The spirits explain further that they are interested in wagering the freedom of the mages in the Labyrinth against the promise of the cabal's aid in breaking the prisoners' resistance. Faced with stakes such as these, the Harbor Lights mages hesitate and request a chance to enter the Labyrinth and examine the people who are trapped there, as well as collecting the Hades, Eve, and Seraphim. One of the spirits, Wampana Feynir, agrees to take them down to the Labyrinth, and grants the cabal an incorporeal form to match his own. As they drift across the hills and valleys of the forest, the spirit explains that the mages should take precautions to avoid getting lost in the Labyrinth, and he won't be held responsible if they are careless. Eventually they descend into an unlikely crevasse, to a depth of at least eighty feet. Wampana Feynir opens a stone door at the bottom of the crevasse and lets them in.

They enter the Labyrinth, which is a long, twisting, and fog-choked hallway. Something about the place distorts the mages' sense of direction, and they would be lost (even though there are only two directions, forward and back) except for the Space spells that Volchik and Surya cast. The cabal eventually comes to a large chamber, where they find five people standing in silence, apparently unaware of the world around them. Three of the people are clear matches for the missing Gravediggers. The other two are a young man and a man in his 40s, whose arm is grotesquely scarred. The group can stir individuals from their fugue state by speaking to them directly, one at a time. They start by confirming that these are, indeed, the Gravediggers.

The young man gives his name as Madog, and as the conversation progresses it takes a turn for the truly bizarre. Madog recognizes the cabal and claims to have been their apprentice a few months ago, when they were powerful mages working for the Seers of the Throne in the Scorpio cabal. He describes a completely unfamiliar timeline, in which the group deliberately subjected themselves to a complicated and powerful ritual intended to reverse their Awakenings; they had gotten so deeply enmeshed in the hideous crimes of the Seers that they wanted out, and this ritual was to be their escape route. Madog also had five quartz crystals in his pocket, each of which carried a fragment of one group member's Awakened power. Madog believed that they could use the stones to regain much of their now-absent strength, since their re-Awakening indicated the failure of the ritual.

Tommy uses Spirit magic to communicate with the spirits inside the crystals, one at a time. If things were weird before, they completely fall off a cliff now. The spirits in the gems claim to be the mages themselves, and reveal a wildly convoluted plan - even though the spirits do not all agree on exactly what that plan was. Surya's spirit, it seems, was an evil angel, and the one who had the deepest knowledge of the plans that John Law and the Scorpio cabal were putting into place. The mages were intended to return to Slumber for a time, only to re-Awaken and ingratiate themselves with the Boston Consilium. Once they had accomplished that, the spirits would merge with them again and restore their knowledge of and loyalty to the Seers of the Throne and the Scorpio cabal.  

Presented with this information, the mages of the Harbor Lights cabal spend a great deal of time discussing the many evident flaws in these plans, as well as challenging the idea that the Seers would bother with such a plan if they possessed the towering amount of power that the plan required.