God finds Harrowhark vomiting in her room aboard the Erebos and refuses to discuss why a Lyctor needs a sword while she is still so ill. Cohort officers press God about military business and the impatient Saint of Joy, but God dismisses them and asks Harrowhark to come with him. Afraid the hated sword will be taken if left behind, Harrowhark straps it to her back with bone despite its weight and her weakness.

As God leads Harrowhark through the ship, Harrowhark struggles with overwhelming Lyctoral perception: the living bodies aboard feel like hot, tempting concentrations of life and death, while preserved corpses register as unnaturally still thanergy. God says Harrowhark has had a shock and that, because time is short, he must show her something meant to hasten her readiness.

In the second cargo hold, God reveals his promised gift: nearly five hundred ancient people, preserved asleep since the Resurrection, intended to renew the Ninth House. Harrowhark is overcome and asks to accompany them home, but God delays that request. Harrowhark then finds coffins holding the dead from Canaan House, notices several missing or incomplete bodies, and learns God has declared the missing dead until the mystery can be solved. The plain coffin with a rose holds Cytherea, whom God intends to return to the First House rather than the Seventh.

Harrowhark asks why God cannot simply resurrect the dead, and God says the cost is too great. He refuses Harrowhark’s obeisance and tells her she does not yet understand what it would mean to call him God. To explain, God questions Harrowhark about death, souls, thanergy, and planetary thalergy, leading her to understand that a planet killed all at once expels a soul-like revenant.

God names these revenants Resurrection Beasts: planetary ghosts born when the system died ten thousand years ago. He explains that they feed on thalergenic planets, pursue him and the Nine Houses, and also hunt Lyctors because Lyctorhood commits an indelible sin. This means Harrowhark cannot return to the Ninth without drawing the Beasts there; instead, God will teach her first to run and later to fight.

The Body then speaks clearly to Harrowhark, saying she must learn the sword. Harrowhark understands this as a sign that her madness has fully returned and insists that whatever she needs is gone, leaving her only half a Lyctor. When God says Ortus Nigenad did not die for nothing, Harrowhark replies that Ortus died believing it was his only gift and that she wasted it; God reacts strangely to the name before Harrowhark collapses.