Alice Law Accidentally Kills Her Advisor

At Cambridge University, Alice Law is a PhD student studying analytic magick under the brilliant and notoriously cruel Professor Jacob Grimes. Her entire academic future depends on him: without his approval and recommendation, she has little hope of graduating or finding a job.

Then Alice accidentally kills him.

During what should be a routine magical experiment, Alice fails to properly close a pentagram, causing a catastrophic accident that leaves Grimes dead. Horrified by what she has done but equally terrified of what his death means for her career, Alice becomes convinced there is only one solution. If souls really do descend into Hell after death, she will go there, find Grimes, and bring him back.

Alice constructs a transportative pentagram capable of taking her into the Eight Courts of Hell, but just as she activates it, Peter Murdoch appears. Peter is another of Grimes’s graduate students and everything Alice believes she is not: naturally brilliant, confident, charming, and seemingly destined for academic success. Rather than stop her, Peter alters the spell so he can accompany her.

Getting into Hell comes with a brutal price. Both Alice and Peter must surrender half of their remaining lifespans. They agree and descend together.

The Long Road Through Hell

Alice and Peter arrive in the Fields of Asphodel, where they unexpectedly encounter Archimedes, the Cambridge department cat, who apparently possesses the ability to travel between the living world and the underworld.

They also meet the Shades of four Cambridge undergraduates who died thirty years earlier in a magical accident supervised by a much younger Grimes. Their presence offers Alice an early warning that her revered advisor has left bodies behind him before. The students also explain that Hell operates through an enormous bureaucracy: even someone as powerful and important as Grimes must wait his turn to pass through the courts.

Their search leads Alice and Peter into the Court of Pride, Superbia, which takes the form of an endless library. There they encounter the Shade of philosopher G.E. Moore, who functions as a kind of infernal dean. Moore attempts to trap them in the library permanently by demanding that they “define the good,” effectively recruiting them into Hell’s endless academic bureaucracy.

Alice manages to beat him at his own game, constructing a logic proof that allows her and Peter to escape. From there, they reach the Lethe, the river whose waters erase memory.

Alice discovers that she is strangely resistant to the Lethe’s effects because of a permanent pentagram Grimes tattooed into her skin during a research trip to Venice. The protection comes with painful memories. Grimes subjected Alice to the procedure despite the immense physical and psychological trauma it caused her, another reminder of how completely she allowed him to control her life in the name of academic success.

Alice Begins to Suspect Peter

As they move deeper into Hell, Alice and Peter enter the Court of Desire, where physical urges become grotesquely exaggerated. Peter begins behaving strangely, worsening Alice’s already fragile trust in him.

Then she searches his bag and discovers notes describing a spell of organic exchange. Her own name is underlined.

Alice immediately reaches a terrifying conclusion: Peter may be planning to trade her soul for Grimes’s.

Before she can determine the truth, they are attacked by skeletal creatures made from bone and chalk. Their unlikely rescuer is Elspeth Bayes, another former student of Grimes who died by suicide years earlier.

Elspeth now lives aboard a boat traveling along the Lethe, accompanied by Archimedes. She tells them about Nicomachus Kripke, Magnolia Kripke, and their son Theophrastus, a family of rogue magicians roaming Hell. The Kripkes hunt other magicians and drain their blood, which they can then use to fuel their own magick.

More importantly, Elspeth possesses knowledge of the Dialetheia, a True Contradiction powerful enough to challenge the fundamental rules governing Hell.

Alice and Peter become desperate enough to try stealing that knowledge from her. Once Elspeth realizes they have come to Hell specifically to resurrect Grimes, she is furious. She remembers him not as the genius Alice has spent years trying to impress, but as a destructive man who hurt the students under his control. Using her strange command over butterflies, Elspeth violently throws Alice and Peter from her boat.

Peter Sacrifices Himself

Stranded in the Court of Violence, Alice and Peter are captured by the Kripkes and imprisoned inside an impossible Escher trap.

