to discover why Nismera holds blood vials labeled with Kaden’s and Isaiah’s names, threatening Cameron with death if he doesn’t deliver.

The night before reaching Flagerun, Samkiel and Orym eat with fellow prisoners. Conversation turns to Nismera’s generals, including a warrior called Blood Scorn who kills without physical contact—privately identified by Samkiel as Isaiah. A chained, hooded prisoner from the Otherworld corrects the group: Nismera controls six powerful warriors, not five. He also mentions fires in the East that enraged Nismera, which Samkiel suspects were Dianna’s doing. When thunder cracks over the camp—in a realm that normally has no rain—other prisoners panic, but Samkiel smirks.

Following a low whistle, Samkiel slips out of camp and into the forest, where Dianna ambushes and pins him to a tree. She produces an antidote made by Miska. He drinks it, endures a wave of agonizing heat, and watches the purple poison veins spreading across his torso shrink back and disappear, leaving only the original scar. The poison neutralized, they kiss.

Dianna and Samkiel have reunion sex in the forest. He admits to counting every hour they were apart to the exact figure, and she teases that he is a stalker. As they rest afterward, she senses a presence in the trees, immediately shifts into a wolf, and launches herself at the hidden onlooker.

The intruder is Orym, who woke to find Samkiel gone and came looking. Samkiel heals Orym’s torn throat while Dianna, still hostile, insists Orym smells of Nismera’s forces. Samkiel explains that Orym’s sister Veruka is embedded as a spy in Nismera’s army, accounting for the scent. When Orym realizes Dianna is Ig’Morruthen and reacts with fear, Samkiel threatens to kill him if he disrespects her again. Dianna wants to leave, but Samkiel insists on honoring his promise to help Orym and Veruka. Orym explains Veruka deliberately turned him over to Nismera to build her cover, and that she believes a weapon is hidden at the prison. Guards approach, and Dianna takes flight as a bird.

Dianna boards Samkiel’s caravan in the form of mist, startling Orym, whose distrust of Ig’Morruthen drives him to a different wagon. Alone, Samkiel confronts her hostility toward Orym, and she argues that repeated betrayals make trust impossible. He counters that alliances are necessary in war, and presses her about the fires in the East, which she admits to setting as a diversion while he was unconscious. She also confesses to destroying Jade City and killing everyone there except Miska. They agree to no more unilateral plans. The caravan arrives at Flagerun—a windowless, circular prison carved into a snowy mountain cliff.

Dianna enters Flagerun hidden as a rodent in Samkiel’s pocket. The prison funnels his group to the lowest level, through a cafeteria and into individual cells. Dianna explores for hours but finds the upper-level doors sealed. Samkiel and Orym are assigned as cellmates. Orym explains the three-tier structure: the lowest level holds prisoners Nismera intends to personally address. Samkiel and Dianna agree to find Nismera’s hidden weapon and escape before she arrives. That night, Dianna slips out to feed on one of the guards’ patrol beasts, then returns. In sleep, the orange-eyed man visits her dreams again.

Two days later, Dianna disguises herself as a scarred male prisoner. At breakfast, she tells Samkiel and Orym she has spread a rumor that they are romantically involved, providing cover for their conspiring. When Orym mentions a prisoner called Savees—from the Otherworld—was isolated for attacking a guard, Dianna defies Samkiel’s warning, bribes a guard’s silence by briefly feeding on him, and finds Savees chained in a corpse-filled cell. His eye is white and blue—not orange. Samkiel follows, and when Savees taunts Dianna, Samkiel forces an apology at blade-point. Savees, stunned to find Samkiel alive, cooperates. Back in the cell, Dianna finally admits to her recurring, orange-eyed dreams and confesses she told Reggie first. When Samkiel presses for more, Dianna lies and says there is nothing else she’s not telling him.

A week after River Bend, Cameron kills the passengers on a ship he boarded to chase a lead. Kaden intercepts him on board, accompanied by Isaiah and a mind-controlled Imogen. When Cameron confronts Isaiah over Imogen, Kaden punches him. Under pressure, Cameron lies that Dianna was spotted on a toruk headed east. Kaden deduces that Reggie, a fate, is helping her. As Isaiah reanimates the corpses Cameron killed, Kaden forces Cameron through a portal back to the palace. There, Kaden berates him for leaving bodies strewn across multiple worlds, expressing annoyance that he never properly taught Cameron to feed or shapeshift. He drags him into Nismera’s war room and threatens the life of Xavier—Cameron’s love—if Cameron does not deliver a convincing lead.

Savees reveals that the prison’s upper floors are locked by a chip in Commander Taotl’s wrist—an Estiine, resembling a large horse-human hybrid—and that many Otherworld beings pledged to Nismera in exchange for territory when the realms fractured. The next morning, Samkiel covertly sparks a cafeteria brawl. In the chaos, Dianna knocks Taotl down a staircase, drags him away, kills him, assumes his form, and uses the wrist chip to reach the upper level. She opens a door to find a single heartbeat inside, freezes in shock, and returns to the cell. The weapon is not an object: it is Logan, a former member of the Hand that Samkiel trained himself.

