Unable to sleep after Thomil’s claims about Kwen magic, Sciona reconsiders everything she has been taught about witches beyond the barrier. She rushes back to the university despite Aunt Winny’s alarm at her talk of witchcraft, convinced that old references to witches “opening windows” might describe real magical imaging rather than superstition.

In the library, Sciona spends nearly two days tracing scattered references to Kwen “witch mirrors,” “scrying wells,” and other spells that showed distant places or other worlds with far more clarity than modern Tiranish mapping. The records are fragmentary, but they consistently suggest that Kwen women once used visual magic similar to Tiranish sourcing. Sciona then connects this evidence to founding mage Andrethen Stravos, whose biographies note that he was raised by his Kwen witch mother before joining Leon. Because Stravos, not Leon, created the great sourcing for Tiran’s barrier, Sciona concludes that Tiranish sourcing likely descends from Kwen women’s magic. She realizes Stravos’s difficult, discarded spell lines may contain the missing method for clear imaging.

After a brief encounter with Renthorn and Tanrel in the library, Sciona returns to the laboratory and works in a sleepless frenzy. By translating four unusual Stravos lines into spellograph-compatible form, Sciona produces a mapping image with sharply defined energy sources instead of the usual blurred grayscale haze. She excitedly tells Thomil that his knowledge of Kwen traditions led her to the breakthrough, and she decides to go further by removing the later Faene-ordained lines that cloud modern mapping spells.

Sciona and Thomil test the revised spell together, and the mapping coil becomes a full-color, crystal-clear “window.” Instead of an abstract Otherrealm, the image shows a snowy landscape with bushes, tracks, moonlight, and an animal moving through it. Thomil grows uneasy because the place looks like the Kwen homeland, not a separate realm. When Sciona siphons from a bush as a test, the bush burns apart in white unraveling light. Horrified, Thomil hurls the spellograph away and reveals the consequence of what they have done: the place Sciona has been viewing is the Kwen, and Tiranish sourcing is Blight itself.