Jaco, a Norman archer recently recruited into the papal guard, struggles with his duty to remain motionless despite smoke from the Pope's braziers stinging his eyes and his rumbling stomach eyeing the untouched quail on Cardinal Anicot's plate. His archery skills had impressed the quartermaster enough to earn him a position guarding the feast, though he finds his role indistinguishable from that of a pillar. The evening takes a dramatic turn when gasps from the crowd draw everyone's attention to the rear of the courtyard, where a second pope has entered - an exact twin to the seated pontiff, but wearing white robes and mitre instead of the ruby-studded burnt orange.
This white-robed pope, accompanied by the captain of the guard and veteran soldiers, holds a crosier in his right hand while a peasant girl holds his left. The seated pope in his golden three-crowned mitre remains calm, while the newer guards around him - recent recruits like Jaco - have no idea what to make of this unprecedented situation. The veteran guards, who had been kept away from the pontiff in recent months, stand prepared with the pope in white, clearly expecting this confrontation.
The white pope denounces his counterpart as a "false pope" and "devil," demanding he show his true form or depart. Thomas, disguised as a hooded friar in the crowd, recognizes this as his moment to strike. Despite knowing the crossbow bolt that pierces his chest would normally be fatal, the armor's strategic dent from his earlier fight with the Comte deflects it just enough to keep him standing. Tragically, the crossbowman who shoots him is Jaco, his old companion from their military days, who desperately begs Thomas's forgiveness upon recognizing his drooping eye.
Thomas leaps onto the cardinal's table, fighting past the lion-faced knight who transforms into a growing monstrosity, and reaches the false pope. His sword cleaves through the pontiff's three-crowned mitre and head, but instead of dying, the creature reveals its true demonic nature - a golden fly's head identified as Beelzebub, one of the fallen angels. The demon grows a second head and rips away Thomas's sword before tearing off his arm, still gripping the sacred spear. The lionish devil, nearly healed from Thomas's earlier wound, mocks him as he dies, explaining that only one being is older and stronger than them, and that being has abandoned Thomas to their mercy.
Delphine watches in horror as Thomas is dismembered and killed, falling to her knees in anguish. As the demons transform into their true forms - six-winged, twelve-eyed monstrosities tall enough to peer into second-story windows - they begin massacring everyone in the courtyard, causing everything they touch to smolder. When a demon animates a corpse to throw a spear at Pope Clement, Delphine throws herself in front of it, taking the spear through her abdomen. As men carry the wounded pope to safety, the twelve-eyed demon picks up the dying girl like a doll, careful not to touch her blood. In her final moments, when asked what she is, Delphine finally knows the answer and smiles sleepily. The lion-faced demon drives Thomas's severed arm, still holding the spear, into her side before biting off her legs and flinging her into the courtyard, where she dies.
Robert Anicot, his mind reeling and silk gloves bloodstained, crawls under tables and flees toward the gates, only to be pushed back by crowds fleeing into the courtyard. They are pursued by the abomination that had been terrorizing the Jewish Quarter—a grotesque creature composed entirely of stacked corpses that moves as a single entity. This horror constantly reforms itself with three or four legs at will, using human ribs as teeth and containing a sentient light at its center. As the bodies forming its limbs wear out, it discards them and moves fresh corpses down to take their place, incorporating Jews and Christians, soldiers and civilians, clothed and naked dead, even a woman with a stag's head, all moving in unnatural servitude.
Robert's screaming transforms into mad laughter as he declares "Hell is here and here is its cavalry," watching the tower-sized devils massacre soldiers while the corpse-creature feeds living people into itself with its horrible mouth. When people try to shelter in the chapel, they find the door barred and are pressed together in suffocating crowds. The abomination makes a crucial error when it attempts to assimilate Delphine's remains—her holy goodness proves lethal to it, causing the corpses that touch her to fall away and the entire creature to unravel. The light at its center extinguishes, and it collapses gratefully as all its constituent dead sigh in relief, finally released from their unholy bondage.
