Violet’s squad faces the Gauntlet carved into the ridgeline. Tensions flare when Tynan mocks Violet, and Ridoc defends her. Professor Emetterio explains the course, the safety ropes, and its purpose, assigning Sawyer to demonstrate. Sawyer runs a near-flawless ascent and clears the final ramp, proving completion is possible even if it didn’t earn him a bond last year.

As the squad cycles in, Tynan freezes on the buoy balls and climbs down via rope, while Rhiannon cleverly grips near the ball chains to advance. Violet starts, calming herself by reciting dragon lore. She times the wheel, crosses the buoys, then slams her cheek on the third ascent’s rails, grabs a rope to recover, and pushes through, clearing the spinning posts.

Aurelie follows, exhilarated, but a dragon’s flyover distracts her on the spinning posts. She slips and, despite Violet’s lunge, falls to her death. The squad is stunned. The next morning at roll call, Captain Fitzgibbons reads the dead, including Aurelie, cementing the cost of the Gauntlet.

That night, Violet volunteers to burn Aurelie’s effects after her parents decline retrieval. Earlier, she tells Dain she couldn’t span the leaning chimney and had to rope down, resolving to find a solution before the official timed Gauntlet. The burn leaves her wavering between fleeing to the Scribes and staying to fight for a bond.

Later in the courtyard, Violet sees Xaden, Garrick, and Bodhi return from an off-books flight. Xaden senses Violet’s presence via shadows and confronts her. He reveals he knows about Dain’s plan, dismisses her fixation on “hope,” and reframes survival as focusing on probabilities and solutions, not possibilities.

When Violet protests that she is too short for the chimney, Xaden insists the right way isn’t the only way and challenges her to figure out an alternative. He admits he lets her live to measure his own decency, then leaves her seething but with a new directive: innovate or die before Presentation.