At dawn, Roman follows Dacre down from Merrow into the under-realm, carrying his typewriter and Elizabeth’s hidden letters because he has not been able to destroy them. The descent opens into Lorindella, a vast underground city filled with soldiers, forges, food lines, and uncanny signs of the realm’s magic, including disguised inhuman residents, a smoking creek, and a winged three-eyed dog. The city’s ordinary military activity, combined with its eerie details, shows Roman that Dacre’s forces are organized, numerous, and deeply established below ground.

Dacre briefly treats Roman like a protected guest by feeding him and telling him to rest, but that illusion ends when Lieutenant Shane delivers a full marching pack and orders Roman to join his platoon. When Roman protests that he is not meant to fight, Shane explains that Dacre wants Roman under his instruction and reveals that Shane is also from Oath. As a result, Roman understands that he is no longer simply observing the war; Dacre is folding him directly into the campaign.

Roman marches east with Shane’s platoon until they reach another immense underground chamber, this one empty, foggy, and solemn. Exhausted, blistered, and hungry, Roman makes camp with the soldiers and clings to his typewriter and the letters in his coat as his last links to himself and to home. His physical misery underscores how trapped and vulnerable he has become inside Dacre’s army.

In sleep, Roman dreams first of Iris Winnow, sitting beside him and speaking about her missing brother, Forest, then of his old life in Oath. He remembers writing privately about Del’s drowning, slipping pages beneath a door, and rereading Iris’s letters; he then relives the moment at the Gazette when Iris was leaving and he silently longed for her to stay. These dreams reconnect fragments of Roman’s damaged memory and make him realize that his secret letter-writing with Iris began long before his current correspondence with Elizabeth.

Dacre wakes Roman before dawn and summons him back into the present. Even under Dacre’s command, Roman is left shaken by the revelation that Iris is more than a vague absence in his mind: she is tied to his deepest habits, desires, and sense of being alive. The chapter ends with Dacre announcing that the time has come to take Hawk Shire, turning Roman’s private recovery of memory into the prelude to a major military assault.