The chapter reframes Liff as both a storybook girl and an impossibility. In one version of events, Liff grew up near Landfall on Imir, encountered talking animals, and defied a witch, but the narration states that Liff could never truly have existed.

Liff's nonexistence follows from the failed history of Landfall. Liff depends on generations descended from Heorest Holt and Esi Arbandir, but those progenitors died without establishing a colony or having children, so the chain of ancestry that would have produced Liff never began.

Despite that contradiction, Liff continues to appear just beyond ordinary reality, living and reliving her life on Imir until she is the only one left. The narration casts Liff as a ghost haunting later visitors to the world where she was never born and never truly died.

The chapter ends by returning to the Urshanabi crash. Captain Holt's gamble failed as the ancient shuttle broke apart in Imir's atmosphere, but as Holt and the others fell, invisible hands reached out to catch them, implying that some unseen force preserved or transformed the catastrophe into the impossible reality where Liff endures.