Cassie collapses under the Book of Despair, convinced the fight is finished and that nothing she does can matter. The world in Cassie’s mind drains of color and possibility, narrowing into a bleak certainty: consciousness followed by death.

Despair forces Cassie to relive intimate suffering, including the memory of Cassie’s grandfather wasting away, the air thick with sweat and pain. Cassie experiences it as a sealed room with no exit, where her crying only feeds the cruelty of the feeling trapping her.

Then despair shows Cassie a future shaped by failure: silent cities, dead fields, animal carcasses, and trees like hands raised in horror. Cassie sees the gray-mist woman as the author of this ruined world, strolling toward Cassie in delight along a “road” revealed to be a path made from crushed, screaming people.

As the gray-mist woman advances, even birds drop from the sky and insects writhe in the mud, as if the woman’s presence inflicts agony on everything living. The woman reaches for Cassie with a hatred-filled scream, and Cassie can feel only the certainty of endless suffering—until something changes: sudden, furious fire erupts, vivid and undeniable in the emptiness.