As the war with the Seers of the Throne heats up, the cabal focuses on different things. Adele, charged with keeping eye on the priests of the Pillar of Faith, begins checking in with the spirits and ghosts she has placed over them to protect them. Colt, onto the Seer influence in Internal Affairs, begins working to expose this involvement to the Sleepers in the police department. Mammon meanwhile sets his sights higher. He sets Vincent on the task of identifying and attacking the finances of the Invisible Hand, Mr. Johnson’s old pylon. He also sends a potent spirit of poverty after them. Meanwhile he watches over Pispir’s orphaned Cryptology, the Good Samaritans. Lastly Valkyrie continues training with Recon, White Ash, and Zelda, planning to lead the cavalry if another attack occurs.
At the same Mammon gets Colt’s army friend Leroy a job in construction. The vet moves out of the sanctum. Colt meanwhile calls another of his friends, who is stationed in Germany. Lester, a SEAL, is about to ship out to Afghanistan in two weeks but promises to look into who Gabrielle Zimmerman is to the German military.
Adele’s questioning turns up something dismaying. One spirit, a guardian of faith called Faithful Hound, has been magically altered by someone. The spirit seems to think nothing has occurred. The spell is cloaked so she can’t read the aura, but she suspects it is her father, Midas. Luckily for the spirit she can fix the damage. The hound relays what really happened. It chased off several of Midas’s servitor spirits, flaming angels, before a man appeared and cast a spell on it.
Adele checks on the ghost stationed there. The old woman, a former member of the congregation, has retreated to her anchor in the church following massive damage to her corpus. Adele heals the ghost and checks on the priest. She finds him preparing a sermon warning against witchcraft and outsiders. She also checks her other charges, finding one other who is effected.
Adele consults with Mammon. The busy mage quickly reads the priest’s, Father Robert, mind. He finds no signs of magic, just fear and awe of a divine visitation. The Mastigos advises her to manipulate the man’s mind back to its prior course.
Meanwhile Recon approaches Valkyrie after training. He is looking for advice on legacies. Most are not open to him or present political or philosophical difficulties, such as Lealtad’s Perfected Adepts and the suspect Illuminated Way, respectively. Valkyrie informs him about Colt’s legacy, the Circle of Four. He seems curious but reluctant to ask Colt directly. Valkyrie encourages him to ask. While he does this, she quietly informs Colt anyway.
Colt invites Recon and Valkyrie for a chat at the sanctum. There over a few beers and some home cooking, Colt explains the history of the Circle as well as his break with their outdated philosophy. He explains the legacy is not order specific and is more than willing to take him on as a student. Colt asks him a few questions first however to make sure he is ready. Recon has the required skill in Prime and seems to be willing to sacrifice his mundane life. As he explains, his awakening involved months of hunting in the Primal Wilds as his body lay in a coma. Satisfied, Colt welcomes him into the legacy and tells him to call him Pathfinder.
Colt soon gets a call back from Lester. Ms. Zimmerman is a secretary to a prominent military official. Colt relays this information to Mammon. The Mastigos sends his mind to Germany. It takes some time but he tracks her down and mentally interrogates her. He learns the woman handles contract killings as a side business. This most recent job was paid for by a dark haired man calling himself Ellipsis. She only met him once in a parking garage in Frankfurt but remembers his French accent. The money transaction was entirely electronic. Mammon sets Vincent to track down the source.
Colt then returns to the task of Internal Affairs and the Knights Protectorate. Using his legacy attainments, he trails IA detectives to their daily meetings. There he notices that the two senior detectives, Williams and Lambert, are in fact mages skilled in Life and Mind respectively. He also notices zombies and ghosts lurking in Twilight, controlled by a Seer of the Throne he has met before, a member of the Disciples of Alhazen.
Colt informs Detective Green, offering him the choice of what to do. He picks the least violent of the plans, to turn the situation around against the Seers of the Throne. Green’s role is to watch over the Internal Affairs while Colt trails the mages behind this.
Adele meanwhile begins her preparation for convincing Father Robert, instructing the ghost with the proper biblical verses and preparing miracles. She aids the ghost in manifesting before the priest. The ghost tells of her faith and the feeling of acceptance she received from the church when she was alive. However the priest is not fully convinced. The two trade bible verses trying to determine the truth of the matter. Finally the ghost vanishes. Later Adele secretly turns his water into wine. A miracle before him, he is finally convinced.
Colt’s investigations have led him across the city. The mages’ paths lead to a shut down radio station north of the city. They also intersect with the real detectives’ homes where the Sleepers lie in magically induced comas. It seems one of the mages comes by each evening to renew the spells on Williams and Lambert.
Colt concocts a plan to wake up the mortals and bring them to the IA meeting, thus using disbelief against Seers. He gathers the cabal and Colt unweaves the spell, using his mastery of prime to hide the fact it was dispelled. Mammon and Adele work to keep the men calm with Mammon posing as an FBI agent. they put the men up in a hotel for the time being.
The next day Green alerts Colt to the meeting time. He takes the senior detectives to the station with with their minds shielded and with a magic wall about them. Colt himself hides nearby while the others scry from afar. When the assembled detectives see both the originals and fakes together, disbelief sets in fast. X2’s spells unweave but he quickly uses magic and his own attainments to vanish from sight. The other fake, Anybody is wrestled to the ground and handcuffed before the truth comes out. Confused they throw him in a jail cell.
The cabal alerts the Guardians who retrieve him. Unfortunately his allies spring him in transit. Equally disappointing, the Disciples abandon their sanctum.
The war continues to heat up with daily attacks by one side or the other. It is worse in Shadow. There the city is torn up by legions of artificial spirits led by Athaliah and flocks of potent fire angels led by Midas. Concerned by what she is seeing, Adele talks to her mother, the White Lady. Her mother notes the growing number of magath, or twisted spirits, and agrees to talk to her father about what can be done.
Meanwhile Colt is contacted by the spirit of the city, Ellsworth, who asks him if he should join Athaliah in the war. The war needs to end soon but the old man is unsure if violence is the right solution. Colt agrees to help look for another option.
The White Lady soon returns. She tries to comfort her daughter and tells her Midas will be alright. As for herself she must go south to hopefully find a meteorite fragment to defeat the Great Fire Spirit. Adele talks to Colt but the Thyrsus is just trying to take care of the existing wounds. To him, the turmoil must end soon and this needs to be done. She then turns to Mammon who feels similarly but will try to talk to Athaliah. Around the same time he learns his poverty spirit has done its work too well, crippling Chicago's construction industry.
Valkyrie is taking a quick vacation. She and Evan take a flight back to her parents in Georgia. As she is looking out the window she see that the ley lines have grown very long and thick, stretching across state lines. An old man in gray looks over. He tells her not to be afraid and then begins telling her that the spirit in the Antediluvian still lives. He ignores her questions, telling her that she must go to the catacombs of the dragons and defeat the guardians.
Then suddenly he is gone, leaving Valkyrie and her son confused.