Their route led through food turned predatory, knights trapped inside old roles and courts where hospitality could be another weapon. Agatha’s influence made appetite dangerous; Hylda’s winter concealed loneliness as well as threat. Kellan kept expecting each encounter to resolve like a clean chapter in a heroic romance.
Ruby supplied the missing friction. She questioned strangers, protected Kellan when his confidence exceeded his skill and continued forward when there was no promise of recognition. Her loyalty demonstrated a kind of heroism that no prophecy had assigned. Kellan gradually stopped treating her as a companion in his story and began acting as a partner in theirs. Ruby returns to her brother Peter at Edgewall before the journey to Hylda. Ruby first warns Kellan away from a sleeper while searching for Peter. Ruby's instinct also had precision behind it: she struck a taunting pixie with an apple, then pulled Kellan out of the Wolf Knight's incoming arrow. These early rescues preceded the more costly choice to carry him unconscious across Hylda's frozen bridge.
Even the witches resisted a single moral shape. Some harms had been chosen, others had grown from isolation or manipulation, and mercy sometimes achieved what combat could not. The quest still required action, but it denied Kellan the comfort of believing that every opponent could be understood by the role they appeared to play. At Hylda's frozen bridge, Kellan collapsed from the cold. Ruby carried him onward rather than abandoning him, and that loyalty reached Hylda when a fight could not. Hylda revealed that Talion had proposed the Slumber with the witches to repel the Phyrexians; Eriette later exploited the enchantment to impose obedience. Kellan confronted Talion with this concealed responsibility before completing the quest. Neither the fae bargain nor the witches' original aim absolved them of what the curse became.