In the River bubble, Ortus Nigenad tries to hold off the Sleeper by reciting from The Noniad, but the Sleeper breaks through Harrowhark’s bone wall with impossible ease and shoots Ortus in the belly. Harrow attacks with constructs, yet the Sleeper destroys them unnaturally, showing that the intruder’s power inside the bubble can override Harrow’s necromantic rules.

As Harrow and Ortus continue the poem, Abigail Pent completes a desperate spirit-working. Blue fire fills the room, the First Bell of Drearburh sounds, and the ghost of Matthias Nonius, legendary cavalier of the Ninth House, appears. Abigail charges Nonius to protect Harrow, and Nonius engages the Sleeper in single combat.

The duel reshapes the bubble. The Sleeper’s guns fail because firearms do not belong in Ortus’s epic, the room becomes more like Drearburh, and the Sleeper’s suit changes into orange dueling armor. Harrow realizes that Nonius, as filtered through Ortus’s poem and devotion, is rewriting the intruder’s rules just as the Sleeper had earlier seized Harrow’s staged Canaan House memory.

The fight turns brutal. Nonius loses his rapier but continues with a dagger, breaks the Sleeper’s arm, and wounds her badly. Protesilaus throws Nonius the sword of the Rose Unblown, and Nonius runs the Sleeper through the heart. When Harrow sees the Sleeper unmasked, Harrow recognizes the face from the portrait in the shuttle on the planet she killed, though Harrow denies knowing her; a tag at the Sleeper’s throat reads AWAKE.

Abigail warns that killing the Sleeper inside the bubble does not necessarily destroy the revenant’s physical anchor outside it, and the bubble begins collapsing because it has undergone too many conflicting transformations. Nonius asks permission to leave and help the Saint of Duty, who is fighting a Resurrection Beast alone in the River. Ortus, Protesilaus, and Marta Dyas choose to go with Nonius, and Abigail sends the four cavaliers back into the River.

With the bubble disintegrating, Abigail explains Harrow’s choices: go back to her body, leave it for the River, or risk hideous unknown consequences. Harrow fears returning will finally destroy Gideon’s soul, but Magnus confronts Harrow with the grief she has refused to face and urges Harrow to live. Harrow decides that Gideon already chose life for Harrow, so Harrow must live. Abigail and Magnus depart, but Dulcinea Septimus stays behind briefly, saying she has something to tell Harrow.