As Caten burns under night skies choked with smoke, Vis and Eidhin stagger through the city, avoiding major formations while intervening wherever isolated legionnaires hunt Octavii and Septimii. Vis keeps up the illusion of Carnifex despite broken legs, mounting blood loss, and exhaustion, because he wants terrified survivors to believe someone powerful is fighting for them. Between skirmishes he sends imbued metal shards into the sky to summon Ka, worries that his warning to Tertius Ericius may not have arrived in time, and nearly gets caught near the front when a Transvect is destroyed in a fiery crash near the Forum.

When their strength finally gives out, the two men take shelter in a ruined house. Eidhin forces Vis to rest and, during the pause, explains why he chose to return: Vis told him the truth, came to him broken and vulnerable, and treated him as brother rather than as a tool. That conversation restores their bond just before Vis's signal is answered by a shadowed man in the street. Vis reveals his true name, offers to become the legitimate leader who can end the war if Ka gives him something terrifying enough to force the rival claimants to negotiate, and listens as Ka says the Cataclysms are not an end in themselves but a desperate way to save humanity from the Concurrence. Ka adds that only Vis can now carry that purpose, then sends an iunctus to guide Vis and Eidhin onward.

Before dawn, the iunctus leads them through the ruined city to the docks, onto an empty bireme, and finally to Agerus. During the voyage, Eidhin tends Vis's wounds while Vis drifts between pain, grief for Aequa, rage, and anxious reflection on Ka's claims. Once inside the mountain passages of the Necropolis, the guide briefly speaks again and clarifies a major revelation: the Concurrence is not a rival people but a rogue, world-spanning system of interlinked iunctii that once ruled hundreds of millions before the Rending. He then brings them to a sealed chamber beneath the Necropolis and has Vis open it.

Inside lies a vast hidden crypt stretching through the mountain, filled with nearly eighty thousand preserved bodies gathered over a century of Hierarchy conquest. The iunctus explains that this place was built as an early answer to the Concurrence, and that Vis can trigger a Cascade by imbuing three pinned corpses on a central platform. Those first iunctii will cede Will to him, awaken others, and continue outward until Vis holds the strength of a Princeps and commands an army that does not sleep, eat, or stop. Eidhin is horrified and begs Vis not to do something so fundamentally wrong to the dead, but Vis, desperate to gain control, end the war, and reclaim the possibility of justice, chooses the burden anyway and wakes the first three.

The Cascade spreads rapidly across the chamber, then beyond it, as the awakened dead rise in widening waves and steadily feed more Will into Vis. The iunctus says that once efficient formations are complete, the awakened will regain their memories and selves, though any further limits will be Vis's responsibility. Eidhin, saddened but loyal, promises he is still with Vis. Then the newly awakened begin speaking in confusion, and Vis hears a voice he knows: turning, he finds his mother and sister among the revived and rushes to them in overwhelming joy. The chapter ends with Eidhin smiling at someone behind Vis and a familiar voice greeting him.