Kaan brings Raeve into his private rooms deep inside the Imperial Stronghold. Raeve stays wary, notices signs of his solitude and secrecy, and follows him through an overgrown garden to a hidden tunnel. When she accuses him of leading her into an ideal assassination spot, Kaan tells her to listen to the stone, and Raeve hears Bulder humming instead of singing, which convinces her that the cavern below is a place of care rather than a trap.

They descend a long freezing stairwell, and the deepening cold affects Raeve unexpectedly: instead of frightening her, it feels familiar and almost welcoming. At the bottom, the tunnel opens into a luminous circular cavern carved with Moonplumes. There Raeve sees a massive fallen silver moon-dragon, preserved in a curled resting pose, and Kaan reveals that the moon was his dragon, Slátra.

Raeve is overwhelmed by the sight and by Kaan's grief when he explains that he has painstakingly reassembled Slátra's shattered body because he cannot bear that she remains incomplete. As Raeve touches the fossilized dragon, she notices a sheltered hollow beneath Slátra's wing and tail. The shape of that space triggers a buried memory of Raeve awakening in a cage, seeing silver shards being carted past her, and instinctively recognizing that those shards came from the same site where she was found.

Kaan presses Raeve, convinced that she knows this moon intimately. He states his belief plainly: Slátra cradled Raeve for a hundred phases, brought her broken body down from the sky, and Raeve emerged from the moon's remains like something hatched. Kaan links that miracle to Elluin, the woman he loved and lost, insisting that the dead woman and Raeve are connected.

To prove Raeve's hidden nature, Kaan summons a flame and demands that Raeve admit whether she can hear its song. Raeve reacts with visceral alarm and nearly loses control, but she denies hearing anything and warns Kaan to stop before she harms him. When Kaan begs her not to lie to him, Raeve rejects both his claim on her and his hope that she is Elluin returned, declaring that Elluin is dead and that she will never be his.

Kaan finally gives her space, and Raeve flees the cavern despite feeling powerfully drawn to remain in Slátra's cold, sheltering hollow. As she climbs back toward the surface, Raeve deliberately buries the emotions, memories, and questions the moon tomb awakened in her. She chooses the safety of ignorance over the danger of confronting whatever truth ties her to Slátra and to Elluin.