QUICK LINKS: Starside Recap by Chapter 1–9 | 19–28 | 29–36 | 37–48
Starside Chapters 10–18 Summary
This chapter-by-chapter summary of Starside by Alex Aster contains spoilers.
Starside Chapter 10
Aris, Kira, and Zane compare their maps, and the group agrees to head for the Beast Tree, where bonding with a creature would give them a real chance of surviving the journey. Before setting off, they make a formal pact: all major decisions go to a vote, they protect each other unless doing so costs them their own lives, and anyone slowing the group gets left behind.
On the road, masked immortal thieves called the Masks ambush them. Serving “the god with many names,” the Masks collect severed heads as tribute. When they try to take Aris’s sword, none of them can pull it from the ground. The standoff turns violent, and Zane kills the last of them. The group takes the three heads and carries them on as proof that the toll has been paid.
They reach Westwere at sundown and are taken in by a former knight named Xara, who runs an enchanted inn. In the morning, she warns them that nearly everyone who attempts the Beast Tree dies on impact, and demons controlled by the God of Death rise each night to tear apart everything in their path. To help them avoid both, Xara lends them her enchanted boat to travel north by river.
Before the group leaves, Aris runs into Raker in the stairwell. He catches her before she falls, makes clear he has no warmth to spare, and walks out without a word.
Starside Chapter 11
On the river, Aris, Kira, and Zane relax and open up. Zane explains that he left his mountain home because he saw its slow decline and wanted to bring back magic before it was too late. Kira says little about her own reasons, though her drive is clearly just as personal.
A violent storm moves in and tears up the river. Aris loses her pack to the current. When the boat hits a rock and knocks Kira’s sword into the water, Kira dives overboard rather than abandon it. She disappears long enough that it seems she may be gone. At last she surfaces and clings to a rock until Zane hauls her back into the boat.
The group pushes on through the storm, and only once the weather eases does Aris notice blood pooling beneath Kira. One of her legs has been badly torn up by the rocks.
Near the riverbank, Kira tells Aris and Zane to go on without her. She reveals that she entered the Questral because her younger sister Anise was born with lungs too weak to sustain her, and magic is the only thing that can save her. Unable to walk or keep pace, Kira invokes the pact and asks Aris for one promise before they part: if Aris makes it back, she’ll find a way to get magic to Anise. Aris agrees.
Aris and Zane carry Kira to the boat and send her back upstream toward Xara’s inn. As the boat pulls away and their hands separate, Aris feels the loss like something she has felt before.
Starside Chapter 12
Aris and Zane reach the Beast Tree and start climbing. Partway up, small creatures with razor-sharp teeth launch themselves from the branches. In the chaos, Zane loses his footing and slips over the edge. Aris catches him and holds on while he drops his ax to shed the weight, then hauls him back up. They push to the top.
At the crown, Aris and Zane watch a man leap and bond with a spiked dragon. Before he can celebrate, one of Cadoc’s allies shoots him from the saddle and claims the creature. It’s clear Cadoc’s group has abandoned leaping and is now killing anyone who bonds successfully, then taking the creature for themselves.
Zane heads back down to recover his ax and deal with the archer below. Aris waits alone until Pagnus crashes through the treetop and charges straight at her. She drives her sword through his leg into bone and drops him to his knees, but Cadoc and the rest surface right behind him. With the edge at her back and Cadoc’s arrow at her chest, she has nowhere to go. She turns and jumps.
Starside Chapter 13
Aris falls from the Beast Tree expecting to die, but a silver dragon rises from underground and catches her. The dragon flies through the night and lands at dawn. Over the following hours, they begin to bond, and the dragon helps Aris train with her heavy sword by batting at her with her tail. Afterward, she flies Aris out to find food and rest.
The reprieve doesn’t last. Cadoc appears on a massive dark dragon and shoots an arrow into the silver dragon’s side, then breathes fire that shreds her wings further. Aris steers them into a nosedive into the forest to break away, but the damage is severe. Rather than let the dragon be destroyed in a fight she can’t win, Aris sends her away and promises to find her again.
Cadoc and his allies set the trees on fire to force Aris into the open. With night falling and flames closing in, she scales a cliff and pulls herself into a cave. When she turns, Raker is already waiting in the dark.
