After the apparent death tied to her research, Sciona falls into a two-day collapse of nightmares, panic, and self-loathing. In her dreams, rot comes from the Leonid and from her own body, reflecting how deeply guilt and horror have fused with her identity. Alba stays beside her through the nights and mornings, trying desperately to calm her, while Sciona begs for any way to stop feeling what she feels.

Aunt Winny, frightened by Sciona's instability, decides to summon a medical alchemist despite Alba's protests. Alba knows that if the doctor finds Sciona visibly out of control, he may force treatment on her and destroy her mind in the name of stabilizing her. That threat jolts Sciona into action. Anchored less by hope than by pride and refusal to be erased by a lesser man, Sciona decides to compose herself enough to confront the doctor on her own terms.

When Doctor Mellier arrives, Sciona presents herself as Highmage Freynan and takes control of the encounter. In private, she sits on her windowsill and threatens to jump if Mellier tries to restrain her, call for help, or interrupt her terms. Sciona makes clear that she does not want remedies that would dull her intellect, obedience, or ambition, and Mellier's sexist insistence that a woman's proper end is stability, submission, and domestic usefulness only confirms her contempt for his discipline.

Sciona then uses the conversation to think through her crisis. Comparing alchemy to her own work in energy sourcing, Sciona argues that medical alchemy treats emotion as matter to be transmuted, which makes doctors try to turn grief into happiness or an unruly woman into a submissive one. That model fails, Sciona says, when suffering is born from irrefutable truth. She begins to redefine her anguish not as poison to be removed but as energy to be directed. If she cannot stop feeling this darkness, she may still be able to convert its force into meaningful action.

This realization pulls Sciona back from self-destruction. She dismisses Mellier, promises she will not attempt suicide again, and decides that what matters now is what she can do with her pain. Recognizing that ordinary mages cannot challenge her thinking sharply enough, Sciona concludes that she needs Thomil's mind to test whatever she does next. By the end of the chapter, despair has not vanished, but it has hardened into purpose: Sciona will act, and Sciona Freynan intends to leave a mark on the world.