Thousands of years earlier, Torrin leads an elite Veyan expedition into the Chained City, a floating prison raised above the fallen colony of Manus by his husband Verian. Verian abandoned the fortress only days before, leaving thousands of prisoners to starve and prompting the Veyan king to order an investigation and the retrieval of one uniquely dangerous captive. A Shadowless Vey warns that darkness born from attempts to purify Sethis's people has become hungry within the prison. Torrin releases an emaciated human who bears the green eyes of the Vey's enemy and declares that their people will be erased from history, but refuses to free a Denari Firstborn or a Veyan traitor from the War of Fang and Fire. Red-black darkness, shifting visions, a disappearing scarecrow, and a woman's song torment the expedition as it crosses the central prison. In the tower sustaining the city's flight, the warden admits that he and Verian looked through the veil, saw the Vey defeated in every possible future, and resolved to awaken beings older than the gods so those powers would consume whatever was coming. The warden gives Torrin the key to the central prisoner but warns that every death the captive causes will belong to him.

Torrin's soldiers rescue Floyd from a smooth, faceless candle-bearer that sings from beyond his daylight, then cross back to the prison's entrance. Flint kills the Shadowless guardian without provocation, and an unseen presence drives the warden to his knees. Inside the sealed central cell, the expedition finds Acuras, the pale prisoner known as the Crimson Knight. Torrin orders four restraining glyphs broken so his transport artifact can carry Acuras to Tyve, but the faceless being manifests outside the room and infects the rescue with madness. Floyd claws at her own ears, Flint bleeds from the eyes and attacks Torrin, and Acuras drains one soldier's blood to restore his strength before recognizing the approaching entity with terror. When Torrin finally activates the artifact, the group passes through a realm of red-black lightning filled with fear, grief, isolation, and mania. Otherworldly hands pull Flint away as he cries the name Argalus. The remaining travelers reach Tyve with Acuras, where Valens Avarith immediately places a radiant spear against the Crimson Knight's neck and arrests him.

In the present, Torrin awakens from this recovered memory at the new mainland outpost surrounding the Twilight Temple portal. His Sending to Helena is intercepted by a presence echoing the Chained City, which repeats that he should remember what it could have done. The Harbingers reject a direct assault upon Keph and instead choose to seek the ancestral knowledge of the Dregda Moor at Dragdah, whose dead were feared even by the Blood Sorcerers. Zandra identifies the creature from Torrin's memory as an Argalus, an embodiment of primal emotion from beyond the veil, but refuses to delay her western mission. Ned Flan'Deres, Silas, and Kiera join the rescue journey. The group revisits the ruined village below the outpost, reunites the surviving boy Ned with his rescued brother, and examines the Rusticulum's mutilated human body fused into engraved armor. Tracks from one adult and two children lead into the forest before vanishing alongside a jackal trail without blood or struggle. After two days traveling toward Tch'nev and the Veng'namar Plateau, Kiera explains how the Drowned One corrupted the traditions of her Ilferan clan and why she wants to undertake the ancestral pilgrimage. As Aronin and Silas sing Tyve's song beside the fire, Torrin remembers seeing a scarecrow watching from the center of the ruined village.