In the last days before the coming catastrophe, Harrow begins praying again, not from faith in a clear recipient but from desperation for clarity and survival. Harrow wants the hidden traitor among the Lyctors revealed, hopes Cytherea is somehow responsible, and struggles to reconcile the impossible sight of dead Canaan House figures alive with the empty coffins and opened letters. Thinking about the contradiction worsens Harrow's bleeding and physical decline.

One month earlier, after Harrow kills a fourteenth planet, an unfamiliar alarm locks down the Mithraeum. The Emperor checks in with the Lyctors, but Mercymorn breaks down after seeing the arriving Resurrection Beast. Mercymorn says the seventh Beast has come early, identifies it as kin to the Beasts that killed earlier Lyctors, and panics because it can perceive the cavalier soul burning inside her.

After the alarm ends, the station remains shuttered for protection from the Beast's approach. Harrow lies beside the Body, whose eyes are open and who says with astonishment that the Beast is coming and near. Harrow, overwhelmed by fear, desire, and desperation, tries to touch and kiss the Body, but the Body remains intangible; when the Body says she must go away for a while, Harrow falls asleep, and by morning the Body is gone.

Later, Mercymorn briefs Harrow, Ianthe, Augustine, Ortus, and the Emperor on the plan to fight the Resurrection Beast in the River. Mercymorn explains the layers of engagement: the Beast must first be fought in the epirhoic layer, then driven down through the mesorhoic and bathyrhoic layers to the barathron, where a stoma will open so the Lyctors can force the Beast through. Ortus argues for beginning lower, but the older Lyctors recall past battles in which such tactics cost Ulysses, Cyrus, and Cassiopeia.

Ianthe questions whether the Beast's physical body can simply be bombed, but the others explain that its layers of dead matter and Heralds make that impractical and that previous attempts drove Lyctors mad or killed them. Harrow asks what to expect from the Beast, and Mercymorn explains that every Beast is different, recounting terrifying forms of earlier Beasts. Mercymorn assigns Ianthe, Augustine, Ortus, and herself positions around the Beast, but gives Harrow no fixed role beyond staying out of the way, making clear that the others do not trust Harrow's competence in the fight.

When Ianthe asks what the stoma is, Augustine and Mercymorn argue over whether the younger Lyctors should have been told. The Emperor answers directly: the stoma is the mouth to Hell, a chaotic abyss at the bottom of the River where his power has no authority and from which no one returns. The chapter ends with the revelation that the Resurrection Beasts are disposed of by forcing them into this unknowable, unreachable place.