Castle retrieves some more presumably-relevant items. Small rocks and round glass pebbles. She passes a large smooth river stone to Royal, who places it prominently in the diagram; the miscellaneous objects go in a circle around the outside, enclosing Castle and Royal and all the chess pieces. Then they sit down again.

"Round two," says Castle. "Quiet please."

This time she talks to the river stone.

She describes in somewhat fanciful language how old it must be, how it was formed by geologic processes and made its way through the forces that shaped it into its current form and carried it at last into her possession. The imagery she calls up comes faster this time, and more strongly: the darkness beneath mountains envelops the room, lightening eventually to the gloom at the bottom of a river. Darkness is a definite theme here.

She asks the stone to lend its strength to this working. She describes a cloak of safety wrapping around 'this traveller', shielding him from the harmful light of day. She describes the strength of stone walls, solidity, opacity, permanence; her personal tower-image surrounds the spellcasting area, a translucent but nevertheless firmly solid stone wall. The metaphor gives him, not a cloak, but a pair of sleek black raven's wings.

Outside the image of the stone tower, an illusory dawn breaks, spilling illusory sunlight into the room. It pours in through the walls of Castle's tower, but loses some of its fire along the way; by the time it reaches Vampire Two, it's thin and weak. He sits in a comfortable shadow. Even as the sun rises to illuminate him fully, the walls are there to protect him. His illusory feathers shine, and he is unharmed.

Castle thanks the stone for its help. The metaphorical sun sets; the metaphorical tower fades; Vampire Two's metaphorical wings are the last to go.