As Sciona is taken from the Magistry after exposing the Freynan Mirrors, she watches the city react in terror to visible proof that Tiranish magic is powered by living deaths. From the police car, Sciona studies the mirrors and confirms Thomil’s theory that the Reserve siphons life at chokepoints where animals and people must pass. When the car’s engine-triggered mirror shows a human victim, the driver panics and crashes, and Sciona is brought half-conscious to jail.

In an isolated cell, Sciona expects the panic to fade once her spell ends, but the unrest only grows. She hears chanting, Kwen throat singing, and gunfire, and eventually Alba comes to see her. Alba confirms that the city is burning, the Kwen are rioting, Alba’s repair shop has been destroyed, and ordinary people are in danger. Sciona insists she revealed the truth to help people, but Alba argues that Sciona has devastated her family and their home for the sake of abstract principles and personal ego; when Sciona still cannot concede the harm she has caused, Alba rejects her, slaps her, and leaves.

After Alba’s departure, Sciona breaks down and begins to accept that Thomil may have been right: Tiran was not ready to face the truth, and the people hurt first are not the powerful mages but everyone below them. Later, a guard informs her that the prisons are overfilled with arrested Kwen and that she is being relocated. Instead of going to her aunt, Sciona is taken into Archmage Bringham’s custody.

Outside the jail, Sciona sees the scale of the uprising as thousands of Kwen flood the streets. Bringham, carrying a military staff, escorts her through the crowd and uses shockwaves, fire, and lightning to maim and kill Kwen who attack them. Sciona is horrified by both the violence and the justice of the Kwen’s anger, recognizing that Bringham’s power and the mage’s weapons are themselves products of the same stolen magic she exposed. A bleeding Kwen boy grabs her skirt, and Bringham crushes the child’s hand to pull Sciona free.

Bringham and Sciona reach Archmage Duris’s armored experimental car, which is designed for situations like this. As Duris drives them through riot-torn streets, he and Bringham openly frame the Kwen as enemies, and Bringham reveals that martial law has been declared, giving mages and officials broad power to suppress the unrest. Passing her neighborhood, Sciona sees poor Tiranish citizens and Kwen fighting while homes and businesses burn, and she finally understands that the greatest cost of her revelation is being paid by ordinary people on both sides. By dawn’s approach on the last day of Feryn’s Feast, Sciona is left with guilt, fear, and the realization that she helped unleash a catastrophe she cannot control.