QUICK LINKS: Starside Recap by Chapter 1–9 | 10–18 | 29–36 | 37–48
Starside Chapters 19–28 Summary
This chapter-by-chapter summary of Starside by Alex Aster contains spoilers.
Starside Chapter 19
Raker agrees to train Aris, motivated by the need to keep her alive as long as she holds the map. The first session ends almost immediately. He puts her in a holding position and goes to sleep, leaving her standing through the night as a test of endurance rather than instruction.
The next evening, Raker gives Aris a second position to hold while he hunts, but he returns with nothing. With food and water exhausted, Aris suggests heading north toward a nearby town. Raker agrees.
The town is abandoned, swallowed by rot. Aris and Raker push through anyway since the decay eases further north. On a narrow stone bridge that night, Raker drills Aris on drawing her sword quickly. She fails repeatedly but finds real speed after enough attempts, and he gives her a grudging acknowledgment before they sleep.
Rain wakes Aris and Raker, their first clean water in days. They drink and refill their canteens as the river rises and floods the bridge. Aris slips on the wet stone, and Raker catches her wrist. The contact pulls up a memory of him tied to physical scars she still carries, making it clear he hurt her in the past. He releases her without a word and walks on, and she follows him into the rain.
Starside Chapter 20
After a night of rain, Aris and Raker find a small patch of unrotted forest with enough berries to share. While Aris practices her stances, two young immortal boys steal her coin. Their mother steps in, returns it, and offers Aris and Raker food and shelter. They accept.
At the inn, Aris goes downstairs for food and snaps at a warrior who harasses her. She slips out before anything comes of it.
Still restless, Aris visits the boys’ mother, a healer, who tells her about the Bone Woods—a mist-covered forest full of creatures so dangerous that even the gods leave them alone. A godsword is rumored to be hidden inside, though no one sent to retrieve it has ever returned.
The healer lets Aris read from a book of beasts, which makes clear how little she understands about the dangers of Starside. Aris falls asleep in the healer’s chair and wakes the next morning having slept deeply for the first time in the journey. The healer sends her off with a handful of medicinal vials.
On the way back to the inn, Aris overhears the warrior from the night before waiting to ambush her and take her sword. She runs, unwilling to return to the inn or bring trouble to the healer. The warriors corner her at the edge of the Bone Woods. With nowhere else to go, she steps into the mist.
Starside Chapter 21
Aris stumbles deeper into the mist, lost and cut off from every sound. The ancient creature known as the Gardener invades her mind, reads her thoughts and emotions, and makes it clear he could destroy her with ease.
Instead of killing Aris, the Gardener grows intrigued by her resolve to face the gods, something even immortals have never dared, and offers a deal: one cherished memory in exchange for safe passage out. She resists but eventually agrees rather than die. He draws the memory from her through a tear on her cheek, consumes it, warns her that far worse creatures inhabit these woods, and vanishes.
Aris bolts as a pack of saberwolves gives chase. She scrambles up a bone tree, but the wolves slam the trunk to knock her down. One uses another as a springboard, launches toward her, and its fangs graze her calf. The venom acts instantly, and her leg goes numb. Another impact shakes the tree, and she falls.
Starside Chapter 22
Aris hits the ground and drives her sword through the nearest wolf before she can think. The pack turns on the fallen animal, buying her time to run. They finish quickly and give chase again, and she tumbles down a slope into a tree. A swarm of oversized bats crashes into the wolves just before they reach Aris, dragging more creatures out of the mist.
Through the chaos, Aris runs into Raker, who’s been searching for her. He pins her against his chest and cuts down the entire horde one-handed. Afterward, he makes it clear he entered only to protect her sword and warns her never to point her weapon at him again. Before they leave, Aris recalls something from the healer’s book and uses saberwolf blood as an antidote for the venom. Raker then resets Aris’s dislocated shoulder with more care than she expected.
Aris and Raker move through the Bone Woods in near silence, with Raker handling every threat that comes close. He identifies one as a lusk, a creature that weaves illusions and feeds on anyone who watches it. The mist breaks open ahead of them.
Starside Chapter 23
After clearing the Bone Woods, Aris and Raker find a stream where Aris bathes and washes her clothes. Raker tosses her a piece of his soap without comment. Nearby, she disturbs a massive magical bear, which gives chase.
An immortal hunter kills the creature with a single arrow. He explains that the bear was hunting Aris’s sword, not her, since aethervores are drawn to magic and her blade carries some. He also tells her that the bear’s saliva heals wounds, and she uses it to seal the cuts on her back before saving a vial.
Aris trades the saberwolf fangs to the hunter for transport out of the woods, cutting three days off their journey. The hunter leads Aris and Raker deeper into the forest at nightfall in search of a skyhorse, the same kind Aris glimpsed near the stream earlier. Then, they continue through a firefly-lit forest.
