Liff gets an opportunity to leave home when Uncle Molder hosts younger Council appointees and her parents are occupied serving them. Molder has recently taken a patched working car around nearby farms under the pretext of searching for Seccers and weapons, returning with food and wine as coerced “donations.” Liff recognizes the intimidation behind this but also understands that nobody will challenge men like Molder.

Because Liff’s parents want her away from the Councilmen, Liff packs a bag and slips toward the treeline, hoping that visiting the Witch by daylight will offer some protection. In the dying forest, Gothi and Gethli appear first as black birds and then as human-like figures. They lead Liff along a path that appears only once they are deep in the woods, while Liff senses a storylike danger in the landscape, including a mysterious Wolf that the Corvids do not seem to perceive.

At the cave, Liff finds a polished stone “mirror” covered in strange, fractured marks that seem part writing and part calculation. The Witch appears: a pale, tired, foreign-looking woman whose authority is stern but whose situation seems strained. Liff demands the return of Captain Holt, whom Liff calls her grandfather, but the Witch reacts with confusion and then anger, pointing out that the colony founder cannot logically be Liff’s grandfather.

Liff tries to threaten the Witch with an iron nail, believing witches cannot touch iron, but the Witch bends it easily and insists she is not a witch. The woman claims to be ancient, powerful, and able to exist in many places, but says this part of herself is constrained by circumstances. Gothi explains that she and Gethli have been trying to catalogue Landfall’s changing people and ecosystem, but the rapid shifts and inconsistencies have overwhelmed them; Gethli thought Liff might help because she seems significant and has appeared in multiple circumstances.

The Witch explains, in terms Liff can grasp, that she is trying to “summon a ghost” by gathering a particular missing survey team whose members are hiding among the colonists. The Witch offers the possibility of raising Captain Holt’s ghost if Liff helps identify strange people in town, clearly meaning Miranda and her hidden group. Liff refuses because Miranda is one of the few adults who treats Liff as a person, and Liff will not betray her.

Realizing that the Witch is effectively tied to the mirror because leaving it would unleash worse dangers, Liff uses a storybook countermeasure and scatters grains across the polished stone. The Witch is only baffled, but Gothi compulsively begins counting and cataloguing the new change, preventing pursuit. Liff escapes along the stream toward town, only to arrive and find that far greater trouble has erupted there.