Gertrude guides Alice up an arduous staircase to the Rebel Citadel, a serene complex perched over the Lethe. She displays statues to “builders and dreamers,” points out a fallen bell tower lost to a quake, and offers a doctrine of time like an hourglass: small peaks that collapse, accumulating toward an ultimate end. Gertrude promises safety and freedom to stay or leave, urging Alice to find peace in the quiet.

Wandering the maze‑like terraces, Alice discovers a shadowed campo filled with withered bushes that whisper. A brittle branch crumbles under her touch, revealing Shade essence. A talking knob in a trunk explains that newcomers “take root” by quieting the mind, becoming tree‑Shades as the most stable form. Invited to rest, Alice attempts meditation but is assaulted by looping memories of Grimes’s death and unresolvable guilt.

The knob points Alice to cliffside monasteries where psalms and contemplation sustain a sect that prays not to gods but to time itself—the kālavāda—awaiting a cosmic reversal when Hell’s order ends. Alice perceives the horror of timeless stasis: thought without novelty, growth without life, and punishment as endless waiting. Panic mounts.

When Alice snaps, a nearby Shade awakens, tears free of the grove, and sprints off the cliff into the Lethe, dissolving into cascading colors before the waters turn black again. Alice feels both envy of the finality and a newfound terror of death. The grove focuses on her and names her “Thorn.” She bolts as Gertrude cries out above.

At the citadel’s base, the doorway is replaced by a seamless wall, but Alice recognizes a magician’s linguistic trick: without doors or windows, nothing is shut. She runs through the illusion, bursts into Dis’s streets, and keeps running—past the bazaar and gates, past Parmenides’s taunts—leaving the city and the river behind for the empty, bone‑strewn dunes.