After Thomil bolts from the laboratory, Sciona finds him shaking in a stairwell. Thomil insists that the white spiral from Sciona’s siphoning spell is Blight itself and that the landscape in the mapping coil was not the Otherrealm but the Southern Kwen. To prove that he knows what he is describing, Thomil recounts watching Blight kill his father and later his sister near Tiran’s barrier. Sciona, unable to accept that Tiranish magic could be feeding on real people, argues that God may simply show each viewer a subjective image of paradise and that Thomil’s unbelief is why he sees horror.

Thomil turns Sciona’s own reasoning against her and asks what she truly saw. He then pushes her toward a more dangerous conclusion by asking why the Forbidden Coordinates form a perfect circle like Tiran’s own barrier. Once Sciona mentally maps the coordinates onto the Kwen, she realizes the pattern fits too well: the best siphoning zones correspond to living, fertile regions. Horrified, Sciona protests that Tiran and its founders could not have built their civilization on human deaths, but Thomil answers that the city already treats Kwen labor as disposable, so magical consumption is only a more literal version of the same cruelty.

The argument escalates into mutual insults. Sciona calls Thomil savage and ungrateful; Thomil accuses Sciona of blindness and hypocrisy. Sciona slaps Thomil, and Thomil surges forward, forcing Sciona back against the wall. When Sciona reaches for her defensive cylinder, Thomil seizes her hand and presses it against his chest, demanding that she kill him if that is what a proper Tiranish mage does once a Kwen is no longer useful. Sciona, crying and cornered, falls back on religious certainty and says Thomil’s people died because they deserved it. Thomil rejects that belief as delusion, shoves her hand away, and leaves her alone in collapse.

Desperate to prove Thomil wrong, Sciona rushes back to her office, shuts out Renthorn’s taunts, and sets up a spellograph. She maps to a familiar sourcing pool at the edge of the common coordinates and is astonished to see a distant ocean shore populated by unfamiliar black-haired people gathering shells. The scene’s beauty restores her hope for a moment; Sciona convinces herself that a God capable of making such wonders would never allow His mages to take human life. Certain that this new vision will disprove Thomil, Sciona activates the siphoning spell.

Instead, Sciona watches a young woman on the shore ignite in white light and begin to unravel. Sciona screams, tries to abort the spell, burns herself, and finally tears the spellpaper free, causing an explosion that stops the siphoning. The mapping coil remains active long enough for Sciona to see the victim still alive but catastrophically mutilated, surrounded by grieving companions as blood spreads through the shallows. Realizing that her brief burst of fire in Tiran has been purchased with a stranger’s ruined life, Sciona can only sob apologies as the girl dies before her eyes.