From Delphine's broken body comes a brilliant light that shines into the sky, warm and heartbreaking as dawn's first ray. She splits down the middle as an angel of God is born into the world through her, emerging with her blood on its wings. The devils desperately try to stop this divine intervention, screaming their mind-killing screams and hurling building-sized rubble, but they cannot prevent the angel's arrival. The first angel, Zephon, wrestles the demons back to make room for others, shining warm moonish light throughout the courtyard and breaking the devils' maddening noise.
More angels follow in rapid succession: Uriel, and then the most perfect one yet—the Archangel Michael, bearing a sword too bright to look at and flying on white eagle wings the size of sails. Michael perches on the Tower of Angels and sings the most beautiful song Robert has ever heard, filling the survivors with relief and gratitude. However, safety proves temporary when Michael's attack on the lion-faced devil causes it to crash into the chapel, toppling the building and its wall onto the people pressed against its door, including Robert. As darkness and crushing stone claim him, a hand squeezes his in his final moments, and he hears an apology: "I'm sorry, Robert of the bushes."
The angelic light creates a careening amber day throughout the city, visible from the papal study where Guy de Chauliac watches the spectacle while the Pope raves about his responsibility and orders his ceremonial ermines burned. From the Tower of Angels, the doctor witnesses what he realizes is less a battle than "an ineluctable pushing back of darkness." More devils streak down like burning stones, trying to hold their earthly position since the war in heaven has turned against them, but their position is hopeless against beings so calm, beautiful, and deliberate. In one memorable scene that obsesses de Chauliac forever, two angels grip a wide-winged devil and drive it down into the Rhone River, appearing to speak in its ears as they fall. When the illuminated plume of water subsides, three angels emerge instead of two angels and one devil, suggesting that even the worst demons can find forgiveness and redemption.
Thomas experiences his final moments on the courtyard bricks, his body undergoing the complete process of death as his vision fails and blackness falls. Though his arm has been torn off and he cannot feel his limbs, he remains conscious enough to smell the nauseating stench of the demons and feel his body's final indignities - his stomach emptying through his mouth, his bowels and bladder voiding, and a final muted ejaculation. Despite being unable to move even the tiny muscles of his mouth, he finds himself smiling at the distant sound of demonic madness, thinking "That's how the poor bastards sing." When something breaks free within him, he gains an aerial view of his own corpse in a spreading pool of blood, shocked to see how old and ugly he has become with blood in his white beard and vomit beneath it.
The courtyard melts away as demonic voices claim him, and Thomas finds himself transformed into a small boy in a dim, windowless room with no visible light source. He faces a hideously deformed clerk-like creature that hobbles around a large table on turned ankles, carrying a stool and clearly in constant pain. The thing has gray, formless skin with holes for eyes, arms with two elbows each, and a fishy mouth in its chest. As it shuffles painfully around the table, checking books and documents while staying hidden from Thomas's view, it explains the cruel cosmic joke of his situation.
The demon reveals that Thomas almost escaped damnation by trying to do the right thing at the end, but had the misfortune of dying before the retreat from Avignon, when all souls were taken regardless of innocence or guilt. This betrayal of the infernal agreement paralleled Satan's betrayal in attacking heaven. The creature torments Thomas with questions about its own motivations - whether it tells the truth out of natural sympathy (making its damnation the torment of damning the undeserving) or to heighten Thomas's pain through outrage at unjust punishment. It explains that hell is worse when you don't feel you've earned it, and describes the elaborate psychological tortures used: making men think they're being pardoned, reborn, or rescued by God himself, only to snatch away hope.
When Thomas asks where he will go, the creature responds "Out" and explains he must go "through me." As a bell sounds like a church bell and screaming begins in nearby rooms, the demon apologetically announces that time is up. It grabs the boy Thomas by his skinny arm, revealing mouths opening not just on its stomach but in many places across its body, and proceeds to eat him alive in an excruciating finale. This horrific scene repeats innumerable times with every possible variation - Thomas trying to reason, fight, or avoid the ending - but always concluding the same way.
