Chapter 25

Celcha wanders the silent, gas-killed city, hoping in vain for survivors and mourning the trainee princess Lutna among the countless dead. Grief hardens into anger as she foresees humans blaming the ganar and Myles Carstar exploiting the aftermath. She turns her fury toward the mountain and the library she deems co-author of the genocide.

Returning to the wolf’s head entrance, Celcha finds only drifting yellow fog and two blood pools left by assistants who shed their forms. She suspects Yute and a partner took mortal shapes to reenter time after witnessing the slaughter. As Celcha hesitates, something seizes her ankle and drags her through a pool.

Celcha falls into the Exchange, a forest of ancient trees and circular light-pools that serve as doors. An assistant shows a mutable black sphere, “built of expectation and imagination,” warning it would mirror nightmares to the fearful. When Celcha asks after two ghosts, the assistant says they have already gone into the future and cautions her not to pursue them.

Pressed for identity, the assistant admits he is forgetting himself: he sought a “cure” for being a fracture in the world. Celcha realizes this is Hellet, transformed and now experiencing time as a pond rather than a river. When she begs to hunt the ghosts together, Hellet insists the library, not the ghosts, made him this way and caused the calamity—and that it cannot be broken from the outside, explaining why he did not wait.