Overwhelmed by the aftermath of her fight with Elain and by her own self-loathing, Nesta flees into the House of Wind stairwell. She pushes herself down the endless steps because the physical pain and exhaustion briefly drown out the thoughts she cannot bear. She reaches step one thousand before she has to stop, drained enough that the noise in her mind finally goes quiet.

Nesta then forces herself back up, resting only briefly until she reaches the top in a near-collapse. Cassian is waiting on the landing and, instead of mocking her, asks how far she made it. When Nesta admits she reached one thousand steps, Cassian is sincerely impressed and gently tries to learn what triggered her spiral.

Nesta refuses to revisit what Elain said and shifts to another disappointment: none of the priestesses signed up for training. That failure makes Nesta fear that if others have needed centuries to recover from trauma, she may never heal either. Cassian tells her that emotional recovery takes far longer than physical training, but when Nesta rejects comparisons to Feyre and the others, he responds by exposing his own darkest history.

Cassian reveals that years after his mother died, he returned to his birthplace and massacred the people responsible for her suffering, with Rhys and Azriel helping him find his father. He says it took him ten years to face both his loss and his vengeance, and he tells Nesta she can take whatever time she needs because he will not break under what she throws at him. Their vulnerability quickly turns back into anger when Nesta insults Rhys, but the fight ends on a different impulse: stung by Cassian's confidence and the intensity between them, Nesta grabs his jacket and kisses him.