Starside Chapter 24
The hunter kills a hellice, and the three camp to eat. Around the fire, Aris asks about his work, and he shares stories about the creatures he has hunted and the Great House heirs who make up most of his clientele.
Aris asks if he knows Vander Evren. The hunter goes quiet and warns that Evren is among the most dangerous beings in Starside. He explains that calling upon Evren requires an ancient dueling ritual involving blood, a great blade, and magical ground.
The skyhorse finally appears, drawn by Aris’s frozen apple, and Raker lifts Aris onto its back. The hunter leaves, and Aris and Raker ride through the night at a speed that blurs the forest. She falls asleep and wakes slumped against his chest.
The horse carries Aris and Raker to a ruined castle across a dark lake. Raker builds a fire, and Aris asks him to resume her training. He refuses and tells her she’s reckless. The hunter’s remark about Raker being her guardian has clearly gotten under his skin. Raker says no map is worth the trouble she brings. He tells her to go home and leave her sword behind. She starts to cry, and he walks deeper into the ruins.
Starside Chapter 25
After Raker’s outburst, Aris takes the only boat and rows into the Storm Woods alone. Violent winds and creatures made of storm debris nearly kill her several times.
Aris faces a ghostly, eyeless woman who unleashes a psychic scream. She blocks out the entity by focusing on a happy memory until it drifts away, recalling Raker’s warning that attention feeds creatures like that.
Valen ambushes Aris with a bow, but a falling branch crushes his arm first. She uses the last of the steelclaw saliva to heal the shattered bone and the infected stab wound he’s been carrying. Before they part, Valen reveals a bounty on Aris and that a cavalry is hunting both her and Raker.
Aris left Raker with no way off the island. Guilt drives her back. She reaches the cliffs above the lake just as the cavalry closes in from the other side. Raker pulls Aris back with a blade to her throat before she can shout a warning. When she tells him why she returned, he releases her and offers to let her follow him again. She accepts.
As they prepare to move, Aris spots a crest on one of the cavalry shields. The soldiers were sent by one of the gods.
Starside Chapter 26
Around a dying fire, Aris asks Raker why the gods would want their swords. He says the gods deliberately limit what immortals can access, keeping them dependent and too scattered to resist. She asks to look at his sword, and he lets her, but pulls it back before she gets a real grip. Raker then points out a flaw in her footwork before they sleep.
In the night, the cavalry surrounds the cave. Raker leads Aris deeper and drops through a hole in the floor. Aris freezes, fear of the dark rooting her in place. He talks her down until she leaps, and he catches her. The soldiers pass overhead and miss them.
Aris and Raker spend a full day in the tunnels in total darkness. When her legs give out, he pulls her upright and keeps them moving. Somewhere in that stretch, she stops dreading whether they’ll get out and starts believing they will.
When light appears ahead, Aris senses something wrong and shoves Raker against the wall. A creature moves through the tunnel, preying on their deepest wants. Both fight to resist it. Aris presses close to Raker, and he pulls her closer instead of pulling away.
Starside Chapter 27
With the demon at their backs and their eyes forced shut, Aris and Raker give in to what the creature stirs in them and become physically intimate. It ends the moment her fingers brush the edge of his mask. He drops her, draws his blade, and kills the demon in a single blind strike.
Once the threat is gone, Raker pins Aris to the wall and tells her it meant nothing, that she’s nothing, and warns her to stay away from him. Then he walks off, leaving her flushed and off-balance.
Aris tells herself it was the demon’s doing and nothing more, but she can’t quite make herself believe it. She pulls herself together and follows Raker through the dark in silence, letting her anger harden back into something she can use.
Starside Chapter 28
Aris and Raker emerge from the tunnels into a barren landscape with no food or water and push on in silence, both fading.
When they wade into a bog, something drags Aris under. By the time she surfaces, Raker has already taken its head off, but the creature keeps moving. Aris recalls that skelmires can only be killed by removing a gemstone from their chest. Raker punches through its ribcage and pulls one free.
A dozen more skelmires rise, and Aris and Raker fight through them until the survivors merge into one massive beast that seizes and chokes Aris. She cuts herself loose and drops. Raker throws his sword through the merged creature and splits it apart. A last skelmire rises behind him, and Aris hurls her blade through its chest.
The creatures’ touch has poisoned Aris and Raker. They slow and collapse separately in the forest beyond. Aris holds up an emerald from the bog floor and calls out for anything nearby to come for it. A luminous woman wearing a crown of stars appears, touches her hand, and leaves a trail of silver roots that forms a path forward.
Aris gets Raker up, and they follow the path until the trees knot into a pair of gates. She reaches for the lock but goes down before her fingers touch it.