Vigga stumbles through the illusionist’s repeating corridors and banquet room in a dull, defeated state, slipping in and out of memories of her mother and the sea. The trap preys on her confusion until the real room and her past blur together. When Sunny uses Vigga’s strength to reach the gallery and scout ahead, Sunny suddenly finds the room below empty and receives no answer from Vigga, Jakob, or Baptiste, showing that the house has begun isolating them inside separate visions.

Jakob emerges into the same banquet room, but now it appears inverted, with the table on the ceiling and the chandelier rising from the floor. He sees dead Templars from his past, including Szymon and Elzbieta, and the vision forces him back into memories of command, doubt, and the brutal choices he made to keep authority. When Elzbieta asks which door is right, Jakob answers that there is no right door and they all lead to hell, revealing how completely his past has curdled into guilt and fatalism.

Meanwhile, Brother Diaz, Alex, and Rikard remain with Balthazar and the severed head. Balthazar keeps clawing at the air as if dragging something invisible closer, producing stronger gusts of unnatural wind through the room. The head babbles fragments from the others’ nightmares, including Vigga’s memory of being dragged to be marked as a werewolf after killing people in her village, and Diaz realizes that whatever Balthazar is doing is becoming more dangerous rather than safer.

Balthazar’s private thoughts reveal the truth: he is not simply trying to dispel the house’s defenses. He is secretly performing two rituals at once, one to suppress the sickness caused by the Pope’s binding and a greater one to break that binding entirely. The effort is much harder than he expected, and he knows a failure could be explosively destructive, but ambition and resentment drive him onward because he sees this as his chance to win freedom and prove himself a great magician.

The chapter closes by showing how fully the house has trapped the others in personal torment. Jakob flees into a battlefield vision where old wars, old enemies, and old atrocities merge into one endless slaughter, pushing him back into the ruthless mindset that made him feared. Sunny, separated from the others, falls into a cruel masked-ball fantasy that turns into a nightmare about her invisibility and social exile, ending with Sunny cornered in misery as the illusion forces her to confront how unseen and unwanted she has always felt.