The translators writing of the dangerous and powerful fifth ritual speaks immediately to Jaime. She reads the ritual actions required and the incantation, fixing both in her mind.
The ritual requires her to strip naked once more, her curvaceous body still glistening from the shower, and paint on her stomach. She uses a can of old acrylic from the closet to paint blue sigils on her own belly, above her fecund womb. Then she must light candles, and she digs out several half-burned scented candles and a lighter. The crackle and mingle, scents of fruit and flora and wood.
Preparations complete she begins to chant repeatedly the phrase in the book, another phrase in the strange language of Lāta, "Rānhu māhambi e epū. Eyro chombo hipa e wāke." This she repeats once, twice, three times, and she can feel the heat in her belly. The candles flickering flames grow taller and taller around her, seeming to stretch and dance as she chants, casting shifting shadows over her body as she calls out the power of her children.
But she realizes too late that she has no children, and that the flames are not merely stretching higher, she is diminishing. She has already shrunk down a good foot and in a panic, she ceases the ritual and cries out. But it's too late by far. The floor around her stretches like a great desert plane of hardwood, and the candles the rushes to quench are now taller than she is. She shrinks and shrinks, down, falling between the cracks in the floor, the cracks in the world, falling and diminishing into nothingness, into blackness, until she becomes too small to exist in this universe and falls out into what lies beyond, to perish.
This is the end of her story.