As Ekay continues to celebrate being reunited with his younger brother Pekk, the sergal children look on with confusion. They don’t at all seem surprised by Pekk’s appearance, and react as if the young agudner was there all along by Ekay’s side. While Ekay is too busy rejoicing to pay attention to this, at least one of the sergals have noticed that something strange has happened — Oracle.

As mentioned earlier, Oracle works as the tribe’s honorary shaman of sorts — while untrained and would only be called a “Wordless” by true shamans, Oracle is more sensitive to the supernatural than the others in the tribe. She contemplates how the tribe recently invoked the sleeping ritual, hoping for their recent misfortunes would change for the better.

Normally such rituals were performed with only modest results, and not all in the tribe had complete faith in their efficacy. But this time, Oracle finds that for the first time in her life, she senses that something truly remarkable may have happened…

…and she finds something about this realization to be incredibly unsettling.