Theia screams and hurls herself at Hel in grief-fueled rage. Lyra realizes the gods are deliberately avoiding killing her—she is too valuable to them as the only one who can stop Hades. She teleports directly into Hel’s sword strike so that it skewers her through the chest. Mortally wounded but still standing, Lyra uses the moment of shock to tear the glamours from both Hel and Anubis. Both are devastated when they understand what they have done and what they truly are. Anubis removes Hel’s blade and heals Lyra instantly. With two gods of death now on her side, Lyra calls the Nightmares—creatures pledged to her—who are able to freeze all the fighters. Lyra swiftly strips the glamours from every remaining god while they are held still. Rhea tells Lyra she must go to Hades now. After a long embrace, Rhea calls Lyra daughter and sends her on her way.

Hermes, glamour gone and now cooperative, offers to take Lyra up to Olympus. She discovers that Hades’s blue fire and smoke have leveled the mountain, blown apart waterfalls, and are still drilling down into Tartarus to reach her. Multiple pantheons of gods have been trying and failing to break through his defenses. Ares briefly stops Lyra from getting too close before finding Aphrodite at her request. Lyra discovers that her tattoo animals were injured trying to reach Hades and calls them back to her arm to heal. When Aphrodite arrives, she agrees to project Lyra’s love toward Hades, with Lyra walking physically forward at the same time. Together, they approach the barrier—slow, unarmed, exposed—as a tentacle of fire rears and bends but cannot bring itself to strike Lyra down.

Lyra calls out to Hades through the smoke, speaking to him directly and honestly. She emphasizes that she has escaped, she is here, and she needs to hold him. The tentacle goes still, creating a narrow path up to the temple. Inside the black temple, Lyra finds Hades seated on an obsidian throne, shrouded in a dark hood and cloak. Fire and lava cascade behind him, and chains of his own making are bolted to the floor around his hands and feet. Noticing Lyra’s long hair, he tries to send her away, believing she is a future version come to disappear on him again. Lyra refuses to be stopped. As he holds her in place with smoke bonds, she strains forward and demonstrates Cronos’s power by freezing time completely. She drops to her knees at Hades’s feet and asks him to really see her. A shudder rips through Hades, and he lunges forward, cupping her face, searching her eyes—and finally knowing her.

Hades breaks his own chains and teleports them both to their room in Erebos. Their reunion is frantic and cathartic. Lyra tells Hades she loves him and will never leave again. He asks her to say it once more.

In the quiet after, Lyra and Hades talk. He forgives her for the secrecy she had to keep, and she tells him she was always only trying to get back to him. He confesses he held back earlier in their relationship because he didn’t know when or how she would become a goddess and was afraid of making promises he couldn’t keep. Lyra gently warns him she has more pain to deliver and removes the glamour from his face. She watches as real memories flood back into Hades, and he realizes who the Titans truly are, what was done to them, and what role he played. He buries his face in her hair and sobs. When he finally speaks, he tells her he knows his father is dead. She holds him through it.

Hades vows to find those responsible and build a new Tartarus for them. As the full weight of his actions hits him, he resolves to fix what he has destroyed. Lyra and Hades discover that his smoke tentacles tore holes from Olympus down through the Underworld to Tartarus, and the oceans are now pouring in. They teleport down. The four pillar Titans are already containing the deluge, and Eurybia works inside it. Rhea redirects Hades to coordinate from above, then tells Lyra she needs to use Cronos’s power.

Lyra initially resists, still barely familiar with her new power and terrified of the scale of what is being asked. Following Cronos’s final instruction to her—to find him in their cell when she needs him—Lyra closes her eyes and wills herself there. She arrives in Tartarus’s past and finds Cronos, who seems to understand that he has recently died for her. Lyra describes the full scope of what Hades did and what must be fixed. Cronos acknowledges it is complicated, but says he can teach her. When she protests that there is no time, he reminds her that she can return to any moment she chooses. They begin.

Cronos teaches Lyra to control her power, starting small. After many attempts, she successfully travels to her chosen destination: Zeus’s temple in San Francisco, on the night of her own birth. She observes Zeus watching her parents and realizes with horror that he does not curse her of his own will. Zeus has been glamoured and is in a highly suggestible state. Lyra commands Zeus to curse her parents’ child, making her unlovable. However, she deliberately builds in exceptions so that the curse cannot affect anyone who cares for her, and only functions in the Overworld. Lyra apologizes to her infant self for being the architect of her own wretched childhood—the only way to set the events in motion that eventually free the Titans. Before she leaves, she witnesses Boone time-traveling to the same night. He glamours her parents and commands them to deliver her to the Order of Thieves at age three. He has been protecting her across time, too.

Lyra returns to the exact moment she left Rhea. She gathers all those who were in Tartarus, including Hades, and explains what she intends to do: Reverse the damage to the world while preserving the Titans’ freedom and her own new power. Hades protests, but after Lyra stops time to make him hear her, he relents. The group forms a chain. With the four pillar Titans holding the water at bay, Lyra seals a protective bubble around all of them, frozen at the current moment in time, and begins reversing the outside world.

Lyra watches the world outside her bubble rewind. Past versions of them all appear and interact with Hades in reverse. She speeds the rewind up, working backward through the battle, the tentacles, the chaos, until she reaches the moment just after the Titans emerged and the gods of death first arrived. At that exact point, she pauses outside time. Iapetus tests the gates of Tartarus from within the stopped moment, and they remain open. As Lyra resets and suspends time, the exertion drains her. Her legs fail, her head drops, and Rhea directs her own power into Lyra to keep her standing. Together, they push forward until Lyra finds the precise moment in history she needs: Hades, Charon, Cerberus, and Demeter standing before closed gates just after Lyra and Boone were pulled inside. She stops there, releases both time streams, and the bubble pops. The gates are still unlocked.

With Persephone’s power restoring Lyra enough to walk, the three of them surface to find Hades on his knees before the gods of death with Anubis’s crook at his throat. They recite a rehearsed cover story—that Cronos reversed time from inside the rubble and spat them out as a last act. The gods of death convene a judgment. A scale materializes with Hades’s divine power weighed against the feather of Maat. The scale drops on Hades’s side, and the gods strip him of his powers and his immortality. His scream shakes Olympus. Anubis splits Hades’s bident into two and presents one to Lyra and one to Persephone, naming them joint Queens of the Underworld in his absence, before departing with the others. Lyra runs to Hades. His eyes, once silver, are now dull blue. He pulls her close and kisses her, then tells her not to worry—he has a plan.

An unnamed narrator reveals themselves to be the one who glamourized the entire immortal world into believing the Titans were monsters. They reflect that even they did not foresee the chain of events that would follow from sending Persephone to Tartarus. Now that Hades is no longer a threat, they see only one path forward: Remain close to Lyra and gain control by becoming her closest friend. The narrator reflects that this is a shame, as they have “always liked her” (523).