Months into captivity, Camilla struggles to reassemble a shattered magical medallion with Nismera’s agent, Hilma, and the witch couple Tessa and Tara. She maintains a fake romance with Kaden as cover while they jointly—and fruitlessly—investigate a room where mysterious blood and bodies once appeared. She has a nightmare in which hooded figures performing a ritual around a dark pool ends when a creature with four white, opaque eyes grabs her and whispers a prophecy. Waking to sounds of pain from across the hall, she slips into Vincent’s room under a cloaking spell and finds him wounded from a mission. He coldly rejects her plea for friendship, but she suspects he’s quietly grateful for her healing remedy as the door closes.

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.