Helena notices an unusually unlocked dining room and quietly steals a sharpened table knife while pretending to admire the room's flowers and silver. She plans first to hide it, then considers suicide, reasoning that a deep enough throat wound or blood loss might make her mind unusable even if Ferron tried to save her. Before she can leave unnoticed, Ferron enters with Atreus and immediately suspects she has taken something.

When Ferron demands to see what Helena is hiding, Helena attacks him instead. Her strike barely wounds him because his body resists the blade, and when Helena turns the knife on herself, Ferron stops her with terrifying speed and resonance, freezing both Helena and Atreus. Ferron heals instantly, orders Helena confined, and Helena realizes she should have used the weapon on herself the moment she had it.

In midwinter, Governor Fabian Greenfinch is nearly assassinated during a statue unveiling, but the crossbow bolt kills Mandl, one of the Undying, instead. The public death shocks Paladia because it proves the Resistance still exists and that the Undying can be killed. Lancaster stops visiting Spirefell, Aurelia becomes paranoid, and Ferron begins returning from hunts or investigations in combat gear, muddy and enraged, while Helena is privately exhilarated.

Stroud visits Helena and reveals that Stroud herself is not Undying, explaining that Morrough sustains her while she works on transference and that the Undying often develop sadism over time. Stroud forces Helena to take tablets because Morrough wants to see her, then drugs Helena with injections that leave Helena sick, bruised, disoriented, and in severe pain. When Ferron later arrives, he realizes Stroud is responsible and takes Helena through tunnels beneath the city into the ruins of Rivertide.

In the underground chamber, Morrough appears rotting and diminished on a throne made from fused necrothrall bodies, including faces Helena may recognize. Morrough violently searches Helena's memories, distorting her imprisonment, transference sessions, and fragments involving Luc and Lila. He realizes Helena is not merely hiding memories but is the Eternal Flame's animancer, capable of resisting and possibly having erased her own knowledge of what she is. Morrough condemns Ferron for failing to notice, links Helena to the West Port Laboratory attack and Lila's attempted rescue, and orders Ferron to watch Helena because the Eternal Flame will likely come for her.

Morrough punishes Ferron by crushing and killing or nearly killing him before Ferron regenerates, then demands that Ferron capture the remaining Eternal Flame members alive. After they escape the chamber, Ferron tells Helena she was captured after levelling much of the West Port Laboratory, where Bennet conducted experiments and where Lila was dying. Days later, Helena calls Ferron and lays out her deductions: the Undying have been dying for weeks, Ferron has been concealing it, Morrough uses the Undying as a power source, the repopulation program is meant to produce an animancer vessel, and the Resistance has discovered how to kill Morrough and the Undying.