With escape looking increasingly unlikely, the resentment and suspicion between them finally erupts. Alice confronts Peter about the organic exchange spell and his involvement in Grimes’s death.

Peter admits that the laboratory accident was not entirely Alice’s fault. He had deliberately sabotaged Grimes’s research after discovering that Grimes had stolen his work. His act of revenge helped create the conditions that led to the fatal accident.

But Alice has also misunderstood the notes in his bag. Peter insists he never intended to sacrifice her. The exchange spell was meant for himself. If a soul had to be traded to bring Grimes home, Peter had planned to give up his own.

When the Kripkes close in, Peter proves it. Using his blood and the Hangman’s Paradox, he creates a way for Alice to escape the trap. There is no way for him to follow.

Alice gets out while Peter remains behind.

The Kripkes drain him until his soul is completely obliterated.

Alice Goes to War With the Kripkes

Now alone, Alice continues into Lower Hell, where a mysterious Shade named John Gradus guides her toward the city of Dis.

There she encounters Gertrude, who leads a Rebel Citadel populated by souls attempting to overthrow Hell’s existing order and rebuild the underworld according to their own ideals. Alice briefly considers what they are trying to accomplish, but eventually sees their project as another futile attempt to impose a new system upon an endless one.

By this point, her original mission has also changed. Peter is gone, and Alice is consumed by rage over what the Kripkes did to him.

She returns to the upper deserts and begins hunting them.

Alice traps Magnolia and Theophrastus inside a Zeno’s Paradox, killing them. She saves something even worse for Nicomachus. Using an Erichtho spell, Alice binds his soul to a reconstructed corpse she secretly prepared back in the Cambridge laboratory. Rather than allowing Nicomachus to simply die, she condemns him to continuing agony inside the body she has created for him.

With Peter avenged, Alice resumes her journey toward the ruler of Hell.

Grimes Was Manipulating Them All Along

Alice finally reaches King Yama, the Lord of Death.

She comes bearing the Dialetheia, which takes the physical form of a strange Janus-headed flower given to her by Elspeth. Its existence as a True Contradiction gives Alice something powerful enough to bargain with.

Yama summons the Shade of Professor Grimes, and Alice finally learns the truth behind her journey.

Grimes has effectively been haunting both Alice and Peter since his death. He manipulated their thoughts and planted the ideas that pushed them toward Hell because he needed them to retrieve the Dialetheia for him. His ambitions extend far beyond returning to Cambridge: Grimes intends to use its power in his attempt to conquer the gods themselves.

The revelation finally destroys Alice’s remaining loyalty to him. For years, she endured his cruelty, exploitation, and abuse because she believed his approval would validate everything she had sacrificed for academia. Even after his death, she surrendered half her lifespan and crossed Hell to save him.

Now she understands that Grimes still sees her exactly as he always has: as something useful.

So Alice changes the terms of the exchange.

Rather than sacrifice herself to resurrect Grimes, she uses the Erichtho spell she has prepared to offer Grimes’s soul instead.

And in return, she asks for Peter Murdoch.

Alice and Peter Return to Cambridge

Alice’s gamble works. Grimes is sacrificed, while Peter is restored despite having previously been obliterated into nonexistence.

King Yama is so affected by the Dialetheia and the contradiction Alice has brought before him that he goes even further. He restores the years Alice and Peter surrendered when they entered Hell, giving them back their full remaining lifespans.

Their journey ends where it began.

Alice and Peter emerge from the pentagram at Cambridge beneath the moonlight, alive and finally free of Grimes.

After sacrificing so much of themselves in pursuit of academic success—and literally going through Hell for the professor whose approval once controlled their futures—they no longer want the lives they were fighting so desperately to preserve.

Instead of returning to the same system, Alice and Peter decide to leave academia behind.

For the first time, they choose simply to live.