Nimur continues to get stronger and to bring the Change other Tomol, who become her followers. Efforts by the Sagittarius and Endeavour crews to contain them are going nowhere. Then the Preserver obelisk/Shepherd’s wordstone sends out an aerial craft that petrifies most of the Changed (Nimur escapes the first time) but one Starfleet security officer gets killed in the battle and three Starfleet crew and some of the non-changed Tomol get petrified along with the Changed. The Sagittarius is still being repaired, and the Endeavour and the Vor’tahk come under attack from a Preserver weapon on the planet after the Endeavour tries to scan the caves where the wordstone is. Nimur gets petrified by a Preserver weapon later, but not before she has caused Kerlo (her former husband) to become one of the Changed, and he becomes their leader. Klisiewicz (with some help from a record of the research from Operation Vanguard that the late Lieutenant Ming Xiong had given him) and Dr. Leone come up with a cure for the damage that the Shedai had done to the Tomol DNA. The cure doesn’t stop the Change itself (which was always part of their nature), but does stop the madness developing. Seta, the high priestess, sets an example for the other Tomol by having herself injected with the cure first. Later, she confronts Kerlo and he causes the Change to start in her, but she had hidden a hypospray in her hand and she injects Kerlo with the cure. It takes a time for the effect to work, but Kerlo starts to regain control of himself, rather than being driven by the madness. With the continuing activity of the Changed, the wordstone sends out a larger weapon that petrifies almost the whole of the island. The last of the Starfleet crew on the planet are beamed off just in time, and some of the Tomol were sheltering in the caves and escape petrification. Klisiewicz had been trying, unsuccessfully, to work out how to reverse the petrification process, but the added abilities that Seta had gained allowed her to ‘converse’ with the wordstone. She emitted a soft, golden glow from her hands towards the encasing stone and it started to dissolve while carrying the cure to those who had been encased and held in a state of suspension for up to three thousand years. Arethusa becomes a Federation protectorate, Kang thanks Khatami for the help the Klingons had received in repairing the Vor’tahk, and the Tomol start to rebuild their society as they learn what they can do with their newly discovered powers. Nimur and Kerlo have no direct recollection of what they did before being cured, but they express regret for their actions. They resume their relationship and take back responsibility for raising their baby daughter, Tahna. The Endeavour starts towing the Sagittarius to Starbase 71 for repairs, and Captain Khatami takes the Vanguard project data from Klisiewicz and locks it away. [Timeline: August 2269, immediately after the events in Seekers 1, Second Nature, and two years after the Organians had stopped the Federation-Klingon war]