Chapter 73

Raeve and her companions navigate underground tunnels toward a hidden lower shaft, where they discover a crucial letter revealing that Sereme and an associate named Elding have been manipulating Raeve through her blood bind. At the tunnel's end, Ahvi begins a dangerous ritual to sever Raeve's bind by temporarily reverting her body to its weakest state before binding her instead to the Book of Voyd—a process that triggers the blood bind's agony as Ahvi completes the final rune.

Raeve leads Kaan and Ahvi through dark caverns toward a familiar location where she once took refuge. They reach a collapsed chamber with moonlight streaming through fractured ceiling and find the hidden gap leading to a lower shaft. Using the Bulder language, Kaan summons stone stairs. When questioned about her presence here, Raeve reveals she walked across the Ergor Plains and took shelter in this tunnel, nearly dying in the process. In the sheltered tunnel below, Raeve retrieves an unfinished letter from Sereme's desk and reads it aloud. The correspondence from someone named Elding to Sereme discusses keeping Raeve "under control" and using her for political purposes until ready to "bring her home," shocking both Raeve and Kaan. Ahvi then begins a binding ritual, using a mixture of materials and requiring Raeve's blood. He explains he will "untread" the bind by pulling a temporal thread back to the moment before Raeve first gave blood to Sereme, which will physically revert her body to that near-death state. He is simultaneously binding her to the Book of Voyd as a replacement anchor. When Raeve resists in horror, realizing she'll be vulnerable and possibly unable to survive without the blood-binding tether, Ahvi reveals he withheld this information intentionally. As Sereme's blood bind activates in agony, Ahvi completes the final rune despite Raeve's anguished resistance.