The party leaves Tch’nev with four coats and travels for several days toward Ilanar. The nearer they come to the Veng’namar Plateau, the more desperation and quiet madness they perceive in the surrounding settlements. Bjorn begins hearing whispers in his sleep and awakens with the sensation of icy hands resting upon his shoulders. During the journey, Brill catches up with the group after traveling alone from the Twilight Temple. Zandra has departed on a separate quest, leaving a small force behind to protect the temple, and Brill has come at her behest to help the party fulfill the oaths he made to them. In Ilanar, the travelers purchase six complete sets of cold-weather equipment and sample locally produced frost wine. Vyr finds the sweet wine strangely bitter because it touches something troubling within her, but purchases a rare bottle of black ice wine for Helena. A merchant warns the party that something evil lives upon the mountain and advises them to carry the light within their hearts.

Bjorn and Kiera seek permission to cross Ilanar’s northern gate, but Maven, the settlement’s self-proclaimed proprietor, demands one thousand gold. He eventually offers passage if Bjorn publicly kisses him, prompting Normandy to negotiate privately and purchase the gate’s opening with two glints. At the Scalding Pot, an old inn once associated with the Grey Knights, the party learns that generations of warfare left the dead buried beneath the glacier and that the region’s original inhabitants may have controlled both the living and the dead. Searching the inn, they find an old battle painting inscribed with the message that only light revealed the truth behind the shadows. When Ned channels Acuras’s pure light through a glint, the painting transforms into a map of the Dragdah pilgrimage. The map describes the Eye of the Mountain, a gorge only the worthy may cross, a days-long glacier ascent, a tundra navigable only through light, and the great bridge leading to Dragdah. It also carries a warning never to cross that final bridge. After revealing the map, the glint tears through the inn’s wall and flies toward the distant Ithelion as though returning home.

Elendra tells Brill that each glint may be a fragment of a greater whole, perhaps debris from the event in which the Ithelion first touched Tyve. She also observes the extraordinary convergence of a Vanari, an Umtheran, and a Vey within a single fellowship. While the others rest, Normandy and Vyr investigate the magic surrounding Maven. They perceive a pale hand reaching from a blood-filled membrane, dark power pressing against the boundary of the world, and Maven writhing above his bed while connected to the bulbous idols he claims to create from his night terrors. The presence senses Normandy and forces its way against his mind until Mathias warns him to retreat. At dawn, Maven opens the northern gates. Ned, Silas, Th’Marck, Rue, and Elendra remain in Ilanar while the core party and Brill begin the pilgrimage. The gates close behind them, and hours later they reach an impossible bridge spanning a bottomless, fog-filled gorge from which the screams of the dead rise.