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The Rim's condemned Sovereign, who bids his family farewell, charges Lysander to unite Gold, and walks naked to his death across the frozen waste.
Sentenced to death, Romulus au Raa performs his last rite on a frozen sulfur dune before his kin alone. He bids each child farewell—young Paleron, Marius, the sobbing Diomedes ('what luck I have to call a man like you my son'), and his 'burning one' Seraphina, warning her not to let glory consume her as it did his brother. To the stunned Lysander he gives a final charge: long ago Silenius au Lune and Akari au Raa—scepter and sword—stood together to birth the Pax Solaris; now Lysander must choose to become the echo of those great men and save the worlds, not run.
He gives Dido a last kiss and words of undying love, then strips naked in the negative-hundred-degree cold and walks toward the Dragon Tomb of Akari, eighty steps distant, to join the honored dead. Bleeding, freezing, driven by immense will, he counts past seventy steps before his body fails him ten short of the monument—falling among the frozen corpses of his ancestors, the greatest man of his people, dead. 'Pulvis et umbra sumus.'
A dignified one-armed Moon Lord, then stripped naked on the ice—scarred pale chest, ribs standing out, corded arm, extremities purpling and bleeding as frost freezes his unbound hair; proud to the last.
The Rim's honorable Sovereign; the condemned man who charges Lysander to unite Gold and dies proving his will against the moon.