After burning the bodies of the slaughtered monks of San Guillaume, Gabriel de León prepares to throw a young boy’s corpse on the pyre when Phoebe returns, and Saoirse warns that “Strife” approaches. A red-coated figure advances: the masked highblood last seen at the watchtower. She bows and names herself Liathe, addressing Gabriel, Saoirse, and Bellamy, and demands the child, Dior.

Liathe claims she has been protecting the company by devastating inquisitorial cohorts from Sul Ilham and León, and that Danton Voss is tracking them with assembled wretched, due to arrive by nightfall. Despite Law the Fifth forbidding the Dead from entering holy ground, Liathe steps over San Guillaume’s threshold. Gabriel realizes she is a sanguimancer—her weapon is literally her own blood forged into a blade—and that something is wrong with the sanctity of the place.

Combat erupts. Saoirse swings her axe while Phoebe attacks; Bellamy fires flaming bolts from the wall. Liathe’s blood-sword flows around Saoirse’s guard, clipping braids and dropping Saoirse with a vicious kick. She carves Bellamy’s shot from the air and, after biting her wrist and speaking a reversed word, shapes her blood into a flail, smashing Gabriel across the courtyard and battering Phoebe. Gabriel counters by cutting the flail with Ashdrinker and then hurling the starmetal blade through Liathe’s chest, shattering her porcelain mask and revealing the flayed ruin of her lower face and neck.

As Liathe recovers, Chloe Sauvage and Père Rafa charge in; Rafa’s blazing wheel of sanctus forces Liathe back. She dissolves into a storm of blood-red moths and scatters into the dimming daylight. Dior rushes to Saoirse’s side as the group regroups, and Rafa and Chloe question how Liathe entered holy ground.

Gabriel concludes there was no enchantment breaking God’s law; the Inquisition’s torture and murder of San Guillaume’s monks profaned the monastery, stripping its sanctity. With Danton likely to arrive by nightfall leading many wretched, the group debates flight versus defense. Gabriel rejects escape as impossible and insists they make a stand.

Gabriel rallies them with a speech about ordinary boys who became soldiers, insisting they only need to stand together. He assigns tasks: Bellamy to fetch water, Père Rafa to bless it, Saoirse to haul strong liquor from the distillery, and Chloe and Dior to gather tallow and burnables for defenses. Privately, Gabriel tells Chloe to keep Dior close and to run if he can cut a way out, believing their odds are grim.

In a desperate gesture, Chloe offers Gabriel her blood to strengthen him; he nearly breaks, but violently refuses, invoking a vow—“Never again.” As the sun falls, he steels himself for Danton’s arrival while Jean-François, in the framing present, pointedly asks to whom Gabriel swore the promise; Gabriel withholds the answer.