At dawn, Archimedes remains with Alice and Peter and confidently leads them toward the second court. On the way, Alice reflects on Cambridge’s ascetic culture and Professor Grimes’s doctrine that the life of the mind must eclipse bodily pleasure, recalling her strained attempts at self-denial. A sudden storm forces them to push through lashing rain until they reach Desire’s entrance, guarded by bronze pigs.

Inside, Desire appears as a shabby student center with a fountain and dim, buzzing lights. A hallway of rooms contains Shades trapped in private loops of appetite—smoking, drinking, masturbating, sniffing books—barely aware of anything beyond their compulsions. The decay and monotony unsettle Alice; Peter remains detached, even confessing book-smell appeal. Searching for Grimes grows oppressive as Alice’s discomfort mounts.

Alice insists Grimes would never be found here; Peter coolly suggests otherwise. Drawn by muffled cries, Peter opens an office door to a graphic sex act, which triggers Alice’s dissociation and panic. She bolts outside into the storm and vomits. A memory surfaces of Venice, when Grimes demanded she name her true desire and pressed that only devotion to truth should consume her—an ideal she could not honestly claim.

Choosing not to reenter Desire, they skirt the building amid the storm. Then a pack of varied chalk-stitched bone-things closes in near the Lethe. Archimedes sprints away; Alice and Peter arm charity-shop knives as the creatures form a line by the water, then attack despite Peter’s attempt to talk.

In the melee, Peter notes their weak spines while Alice discovers Lethe water corrodes the constructs, making them sizzle and disintegrate. She brandishes her Perpetual Flask to drive the pack back. But the bone-things surge all at once; as they swarm her, Alice twists, loses balance, and topples into the Lethe with them.