Trapped and aware inside his unresponsive body, Logan watches Taotl’s form dissolve to reveal Dianna. He screams internally but cannot move or speak. She tells him Samkiel is alive and promises they are coming to help him. Hope surges through Logan though his face shows nothing.

The chapter shifts back in time to Rashearim: Logan tried to flirt with Neverra, another member of The Hand, who was avoiding him. When Samkiel overheard her discussing him dismissively, he stepped in and commanded her to accompany Logan to an upcoming ball. Afterward, Samkiel confided to Logan that he intervened because he wanted Logan to have fun—something Samkiel himself wishes for himself, revealing a private loneliness Logan had not seen before.

Still imprisoned in her own mind, Imogen observes Isaiah and Kaden conferring quietly as soldiers move through the palace. She reflects that the only respite from feeling hollow comes when Isaiah looks at her—despite hating her situation, she notes he has never touched her inappropriately, gives her his bed, and sleeps on the floor himself. After Kaden departs, Isaiah speaks the command word and Imogen follows.

Sleepless after seeing Logan empty and unresponsive, Samkiel blames himself for the mind control that plagues the former members of his kingsguard. Dianna firmly shuts down this line of thinking and seduces him to pull him from his grief. Later, Samkiel presents Orym with an escape plan: Using a stolen prison map, he will carve a tunnel from the lowest level to the riverbank at the mountain’s base. Dianna arrives in Taotl’s form and reveals she and Savees have already begun digging the tunnel at night. Samkiel notices a bloodstain on her collarbone and confronts her about feeding on the guards. She admits it’s true, citing the drain of sustained shapeshifting. He asks her to rely on him and offers his own wrist if she is hungry. She agrees with a pinky swear. After she leaves, he knows she lied.

Back at the palace, Cameron finds Orym’s sister, Veruka, waiting in his room. She reveals she knows he lied to both Kaden and Nismera when he told them the toruk traveled west rather than east. She claims to have covered his tracks temporarily. She warns that his reckless searching will lead Nismera directly to Dianna and proposes they work together. Before leaving, she tells him that the real concern is not why Nismera fears Dianna, but what makes a goddess afraid—and hints the answer lies with a rebel group called The Eye, one that Nismera fears.

Dianna finds Samkiel furiously digging the tunnel alone. He confronts her about lying to him—he has known since Jade City that she cannot keep solid food down. She admits blood is the only thing she can consume and has been feeding on guards and patrol beasts. He produces a blazing dagger, offers his wrist, and shows her faint bite marks from when he let her feed on him on two previous occasions—including once when they were still enemies. He tells her to stop protecting him from her own needs. She feeds from his wrist, the intensity overwhelming them both and escalating into sex in the tunnel. When they finish, Orym leads Reggie into the tunnel. The fate explains he had a vision and warns them Nismera’s forces believe Dianna is at Flagerun and are on their way. They are out of time.

Camilla senses a trace of Oblivion’s power and uses a cloaking necklace to follow Tessa and Tara to a secret laboratory. She witnesses Nismera and her engineer Quill testing a binding between the Ring of Oblivion and a golden death spear made with Dianna’s blood. Quill explains the ring is formed from Dianna’s essence, so the two should be compatible. Nismera dons the ring and fires the spear at bound prisoners, who explode instead of surviving, proving the experiment a failure. Camilla flees, bursts into a war council, and publicly propositions Kaden to force a private meeting—drawing notice from council member Leviathan, the ice-wielding King of Yejedin Ittshare, Isaiah, and a visibly hurt Elianna.

That night, Kaden comes to her room, furious. He grabs her wrist, injuring her, and she shares the memory of the lab through a kiss. Kaden only shows concern about why Nismera might need his and Isaiah’s blood to stabilize Oblivion. He dismisses the innocent deaths as irrelevant, threatens to hand Camilla over to Nismera if she keeps snooping, and leaves.

Returning from a failed hunt for Dianna, Vincent reflects on how Nismera tricked him into a permanent binding spell years ago, making his will subservient to hers forever. Quill presents Nismera with a newly forged steel gauntlet, which she gives to Vincent—calling him her pet—and charges him with traveling to Flagerun to kill a captured fate she believes is Dianna’s companion, Reggie. That night, Vincent finds Kaden in Camilla’s room and, seeing a bruise on her chin, attacks Kaden in a jealous rage. Camilla separates them with magic. After Kaden leaves, Vincent shows her the gauntlet but lies about the purpose of his mission. She gives him a protective disk she crafted to absorb nightmares. He promises to say goodbye before leaving and spends the night seated outside her door.

Kaden drinks alone at a bar, jaw aching from Vincent’s punch. A slamming door triggers a vivid memory: long ago, their father Unir sealed Kaden and Isaiah inside a brutal prison realm as punishment for an act that would have started war, then abandoned them there for centuries. Kaden held a sobbing Isaiah together, blaming their father’s coldness entirely. Isolated, they hardened, and Kaden vowed to make Unir suffer—cementing his loyalty to Nismera when she eventually freed them. Isaiah finds him at the bar and reports Vincent is heading to Flagerun. Kaden reiterates his desire to see the old gods’ world destroyed and reaffirms his promise to protect Isaiah as war draws near.