Miles away, Shrike revives himself and arrives at Erdene Tezh too late, finding the remains of the Stalker Fang. Although her Stalker brain is dead, Shrike downloads memories from the older part of her brain. He then finds Tom and Hester's bodies, and considers taking Hester to be Resurrected, but decides against it when he sees that they held hands when they died. As he takes their bodies, Shrike recalls his own long-lost memories of his own two children (Ruan and Fern from "Fever Crumb") before he was turned into a Stalker. Laying the bodies down in an outcrop nearby, Shrike shuts down and watches their bodies decompose over the years. As the years flash by him, an oak tree grows from Hester's body, and he eventually slows this time lapse when he notices human figures nearby. Finally out of his fugue state, Shrike discovers that a forest has grown round him, and meets a girl and a boy. The pair take him down into a village, where Shrike finds that he was considered an old shrine statue, and the people hung flowers around his neck for luck.