Vis wakes in a hut at Caer Áras, battered but alive, and confirms that his silver arm still works. When he steps outside, Tara, Conor, Fearghus, Seanna, and Miach greet him with open relief and rough affection. They explain that the siege was broken four days earlier, that Fiachra’s men fled in fear after Vis’s display of power, and that a visiting draoi named Uallach has taken Lir’s staff to the Grove to defend Caer Áras’s position. They also reveal that Ruarc surrendered that morning and asked to speak to Vis before anything is done to him.

Back inside, Vis tells his friends nearly everything that happened after they were separated, stopping short of speaking about Fornax. When the story reaches his father, Tara gently tells him that his father’s body was found downriver and has not yet been given funeral rites. Vis insists on seeing him at once, and his friends escort him through a Caer Áras that now watches him as a hero called “Silverhand.” At the cave where the body is kept, Vis presses the scarab medallion to his father’s cheek, confirms there is no life left, and says his private goodbye.

On returning to the caer, Vis is reunited with Gráinne, Róisín, and Tadhg, and then discovers that Onchú is alive as well. The cairn Vis had seen near their home was for a sheep, not Onchú, and the misunderstanding turns his grief into relieved laughter. Gráinne invites him to return with them and live a simpler life rebuilding the farm, but Vis decides he must remain in Caer Áras. He shares a meal with them before they leave, choosing duty and the currents of events over the peace he briefly imagines.

That evening, Caer Áras gives Vis’s father a solemn royal funeral because Tara has told the people that he was a king. Vis helps carry the body, lights the pyre by the lake, and finally breaks down, weeping openly as Tara and the others close around him and hold him up. After the cremation, the six friends carry the cleaned bones into a grove of cairns, where Vis places his father’s remains in a sealed tomb marked with the triskeles. Tara explains that, here, the symbol means that his father was not of this world but belonged in it, and when they stop at her father’s cairn, Vis and Tara quietly agree that the people of Caer Áras are now “our people.”

Before dawn, Vis meets Ruarc alone in the same hut where Vis was once confined. Ruarc reveals that his true name is Caeror, that he arrived in Luceum almost eight years earlier the same way Vis did, and that he is Ulciscor’s brother. He claims he hunted Vis because he believed his other selves had died and says that one of Vis’s counterparts has now made a terrible mistake, making their conversation urgent. When Ruarc offers an imbued torc as a means of showing him the truth about the war and what still must be done, Vis refuses to trust him and crushes it in his silver hand. Vis leaves without hearing the full explanation, but when Ruarc urgently warns him not to reveal what he truly is to the draoi or anyone else until he has heard the whole story, Vis agrees to stay silent for now.