Eventually Thomas learns not to try escaping, though his body still instinctively runs and struggles because the pain is so extreme. The interaction gradually shortens until it becomes nothing more than the creature reading his name and sentence - "Thomas de Givran, I damn thee" - followed by being chewed alive. Through repetition Thomas progresses from shivering and letting it happen, to crying and letting it happen, to simply letting it happen without resistance. Finally, he stops yelling altogether, which his tormentors recognize as readiness for something even worse than this endless cycle of consumption and rebirth.
Thomas endures the full spectrum of hell's torments, losing his name and sense of time as he progresses from physical anguish to psychological heartbreak. The demons systematically strip away every aspect of his humanity: he is skinned and forced to drag his own flesh before sewing it back on with the dirt it has collected, shredded and crammed with thorns, crowded with naked throngs while fighting desperately for glimpses of sky or drops of cool water. When his captors discover his love of fighting, they exploit this too, making him battle endlessly until even his rage breaks and he weeps in defeat when confronted.
The torments grow more personal and blasphemous as hell forces him to murder and betray those he loves, then desecrate, cannibalize, and regurgitate them. His strength becomes the source of his humiliation as he is made a plaything, his sexuality perverted as he is rendered sexless, and his faith corrupted as he is forced to live out every oath he has spoken in grotesque parody. Hell strips away his capacity for laughter and disbelief through outrages that mock the sacred - lapping Christ's wounds, being drowned with Christ in filth, boiled in Mary's sour milk, and sodomized by the apostles. The demons take his humor not because they lack it themselves, but because they are offended that humanity was granted this gift alongside their divine nature.
Thomas finds himself in a hellish version of Paris, bloated and plague-dead but conscious, unable to move except to blink with his mouth painfully agape. Devils disguised as guards on crenellated walls use him for target practice, shooting arrows into his body while he screams helplessly. When a proper light approaches down the dim street, the devils lose their human disguises and attack with cruel barbed weapons, joined by a wheel made of severed limbs. But the approaching figure - a girl driving a cart surrounded by golden daylight - cannot be touched by any unclean thing.
Thomas recognizes her as the girl from their journey, though he forces himself to forget her name, knowing it would kill him with sadness and failure in this place. As she approaches within her dome of spring-like golden light, he suspects another cruel illusion designed to torture him with false hope. He has endured countless false versions of her before, forced to choke, violate, and butcher her repeatedly. When she removes the arrows painlessly and closes his agonized mouth with her small, comforting hand, he spits in her face and curses her as another deception.
The girl waits patiently as Thomas watches her for what seems like a day and night in hell's distorted time. Everything changes when six of hell's princes, tall as castle walls, descend through the roof carrying the smoldering, seemingly dead body of an angel of unimaginable beauty - Lucifer himself, fallen and defeated. This proof that the war in heaven has turned convinces Thomas of the girl's authenticity. She warms his hands with her breath, kisses his feet and forehead, and smells of cedar and sea.
When Thomas asks why she did not come as he would recognize her, she explains she came as he would follow and love her in innocence. She reveals that he was "the last one" she could still save, and when he protests his damnation, she simply says "Not any more." Under a true night sky with properly placed stars, she asks if he wants to remember - not hell, but her, them, Delphine. She explains that she was "two things together, then one, now two again apart," and warns that remembering will be harder because "love is always harder" - requiring weathering blows for another's sake, meaning loss of self and other, and faith in the death of loss. Thomas chooses to remember, saying yes to love despite its difficulty. As she takes the reins and they roll down a road near a beach in someplace warm like Provence or Galilee - or perhaps no place at all - Thomas sees stars above and a simple seagull passing before them, finally able to sleep in peace.
