At the glacial waystation, Vyr sees the wooden haft of Helvegen shine with golden light while Bjorn sleeps, though the glow disappears when he wakes. Bjorn explains that the thrice-rooted wood has passed between Nornian chiefs for generations and that he only helped reforge the weapon's head and grip. The party climbs through the glacier and emerges into the Wraith Wilds, where a mummified Dregda Moor guardian with yellow-green eyes recognizes Bjorn as keeper of the old blade. The being speaks with many voices, says Helvegen sings to the dead, and welcomes Bjorn's new tribe to attempt the pilgrimage. It tells the travelers that the wilds will confront them with fear, truth, and the past, while the great stone ahead will accept offerings and questions for their ancestors. Vyr discovers that the Dregda Moor deliberately refuse to cross the veil of death, an affront to Umtheras, and the guardian points to her crystal while declaring that she will cross it. Before allowing them onward, it warns them to beware the Felrune Bridge and the fallen kingdom beyond, for only death waits within Drag'Dah.

Roped together against the blizzard, the travelers follow Bjorn and Helvegen through the Wraith Wilds as the storm turns private grief into living visions. Normandy relives his mother's illness and his father's violence. Bjorn returns to his final parting from Bjor Kavaar, who urged him to lead their people away from Norn while she and the Shadow Claws remained behind. A wraith forces him to look back and see his wife cradling her stomach, revealing that she was pregnant when he left. Vyr revisits her dying father, who tells her that reverence for death must not become a refusal to live. Brill remembers meeting and courting Cassily before discovering her murdered body, after which the robed figure tells him that the others will need someone who understands death. At dusk, the party reaches a sixty-foot stone and an inextinguishable brazier watched by another Dregda Moor guardian. Each traveler sacrifices part of the past, including Brill's secret love poem, Whisper's silken rose petals, Vyr's mother's cloak, Normandy's Felric name, Torrin's empty locket, Aronin's guitar Isabella, and Bjorn's locket of Bjor Kavaar's hair with a gilded flower. When the flame asks for a bearer, Helvegen's golden haft repels it, but Bjorn takes it into his hands. He experiences Kypheron's final moments during the Dragon War, seeing Valens hurl a radiant spear into the dragon god's chest while Torrin stands behind him with a hammer. Bjorn awakens with fire in his eyes as the brazier erupts, the storm stops, and the marks of generations of pilgrims ignite across the stone. The party learns that the brazier held Kypheron's last flame, while Bjorn carves the flower he seeks for his niece into the monument.

The cleared sky reveals the Felrune Bridge, a vast crossing above a screaming chasm with a tower at its midpoint and the frozen black keep of Drag'Dah beyond. During the night, green lights briefly appear within the keep, while the carvings inside the great stone mysteriously brighten. The party crosses the bridge the next morning and finds three corpses near the tower, but the storm closes behind them and the Dregda Moor voices repeat that they were warned. A colossal undead bird with the same sickly green eyes severs Bjorn's rope, carries him above the chasm, and hurls him into the mist. Bjorn throws Helvegen back to Kiera before falling. Whisper invokes their bond, cuts himself free, and leaps after Bjorn with another rope, but one of the risen dead seizes Whisper's mind and forces him to stab the man he tried to save. The companions destroy the undead wardens and pull Whisper back, but Bjorn plunges approximately fifteen hundred feet into the mire below, surviving with only a trace of life while his equipment shatters. Pursued by rabid wolves beneath immense roots, he finds a small cottage and a young woman gathering herbs. She heals him, identifies herself as Magda Navaa, and says that she and her sisters are guardians, leaving Bjorn face to face with a woman he knew only as an ancient adviser.