Locked in the dungeon, Elias paces his cell and blames himself for everything that’s gone wrong since the trials began. Sometime later, the Commandant arrives and is nice to Elias for the first time in his life. When she was pregnant with him, she kept it a secret as long as she could while trying everything to rid herself of him. When the pregnancy started to show, she took a solo mission to tribal territory, where she gave birth to him alone in a cave. She should have killed him, but her maternal instincts wouldn’t let her.

She left him with a tribe and thought she was rid of him until he came to Blackcliff six years later. Elias’s grandfather never gave her any credit for her accomplishments and named Elias as his heir, which made her even more angry. Elias finally understands his mother and that he’ll never be like her. While his death will finally let her be rid of him, for him, it’s the “freedom to go to my death knowing it’s for the right reason” (419).