Thomas awakens to find himself alive among a cart full of corpses, confused and disoriented as he tumbles out of a death wagon being emptied into a mass grave. The cart workers are startled to discover he is still breathing, having witnessed his seemingly fatal injuries during what they remember as an earthquake that devastated Avignon. Thomas learns from a boy named Isna that an army of beautiful yet terrifying angels appeared in the sky during the catastrophe, confirming that the war in heaven has indeed turned in God's favor. The workers describe how Villeneuve melted into the river, the Rhone diverted through Avignon, and half the palace crumbled, though their memories of the supernatural battle have been mercifully dulled into more comprehensible natural disaster.
Thomas spends his remaining days in Avignon desperately searching for Delphine, working among the rescue teams moving heavy beams and clearing rubble from the destroyed city. He finds Cardinal Anicot's body crushed near the chapel entrance, caught symbolically between a stone devil gripping his hair and a stone saint holding his hand. Despite questioning everyone who might have seen the girl, no one can recall what became of her after that terrible night. The Pope he encounters now radiates genuine benevolence rather than the sinister authority displayed at the feast, having recovered from what he describes as a long fever. This transformed Clement cancels the planned crusade, forbids any pogrom against the Jews, and marshals both Christian and Jewish doctors to tend the wounded together.
On his final day in Avignon, Thomas discovers his broken sword in a gutter and presses his lips to the ruined blade - not from fondness for the violence it wrought, but for the trace of Delphine's blood that still remains on it. He abandons the weapon and wanders north as November arrives and the plague moves on to England. Rejecting an offer to serve in a seigneur's guard, Thomas sells his horse and takes up agricultural labor, learning farming and making friends among the common workers. His wandering eventually brings him and three companions to a seemingly abandoned Norman farmstead, where they seek shelter from rain in a barn.
The farm's sole survivor is a young girl who has awakened from some mysterious months-long sleep to find her father's skeletal remains and her world transformed. When she approaches the strangers for help burying her father, Thomas is deeply moved by her presence, weeping at the sight of her though he cannot understand why she seems so familiar. After helping with the burial and sharing roasted chestnuts by a fire, the girl joins their group, riding her donkey as they walk around her. In their conversation, she learns his name is Thomas from Givra, and when she playfully challenges him to guess her name, he leans close and whispers "Little Moon" - suggesting a profound recognition that transcends his conscious memory.
An old Franciscan friar approaches a castle where he is grudgingly admitted by the guards and directed to the kitchens for sustenance. The lord of the castle, a young nobleman wearing fashionable long-toed shoes, shows wariness toward the itinerant monk, especially given that a new wave of plague has returned - though weaker than before, this "children's plague" claims primarily the young, requiring carpenters across France to specialize in making small coffins. In the kitchen, Marie, a gap-toothed woman, feeds the friar and asks for prayers for her unborn child, recognizing him as the only friar she has encountered who genuinely means what he preaches about love rather than fear.
The friar is summoned to meet the lady of the house, an elderly blind woman named Lady Marguerite who makes a practice of speaking with Franciscan friars. In her parlor, surrounded by familiar scents including bergamot, the old woman engages him in philosophical conversation about the nature of God's will versus luck in determining who lives and dies from plague. She reveals her concern for her grandson's safety and asks the friar to pray for the boy, while she pragmatically admits she will pray for luck. Their discussion touches on faith, loss, and the unknowable nature of divine intention.
The conversation takes on deeper resonance as the lady probes gently into the friar's past, learning that he was once married, lost his wife, and has a daughter who became a nun at a convent in Amiens, which he visits monthly. There are subtle hints of recognition between them - the lady's acute hearing picking up nuances in his voice, and the friar's emotional responses to certain questions and scents in the room. When he prepares to leave, continuing his journey to visit his daughter who tends the convent garden, the lady performs a telling gesture.
As the friar reaches the door, Lady Marguerite taps her ring three times on the bench in a specific pattern - bull, fox, lamb. This coded signal causes the friar to stop and become emotional, his eyes moistening as he recognizes the significance. He responds by tapping his bowl three times on the wall before departing. The story concludes with the revelation that this friar is Thomas, now peaceful in his religious vocation, and the lady is Marguerite, his former lover, both having found ways to honor their past connection while living their separate lives dedicated to service and faith.