His plan is to find the Ibis Crown in the city's haunted catacombs, and reclaim the title of Emperor, rallying humanity behind him. A small group of volunteers enter the crypts of the city and find the Crown, with Alric declared the new Emperor, and the journeymen resuming their position as the Emperor's Royal Guard; the Heron Guard. Meanwhile, The Deceiver and a detachment travel to Forest Heart to locate a fragment of the Tain, in which Alric believes The Summoner to be hiding. They successfully find the fragment, enter the Tain, and kill The Summoner, cutting off Soulblighter from the Myrkridia. Acting on his own authority, The Deceiver then attacks Soulblighter's camp, but he and his men are captured. Phelot, a shade in charge of the prison, is in the service of The Deceiver, and frees them. The Deceiver attacks Soulblighter, who turns into a murder of crows to escape. He succeeds, but The Deceiver kills one of the crows, preventing him from fleeing in this manner again. The detachment then meet a scouting party near Silvermines; Alric and The Legion are moving to attack Soulblighter, but have been pinned down by Shiver, whom The Deceiver immediately heads to confront. He hunts her down, and Phelot destroys her army. The Deceiver then kills her, but her death triggers a magical energy backlash that also kills him. With Shiver dead, Soulblighter is forced back against the Cloudspine. His army is defeated, but he flees into the volcano Tharsis, where he plans to shatter the Cloudspine itself, causing widespread devastation. Alric and The Legion pursue him, and Alric breaks the rock on which he stands, plunging him to his death in the molten lava. With Soulblighter's death, the narrator learns of "The Leveler", an immortal evil spirit. The forces of Light and Dark rule the world successively in thousand-year cycles, with each Age of Light climaxing with the arrival of The Leveler, who ushers in an Age of Darkness. The Leveler inhabits the body of the hero who defeated him in the previous cycle — thus the hero who saves civilization is destined to destroy it - as a result Connacht returned as Balor. Soulblighter was not The Leveler; he tried to force the cycle, and as a result may have broken it. Whether this is the case will not be known for over nine hundred years, when it comes Alric's