Two years before the Wall, Rhysand walks through the aftermath of a devastating battle. The war-drums have been replaced by flies, pyres, and survivors’ screams as he crosses a field covered in human and faerie dead. Though badly weakened, he keeps moving because the army still needs weapons stripped from the fallen and because the scale of the slaughter forces him to confront what this war has become.

Rhysand reflects on why the battle mattered. He and the allied mortal and faerie forces were ordered to hold the lines before a strategically vital keep whose location, supplies, and forges made it too important to lose. Ravennia’s Loyalist legions had attacked for three days, aiming to break a resistance already close to splintering, and Rhysand spent his magic and then his physical strength keeping the defense intact.

As he studies the corpses, Rhysand sees fresh evidence of the enemy’s brutality, including a rider killed by claws rather than a clean battlefield strike. That confirms what the resistance has already learned: the slaveholding territories and kingdoms will not honor old rules of war, especially when fighting the faeries who stand beside humans. The battle was won only because Rhysand refused to yield and because Illyrian reinforcements finally arrived at dawn on the third day after his plea for aid.

That relief does not comfort him for long. Rhysand realizes he has not seen Cassian or Azriel among the living and fears his father may have sent Cassian into a unit likely to be destroyed. He begins searching the piles of dead Illyrians one by one, briefly dreading that he has found Cassian before discovering another fallen soldier instead.

Rhysand continues across the endless killing field, checking one body after another. Some of the dead are familiar, some are strangers, but none are the brothers he seeks. The chapter ends with Rhysand still searching through a landscape of ruin, underscoring both the cost of the war and the personal fear driving him onward.