Starside Chapter 14
Aris refuses to leave the cave at Raker’s order. After a tense standoff, she swings at him to force a response, then proposes they work together. He wants nothing to do with her until she produces the map from the Tower of Knowledge. When he threatens to kill her and take it, she throws it into the fire and tells him she’s committed it to memory. With no other option, he agrees to an alliance, though his terms are harsh and self‑serving.
That night, a demon takes the shape of Aris’s dead sister and calls to her from the forest floor. She follows until the illusion breaks. She kills it, but the act draws more demons up from the ground.
Aris and Raker flee and climb the cliff. The cave is already swarming with demons, so they go over the top and run toward a lake in the distance. Aris pieces together that water stops the demons, remembering the moat around Westwere and Xara’s promise they were safe on the boat. She nearly makes it but runs off the cliff in the dark and plunges into the lake. Her sword drags her down, and she begins to drown. Raker dives in after her. The last thing Aris sees before losing consciousness is him cutting through the water toward her, just out of reach.
Starside Chapter 15
Aris wakes on a small island in the lake with demons lining every shore. Raker tells her the demons can’t cross water and will be gone by morning, and he’s right. At dawn, he has her draw the next section of the map from memory, and they set off toward the Prism Pass.
That night, Aris and Raker camp beside a river. A demon emerges from the trees, and Aris falls into the current while trying to defend herself. She hauls herself onto the strip of land where Raker has made camp, bleeding and soaked. He doesn’t move to help. The next day, they carry on in silence, Aris half-jogging to stay within sight of him.
The Prism Pass is a sweeping mountain valley threaded with waterfalls, sunlight breaking into ribbons of color between the peaks. Raker leaves Aris at a cave behind one of the falls and disappears without explanation.
Aris forages and finds the forest almost absurdly full of food. She stumbles across a sleeping green dragon that makes clear with a glance it has no interest in being claimed, then gets set upon by tiny winged creatures that pull her hair and nick her skin before she shakes them off.
Deeper in the grove, Aris finds a gentle elk that walks toward her without fear and lets her reach out. Just as she makes contact, Raker steps out and drives his sword through it. He slings the elk over his shoulder, tells her everything dies, and heads back to the cave without another word.
Starside Chapter 16
Aris and Raker move through the Prism Pass in near silence. That night, Aris slips out alone to bathe and is cornered by a demon who claims to collect stolen brides for a god. He can’t cross the water, so she stands her ground in the freezing stream until sunrise drives him off.
The days that follow settle into a grim routine. Raker hunts and keeps to himself, while Aris forages and stays fed on her own. One afternoon, she hears his sword in the forest and goes to investigate, assuming he’s found another animal. Instead, she finds him training, stripped of his armor, moving with a speed and control she’s never seen in anyone. She’s still watching when he notices her and drives his blade through her shirt, pinning her to a tree. She asks him to teach her. He refuses and walks away.
Starside Chapter 17
Aris and Raker move through a landscape of ash and rot where every water source has turned an undrinkable red. With her food spoiling and no clean water in sight, Aris grows increasingly dehydrated.
Since Raker refuses to teach her, Aris practices alone at a rest stop. After several failed attempts, she pulls off a basic cutting move without losing her footing, a small but real victory. That night, a nightmare wakes her screaming, and Raker silences her roughly, warning she’ll get them both killed.
As the rot deepens and Raker returns from a hunt with nothing, Aris offers him her food. He accepts, and they share an uneasy meal. It’s the first time he speaks her name, which she never gave him. He ignores her question about how he knows it, but before the meal ends, he hands her his canteen and tells her to keep it.
The next day, Aris pulls off the move again while Raker is away. She’s still practicing when a stranger steps out and presses a glowing red blade to her throat. He announces that his Lordship will want her sword, then knocks her out.
Starside Chapter 18
Aris comes around in the middle of a group of immortals who plan to hand her and her sword over to someone they call Lordship. While their attention drifts, she kills the nearest immortal and runs.
A fight breaks out. Aris’s sword is too heavy to use effectively, so she grabs a bronze blade from one of the bodies and works her way through the group until only the leader remains.
The leader drags Aris to the edge of a deep crater she senses is connected to the rot spreading through the land. His glowing red sword carries a blood magic that overrides her body and pulls her toward the hole against her will. She fights it and notices he’s also straining to hold the weapon, which seems to belong to someone far more powerful. She breaks his control and kills him. With his last effort, he throws the sword into the crater rather than let her have it.
Raker appears. It’s clear he watched and never intervened. When Aris confronts him, he only asks whether any of the blood on her is hers. When she tells him no, he tells her to get up.