Aelin and Manon arrive inside the witch mirror in a foggy twilight void. Aelin feels that she has a body that is not truly a body, while Manon appears nearly transparent and wraithlike. Neither knows where they are, and Aelin worries about whether time has stopped outside or whether Maeve has attacked their forces in Aelin’s absence.

Aelin expects the mirror or the two Wyrdkeys hidden in her jacket to react if the mirror is truly the Lock, but nothing happens. Aelin draws Goldryn for light, and Manon proposes that the two stay close and speak only when necessary. Before they can choose a direction, the fog darkens into pure night.

A murky light approaches and expands around Aelin and Manon, revealing figures and a landscape. Aelin realizes that the people in the vision cannot see, hear, or scent them; that the scene is a memory from a thousand years earlier; and that the woman before them is Elena Galathynius.

Elena kneels in a barren mountain pass, bloodied and weeping before an obsidian sarcophagus marked with pale blue Wyrdmarks. The Eye of Elena is set in the center of the sarcophagus. After the Wyrdmarks and the Eye dim, Elena twists the Eye three times, removes it, and seals the sarcophagus, locking it.

Manon realizes that Aelin has had the Lock all along in the form of the Eye of Elena. Aelin concludes that they were deliberately misled about what they needed to retrieve, and the mirror has sent them into the past to reveal the truth while the battle outside remains unresolved.